Aux frontières de la codicologie et de la diplomatique. Structure et transmission des recueils documentaires éthiopiens

Anaïs Wion (1, 2)

1 CEMAf - Centre d'Etudes des Mondes Africains
2 IMAF - Institut des Mondes Africains

A general overview of the manuscript tradition and culture in Ethiopia is followed by a description of what is here called «archives» in the Ethiopian Christian documentation. These texts, copied in the blank spaces of liturgical manuscripts, do deserve a closer attention. Therefore, the necessity of establishing a special diplomatic for the study of Ethiopian archival documents is presented. As an illustration of this necessity, comes a first description of the so called «Liber Axumae», published by C. Conti Rossini in 1909-10, which is until now the archetype of Ethiopian archives. When studying the structure of this editio princeps, one notice that it is made of a selection of documents extracted from various codices and organized according to chronological and typological a priori criteria. Examining these codices, two groups can be, at first, distinguished. One is made of the Golden Gospel of Aksum Seyon (BN Eth Abb 152). The other is made of various manuscripts amongst whom Bn Eth Abb 97 and 225, EMML 50 and Bodleian Eth. 26 (Bruce 93). Then, the historiographical and political reasons of building such a compilation of document from the 1770s' up to the late 19th c. is stressed.

Mots clés: codicologie; diplomatique; manuscrit; Ethiopie; charte; Liber Aksumae; Aksum

Domaines: Histoire

Anaïs Wion. Aux frontières de la codicologie et de la diplomatique. Structure et transmission des recueils documentaires éthiopiens. Gazette du Livre Médiéval, 2006, 48 (1), pp.14-25. ⟨10.3406/galim.2006.1700⟩. ⟨hal-00450575⟩