The Nativity of Jesus from an apocryphal text first written in Coptic in the 5th century. The full text only exists in the Ethiopian version. This 18^th-century MS has 265 illustrations and was written for King Iyasu. The Holy Family is often depicted fleeing the persecution of Herod. (ነገር ማርያም [Nagara Māryām / History of Mary], Ethiopia, 18^th century. Or 607, f 17r)

Travelers, missionaries and military officials active within Ethiopia enabled western collectors to continually acquire manuscripts from the region since the fifteenth century. The exact number of such manuscripts housed within collections outside of Ethiopia cannot be determined. Nevertheless, many were acquired by European Cultural Institutions via donation, bequest, official transfer and commercial purchase. The three most significant of these bodies are the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana in Rome, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris and the British Library in London possessing a combined holding of two thousand seven hundred Ethiopian manuscripts.

Illustration of one of the most venerated martyrs in the Ethiopian Church, the child St. Kirkos & his mother St. Iyalota. (ገደለ፡ ቅዱስ፡ ቂርቆስ [The Acts and Miracles of Cyricus], Ethiopia, 18^th century. Or 720, f 50r)

In its entirety, the British Library’s Ethiopian Manuscript Collection covers all aspects of Ethiopian literature. Biblical and apocryphal literature, service books, prayers, music, poetry, theology, lives of saints and exegesis (commentaries) are well represented. There is also a rich diversity of secular works covering mathematics, science, grammars, vocabularies, astrology, magic, poetry, divination and medical texts. Official material taken from Ethiopia’s Royal archives can also be found. It also includes one of the most significant illuminated collections outside of Ethiopia, totalling one hundred and twenty individual manuscripts created between the fifteenth and early twentieth centuries. More than ninety of these are lavishly illuminated containing up to a hundred separate illustrations.

In the 6th century, St Yared invented a musical notation system representing pitch/melody still used by the Ethiopian Church. He named his complex melodic layers after the three birds St Yared saw in paradise. This manuscript, copied in 1735, contains text in Ge'ez, Izil & Araray. (ድጓ [Dēggwä], Ethiopia, 1735. Or 584, f 232r).

The first donation of Ethiopian manuscripts housed in the British Library was made by the Church of England Missionary Society which included seventy-four codices acquired by missionaries during the 1830s and 1840s. The largest was made in 1868, following the official transfer of three hundred and forty-nine manuscripts taken from Emperor Theodore’s capital at Maqdala by a British punitive expedition the previous year. The British Library’s Ethiopian Manuscript Collections are therefore culturally and historically significant.

The movement of heavenly bodies and of the firmament, revealed to Enoch in his trips to Heaven guided by the angel Uriel. (መጽሐፈ መድበል [Mestira Zaman], Ethiopia, 1721-30. Or 790, f 9r)

In 2016, the British Library launched its Heritage Made Digital Programme to digitise collections of particular national and international cultural significance in addition to fragile objects deemed unsuitable for physical use. The Programme’s long-term objective is to make this material available for global research and consultation via a single online platform. Given the significance of Ethiopian Manuscript Collections, the Maqdala Collection was one of the first to be selected for digitisation by the Heritage Made Digital Programme.

The Four Living Creatures - the lion, the ox, man, and the eagle - are venerated in the Ethiopian Church and considered to be nearer to God than all other celestial beings. (አብቀለምሲስ [The Revelation of St. John], Ethiopia, 1700-1730. Or 533, f 30r)

This work not only provided an important opportunity to increase awareness about this collection leading up to the 150^th Anniversary of the Battle of Maqdala in 2018, it also enhanced our knowledge of the collection’s holdings leading to the discovery of several little-known illuminated manuscripts covering biblical, hagiographical and apocryphal themes. Currently, over fifty thousand pages from the library’s remarkable collection of Ethiopian manuscripts are now freely available online for researchers and the general public.

St Gebre Menfes Kidus an Egyptian hermit, the founder of the 14^th-century monastery of Zuqualla, in an extinct volcano mountain in Ethiopia. (ተአምረ ማርያም [Miracles of Mary], Ethiopia, 17th century. Or 639, f 174v)

Users can find all relevant digitised manuscripts through the Digitised Manuscripts platform, www.bl.uk/manuscripts, by searching in the keyword(s) search box for the word "Ethiopian".

The Nativity of Jesus, from an 18th-century hymnological composition. (ጥበበ ጠቢባን [Wisest among the Wise], Ethiopia, 18^th century. Or 590, f 41r)

Eyob Derillo, Curator of Ethiopian Collections

Earlier this summer while in lock down, the Bagri Foundation extended an invitation to curators based in the UK and abroad to collaborate on a new digital series to showcase their collections while museums and libraries were forced to shut down and be closed to the public. For this series, Malini Roy, the Head of Visual Arts (Asia and Africa Collections) at the British Library, talks about natural history drawings produced in South Asia during the early 19th century. The video clip is featured below.

The British Library's collection includes several thousand natural history drawings produced in the subcontinent; only a selection is featured in the YouTube video.  In the late 18th century British and Scottish botanists and surgeons led a movement to document the natural history of the subcontinent. The East India Company, initially established as the British trading company and eventually a major governing power over parts of the subcontinent, recognised the need for this scientific research. Its practice was therefore adopted as official policy and resulted in the collection of rare species of flora and fauna. The specimens were preserved in the newly established Royal Botanic Garden in Calcutta and the Barrackpore Menagerie. As part of the documentation process, Indian artists were hired to illustrate the scientific specimens. Sets of the watercolours and drawings remained in archives in India, while duplicates were sent to the East India Company’s Library in London, and are now held in the British Library.

