Ethiopian Manuscripts in the National Library of Russia

Introduction

Ethiopia is often equated with the entire Horn of Africa, although there are several independent countries: Eritrea, Ethiopia, Djibouti and Somalia. The country is located on the the easternmost projection of Africa and is considered to be the heir of the great Kingdom of Aksum. Along with the official name of Ethiopia that derived from the Greek word for 'people with faces, burnt by the sun', the country has another name - Abyssinia, under which it is known among the Muslim and European nations. It goes back to the ethnonym Habash(m) that means a local tribe or confederacy of tribes, and was first met in South Arabian inscriptions of the 3th century BC.

Ethiopia is a unique historical and cultural region of the African continent, as it has preserved its own ancient written tradition. This is due to the fact that it is one of the first on the planet to adopt Christianity as a state religion. Its Church is on a par with the oldest Eastern Churches such as Armenian, Syrian and Coptic. Christianity came to this country under King Ezana and his successors in the mid-4th – early 6th centuries together with Syrian merchants and missionaries. Until 1959, the Ethiopian Church was part of the Coptic Church, its metropolitans were appointed by Patriarches of Alexandria and were sent to this East African country from Egypt.

Translations of Christian Literature

Since the adoption of Christianity, there was a problem of the translation of the Bible into the vernacular language – Ge'ez, or classical Ethiopic, belonging to the Northern branch of the Afro-Asiatic family. The modern official language of Ethiopia - Amharic that became of the language of the military-political elite by the 13th century, belongs to the Southern branch of the Afro-Asiatic family. Ge'ez, apparently, ceased to be spoken at the time of the decline of the Axumite Kingdom in the 8th-10th centuries. But it was the only literary language until the 19th century. Now, Ge'ez is the liturgical language of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, in which church services are conducted. Thus, the texts in Ge'ez were understood only to a limited circle of people involved in church service or received a traditional education.

Similar to the South Arabian one, a consonant-only alphabet that was used to write Ge'ez in Ethiopia for centuries, evolved into a syllable alphabet representing vowel sounds by adding vocalic diacritics to the consonantal letters. Such alphabet accurately transmit the pronunciation of foreign words. The Ethiopian syllabary, in its original version, consisted of 275 characters, in addition to special characters and punctuation marks.

The first books in Ethiopia were translations of the Scriptures, both Old and New Testaments, quotations of which are found in the monumental inscriptions of the Axumite kings, liturgical writings, sermons. That is why, the Ethiopians associated texts of this kind with the notion of the book. The phrase "holy book" (metshaf kydus) meant the Bible, but the word "holy" could be dropped from it without changing the meaning, so the word "book" (metshaf) had the same meaning. An arabic term for a bound book (mushaf) was borrowed from Ethiopian, which is not surprising: the early Islamic community contact with Ethiopia closly and used the Ethiopian word for the Quran sheets.

Ethiopian Literary Heritage Proper

A number of biblical apocrypha and early Christian texts have come down to us only in translations into the Ge'ez language, thanks to centuries of isolation of the country from the outside world and the conservatism of its scribes.

Ethiopian scribes were brought up by the traditional system of education, which was the only form of education in this country until the early 20th century. It was only ecclesiastic and included several stages which a student could study for up to 30 years. Ethiopian manuscripts (whether royal chronicles, monastic chronographs or lives of the saints) astonish at erudition of their authors in Scripture and the writings of the early Church Fathers. Scribes' works reveal their perfect education and knowledge in combination with skills which, in many ways, formed the features of Ethiopian manuscripts, determined people's attitude to the book, its repertoire, and even some of the unique features of Ethiopian medieval texts.