✖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.

Introduction Navigation Bar Lists Items Resources Indexes Searches Data Links Citation Bibliography

Questions?

Need help, want to ask and avoid reading all this? You can ask by opening an issue on GitHub. You can also search through past issues (open or closed) and discussions. You may find additional examples and already asked and answered questions there to help you.

Some hints on how you can navigate this website

Introduction

This help page will walk you through what the website has to offer, additional explanations can be found on individual pages and clicking info buttons.

We will start from the navigation bar at the top of each view, then look at contents of each of the menus in more details, discussing each list, item, resource and index view.

If you are looking for information about the project, please see our institutional project website.

Note that the data as well as the website are in continuous development. You are likely to encounter errors. If you care enough, please, do let us know and we will try to sort them as soon as possible or inform you on why this happens at least.

Lists

We use to have several, different, list views for each type of item. Since 2022 this is not the case anymore. We have unified the results view to the one provided in the search. All former list views will redirect here and provide always the same visualization of the results.

Items

Item views represent one resource and its relations to others.

Some features are shared by most of the item views.

Under the navigation bar a list of optional views for the same item are offered. These vary according to availability. For example, if no transcription or text are available, this option will not be there.

There is always in this options bar a button called "Explore this page", which will activate a short step by step introduction to what the page has to offer. You find then a button to notify errors but also an edit button, which will allow you to edit the entry in question. You will be prompted to the GitHub file, which you can edit and make a PR with your changes. These will be reviewed, discussed with you and eventually approved.

You find then some options which you can use to facilitate your reading of the page, if needed, and show or hide the pointers from each linked entitiy and the bar on the right with all related items.

There used to be a button to produce a PDF output from the entry. This functionality was never used, but when it did it slowed down sensibly the application, so, it has been retired. The scripts to achive the same are still available and have been improved as a separate package called Make PDF.

The following buttons are item specific and are discussed below.

The title line gives you basic name and references for each item, as well as authors of the record and their role. Under it you will have a small item navigation bar on the left, which can be scrolled and expanded for very long entries.

The content of the entry is than at the centre of the page and organized in different ways according to the item type.

At the bottom of the page you have also a list of possibilities to see related items, which also varies according to the item type. You will however always have a way to select one of the keyword associated to the current record and load a list of records which share that keyword. You will also always have a box for eventually existing public annotations made with Hypothes.is. This offers you a very easy way to interact and enrich the data visualized, by simply making an annotation which uses the tag suggested. We do not currently support any other annotation tool, but let us know what you use, and if it is possible we will fetch annotations from there as well.

At the right you will find the relations column with all relations expressed in the current record and the links to the related entities, grouped by name of the relation, for example, witnesses of a given literary work.

One last shared feature of the item views is the lower part, just above the footer, where you find human readable and actionable links to the RDF representations and a function to show all version of the resource and permalinks. If you click on any of this you will see the data at that point shown with the current interface, and the citation will be updated with the information available then.

The four boxes below provide Citation, Revision history (which can be entirely different from the version history!) and eventually present further information on the attribution of the contents, followed by a licence statement.

Most boxes are scrollable, and have a fixed height to manage better the space available.

Every item view, as well as the individual repository filtered list also have a function "Show Attestations", which will search for references to the current record and list them with some context information, for example, for a person, other persons which co-occur in the same context.

You can click on any linked entity to be brought to that item view, or click on the little hand to load items related to that entity.

We use Alpheios in an embedded form, so that you do not need to install the plugin. This means that any word in the languages supported can be double clicked to load morphological data and definitions from Alpheios. We provide Alpheios with a parser for Gǝʿǝz, so that you can double click on any word tagged as Gǝʿǝz and retrieve possible matches with links to the Online Lexicon Linguae Aethiopicae. Additionally, if you hover on any Gǝʿǝz word, we will offer a series of useful links to a search in the database for that word, a search in the dictionary, a search in the parser via its web interface and a search in the TraCES corpus of annotations.

Another function available from all items is the direct exportability of bibliographic metadata, which are embedded in the page.

Manuscripts main view

The main item view for manuscripts will provide you two main parts: the codicologial descriptions and the content description. You can hide either of them.

At any place in the description, which contains a placement in the manuscript for which there are photos, you can click to open a small viewer at the location in question.

Information is organized by Codicological Unit and contents are grouped, you will need to click on the button of an item to expand its content and see the information available for it.

If a collation is available, then the codicological part of the description will have buttons to display it, using VisColl.

Clicking on the title of a content will lead you to the Textual Unit record for that.

Additional views which may be available for a manuscript are the transcription view, the image view, the Syntaxe view and relations view, all detailed below.

