An Ancient Homiliary from ʿUrā Masqal
(Massimo Villa)
The spectacular churches of ʿUrā Qirqos/ʿUrā Masqal, located near the Ethiopian-Eritrean border, are known thanks to their rich and valuable collection of manuscripts. This collection—entirely transferred to the church of ʿUrā Qirqos (Gulo Makadā, Tǝgrāy) around the turn of the 21st century—is recognized for its extraordinary literary and documentary value. It includes manuscripts such as the early codex containing the so-called Aksumite Collection (ms UM-039) and a copy of the Zāgwe King Ṭanṭawǝddǝm’s land charter (ms UM-035). A significant portion of the collection (59 items) was digitised in the framework of the project Ethio-SPaRe during several field missions between 2009 and 2014, and many of them have been catalogued in the project’s database. A challenge for the cataloguing and subsequent study of the oldest manuscripts of the collection arises from the fact that some are severely damaged and incomplete, consisting of membra disiecta of multiple original production units put together at random. This makes it very difficult and time-consuming to identify individual textual units and accurately evaluate the oldest layer of the site’s textual heritage.
Intensive research has been conducted towards reconstructing, on palaeographic and textual bases, the sequence of leaves that constituted one of the ancient homiliaries of ʿUrā Masqal. The leaves of this homiliary are now scattered among the manuscripts of the collection with the following shelfmarks: mss UM-030, UM-037, UM-045, UM-046, and UM-050.
The homiliary in question (assigned now the shelfmark UM-050b), certainly a pre-fifteenth century codex, originally comprised at least 194 parchment leaves and contained at least 36 texts. Some parts of the original manuscript (e.g. the initial leaves) have been lost, and some homilies remain incomplete. The work was conducted solely on digital images; the manuscripts themselves could not be examined. The proposed reconstruction is certainly a tentative one and there are questions which are still open; even though, it appears that it has been possible to reassemble nearly the entire manuscript. In some cases, it has been possible to reconstruct the number of lost leaves from the extent of the textual lacunas (for example, text no. 27 most likely has a gap of three leaves), while in other cases the extent of the lacuna cannot be determined with precision. It is estimated that approximately twenty leaves have been lost overall.
The reconstruction of the content of the homiliary presented § 2 of the recent working paper includes precise indications of the origin of the leaves and the identification of individual works. In § 3, the reconstruction is visualized; the images can also be accessed in the web viewer The rearrangement of the surviving leaves has resulted in a double foliation. One sequence of folia numbers is visible on the parchment leaves: they were foliated in their respective manuscripts, just before they were photographed in situ. The secondary foliation, with folia numbers inserted in the digital images, reflects the reconstructed order of the leaves.
The ancient homiliary of ʿUrā Masqal is a further witness of a type of archaic homiletic collection represented by a small corpus of pre-fifteenth-century codices already known in scholarly literature. They are ms EMML 1763, from Dabra Ḥayq ʾƎsṭifānos (Wallo, Ethiopia), ms EMML 8509, from Ṭānā Qirqos (Bagemdǝr, Ethiopia), and ms London, British Library (BL) Or. 8192, from Gwǝnagwǝna (Eritrea). With the latter, Or. 8192, the homiliary of ʿUrā Masqal shares striking similarities in content and arrangement of individual texts. The geographical proximity between the churches ʿUrā Masqal and Gwǝnagwǝna, only a few kilometres apart, suggests that these two homiliaries may have some historical connections. This and numerous other issues concerning the homiliaries in question require further study; a short study on the palaeographical and codicological features of the reconstructed codex is in preparation and will appear as a continuation of the present study.
