IN KAISERLICHEM AUFTRAG. Die Deutsche Aksum-Expedition 1906 unter Enno Littmann, Ethnographische, kirchenhistorische und archäologisch-historische Untersuchungen (3), 2017
The photographs of the DAE taken in 1906 show two complementary aspects of the written history of... more The photographs of the DAE taken in 1906 show two complementary aspects of the written history of Aksum. First, the Golden Gospels of Aksum is a cartulary of the royal charters promulgated in favour of the northern religious institutions, via Aksum. Aksum has been, at least until Fasiladas, a privileged political center who acted as an intermediary between northern institutions and the royal court. Second, the compilation known as the Bokk of Aksum is made of heterogeneous texts. Nonetheless, this sequence of documents is the result of choices and shall be understood as a single – or at least a cumulative – historiographical project. Some sequences can be deciphered, leading to an understanding of the narrative intent that links those documents. The first movement focuses on the consecration and anointment of the kings in Aksum, which finds its legitimacy in the narrative of the KebräNagast, when King Solomon anoints his son Ebn El-Hakim in Jerusalem and transfers to him the kingship over Israel. A second sequence deals with land tenure as attributed to the church of Aksum Ṣeyon by royal donations. The legendary anchor of the first and main gult, instituting Abreha and Asbehä as the first royal grantors of the land tenure of the church, shows that it has been a necessity to link the obvious remnants of the past and thus to ensure the preeminence of Aksum upon any other place in Ethiopia. A third movement returns to history and is clearly attributed to King Sarsä Dengel. It is composed of lists of kings - Christian as well as Muslims - and patriarchs, and inserts the history of Aksum in a broader framework. The opening of Ethiopian historiography to „Universal Histories“ -translated from Arabic- as well as the confrontation of the Ethiopian Christian kingdoms to the Ottoman and the European worlds during the 16th century mark the opening up of Ethiopian historiography to the wider world and might have contributed to this new way of writing and formalising history. A fourth movement mentions the flight of the Ark of the Covenant from Aksum during the Roman catholic reign of Susenyos (ca. 1615), the rebuilding of the church during Fasiladas' reign (1655) and the renewal of laws, rules, charges and gult donations by King Iyasu (1687) before his failed attempt to be anointed in Aksum. Ending the compilation, a version of the Short Chronicles has been added. It goes until the 4th year of Fasiladas reign and the building of Gondar, as if the birth of the new capital of the monarchy was the end of the Aksumite history.
Eventually, Aksum is the main character of this compilation. The historiographical project behind it is to place Aksum at the centre of a „national history”.
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Eventually, Aksum is the main character of this compilation. The historiographical project behind it is to place Aksum at the centre of a „national history”.
In the mid-18th century, at the royal court of Gondar, the scriptorium of King Iyo’ās (1755-1769) imported sheets of paper to make a lectionary (senkesar) in three volumes. Today, one volume remains in Addis Ababa at the Ethiopian National Archives and Library Agency, Department of Manuscripts, under the serial number 197. It is the only known Ethiopian Christian manuscript on paper. In Ethiopia, Christians copied their manuscripts exclusively on parchment. This innovative and ambitious project met the most sophisticated Ethiopian standards while adapting the codicological norms to the requirements of this new medium. Craftsmen who knew how to work on paper, foreigners or Ethiopians trained by foreigners, made this volume. The status of this manuscript was high enough to be part of the imperial library at the turn of the twentieth century and then included in the national heritage collection.
The Orthodox Christian Church of Ethiopia was statutorily a Coptic bishopric. From the fourth century until the middle of the twentieth century, its metropolitan bishops were appointed by the Patriarchal See of Alexandria. Three Copto-Arabic documents, issued between 1375 and 1424 by Egyptian bishops in Ethiopia, provide a better understanding of the power relation issues between the Coptic episcopate, the Ethiopian political power, and the powerful monastic networks of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. Did abuna Salāmā, the “Translator”, plot with the monks of Ḥayq Esṭifānos to place Dāwit on the throne? What accounts for his successor, abuna Bartalomēwos, first a faithful ally to the throne, ending up placed under close surveillance and then dismissed and imprisoned? Did an Egyptian bishop, whose seat was in the Nile delta, “take his place” after seeking asylum in Ethiopia? In the wake of the shift in the power relations woven between Alexandria and Ethiopia, how come two Egyptian metropolitans endorsed all religious decisions, even the least orthodox ones, taken by King Zar’ā Yā‘eqob? Analysing these documents enables one to raise, and sometimes answer, these questions. It is also an opportunity to take a new look at administrative scriptural practices.
