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Board of Trustees, Boston University Athiopische Handschriften, III: Handschriften Deutscher Bibliotheken, Museen und aus Privat Besitz by Veronika Six; Ernst Hammerschmidt Review by: Gene Gragg The International Journal of African Historical Studies, Vol. 29, No. 2 (1996), pp. 436-438 Published by: Boston University African Studies Center Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/220563 . Accessed: 09/05/2014 13:24 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . Boston University African Studies Center and Board of Trustees, Boston University are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The International Journal of African Historical Studies. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 194.29.185.15 on Fri, 9 May 2014 13:24:13 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Athiopische Handschriften, III: Handschriften Deutscher Bibliotheken, Museen und aus Privat Besitzby Veronika Six; Ernst Hammerschmidt

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Page 1: Athiopische Handschriften, III: Handschriften Deutscher Bibliotheken, Museen und aus Privat Besitzby Veronika Six; Ernst Hammerschmidt

Board of Trustees, Boston University

Athiopische Handschriften, III: Handschriften Deutscher Bibliotheken, Museen und aus PrivatBesitz by Veronika Six; Ernst HammerschmidtReview by: Gene GraggThe International Journal of African Historical Studies, Vol. 29, No. 2 (1996), pp. 436-438Published by: Boston University African Studies CenterStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/220563 .

Accessed: 09/05/2014 13:24

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Boston University African Studies Center and Board of Trustees, Boston University are collaborating withJSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The International Journal of African Historical Studies.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 194.29.185.15 on Fri, 9 May 2014 13:24:13 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 2: Athiopische Handschriften, III: Handschriften Deutscher Bibliotheken, Museen und aus Privat Besitzby Veronika Six; Ernst Hammerschmidt

436 BOOK REVIEWS

ATHIOPISCHE HANDSCHRIFTEN, III: HANDSCHRJFIEN DEUTSCHER BIBLIOTHEKEN, MUSEEN UND AUS PRIVAT BESITZ. By Veronika Six; edited by Ernst Hammerschmidt. Verzeichnis der Orientalischen Handschriften in Deutschland, Band XX, 6. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1994. Pp. 569. D.M. 368.

Since its inception in the early 1960s, the series VOHD (Verzeichnis der Orientalischen Handschriften in Deutschland) has been publishing catalogues of manuscript collections in Germany from a wide range of Asian and African sources. Subseries XX (Ethiopian manuscripts) consists of six volumes, three (XX, 1-3) describing collections catalogued by a team of German scholars in churches and monasteries on Lake Tana in Ethiopia (1973, 1977, one volume still in preparation), and three describing MS collections housed in Germany. Of the latter, two previously published volumes describe the two principal collections in Germany, that of the Staatsbibliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz in Berlin (XX, 4; 1983) and that of the Bavarian Staatsbibliothek in Munich (XX, 5; 1989). The present volume catalogues the remaining known Ethiopian MSS, 263 of them, held in thirty-one other public and private collections in Germany (together with a couple of additions to the catalogues of the Berlin and Munich collections).

In organization the volume adheres to the format set for the other volumes in the series (and indeed for Ethiopic MSS generally): a running catalogue number for each MS, and identfication of its 'home" collection and access number, a physical description (material, whether bound or scroll, number of pages if bound, columns, dimensions), and a table of contents and description of the text or texts contained in the MS. Especially useful is the listing of all existing editions and translations of each text, and of the most important discussions of the text in the scholarly literature. The non-Biblical texts are identified by traditional name and, for the less familiar texts, by incipit, and/or short extract-the latter given only in the original Ge'ez, so that any non-6thiopisant user will be very much dependent on the literature citations. Illuminations and graphic elements are succinctly described, as well as any other peculiarities of the MS (colophons, owners' names scratched out and replaced, secondary use of pages for business documents, contracts, etc.).

In content these texts provide an interesting cross-section both of what was written in traditional Ethiopian literate culture, and-especially since these small collections are frequently the result of bequests and donations of travelers and missionaries to their home-town libraries and museums-of what nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europeans tended to acquire in Ethiopia. Thus far and away the largest category of texts (108 of the 263) are "magical" in content, including 99 representatives of the ubiquitous and fascinating genre of the "magic scroll," a collection drawn up to the specifications of an individual client by a learned cleric,

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Page 3: Athiopische Handschriften, III: Handschriften Deutscher Bibliotheken, Museen und aus Privat Besitzby Veronika Six; Ernst Hammerschmidt

BOOK REVIEWS 437

containing personalized prayers and prophylactic invocations against physical (dysentery, eye diseases, sterility, impotence) and spiritual (evil eye, malicious spells) ills. The larger bound volumes all tend to contain several genres of texts. But categorizing approximately, one can sort the MSS into several rough classes. Hymns, prayers, and liturgies account for the next-largest single class (67 MSS) after magic. Among Biblical texts Psalters, referred to as dawit ("David") predominate (28 MSS); 4 MSS have Old Testament books, 7 have New Testament, but 9 have Aprocryphal books-reflecting the popularity of that genre in Ethiopia. There are 14 collections of sermons and theological discourses (both called dersan), and 10 collections of saints' lives.

