Foundation Charter
Eugenia Sokolinski
General description
The foundational charters in the pure form, i.e. pivoting on an account somehow describing the foundation ritual, seem to be rare (at least among the mss of Ethio-SPaRe).
Most frequently such a document includes a formula concerning gwəlt which is given to the institution upon the foundation, but also a reference to the establishing of the institution, in whatever form.
In rare cases, the account about a foundation, originally of documentary nature, becomes a literary work of historiography, like the story of the foundation of Dabra Bǝrhan Sǝllāse in Gondar, by Iyasu I in several versions, or Dabra Ḍaḥay Qʷǝsqʷām by Iyasu II.
Sometimes we learn only indirectly that a document is related to the foundation of a church or it is called like this in a scholarly literature, but no relevant features can be solicited from the document itself, as it is the case with the recently published charters of Baʾātā church in Gondar (Kropp, “The Foundation of the Church Däbrä Tebäb Bä’ata Maryam”. Also the term gwəlt is not directly use there).
Records and accounts on the church foundation/ construction of church, of various types, without clear information on gwəlt, are rare.
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Publication Statement
Encoding Description
Encoded according to the Beta maṣāḥǝft Guidelines. These Guidelines detail the TEI format ruled by the Beta maṣāḥǝft Schema. The present TEI file is enriched with an Xquery transformation taking advantage of the exist-db database instance where the data is stored and of the many external resources to which this data points to.
Definitions of prefixes used.
Use the tag BetMas:FoundationCharter in your public hypothes.is annotations which refer to this entity.
Suggested Citation of this record
To cite a precise version, please, click on load permalinks and to the desired version (see documentation on permalinks), then import the metadata or copy the below, with the correct link.
Eugenia Sokolinski, Alessandro Bausi, Pietro Maria Liuzzo, Daria Elagina, ʻFoundation Charterʼ, in Alessandro Bausi, ed., Die Schriftkultur des christlichen Äthiopiens und Eritreas: Eine multimediale Forschungsumgebung / Beta maṣāḥǝft (Last Modified: 28.9.2021) https://betamasaheft.eu/authority-files/FoundationCharter [Accessed: 2024-04-24+02:00]
Revisions of the data
- Daria Elagina Daria Elagina: Small corrections of transliteration. on 28.9.2021
- Eugenia Sokolinski Eugenia Sokolinski: Provided List in Issue 47 on 2.6.2016
- Pietro Maria Liuzzo Pietro Maria Liuzzo: prepared XML file on 11.5.2016
Attributions of the contents
Pietro Maria Liuzzo, contributor
Daria Elagina, contributor