Textual and Narrative Units main view

Landing on the main view for a Textual unit you will see the main title, but also the Clavis Aethiopica number, the responsible editors and authors of the record in question and the status of the resource.

The main content is in this view more straight forward, as it provides the information availble about the text. If a text or even just a part of it is availble, you will see a red button in the options bar just under the navigation bar.

In the item navigation bar, you will also have direct links to the places and persons list views already filtered for this work. This is different from what you will get clicking the places optional view for a work item, which will print on a map the places attested and marked up in the given resource.

The witnessess section will contain links to manuscripts used for the edition from which the record was created.

At the bottom of the main content area you will have, beside the attestations button also a Voyant button, which will transfer the entire data available into Voyant web version, for your further analysis needs.

The relations bar on the right is topped by the list of manuscripts which we know to contain the given work. A link is provided to see these in the Manuscript filtered search view. Any Textual Unit can appear either alone or as part of others and we will list here also those manuscripts which contain a text which contains the current Textual Unit. For each matchin manuscript we will tell you the name, linking to the record, if there are images, and also extract some data about placement of the Textual Unit in the manuscript, with the identifier of the item, the placement, the position in the count of items, and if there is any text available, a word count for it.

Places main view

The item view for places features at the top links to classification and filtered searches for the place classification, as well as a link to searches for manuscripts to be found in repositories connected to that place.

Two maps are provided when available, one based on the coordinates we have, the other from Pelagios Commons API.

The item navigation bar will also directly link to the places index filtered for this entity.

The main data section provides information as it available, the relation bar on the right additionally provides a list of churches and monasteries of which we know about and which are related explicitly with this place. Also a list of resources linked to this place in Pelagios is added.

Disclaimer: Place records should ideally contain the attested names of the place in local languages and translation, including possible variants, as well as any information available on the foundation of the place, its existence and development. Coordinates can be added or will be retrieved if a reference to the place’s Wikidata ID is given. This is a work in progress, and many records were inherited from the Encyclopaedia Aethiopica, there are still many inconsistencies that we are trying to gradually fix.

Persons main view

What distinguishes this item view from the others is the presence of a box with the core informations available: names, relevant dates, etc.

The item navigation bar will also directly link to the persons index filtered for this entity.

Disclaimer: ideally, records should contain the person’s original and transliterated names and basic information on their life and occupations as well as a reference to their Wikidata ID, if existing. As this is a work in progress, and many records were inherited from the Encyclopaedia Aethiopica, there are still many inconsistencies that we are trying to gradually fix.

Authority files main view

These only contain the general information and the relation as above and have no additional specific feature.

Text/Transcription view

For manuscripts and textual units, you may have respectively a transcription or a text available, more often just parts of either. We welcome contributions in this sense, if you have content which can be shared and has clear sources.

The text and transcription view is divided in three main areas, one with the witnesses (for text), the area of the text and eventually images related to it as well as apparatus, and the bibliography.

The navigation and indexes will allow you to call specific parts of the text according to its structure, using an implementation of the Distributed Text Services specification.

Each structural unit of the text may also have links to quotations of that passage, to an alignment tool for different version and to alternative versions if available. An info button will tell you more about each.

If a translation of the passage viewed is available, you will see that as well at the top as a separate edition and you may choose to restrict your text view to that only. If images of the witness manuscripts are available and explicitly linked, the images of all available linked witnesses will be shown below the text transcription and follow on with the navigation. There is currently only one partial example of this however, and we hope to have more in the future.

Compare

Textual Units and Narrative Unit, will have a button in the option bar, linking to the Comparison view. This will print for a given Textual or Narrative Unit, all the manuscripts which contain it with a summary of their contents ordered by date. You will see the unit in question highlighted to enable you to see where it occurs in the different manuscripts. Under this you will also have charted information from the manuscripts in this selection.

Graph

In most cases this view does not do anything yet. It will pull information useful from the RDF representation of the data, when it is available. Because the RDF only contains some of the information encoded in the TEI, this is often nothing additional to show here.

Syntaxe

In this view we provide tool for the structural analysis of manuscripts following La Syntaxe du Codex, namely a table to support the identification of convergent discontinuities and a Sankey chart summarizing the stages of transformation and circulation of a given manuscript.

TEI/XML

This view will produce the enriched and explicit TEI file for interchange and reuse which we produce from the simple version used for data entry and controlled by the schema. No schema association is made here and xi:include is used for static parts.

Relations

The relations view of any item will produce a force graph of the entities and their relations to the current one, as well a table of such statements including statements which point to the current resource.