Of more interest as a historical source, there is the well-known collection of traditional civil and canon law, the fatha nagast (Cat. num. 130). History is represented by two king lists: one (Cat. 236) goes from Adam to David, and then from Solomon to Yekuno Amlak (1270-85), with a summarizing note taking the chronology to Iyasu 11 (1730-55); the other (Cat 238) goes from David to Yekuno Amlak, and from Yekuno Amlak to Tewodros 11 (1855-68). Chronological preoccupations of another order are contained in a long text (Cat. 115) concerned with calendrical and astrological calculations-about a dozen other texts have sections dealing with horoscopes or calendrical computation. Finally, of historical interest are some collections of letters (all on paper, not parchment). One (Cat. 252) is correspondence from the years 1650-57 between the creator of Ethiopian studies in Europe, Hiob Ludolf, and his Ethiopian informant, Abba Gregorius. The others are incidental letters in Amharic from King Menilek 11 (1889-1913; Cat. 258), from an Ethiopian governor (1838-1909; Cat. 259), and from Lorenz Jensen, a German diplomat in Addis Ababa (1909-1921; Cat. 261).

Very few of these MSS are explicitly dated (and most of these are 19th or 20th century). The paleographic criteria for dating of Ethiopian MSS are still quite uncertain, in spite of recent progress.1 Given this caveat, the probable distribution of the MSS in time, according to the dating of the cataloguer, demonstrates the characteristically short life expectancy of a manuscript in Ethiopia: possibly 14th century, 3 MSS (all fragmentary); possibly 15th, 3 MSS; possibly 17th, 12 MSS; either 17th or 18th, 18 MSS; probably 18th, 55 MSS; either 18th or 19th, 33 MSS. The remaining 139 MSS are from the 19th century, with a few early 20th century MSS mixed in.

Thanks to the reunification of Germany, MS collections in former East Germany could be included in the survey without problem. The overview of Ethiopian MSS in German collections is thus reasonably complete. It is inevitable,

1 See Siegbert Uhlig, Introducdon to Ethiopian Palaeography (Stuttgart, 1990).

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Page 4: Athiopische Handschriften, III: Handschriften Deutscher Bibliotheken, Museen und aus Privat Besitzby Veronika Six; Ernst Hammerschmidt

438 BOOK REVIEWS

however, that other MSS will be discovered in forgotten or uninventorized storage, that new MSS will be acquired, and that the relevant bibliography of editions and discussions will continue to grow. One hopes then that the maintenance of this, as well as of other comparable reference works will now be continued in the dynamnic form that emerging electronic platforms make possible.

GENE GRAGG

University of Chicago

TERMS OF TRADE AND TERMS OF TRUST: THE HISTORY AND CONTEXTS OF PRE-COLONIAL MARKET PRODUCTION AROUND THE UPPER ZAMBEZI AND KASAI. By Achim von Oppen. Studien zur Afrikanischen Geschichte, Band 6. Munster and Hamburg: Lit, n.d. Pp. viii, 473; 3 maps, 32 figures. $47.50.

In a convincing study, Achim von Oppen challenges classical sociologists, anthropologists, and historians (Weber, Durkheim, Polanyi, Bohannan, Dalton, and Meillassoux), and modem development experts who have sharply differentiated subsistence from market-oriented systems. While those scholars agreed that the flow of economic goods in "primitive economic systems" did serve to cushion the impact of local shortages and provide some variety in consumption patterns, the main function of economic exchange, they suggested, was to acknowledge and strengthen the social structures of comparatively non-centalized, non-hierarchical, and non-coercive cultures. In the view of classical anthropologists, this cohesion was more important to ipre-modern subsistence producers than innovation, investnent, and individual accumulation, the marks of a market economy. Only in modem societies, characterized by inequality and fierce competition, were people thought to make rational choices on the basis of supply and demand, use-value and exchange-value, the availability of credit, and the desire for surplus value and

growth. According to conventional historical and economic analysis, capitalism and development emerged by destroying or harshly exploiting traditional systems. Subsistence agricultumlists were swept away to make room for commercial farmers or else the surplus production and unused labor of traditional villages were appropriated to produce slaves, supply migrant laborers, or support urban workers. Building on this perspective, free-market economists, dependency theorists, and Marxists all agreed that archaic economies of affection were incompatible with modem economic development. Furthermore, scholars believed that transforming

This content downloaded from 194.29.185.15 on Fri, 9 May 2014 13:24:13 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions