The Parchment Makers: an Ancient Art in Present-Day Ethiopia.

Directed by Neal W. Sobania and Raymond A. Silverman

1/2" VHS videocassette, color, 19 min. Hope College (Holland, Michigan) and Sola Scriptura (Orlando, Florida), 2000. Available from International Education Office, Hope College. $20 NTSC format, $25 PAL format.

Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity (EOC) has given rise to rich artistic traditions, including a vernacular architecture exemplified by the world-renowned rock-hewn churches at Lalibela; icons and paintings; indigenous liturgical music such as the traditional chant, kidase; and vernacular literature, specifically Ethiopic manuscripts, also known as parchments, after the material on which they are written. The literature and liturgy of EOC are written in Geez, which was the official language of the state and the church when the Bible was first translated during the seventh century A.D. Geez has continued to function in Ethiopia as an ecclesiastical and liturgical language, as Latin does in the West (Shelemay & Jeffery 1993:6).

Neal Sobania and Raymond Silverman's The Parchment Makers documents an ancient art that is still practiced today. The video, narrated by Hera Sereke-Brhan, records centuries-old methods by which Ethiopians have been producing manuscripts, that is, books written on parchment. Merigetta Birhane, a 66-year-old clergyman of the Cathedral of Aksum Tsion, (1) is a parchmenter and scribe. Silverman and Sobania videoed this artist as he created a book in his residence.

Many of the materials needed to create the manuscript, such as parchment, ink, and pen, are fashioned locally, some by the artist himself. In this video, Merigetta Birhane transforms goat skin into parchment, a laborious and meticulous process which includes stretching the skin on a wooden frame, removing the hair, washing and drying the skin in the sun or drying room, and repairing any holes. He uses local tools: a sharp blade for scraping the outside of the skin, a light piece of volcanic glass for reducing it to the appropriate thickness by removing its upper layers, and a needle and thread. Once the parchment is made, the artist uses scissors to score and carve it into sheets called bufollio, which are flattened, ruled, and folded to create pages. From his goat skin Birhane makes two bufollio--four-page sheets--both sides of which will be used for writing.

The second arduous task is the writing of the book on the parchment. As a scribe, Birhane copies from the existing books from the library of the Cathedral of Aksum Tsion. The layout of the page is determined not by the artist but by the format of the exemplar book. The narrator describes the artist as he works: "His hand glides across the page forming character after character ... writing down one column, and then resuming on the top of the next. Birhane stops only to dip his pen in the ink, just as Hebrew, Christian, and Islamic scribes did for centuries before him." The pen, shembako, is made of bamboo; the ink is a mixture of ash, gum arabic, water, and roasted barley or sorghum; and the inkwell is of cowhorn. The artist uses the very last page of the new book to document the conditions under which it has been produced. This page, the colophon, contains the name of the artist, the date of completion, and the name of the person who commissioned the book. Finally, the quires of pages are bound between two wooden covers and the spine is tied with damp leather.

The Parchment Makers makes a second major contribution. Its well-researched script situates this living Ethiopian tradition in a global historical context that includes writing systems such as those of the ancient Middle East and medieval Europe. It focuses particularly on manuscript production. We are told that because of its softness and flexibility, papyrus was the predominant surface for writing, particularly in ancient Egypt from the third century B.C. to the rise of Christianity. Around the first century A.D., Egyptians began to use the more durable parchment, which eventually replaced papyrus altogether; the books of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam were and still are copied on this medium. In Ethiopia the tradition of parchment manuscripts seems to have begun during the fifth century A.D., when the books of the Bible were being translated into Geez. The production of handwritten books became widespread in different parts of the world, especially in medieval Europe, where monasteries served as the centers for manuscript production until the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century.

These comparative perspectives are provided not only through the narratives but also through images, mainly still photographs. We see, for example, Ethiopian priests in liturgical dress, pages of sample manuscripts, a herd of cattle, sheep, and goat grazing in a field in Aksum, the Aksum Tsion Cathedral, and an illustration of medieval European monks engaged in writing and copying. The images and narratives are effectively juxtaposed to guide the viewers through a proper reading of the images of parchment making both inside and outside the video. The Ethiopian instrumental musical score and the narrator's facility with the local lexicon add to the ethnographic richness.

