Marco di Bella and Nikolas Sarris, independent conservators

The Conservation of a fifteenth century large parchment manuscript of Gädlä sämaʿtat from the monastery of Ura Mäsqäl: Further conservation experiences from East Tigray, Ethiopia

The celebrated fifteenth century parchment manuscript known as Gädlä sämaʿtat, (Spiritual Combat of the Martyrs) is written in Gǝʿǝz (Classical Ethiopic) and contains a collection of hagiographic texts identified at least from the thirteenth century. It survives for centuries at the monastery of Ura Mäsqäl in East Tigray in a state of disintegration, abandonment and dispersion, as the manuscript had broken into loose leaves and fragments scattered in parts among other manuscripts while becoming exposed to water damages and frequent rodent attacks.

Under the hospices of the Ethio-SPARE project this enormous in size manuscript received the necessary attention, in respect for its uniqueness for its collection of rare hagiographies that are identified as either copies from other languages or original Ethiopic texts. An expedition for the conservation and digitization of this manuscript was decided and organised to be carried out in three different visits to Ethiopia.

The experiences from working on the conservation of this manuscript were unprecedented. On one hand the particularities of working on a very large and distorted parchment manuscript under difficult working conditions, challenged the conservation team with unexpected surprises and dilemmas and this paper presents the adaptations and problem solving that this project entailed. The logistic hurdles that had to be overcome to achieve a state-of-the-art conservation work with minimum equipment offered valuable experiences of their own. The workspace where the conservation was carried out had to be prepared each time by adapting an office space, while extreme dry weather conditions were often an obstacle. Stretching and flattening the distorted parchment leaves under these conditions were a challenge for which particular techniques had to be developed, while the sewing and binding of the 40cm thick textblock led to the development of a special conservation binding that would combine the original bookbinding characteristics of this volume with –until now- less known Ethiopic bookbinding features that were identified through research on many early local Ethiopic structures, in order to provide a sturdy and at the same time flexible binding.

This project presented a unique opportunity of multidisciplinary work on a manuscript, bringing together simultaneously the expertise of codicologists, conservators, philologists and analytical scientists on site, demonstrating the necessity of collaboration between these disciplines for the holistic study of manuscripts, their bookbindings, their history and their texts.