Beta maṣāḥǝft: Manuscripts of Ethiopia and Eritrea

Friday, September 21, 2018

Beta maṣāḥǝft: Manuscripts of Ethiopia and Eritrea

Manuscripts in Ethiopia and Eritrea are for the most part still preserved by church parishes, scattered all over the highlands, often in places difficult to reach. There is no reliable figure for the total number of surviving Ethiopic manuscripts, the numbers are likely in hundreds of thousands: there are between 13,000 and 34,000 active parishes in Ethiopia and Eritrea, each in the possession of at least several manuscripts, with biggest collections counting several hundred codices (e.g. c. 570 manuscripts are preserved at Dabra Bizan, and 220 (and formerly up to 800) in Gunda Gundē). While the assumed numbers are very high, the number of historical – most valuable for researchers – manuscripts is diminishing at a quick pace as they are gradually substituted by more recent ones. Field research confirms that over 90% of each manuscript collection is composed of manuscripts dating from the nineteenth and twentieth century. This does not diminish, or rather, on the contrary, this underlines the necessity to record what has survived until today. Older manuscripts, often in bad state of preservation, disintegrated and/or incomplete, are frequently not assigned the value they deserve.