✖Here you can explore some general information about the project. See also Beta maṣāḥəft institutional web page. Select About to meet the project team and our partners. Visit the Guidelines section to learn about our encoding principles. The section Data contains the Linked Open Data information, and API the Application Programming Interface documentation for those who want to exchange data with the Beta maṣāḥǝft project. The Permalinks section documents the versioning and referencing earlier versions of each record.
Click to get back to the home page. Here you can find out more about the project team, the cooperating projects, and the contact information. You can also visit our institutional page. Find out more about our Encoding Guidelines. In this section our Linked Open Data principles are explained. Developers can find our Application Programming Interface documentation here. The page documents the use of permalinks by the project.
✖Descriptions of (predominantly) Christian manuscripts from Ethiopia and Eritrea are the core of the Beta maṣāḥǝft project. We (1) gradually encode descriptions from printed catalogues, beginning from the historical ones, (2) incorporate digital descriptions produced by other projects, adjusting them wherever possible, and (3) produce descriptions of previously unknown and/or uncatalogued manuscripts. The encoding follows the TEI XML standards (check our guidelines).
Shelf marks (full list)Manuscripts (search)List of Digitized ManuscriptsCatalogues EncodedInscriptions
✖We identify each unit of content in every manuscript. We consider any text with an independent circulation a work, with its own identification number within the Clavis Aethiopica (CAe). Parts of texts (e.g. chapters) without independent circulation (univocally identifiable by IDs assigned within the records) or recurrent motifs as well as documentary additional texts (identified as Narrative Units) are not part of the CAe. You can also check the list of different types of text titles or various Indexes available from the top menu.
Clavis Aethiopica (Works)Narrative UnitsStudies
The clavis is a repertory of all known works relevant for the Ethiopian and Eritrean tradition; the work being defined as any text with an independent circulation. Each work (as well as known recensions where applicable) receives a unique identifier in the Clavis Aethiopica (CAe). In the filter search offered here one can search for a work by its title, a keyword, a short quotation, but also directly by its CAe identifier - or, wherever known and provided, identifier used by other claves, including Bibliotheca Hagiographica Graeca (BHG), Clavis Patrum Graecorum (CPG), Clavis Coptica (CC), Clavis Apocryphorum Veteris Testamenti (CAVT), Clavis Apocryphorum Novi Testamenti (CANT), etc. The project additionally identifies Narrative Units to refer to text types, where no clavis identification is possible or necessary. Recurring motifs or also frequently documentary additiones are assigned a Narrative Unit ID, or thematically clearly demarkated passages from various recensions of a larger work. This list view shows the documentary collections encoded by the project Ethiopian Manuscript Archives (EMA) and its successor EthioChrisProcess - Christianization and religious interactions in Ethiopia (6th-13th century) : comparative approaches with Nubia and Egypt, which aim to edit the corpus of administrative acts of the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia, for medieval and modern periods. See also the list of documents contained in the additiones in the manuscripts described by the Beta maṣāḥǝft project . Works of interest to Ethiopian and Eritrean studies.
✖While encoding manuscripts, the project Beta maṣāḥǝft aims at creating an exhaustive repertory of art themes and techniques present in Ethiopian and Eritrean Christian tradition. See our encoding guidelines for details. Two types of searches for aspects of manuscript decoration are possible, the decorations filtered search and the general keyword search.
Index of decorationsArt KeywordsIlluminations
The filtered search for decorations, originally designed with Jacopo Gnisci, looks at decorations and their features only. The filters on the left are relative only to the selected features, reading the legends will help you to figure out what you can filter. For example you can search for all encoded decorations of a specific art theme, or search the encoded legends. If the decorations are present, but not encoded, you will not get them in the results. If an image is available, you will also find a thumbnail linking to the image viewer. [NB: The Index of Decorations currently often times out, we are sorry for the inconvenience.] You can search for particular motifs or aspects, including style, also through the keyword search. Just click on "Art keywords" and "Art themes" on the left to browse through the options. This is a short cut to a search for all those manuscripts which have miniatures of which we have images.
✖We create metadata for all places associated with the manuscript production and circulation as well as those mentioned in the texts used by the project. The encoding of places in Beta maṣāḥǝft will thus result in a Gazetteer of the Ethiopian tradition. We follow the principles established by Pleiades and lined out in the Syriaca.org TEI Manual and Schema for Historical Geography which allow us to distinguish between places, locations, and names of places. See also Help page fore more guidance.
PlacesRepositories
This tab offers a filtrable list of all available places. Geographical references of the type "land inhabited by people XXX" is encoded with the reference to the corresponding Ethnic unit (see below); ethnonyms, even those used in geographical contexts, do not appear in this list. Repositories are those locations where manuscripts encoded by the project are or used to be preserved. While they are encoded in the same way as all places are, the view offered is different, showing a list of manuscripts associated with the repository.
✖We create metadata for all persons (and groups of persons) associated with the manuscript production and circulation (rulers, religious authorities, scribes, donors, and commissioners) as well as those mentioned in the texts used by the project. The result will be a comprehensive Prosopography of the Ethiopian and Eritrean tradition. See also Help page for more guidance.
Persons and groupsEthnic units
We encode persons according to our Encoding Guidelines. The initial list was inherited from the Encyclopaedia Aethiopica, and there are still many inconsistencies that we are trying to gradually fix. We consider ethnonyms as a subcategory of personal names, even when many are often used in literary works in the context of the "land inhabited by **". The present list of records has been mostly inherited from the Encyclopaedia Aethiopica, and there are still many inconsistencies that we are trying to gradually fix.
✖This section collects some additional resources offered by the project. Select Bibliography to explore the references cited in the project records. The Indexes list different types of project records (persons, places, titles, keywords, etc). Visit Projects for information on partners that have input data directly in the Beta maṣāḥǝft database. Special ways of exploring the data are offered under Visualizations. Two applications were developed in cooperation with the project TraCES, the Gǝʿǝz Morphological Parser and the Online Lexicon Linguae Aethiopicae.
BibliographyIndexesProjectsVisualizationsGǝʿǝz Morphological ParserOnline Lexicon Linguae Aethiopicae
Help