During the medieval and early modern period in Ethiopia, land charters -materials produced by officials to administer agricultural land- have little to say about the practical issues of resource management. These highly codified and legalistic texts focus on regulating access to land rights. The present paper analyzes a document which is unconventional in being much more pragmatic and this partly counterbalances the silence of the sources regarding the natural and agricultural environment. It is a tax-list giving a long prescriptive list of taxes (in cereals and beans, honey, cotton cloth and edible oil) due from the agricultural plains surrounding Aksum, the holy city in northern Ethiopia. Aksum has been a center of power, political and symbolic as well as economic, which explains the raison d’être for this atypical document. The tax-list was copied for several centuries, and this stability as well as the differences among the few known copies testify both to the longevity of administrative and political control over this region and to an adaptability and flexibility notably as regards the measurement of taxable products. The present analysis of a royal prescription of taxes will also help to clarify how complex political structures have shaped territories and agricultural practices over a very long term (fifteenth to twentieth centuries).
This second article in a series devoted to the history of the philosophical treatises attributed to Zar’a Yā‘eqob and his disciple Walda Ḥeywat explores the phase of “demystification”. How did doubts arise about the Hatatā Zar’a Yā‘eqob as soon as 1916; and how did its authorship come to be attributed to Juste d’Urbin in 1920? The article, by the great philologist and historian C. Conti Rossini, that turned this “rare pearl in Ethiopian literature” into a literary hoax is a compendious collection of pieces of evidence rather than an irrefutable proof. Another philologist, E. Mittwoch, tried a few years later to prove that Juste d’Urbin was the author; but his linguistic and philological analysis was biased due to an indirect source it used. The academic community accepted, nonetheless, these two scholars’ authoritative arguments. The current article follows up on this scholarship in an effort to corroborate and enrich it, and to show its weak points. It provides a new interpretation based on genetic criticism of these texts that tries to see the author, Juste d’Urbin, at work writing the Hatatā Zar’a Yā‘eqob. Furthermore, Juste d’Urbin’s unpublished correspondence to Antoine d’Abbadie is used to better understand this freethinker’s thoughts and motivations.
On the Ethiopian highlands in the middle of the 19th century, Juste d’Urbin, a Catholic missionary, chose to stop evangelizing and devote himself fully to the study of the Ge’ez and Amharic languages and of the country’s Orthodox civilization. He sent to his mentor, Antoine d’Abbadie (well-known at the time for his writings on Ethiopia) his work, in particular two copies of a very rare philosophical text presumably authored by an Ethiopian in the 17th century. This first article in a series devoted to the history of Ḥatatā Zar’a Yā‘eqob and its appendix, Ḥatatā Walda Ḥeywat, shows how these texts fit into Juste d’Urbin’s work, describes the manuscripts he sent to Antoine d’Abbadie, and analyzes the hitherto unpublished correspondence between these two men. Juste d’Urbin, a linguist and translator, wanted to make a contribution to Ethiopian studies. His letters reveal an ambitious, anxious thinker who wanted to realize a work of philosophy. Might the two Ḥatatā have been a response to this twofold ambition?
Eventually, Aksum is the main character of this compilation. The historiographical project behind it is to place Aksum at the centre of a „national history”.
