Paper short abstract:

The reluctance of the church and the state, which among other things is caused by researchers’ local value mishandling, challenged Northern Ethiopian manuscript preservation; a versatile number of archaic materials, like in the Tigray Crises, are lost before being digitized and archived.

Paper long abstract:

An estimated 750,000 Gǝʿǝz manuscripts, like the Gospels of Abba Gärima dated to 330-650 CE are preserved in Ethiopian churches and monasteries, museums, and libraries. Except for a few thousand manuscripts digitized by European research projects, more than 90% of them are kept in the wilderness exposed to damage and prowling as the archival practice and preservation are exceedingly inadequate. Not only does the conflict of interest for ownership between the government heritage authorities and the church makes digitizing bureaucratic, but also the secluded monasteries are autonomous from the church’s administrative structure itself; under the same dogma, each cloister may have its own monastic cult. The technophobic, but humble Orthodox monks, don’t mostly trust the urban people because digitized manuscripts are not easily accessible, nor are their copies left, in the local archives; it is also presumed that researchers manipulate and devalue religious traditions and cultural norms. Ethiopian stories about looted objects found in western archives, and narratives (also sentimentalized) on the issue corroborated the strong stand of the church (supported by the state) against digitization. The late Ethiopian patriarch Abunä Ṗaulos announced in a circular letter, in 2009, not to digitize a manuscript. On top of that, the lack of infrastructure and inaccessibility of the mountainous monasteries frustrate researchers; on our experience of manuscript assessment and digitization in various monasteries, some of them take a day’s travel on foot. Thus, both the practice and attitude towards manuscript digitization in Ethiopia have affected cultural heritage preservation. During the Tigray crisis, thousands of manuscripts among cultural heritage objects were damaged and looted before they were digitized and archived. Many of them today are observed in e-commerce and antiquity shops. The objective of this paper, therefore, is to investigate the challenges of manuscript digitization and its imprecision on heritage damage and loss.