You are looking at work in progress version of this website. For questions contact the dev team.

Hover on words to see search options.

Double-click to see morphological parsing.

Click on left pointing hands and arrows to load related items and click once more to view the result in a popup.

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March 2024 highlight: Ethiopic manuscripts of St Catherine’s Monastery on Mount Sinai

Six Ethiopic manuscripts preserved in St Catherine are already well known to the scholarly community (Sinai Ethiopic 001-006), having been microfilmed by Library of Congress in cooperation with the American Foundation for the Study of Man and Farouk I University (1950) and catalogued by the Egyptian Ethiopianist Murad Kamil (1957). The collection has been recently expanded by one more manuscript (Sinai Ethiopic 007) which is a private gift. Following the collapse of a tower and the ensuing restauration work, further manuscripts and fragments were discovered in the monastery in 1975. Ethiopic manuscripts had been mentioned summarily as being among them, but have been neither described nor studied yet.

In 2023, Denis Nosnitsin and Dorothea Reule of the Bm project had the possibility to survey the manuscripts and produce a description of the entire Ethiopic collection. The description (and partially the images) of 15 manuscripts can now be accessed at https://betamasaheft.eu/

For a detailed report visit https://www.betamasaheft.uni-hamburg.de/manuscripts/newresearch/stcatherine.html

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mss

Manuscripts
Descriptions of (predominantly) Christian manuscripts from Ethiopia and Eritrea are the core of the project. We encode descriptions from printed catalogues, incorporate records produced by other projects, and describe previously uncatalogued manuscripts. We also serve manuscript images and transcriptions.
Manuscripts in Dabra Dāmmo, by Ethio-SPaRe
Works

Texts
Any text with an independent circulation is a work, with its own identification number within the Clavis Aethiopica (CAe). Recurrent motifs as well as documentary additional texts (identified as Narrative Units) are not part of the CAe.
QS-005 by Ethio-SPaRe
persons

Persons
We create metadata for all persons (and groups of persons) associated with the manuscript production and circulation (rulers, religious authorities, scribes, donors, and commissioners) as well as those mentioned in the texts used by the project. The result will be a comprehensive Prosopography of the Ethiopian and Eritrean tradition.
NSM-004 by Ethio-SPaRe
places

Places
We create metadata for all places associated with the manuscript production and circulation as well as those mentioned in the texts used by the project, which will thus result in a Gazetteer of the Ethiopian tradition. We clearly distinguish between places and names of places. Our named entities are aligned with Wikidata.
Māy Č̣aw Mikāʾel by Ethio-SPaRe
txn

Taxonomy
Concepts in our taxonomy help classify and easily group records. One can search by text genres, peoples' occupations, codicological aspects, etc. The project also aims at creating an exhaustive repertory of art themes and techniques present in Ethiopian and Eritrean Christian tradition with the help of an extensive taxonomy.
RIÉ 270 in Salt's A voyage to Abyssinia, from the Internet Archive

The project Beta maṣāḥǝft: Manuscripts of Ethiopia and Eritrea (Schriftkultur des christlichen Äthiopiens und Eritreas: eine multimediale Forschungsumgebung) is a long-term project funded within the framework of the Academies' Programme (coordinated by the Union of the German Academies of Sciences and Humanities) under survey of the Akademie der Wissenschaften in Hamburg. The funding will be provided for 25 years, from 2016–2040. The project is hosted by the Hiob Ludolf Centre for Ethiopian and Eritrean Studies at the Universität Hamburg. It aims at creating a virtual research environment that shall manage complex data related to the predominantly Christian manuscript tradition of the Ethiopian and Eritrean Highlands.

