Despite standing between 2,000m and 3,000m above sea level, Ethiopia’s strategic position at the mouth of the Red Sea has long provided it with access to the cultures of the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean worlds. Excavations in the ancient capital of Aksum trace the origins of the Aksumite dynasty to the 2nd century B.C. The Aksumites were preceded at least from the 8th century B.C. by an indigenous culture which ran parallel to a successful colonial or emigre community of Sabeans who came from directly across the Red Sea in Yemen. The Sabeans brought with them their written language, for which epigraphic evidence is not lacking. The Aksumites used Ge’ez, an independent subgroup of the Semitic languages, known from epigraphic inscriptions to have been fully developed by the 3rd century A.D. The royal court adopted Christianity along with other kingdoms situated on the periphery of the Byzantine Empire, shortly before the Conversion of Constantine in the second quarter of the 4th century. The Garima Gospels, recently attributed to the 5th-7th c. A.D., are among the earliest, if not the earliest extant translations of the Greek Bible. Sitting squarely on the maritime trade route between Rome, Persia, India and points east, this highland stronghold was the recipient of cultural and technological developments from both directions; its religions, of which Christianity became the most dominant, arrived from the Eastern Mediterranean and Red Sea regions, while significant aspects of material culture were carried by the trade winds across the Indian Ocean, particularly from the Subcontinent itself. Due largely to its geographic position, Ethiopia belongs neither to the East nor to the West but has developed over the millennia as a unique socio-political entity that is very different from its neighbors in Egypt, Sudan, Somalia, and Arabia. This presentation will focus on its global connections across time and space, with particular reference to the imported textiles that appear on the inner book boards of some Christian manuscripts and Mamluk metalware used during religious ceremonies.

Michael Gervers is trained as a Western medievalist (B.A. Princeton; PhD University of Toronto) with particular interests in charters and material cultural. As an M.A. student at the Centre d’études supérieures de civilization médiévale at the Université de Poitiers, he excavated the rock-hewn church of St. Georges below the village of Gurat in the French Aquitaine. The pursuit of rock-hewn ecclesiastical architecture led him to Ethiopia, where he has worked for the past 40 years recording art and culture, with 70,000 images deposited in the database Mazgaba Seelat (https://ethiopia.utsc.utoronto.ca/). Research in Ethiopia has led him to the study of Mamluk metalware, and ancient imported textiles preserved on the book boards of manuscripts.