Ethiopic Palimpsests

Abstract

While spectacular scholarly breakthroughs and technological advances have led to a surge in recent scholarship on palimpsests, their existence within the Ethiopic manuscript tradition has hitherto received virtually no attention. Nonetheless, at least sixteen Ethiopic palimpsests have been identified, with many more to be found within collections inaccessible at present. Those available for study exhibit strong tendencies towards having biblical commentaries overwritten and being manufactured around the seventeenth century, though the only such manuscript to have undergone multi-spectral imaging thus far (Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Petermann II Nachtrag 24) is of slightly later date. This manuscript contains no less than ten discrete scriptiones inferiores, but in this regard it likely constitutes an outlier to palimpsesting as practised within the Ethiopic tradition more broadly