The final products of parchment making and scribing have been the main focus of national and international scholarship on Ethiopian manuscripts (e.g., Tamrat 1972; Ullendorff 1960, 1968), and there has been a major effort to inventory, catalog, and microfilm about 7,000 manuscripts. (2) The Parchment Makers, on the other hand, focuses on the actual process of production, from goatskin to book. According to A. Gell (1992:46), the essence of an art is its making: "It is the way an art object is construed as having come into the world which is the source of the power such objects have over us, their becoming rather than their being." By documenting the process of parchment's becoming, the video makes its most significant contribution to the scholarship on this subject. In this way it is similar to Raymond Silverman's groundbreaking volume Ethiopia: Traditions of Creativity (1999), which focuses on the creative process and the artists themselves, as well as on a wide range of art traditions, most of them neglected by other scholars of Ethiopian arts.

The Parchment Makers carries broader implications for other areas of Ethiopian studies; in addition to their religious significance, these manuscripts are rich sources of cultural, social political and economic information. The video also has international implications because of Ethiopia's cultural diversity and geopolitical importance. The country's mosaic culture is the result of centuries of coexistence of indigenous, Judaic, Christian, and Islamic traditions. It is also "one of the world's great crossroads where the peoples and cultures of Africa, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean have been meeting for thousands of years" (Silverman 1999:3). Thus, the information in this video, which shares elements with the ancient Middle East and medieval Europe, is valuable for comparative research on world religious art histories.

Nevertheless, I have a few quibbles. Given that the artist engaged in art making constitutes the central theme, including his voice could have added to the ethnographic richness of the video, providing the artist's perceptions of himself, his profession, and the whole processes of parchment making. Also, we are not told how Merigetta Birhane acquired his technical knowledge and skill. Traditionally, the process of making parchment and copying texts, along with learning to read and write in Geez, is part of the church education given to young people (mostly male), beginning in childhood. Such information would have helped viewers make more meaningful associations between what has been videoed and what has not. Moreover, one could not help but wonder whether there have been changes in the production of manuscripts over time, and whether regional or individual variations (in tools, styles, and text specializations) exist within Ethiopia.

Despite these minor limitations, The Parchment Makers is a valuable teaching and research tool. Though it represents centuries of cultural and religious traditions, it is short enough to hold the viewers' full attention. The video is well-shot, employing a very steady camera, occasionally zooming in to show minute technical details and pulling back to show the entire layout of the process of parchment production. The use of the video medium for the scholarly study of Ethiopian manuscripts is innovative, and this production will certainly be of interest to a broad range of educators, artists, and scholars of multiple disciplines.

(1.) This cathedral is famous for its large cultural holdings such as parchments, crosses, icons, and paintings, as well as for "hosting" the Lost Ark of the Covenant.

(2.) This effort was undertaken by the Ethiopian Manuscript Microfilm Organization of the Ministry of Culture, in collaboration with St. John's University in Collegeville, Minnesota. The archives are housed in both Addis Ababa and St. John's University (see Quirin 1982).

References cited

Gell, A. 1992. "The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technolog35" in Anthropology, Art, and Aesthetics, eds. Jeremy Coote and Anthony Shelton, pp. 40-63. New York: Oxford University Press.

Quirin, James. 1982. "A Preliminary Analysis of New Archival Sources on Daily Life in Historical Highland Ethiopia," in Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference of Ethiopian Studies. University of Lund, 26-29 April, ed. Sven Rubenson, pp. 393-410. Institute of Ethiopian Studies, Addis Ababa University.

Shelemay, K.K, and P. Jeffery (eds.). 1993,1994,1997. Ethiopian Christian Liturgical Chant. Madison: A-R Editions. 3 vols.

Silverman, R. (ed.). 1999. Ethiopia: Traditions of Creativity. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Tamrat, Taddesse. 1972. Church and State in Ethiopia, 1270-1527. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Ullendorff, Edward. 1960. The Ethiopians. London: Oxford University Press.

Ullendorff, Edward. 1968. Ethiopia and the Bible. London: Oxford University Press for the British Academy.

WORKU NIDA, a doctoral student in the Department of Anthropology at UCLA, worked at the Ethiopian Manuscript Microfilm Organization of the Ministry of Culture from 1984 to 1998.