In the mid-18th century, at the royal court of Gondar, the scriptorium of King Iyo’ās (1755-1769) imported sheets of paper to make a lectionary (senkesar) in three volumes. Today, one volume remains in Addis Ababa at the Ethiopian National Archives and Library Agency, Department of Manuscripts, under the serial number 197. It is the only known Ethiopian Christian manuscript on paper. In Ethiopia, Christians copied their manuscripts exclusively on parchment. This innovative and ambitious project met the most sophisticated Ethiopian standards while adapting the codicological norms to the requirements of this new medium. Craftsmen who knew how to work on paper, foreigners or Ethiopians trained by foreigners, made this volume. The status of this manuscript was high enough to be part of the imperial library at the turn of the twentieth century and then included in the national heritage collection.
The Orthodox Christian Church of Ethiopia was statutorily a Coptic bishopric. From the fourth century until the middle of the twentieth century, its metropolitan bishops were appointed by the Patriarchal See of Alexandria. Three Copto-Arabic documents, issued between 1375 and 1424 by Egyptian bishops in Ethiopia, provide a better understanding of the power relation issues between the Coptic episcopate, the Ethiopian political power, and the powerful monastic networks of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. Did abuna Salāmā, the “Translator”, plot with the monks of Ḥayq Esṭifānos to place Dāwit on the throne? What accounts for his successor, abuna Bartalomēwos, first a faithful ally to the throne, ending up placed under close surveillance and then dismissed and imprisoned? Did an Egyptian bishop, whose seat was in the Nile delta, “take his place” after seeking asylum in Ethiopia? In the wake of the shift in the power relations woven between Alexandria and Ethiopia, how come two Egyptian metropolitans endorsed all religious decisions, even the least orthodox ones, taken by King Zar’ā Yā‘eqob? Analysing these documents enables one to raise, and sometimes answer, these questions. It is also an opportunity to take a new look at administrative scriptural practices.
During the medieval and early modern period in Ethiopia, land charters -materials produced by officials to administer agricultural land- have little to say about the practical issues of resource management. These highly codified and legalistic texts focus on regulating access to land rights. The present paper analyzes a document which is unconventional in being much more pragmatic and this partly counterbalances the silence of the sources regarding the natural and agricultural environment. It is a tax-list giving a long prescriptive list of taxes (in cereals and beans, honey, cotton cloth and edible oil) due from the agricultural plains surrounding Aksum, the holy city in northern Ethiopia. Aksum has been a center of power, political and symbolic as well as economic, which explains the raison d’être for this atypical document. The tax-list was copied for several centuries, and this stability as well as the differences among the few known copies testify both to the longevity of administrative and political control over this region and to an adaptability and flexibility notably as regards the measurement of taxable products. The present analysis of a royal prescription of taxes will also help to clarify how complex political structures have shaped territories and agricultural practices over a very long term (fifteenth to twentieth centuries).
This second article in a series devoted to the history of the philosophical treatises attributed to Zar’a Yā‘eqob and his disciple Walda Ḥeywat explores the phase of “demystification”. How did doubts arise about the Hatatā Zar’a Yā‘eqob as soon as 1916; and how did its authorship come to be attributed to Juste d’Urbin in 1920? The article, by the great philologist and historian C. Conti Rossini, that turned this “rare pearl in Ethiopian literature” into a literary hoax is a compendious collection of pieces of evidence rather than an irrefutable proof. Another philologist, E. Mittwoch, tried a few years later to prove that Juste d’Urbin was the author; but his linguistic and philological analysis was biased due to an indirect source it used. The academic community accepted, nonetheless, these two scholars’ authoritative arguments. The current article follows up on this scholarship in an effort to corroborate and enrich it, and to show its weak points. It provides a new interpretation based on genetic criticism of these texts that tries to see the author, Juste d’Urbin, at work writing the Hatatā Zar’a Yā‘eqob. Furthermore, Juste d’Urbin’s unpublished correspondence to Antoine d’Abbadie is used to better understand this freethinker’s thoughts and motivations.