Images Viewer

For manuscripts of which we store and serve images, the images view will offer a Mirador viewer reading a IIIF Manifest extracted from the TEI. This allows the creation of ranges which make the navigation of the set of images easier, by linking a feature, for example a decoration to the exact image. The information box in the viewer will also provide additional information about the images.

geoJson

For places records where sufficient information is at hand, it will be possible to see or retrieve also a geoJson formatted version of the data.

Indexes

Some specific features of the records can be searched as such in the database, with dedicated indexes dedicated to those who are predominantly interested in these features.

List of cited publications

This is a reverse index of all publications actually cited in the database. For each bibliographical reference you will have the Zotero tag, and a link to the EthioStudies library and a list of all entries pointing to this. Eventually, if you filter this by catalogue bibliography, then you will have the same as the Catalogue list view.

You can limit this list to a specific type of record (e.g. only Textual Units). Clicking on the link which you find after each bibliographic record in the item views, you will land at this view filtered for that record only.

List of places/persons annotations

This indexes, requested initially by Éloi Ficquet, provides a paginated list of places annotated in the records, anywhere, so, either inside the text or in its description. For each place you will see each annotation listed and grouped by record in which it occurs. Beside the list a pie chart with the break down of the actual forms annotated is also provided. You can limit to a specific identifier or to a collection.

Titles Supplications Colophons

This filtered view will give access to what is marked up as title, colophon or supplication in the records.

You will be returned directly a list of all relevant features on loading the page, with specific filters. Each filter refers to features of the selected items. The full text of the titles colophons or supplications is provided in the result list, with a reference to the element where it occurs and a link to the resource.

Calendar

This view also offers access to parts of texts which have been associated to a relative calendar date, for example for liturgical recurring celebrations.

You will be able to limit your search by day or month and see in which records there are elements which have been associated with such calendar date.

Decorations

The decorations filtered search, originally designed with Jacopo Gnisci, will look at decorations and their features only. The filters 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 for that manuscript.

Bindings

The same type of filtered search is offered here for bindings and their features. Eliana Dal Sasso designed the encoding and the search for binding features present here.

Additions

Here you will be able to access and browse the text of all the texts which are recorded as additions to manuscripts.

Resources

Compare

The comparison view will take as input any Textual Unit identifier and search for the manuscripts which contain it and have been encoded with a proper identifier. See above the comparison item view.

Map of Manuscripts

This map view, using the Dariah-De Geobrowser will extract from manuscript records which have been explicitly linked to a Textual Unit, information on their current repository and original location as well as date. You will thus be able to see where are the manuscripts and in which period they originated in which area. This is as always subject to data availability, but if you are not satisfied with the data, you can also add your contribution.

Related Textual Units

This view, initially requested from Wendy Belcher presents a table of all Textual unit related to a main one.

Literature Flow Sankey Chart

Selecting a keyword, you will be able to extract a chart of the textual units or manuscripts containing a given textual unit which have been tagged with that keyword. The way this chart works is explained in the book by Liuzzo cited below and available in open access.

Collate passages with Collatex

When the Collatex is running on the server, you can use the application to compare texts which are stored in the database. The results will highlight segments which are equal or not in a tabular view.

Chojnacki collection

Jacopo Gnisci worked on the Chojnacki collection at the Vatican Library to digitize photos donated by the scholar to that library. Clicking at this link you will see these images as they are provided via IIIF by the Vatican Library. This work was supported by Beta maṣāḥǝft.

Tweed collection

This will link to the splash page of the Tweed Collection, part of the EMIP data.

Search

Indexes

This app is built with exist-db, and uses Lucene as the standard search engine. This comes with several options available. A full list is here

Input

The search form has explanations of each of its parts which will appear on hovering. Read them to learn what each button does.

If you are using the keyboard provided, please note that there are four layers, the normal one and those activated by Shift, Alt, Alt+Shift.

Normal and Shift contain mainly Fidal. Alt and Alt-Shift diacritics.

To enter letters in Fidal and the diacritics with this keyboard, which is independent of your local input selection, you can use two methods.

Orthographic variants of the Ethiopic language are searched as a standard if not otherwise specified. The following are the options considered by the search engine.

