Literature

The Ge'ez written heritage of Ethiopia and Eritrea is entirely part of the Judaeo-Christian tradition of the Mediterranean.

The literary tradition began in the Aksumite time (fourth to ninth/tenth centuries) with the translation of the Bible and the main bulk of the Christian literature from the Greek language.

When Arabic became the main language of the Coptic Church in Egypt, the mother church of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tawahedo Church, a bulk of texts were translated, or sometimes retranslated, from Arabic.

History of literature and philology have been the main relevant branches of Ethiopian studies that have been paid a continuous attention. Important text editions – from the books of the Bible to recent historiographic collections – have been made available, even if not all according to the standards accepted in philologies of other textual traditions. Little has been done in the past decades towards a general comprehensive history of Ethiopic literature, the last critical overviews having been offered in the 1960s. None of the available overviews see literary developments in connection with the changes in language and style of narration, and none has taken into account the complexities of the manuscript transmission phenomena in their relationship to text history. On the one hand, format, size, script, palaeography of the manuscript medium actively determines the perception and the concrete essence (in terms of volume and capacity) of a ‘text’ either as a ‘work’ or as a ‘piece’ (that is, as an ‘embedded and embodied discrete component’). At the same time, the mere definition of a singular text often depends on the actual circumstances of its material transmission. A related challenge is the definition of a text by its genre or title: in the case of Ethiopian literature we frequently deal with traditional labels that have been conventionally used in scholarship but in reality may be assigned to different texts (or parts of texts) at the same time and finally are the result of a long and complicated process that should be a matter of research in itself.

While for other important written traditions, systematic repertories exist, primarily in the form of ‘Claves’, nothing comparable has been attempted for the Ethiopian textual heritage. The only work that according to unanimous consensus has most and best contributed in recent years to our understanding of the Ethiopic literature by providing up-to-date and richly referenced entries, that is the ‘Encyclopaedia Aethiopica’, does not attempt to furnish any comprehensive register; it only has encyclopedic entries for the most important ‘works’ and ‘genres’. Thus, a systematic comprehensive study of Ethiopic literature is fully missing; the project will be closing this lacuna by offering a new integral approach to this field of study.

The project creates the Clavis Aethiopica (CAe) – 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.

The current provisional list of all IDs is available here.