Maróti Gábor

The Ethiopian Orthodox Amharic manuscript Missale and Antiphonale codex

It is typical of liturgical musical sources that we cannot currently trace the history of sound notation in the Western Church back to earlier than the 10th century, since our musicological sources do not contain fragments from before the tradition of visualization indicating the direction of sound that preceded the line-dot system.

Before the theological and church-historical processes of liturgical and traditional representation that began in 1054, the Eastern and Western rites were as separated from each other as the later Roman or local liturgical variants, and therefore did not result in an institutionally demarcated practice from an ecclesiastical, normative, or musical point of view. Due to the physical and cultural distance, these early liturgies could not have come into contact with either Roman practice or the Western Church at all; however, their theological content and liturgical value are identical in every way to the “modern” application variants. From a liturgical history perspective, it is of special value that the Eastern and African sources, despite their different development paths, adhered to the earliest traditions to the extreme in almost every detail, and therefore provide a historical memory that allows us to look into the centuries preceding the surviving physical sources.

The Ethiopian manuscripts are remarkable products of a living manuscript culture that has survived from the fourth century to the present day. Their bindings often preserve structures similar to those of early Christian books of the fourth and seventh centuries; their liturgical musical tradition is a living example of a system transmitted through oral teaching, with minimal use of notation.

The examined codex does not have a colophon (κολοφών, Greek word, meaning: end, peak, an “imprint” characteristic of ancient and medieval codex literature, which usually contains literary and textual history data of the codex) that would give the exact date of completion; a note in the textual process indicates that the main text was completed on "Tahsas 22" (December 31 or January 1), but the year is not mentioned. The name of the scribe is given as Gabra Madhenk, as an insertion of a deletion, belonging to the temple called Mahdara Maryam, after which the name of the Son of Thunder [Walda Nagwadgwad] was added. The name of the original owner, Gabra Sellase, appears in some of the benedictions.

Christianity arrived in Ethiopia in the fourth century, and until the seventh century Ethiopia maintained close ties with the Coptic Church. Despite a brief period of Portuguese rule, the country remained isolated until the nineteenth century. The continuation of manuscript culture in the modern era makes Ethiopian textual sources a special starting point for scholars interested in earlier manuscripts. Both the liturgical texts and music of Ethiopia are important witnesses to the earliest Christian musical traditions. Not only is it remarkable from a liturgical historical perspective that it preserves extremely ancient textual memories and content structures preserved in early oral tradition, but also that this community has remained undisturbed in ancient cultural isolation.