  • 's','s', 'ḍ'
  • 'e','ǝ','ə','ē'
  • 'w','ʷ'
  • 'ʾ', 'ʿ'
  • '`', 'ʾ', 'ʿ' (note that you can use the tick if you are not sure about the two, but none will be inferred for you)
  • 'ሀ', 'ሐ', 'ኀ', 'ሃ', 'ሓ', 'ኃ'
  • 'ሀ', 'ሐ', 'ኀ'
  • 'ሁ', 'ሑ', 'ኁ'
  • 'ሂ', 'ሒ', 'ኂ'
  • 'ሄ', 'ሔ', 'ኄ'
  • 'ህ', 'ሕ', 'ኅ'
  • 'ሆ', 'ሖ', 'ኆ'
  • 'ሠ','ሰ'
  • 'ሡ','ሱ'
  • 'ሢ','ሲ'
  • 'ሣ','ሳ'
  • 'ሥ','ስ'
  • 'ሦ','ሶ'
  • 'ሤ','ሴ'
  • 'ጸ', 'ፀ'
  • 'ጹ', 'ፁ'
  • 'ጺ', 'ፂ'
  • 'ጻ', 'ፃ'
  • 'ጼ', 'ፄ'
  • 'ጽ', 'ፅ'
  • 'ጾ', 'ፆ'
  • 'አ', 'ዐ', 'ኣ', 'ዓ'
  • 'ኡ', 'ዑ'
  • 'ኢ', 'ዒ'
  • 'ኤ', 'ዔ'
  • 'እ', 'ዕ'
  • 'ኦ', 'ዖ'

Some examples

  • If you search Taammera, you will not find Taʾammǝra or Taʿammera but only Taammera. Try Ta`ammera instead or use the keyboard provided to enter aleph and ayn.
  • If you are searching for Yāʿǝqob, you will not have a lot of luck searching Yaqob, unless some kind cataloguer has actually added it into the data as simplified spelling form. Try instead entering Yaqob~0.5 which is a fuzzy search, this will return also Yāʿǝqob. Also Ya`eqob is fine for example.

Keys Combinations

With this method you use keys combinations to trigger specific characters. Click here for a list of the available combos. This can be expanded, do not hesitate to ask (click here to post a new issue).

Hold and choose

If you hold a key optional values will appear in a list. You can click on the desiderd value or use arrows and enter to select it. The options are the same as those activated by combinations.

With this method you do not have to remember or lookup combos, but it does take many more clicks...

New features of the search

This new faceted search allows you to search for a term wherever it is, and then drill down the results, as in a commercial website. Once your hits have been retrieved you can select the features which help you restrict to a set of results. Beware, however, because not everything can be indexed as text. if you search for "Mary", you will not match all instances, but just those where Mary is written up in the text. In most cases, this is not the case, as we prefer where possible to use a pointer and store the name in an authority file only. It is true that you will match that person file, and from there you can navigate, and check occurrences and attestations of a given person, for example. In this search, we are not trying to give you sliders and similar things, or format the contents, or filter out dirty data, you have to declaratively select among the available values, for types of decorations as for dates.

Examples:

XPath search

All searches are XPath searches in an XML database like the one behind this website, but what you can ask in a XPath query is much more than any of the provided search interfaces can offer. So, if you know how to write your XPath, and know the source TEI (available for each file, by appending .xml to the identifier of the record) you will then be able to see your results listed.

Here you can avail yourself also of the structure of the file, the relative position of elements, and the nested elements, querying across the axes.

Examples:

SPARQL Endpoint

Parallel to the XML, also an RDF triple store is maintained by the project. Here you get an interface to the SPARQL endpoint. You can add your SPARQL query and see the results available. The endpoint can be queried from other visualization tools like Palladio.

Examples:

Data

There are many ways to access the data which are not the website. You can check the API Documentation and our page about Linked Open Data. You can also clone the repositories from GitHub or get stable citable dumps from the repository of the ZFDM (see below).

Citation

To cite pages in the website, look first at the bottom of the page. versioned resources have long lasting links . If not, you have a number of other options depending on what you want to do.

Simply point to the general page (e.g. https://betamasaheft.eu/gender) or to one of the views (/gender/table, /gender/graph, /gender/page) or to the data at /gender/data. All these are stable links, they will not change. Their content will, these are not resources subject to versioning, like manuscripts, e.g., which can be cited using PIDs, but only visualisations of aggregates and queries.

To cite a stable version of the specific dataset (/gender/data) which you used via its HTML view, so not the latest version and not that specific view, but indeed what you used in whatever way, you could save a copy of the data, in a format of your choice to Zenodo, and point to that dataset and its DOI, which allows very easy versioning of the imported resources in case you need to update that deposit. The metadata would have to contain reference to BM as required by the CCBYSANC of the data, allowing non commercial derivates with attribution.

If you want to cite the page as it looks when you are looking at it and with the data as it looks, save it to the Way Back Machine with any of the available plugins and cite the web resource pointing to the version stored there. e.g. https://web.archive.org/web/20200812190615/https://betamasaheft.eu/gender/table/female, this adds to the declaration of when you looked at something the possibility to check it at that point in time.

Bibliography

Bibliography about the project is also available, here are some examples.