Bāḥra ḥassāb: Knowledge Transmission in Ethiopia and Eritrea From Antiquity to Modern Times

• Applicant: Dr. Daria Elagina
• Subject Area: African, American and Oceania Studies ; Ancient History ; Medieval History ; History of Science
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 536604808

A land of written civilization from the 1st millennium BCE, the highlands of Eritrea and Northern Ethiopia present a peculiar case of a cultural area with a long and uninterrupted manuscript tradition. Alongside other literary heritage, the manuscript culture of Ethiopia and Eritrea has transmitted through many centuries a corpus of texts and graphical elements (tables and diagrams) traditionally designated in the Ethiopic culture as bāḥra ḥassāb. The corpus conveys traditional knowledge pertaining to the calendar, chronology, astronomy, cosmology, astrology, meteorology, divination, and many more aspects. Many elements of this corpus are of foreign (e.g. Hellenistic, Arabic or European) origin. Having been integrated into the Ethiopic manuscript culture these foreign elements provided grounds for unique cross-cultural ideas and shaped the local epistemic tradition which has survived until today. The corpus of bāḥra ḥassāb is a crucial element of the culture of Ethiopia and Eritrea, an important source for comparison with other manuscript cultures, and a peculiar example of a non-Western epistemic tradition. However, current scholarship, despite some important and profound contributions, lacks a comprehensive understanding of the scope, origin, and constituent elements of this corpus. Descriptions of the relevant manuscript are often superficial and a philological and manuscriptological analysis of the elements of bāḥra ḥassāb is still a scholarly desideratum. The proposed project aims to study the corpus of bāḥra ḥassāb based on primary sources (manuscripts) under the application of sustainable digital tools. The main goal of the project is to obtain a systematic and comprehensive understanding of bāḥra ḥassāb, its repertoire, topics, origin, and historical development as a world culture phenomenon, and to produce tools and methods for its study. The project will be of importance not only for the field of Ethiopian studies as such, but also for allowing bāḥra ḥassāb to be included in interdisciplinary and intercultural research on Computus, divination, historical epistemology, and similar topics, from which it has been almost completely excluded so far. Moreover, the project will also contribute to the further development of the recently established ‘History of Knowledge’ (‘Wissensgeschichte’) by offering a detailed analysis of the knowledge tradition of a non-Western culture.

• DFG Programme: Independent Junior Research Groups