You are very welcome to join us and contribute to the digitization and digital description of the manuscript tradition of the Ethiopian and Eritrean Highlands. See the section on contributing and reusing data below.

Manuscripts

Beta maṣāḥǝft is primarily dedicated to digitally encoding manuscript descriptions, both from printed catalogues and ex novo. The descriptions are prepared in TEI XML format according to our Encoding Guidelines. We take care to respect the syntax of manuscripts, describing each codicological unit separately to avoid confusion with dating, attribution of creators and places of origin. (Note that many descriptions are inherited or imported from other databases).

Click here for a sample record with some hints on navigation

You can access the manuscripts in several ways.

By shelf mark
Shelf-Marks
ʿUrā Qirqos by Ethio-SPaRe
By catalogue
Catalogues
From the Internet Archive
By repository
DZ
Dabra Zayt by Ethio-SPaRe
List with filters
List
UM-027 by Ethio-SPaRe
Map
Viewer
All images
DZ-005 by Ethio-SPaRe
Available images of manuscripts from Eritrea and Ethiopia

Texts

The Clavis Aethiopica is a comprehensive repertory of all known works of Ethiopian and Eritrean literature that provides a unique identifier and a reliable reference to each work. We consider a work any text with an independent circulation. Wherever a work also exists in other traditions, references to these works as well as to other Claves are provided wherever possible.
When a unique identifier is needed for text portions (paragraphs, chapters, miracles, or episodes which are not explicitly highlighted as text part with individual circulation but may be extant as different versions in multiple recensions or even in different works), these do not receive a Clavis Aethiopica number but a Narrative Unit ID. We also include records for the important early works in Ethiopian and Eritrean studies.
We gradually include available digital transcriptions of edited texts as well as produce new digital editions of important works.
The records are prepared in TEI XML format according to our Encoding Guidelines.

Click here for a sample record with some hints on navigation

You can access the texts in several ways.

Clavis Aethiopica
CAe
AP-010 by Ethio-SPaRe
Narrative units
NAR
DZ-006 by Ethio-SPaRe
Early studies
Ludolf
Ludolf's Commentarius
Compare mss
compare
CollateX
collate
Lexicon
lexicon

Prosopography

We create metadata for all persons (and groups of persons) associated with the manuscript production and circulation (rulers, religious authorities, scribes, donors, and commissioners) as well as those mentioned in the texts used by the project. Wherever possible, we provide information on names, family relations, dates of activity, relevant places, and relation to other records (especially manuscripts) in our database. Read more in the guidelines.

Click here for a sample record with some hints on navigation

You can access the persons in several ways.

Browse the list
persons
MALM-004 by Ethio-SPaRe
Index
index
ʾAbbā Garimā I
Ethnic groups
adwa
Source: Wikimedia

Gazetteer

We create metadata for all places associated with the manuscript production and circulation as well as those mentioned in the texts used by the project, which will thus result in a Gazetteer of the Ethiopian tradition. We clearly distinguish between places and names of places, following the definition of Pleiades. Our named entities are part of authority files aligned with Wikidata. Read more in the guidelines.

Click here for a sample record with some hints on navigation

You can access the places in several ways.

Browse the list
AAU
Source: Wikimedia
Index
Fasil
Source: Wikimedia
Repositories
mss
Image by Ethio-SPaRe

Taxonomy

The project works with an extensive taxonomy that allows to classify and index items in a number of ways. One can search by text genres, peoples' occupations, codicological aspects, etc.

A particular focus of the project and its partners is in the art themes and techniques present in Ethiopian and Eritrean Christian tradition. In this case, the taxonomy includes general keywords as well as extensive records for art themes.

The taxonomy allows for a number of indexes that can be used as focused alternatives to searches.

Keywords Art themes Decorations Miniatures
Bindings Additions Titles, Colophons, Supplications
Index Places Index Persons Bibliography
Works

Online Lexicon Linguae Aethiopicae

Persons

Gǝʿǝz Morphological Parser

Join us and contribute

You may not only notify us about errors, but directly fix them or suggest a change. Beta maṣāḥǝft data is yours! You can enter the data you are interested in, share it with the world and benefit from all what others have shared in the same way. Each entity has an edit button, which you are more than welcome to hit. You will be brought to the GitHub page where you can edit and make a Pull Request. All data is encoded in TEI XML, according to the schema customized for the project.

Beta maṣāḥǝft Guidelines

Reuse the data

The data is available to you for reuse via this website, or via our GitHub organization in the formats you can download from the website and also in several other formats.

Data API LOD documentation
Beta maṣāḥǝft in Numbers

Beta maṣāḥǝft in Numbers