Steven Delamarter

George Fox University Professor and Students Study Ethiopian Manuscripts at TWU

On the weekend of January 20-21, 2006 and at the invitation of TWU M.A. in Biblical Studies, George Fox professor Steve Delamarter and a team of students, Jenifer Manginelli, Dylan Morgan, Roger Rundell, and Erik Young, came to TWU to photograph four Ethiopian manuscripts and to gather cataloguing information on each one. These manuscripts had been acquired by Dr. Robert Thompson in Ethiopia and donated to TWU.

The first manuscript is a complete Ethiopian Psalter, comprised of 142 folios bound into twelve quires.  This codex is a fairly deluxe version of the Psalter with a tooled leather cover and eight illuminations.  Ethiopian Psalters contain 151 Psalms of David, The Fifteen Biblical Canticles, The Song of Songs, and two Ethiopian Orthodox works known as The Praises of Mary and The Gate of Light.  The second codex, made up of 72 folios in seven quires, contains a number of works praising Mary.  The third manuscript is the remains of an Ethiopian Psalter. Only 50 folios remain, but these cover from Psalm 93 through Psalm 151, The Biblical Canticles, The Song of Songs and the beginning of the Praises of Mary.  Several folios had come loose or had been placed in the wrong order in the stack.  These were restored to their proper locations.  The final manuscript is a tiny prayer book to Mary.  The format of the manuscript is an accordion-fold, a long strip of parchment folded back and forth to form pages.

The high-resolution digital imagery will be added to the collection of the HIll Monastic Manuscripts Library at St. John's University in Collegeville, MN where they will be catalogued and accessible to researchers around the world. In addition, the images will be deposited at the Institute of Ethiopian Studies in Addis Ababa and at TWU's M.A. in Biblical Studies Department.