On the Ethiopian highlands in the middle of the 19th century, Juste d’Urbin, a Catholic missionary, chose to stop evangelizing and devote himself fully to the study of the Ge’ez and Amharic languages and of the country’s Orthodox civilization. He sent to his mentor, Antoine d’Abbadie (well-known at the time for his writings on Ethiopia) his work, in particular two copies of a very rare philosophical text presumably authored by an Ethiopian in the 17th century. This first article in a series devoted to the history of Ḥatatā Zar’a Yā‘eqob and its appendix, Ḥatatā Walda Ḥeywat, shows how these texts fit into Juste d’Urbin’s work, describes the manuscripts he sent to Antoine d’Abbadie, and analyzes the hitherto unpublished correspondence between these two men. Juste d’Urbin, a linguist and translator, wanted to make a contribution to Ethiopian studies. His letters reveal an ambitious, anxious thinker who wanted to realize a work of philosophy. Might the two Ḥatatā have been a response to this twofold ambition?
Référence de l'ouvrage : Amélie Chekroun, La conquête de l’Ethiopie. Un jihad au xvie siècle, Paris, CNRS éditions (collection Zéna, 3), 2023, 380 p., ISBN : 9782271145543, (disponible aussi en format epub)
The third part of the book, entitled "Ethiopian Stories", has been significantly revised: the choice of oral texts has been renewed and each interview is accompanied by an introduction presenting the informant, the conditions under which the interview was conducted and an analysis of the content of the interview.
This book reflects several stories, that of an anthropologist and illustrator immersed for the first time in the Ethiopian reality and seeking to go back in time and probe the collective memory; those of a particular moment during which Ethiopia after the Derg and at the beginning of Mélés Zenawi's "reign" has not yet fully embraced ultra-liberalism and ethnic federalism; and those linked to the foundation of a dynasty and of a capital north of Lake Tana, by two powerful and controversial sovereigns in the Pre-Modern period.
The academic online journal Afriques. Débats, méthodes et terrains d’histoire publishes, in his column Sources, under the direction of Claire Bosc-Tiessé, the first online edition of a Ge’ez text. This is the hagiography, the malk’e and the miracles of Daniel, abbot of the monastery of Dabra Maryam Qorqor, in Garalta (Tigray). This text is edited, translated into French and presented by Gérard Colin, together with an index of biblical quotations and of proper names.
The international team of the Digital Benin project has brought together around 5000 objects belonging to this heritage, spread across 131 institutions and collections worldwide into a single digital space. Among the many challenges it faces, this paper focuses on the issue of metadata. Will this situation provide an answer to the perennial question: is metadata really interoperable? The answer is: forget everything you know about Dublin Core or whatever!
Les missions ethnographiques en Afrique subsaharienne (1928-1939)" présente les collectes de manuscrits éthiopiens effectuées par Marcel griaule en 1928-29 lors de son premier voyage en Éthiopie, puis lors de la Mission Dakar-Djibouti en 1932 à Gondar.
Catalogue de l'exposition "ETONNANTE ETHIOPIE". Marnaz, 19 sept.- 04 oct. 2015, à travers la collection privée de DENIS GERARD
L’ouverture à tous les espaces africains et à la très longue durée est avant tout militante. Il s’agit de considérer que relèvent de l’Afrique aussi bien les régions au sud du Sahara que celles qui sont au nord, les espaces méditerranéens participant de réseaux qui trouvent aussi leurs racines en Afrique. Il est en outre nécessaire de mobiliser et rassembler toutes les recherches sur l’Afrique ancienne pour se doter d’un lieu d’échanges, tenter de dynamiser le champ et éventuellement recruter.
Mais au-delà du militantisme, ce séminaire se fonde sur l’idée que par une attention première à l’étude des sources textuelles, picturales et/ou archéologiques, les chercheurs de tous horizons peuvent partager des questions de méthode.
Elle se déroulera à partir du centre des Colloques du Campus Condorcet, Place du Front Populaire, Aubervilliers, salle 50 au au rez-de-chaussée, métro Front Populaire (en hybride présentiel et en zoom, sur Zoom (ID de réunion : 969 4150 9076). Si vous êtes intéressés par l’accès à la visioconférence, demander le mot de passe aux organisatrices à l’adresse : projetmssabbadie at gmail point com.