The Parchment Makers: an Ancient Art in Present-Day Ethiopia - Video Recording Review

African Arts, Autumn, 2002 by Worku Nida

Directed by Neal W. Sobania and Raymond A. Silverman

1/2" VHS videocassette, color, 19 min. Hope College (Holland, Michigan) and Sola Scriptura (Orlando, Florida), 2000. Available from International Education Office, Hope College. $20 NTSC format, $25 PAL format.

Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity (EOC) has given rise to rich artistic traditions, including a vernacular architecture exemplified by the world-renowned rock-hewn churches at Lalibela; icons and paintings; indigenous liturgical music such as the traditional chant, kidase; and vernacular literature, specifically Ethiopic manuscripts, also known as parchments, after the material on which they are written. The literature and liturgy of EOC are written in Geez, which was the official language of the state and the church when the Bible was first translated during the seventh century A.D. Geez has continued to function in Ethiopia as an ecclesiastical and liturgical language, as Latin does in the West (Shelemay & Jeffery 1993:6).

Neal Sobania and Raymond Silverman's The Parchment Makers documents an ancient art that is still practiced today. The video, narrated by Hera Sereke-Brhan, records centuries-old methods by which Ethiopians have been producing manuscripts, that is, books written on parchment. Merigetta Birhane, a 66-year-old clergyman of the Cathedral of Aksum Tsion, (1) is a parchmenter and scribe. Silverman and Sobania videoed this artist as he created a book in his residence.

Many of the materials needed to create the manuscript, such as parchment, ink, and pen, are fashioned locally, some by the artist himself. In this video, Merigetta Birhane transforms goat skin into parchment, a laborious and meticulous process which includes stretching the skin on a wooden frame, removing the hair, washing and drying the skin in the sun or drying room, and repairing any holes. He uses local tools: a sharp blade for scraping the outside of the skin, a light piece of volcanic glass for reducing it to the appropriate thickness by removing its upper layers, and a needle and thread. Once the parchment is made, the artist uses scissors to score and carve it into sheets called bufollio, which are flattened, ruled, and folded to create pages. From his goat skin Birhane makes two bufollio--four-page sheets--both sides of which will be used for writing.

The second arduous task is the writing of the book on the parchment. As a scribe, Birhane copies from the existing books from the library of the Cathedral of Aksum Tsion. The layout of the page is determined not by the artist but by the format of the exemplar book. The narrator describes the artist as he works: "His hand glides across the page forming character after character ... writing down one column, and then resuming on the top of the next. Birhane stops only to dip his pen in the ink, just as Hebrew, Christian, and Islamic scribes did for centuries before him." The pen, shembako, is made of bamboo; the ink is a mixture of ash, gum arabic, water, and roasted barley or sorghum; and the inkwell is of cowhorn. The artist uses the very last page of the new book to document the conditions under which it has been produced. This page, the colophon, contains the name of the artist, the date of completion, and the name of the person who commissioned the book. Finally, the quires of pages are bound between two wooden covers and the spine is tied with damp leather.

The Parchment Makers makes a second major contribution. Its well-researched script situates this living Ethiopian tradition in a global historical context that includes writing systems such as those of the ancient Middle East and medieval Europe. It focuses particularly on manuscript production. We are told that because of its softness and flexibility, papyrus was the predominant surface for writing, particularly in ancient Egypt from the third century B.C. to the rise of Christianity. Around the first century A.D., Egyptians began to use the more durable parchment, which eventually replaced papyrus altogether; the books of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam were and still are copied on this medium. In Ethiopia the tradition of parchment manuscripts seems to have begun during the fifth century A.D., when the books of the Bible were being translated into Geez. The production of handwritten books became widespread in different parts of the world, especially in medieval Europe, where monasteries served as the centers for manuscript production until the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century.

These comparative perspectives are provided not only through the narratives but also through images, mainly still photographs. We see, for example, Ethiopian priests in liturgical dress, pages of sample manuscripts, a herd of cattle, sheep, and goat grazing in a field in Aksum, the Aksum Tsion Cathedral, and an illustration of medieval European monks engaged in writing and copying. The images and narratives are effectively juxtaposed to guide the viewers through a proper reading of the images of parchment making both inside and outside the video. The Ethiopian instrumental musical score and the narrator's facility with the local lexicon add to the ethnographic richness.