While not all of our collections are on public display, in recent years a range of natural history drawings have been on display in the Library's Treasures Gallery. More recently, the works by Haludar were featured in the Wallace Collection's exhibition Forgotten Masters that ran until September 2020. You can read more about the South Asian natural history collections in the following blog posts and articles:

Mildred Archer, Natural History Drawings in the India Office Library, H.M.S.O., 1962.

Ralf Britz (ed.) Hamilton’s Gangetic Fishes in Colour: A new edition of the 1822 monograph, with reproductions of unpublished coloured and illustrations, London: Natural History Museum and Ray Society, 2019

Malini Roy, Natural History Drawings from South Asia, Asia and Africa Blog, 8 August 2013.

Malini Roy, 'The Bengali Artist Haludar', in W. Dalrymple, Forgotten Masters: Indian Painting for the East India Company, Wallace Collection, 2019.

Malini Roy, Moloch Gibbons and Sloth Bears: the work of the Bengali artist Haludar, Asia and Africa Blog, 7 February 2020.

William Dalrymple (ed.), Forgotten Masters: Forgotten Masters: Indian Painting for the East India Company, Wallace Collection, 2019.

Malini Roy, Head of Visual Arts

One of the most beautifully illustrated 18^th-century amulet scrolls featuring a rider bearing a lance fighting a horned demon armed with a sword. (Or 12859)

With the exception of a few works, magic, medicine, talismans, and divination in Ethiopian manuscripts have received little serious scholarly attention. Research on the subject has so far been mostly restricted to the texts found on manuscripts. The scholarship on Ethiopian magic is very small and not fully investigated; the subject is still in its infancy.

This short illustrated blog will explore some magic and divination in Ethiopian manuscripts and other items, such as amulets from the collection, making use of images from some of the best examples of the manuscripts and amulet scrolls in the British Library’s collections. As well as containing spells, charts, magical squares and numbers, these manuscripts are adorned with rich illustrations. For an introduction to the amulets, see my previous blog post.

An 18^th-century practitioner’s handbook. This manuscript is decorated with over 200 illustrations of magical pictures, squares and lines of magical and talismans. (Or 11390, f. 47v)

The English term "magic" is a cultural construct rooted in Western thought and in a particular ethnocentric history, more specifically in the complex of Greco-Roman culture overlaid with Judaeo-Christian theology. Thus, the late 19^th-century Western approach to the study of magic was, to a large extent, shaped by its inheritance. Consequently, the term "magic" has been problematized, and has become the focus of endless scholarly debate leading to a situation in which both its definition and its relation to religion has become contingent upon the interest and research area of each particular scholar. Nevertheless, there is a fair amount of agreement that one of the main characteristics of magic can broadly be described as having an immediate goal, while the purpose and function of religion is long term.

While most divination treatises are usually just texts, this example has an elaborate drawing of charts and magic square. (Or 12034, f.64v)

There are many factors distinguishing the Ethiopian tradition of magic from its Near-Eastern counterpart. One aspect is the strong connection between the divination and amulet scrolls. Only the Ethiopian tradition has a firm, established, and attested connection between the amulet writers and the Church; this is not found in either Near-Eastern Christianity or Judaism.

We must therefore be cautious when discussing "magic" in general outside of its cultural construct in Western scholarship, since the difference of terms changes their meanings from culture to culture. In order for us to understand Ethiopian magic and what constitutes it, it needs to be contextualized by its historical and cultural heritage and characterized in reference to a variety of areas of study.

Another example is this 17th-century divination manual Awda nagaśt “Cycle of the kings” (Add MS 16247, f. 14v)

Ethiopian magic and divination books are a striking and very distinctive form of Ethiopian material culture. Part of a rich magical literature of incantation, these manuscripts are also adorned with a variety of illustrations that were created for spiritual edification and for protection from real or imagined harm. While Christian icons were intended to promote spiritual growth, Ethiopian magical art consists of visual representations of the world of demons and the supernatural, making the invisible visible for all believers.

An 18^th-century amulet scroll composed of three strips of parchment measuring 1570 X 70 mm. It features an incantation against various diseases, accompanied with talisman and magical characters. (Or 5424)

The British Library's collection of magic, divination, and magico-medical writing that fits into this group of manuscripts numbers over 40, making it the largest in the UK. The Wellcome Trust possesses 16 manuscripts, and the Cambridge University Library holds 14 manuscripts.

The majority of the Scrolls were acquired after the Maqdala collection catalog's publication in 1877. The provenance preserved in some of the manuscripts themselves or in the library register allows us to confirm their origin; however, the vast majority of the Scrolls contain no mention of where they came from.

Eyob Derillo, Ethiopic Collections Engagement Support

Further reading:

Derillo, Eyob, “Case Study, Traveling Medicine: Medieval Ethiopian Amulet Scrolls and Practitioners' Handbooks,” in Toward a Global Middle Ages: Encountering the World Through Illuminated Manuscripts , edited by Brian C. Keene (Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2019), pp. 121-124. (Document Supply on order)

Mercier, Jacques, Art That Heals: The Image as Medicine in Ethiopia. New York: Prestel, 1997. (LB.31.b.15213)