During the first millennium B.C., merchants and settlers from Arabic Felix crossed the Red Sea and established settlements in the vicinity of present day Massawa, and in the following centuries they slowly pushed inland, bringing with them the sociopolitical structures and a cultural heritage that were highly developed in comparison to indigenous forms. Early epigraphic monuments and the survival of Semitic personal and place names on Ethiopian territory attest to the gradual expansion of the Arabian enclaves toward the south and the west. While these settlements remained thoroughly South Arabian in outlook and culture for quite some time, a synthesis of African and South Arabian began to eventually develop into an Ethiopian culture. One of the most lasting and influential contributions of the South Arabian languages and alphabet with the language and script of classical Ethiopia (Geez) furnishes ample evidence for this fact. Almost without exception the Ethiopic letters are derived from South Arabian models.
Early inscriptions and coins found in Ethiopia demonstrate that in the beginning Geez was written without vowels, like the South Arabian languages and indeed almost all the other Semitic languages. However, in the early Aksumite period the Ethiopians began to attach vowels to their inherited consonantal forms and thus initiated its developments into a syllabury, and essentially syllabic script. This syllabary has since dominated the Ethiopian literary production, even though it took several more centuries for it to be refined into a completely adequate syllabic system. Vowel less inscriptions dating from the eleventh and twelfth centuries and some manuscripts of the twelfth, thirteenth and even fifteenth centuries bear evidence of the freedom Ethiopian scribes continued to display in matters of vocalization.
For centuries, manuscript writing continued to cling to the models of letter design that had been developed in the epigraphic period. The signs continued to have a rather rectangular shape, as if they had not been written with pen and ink on vellum but had been hammered and chiseled into stone. Curved lines were avoided and straight vertical and horizontal strokes from left to right gave manuscripts their characteristic appearance until the first half of the fifteenth century. This monumental style of manuscript writing is aesthetically very appealing, as is its South Arabian ancestor, and quite often these early Ethiopian manuscripts are masterpieces of calligraphy.
The adoption of Christianity by the Ethiopian emperor Ezna during the Fourth century effectively transformed Ge'ez, the classical language of the Aksumite empire, inot the literary language of the Ethiopian Church. Although no longer widely spoken by the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, this language has survived to the present day in the same way that Latin has remained the authoratative language of teh Roman Catholic Church. The Gospel books, doctrinal texts, service books, devotional aids and magical writings, fundamental to the practice of religion in Ethiopia testify to the wide range of functions assumed by Ge'ez texts.
Produced entirely by hand, Ethiopian manuscripts eloquently exhibit the time and labor involved in their creation. The parchment used to produce these books was obtained from animal skins that were washed, stretched, scraped, and dried to create suitable writing material. When ready, parchment was cut to the required size and lined in preparation for writing. These lines, which were incised into the surface of the parchment with a blunt instrument, often remain visible beneath the text. Once a sufficient collection of prepared parchment was assembled, the scribe began the work of copying and writing out the entire text with a reed pen, known as a bere. Because no cursive form of Ge'ez exists, copying religious texts was a laborious process, requiring the scribe to lift his bere from the surface of the parchment between every letter. Generally, red ink was reserved for the opening lines of a text, new chapter headings, and names. Once complete, the text leaves were assembled into gatherings, much like a modern newspaper, and sewn together with thread. The stacked gatherings were then chain-stiched to each other and bound between wooden boards. A single manuscript therefore, represents a considerable expenditure of materials and labor, requiring scores of animal skins and months of dedicated copying. From a very early period, the reproduction and embellishment of religious texts remained one of the primary responsibilities of monks and priests. A monk's religious education often included artistic training, falling under the rubric of "spiritual work."
The first great centers of manuscript production in Ethiopia emerged in regions alreadyt renowned as monastic enclaves, particularly, Lake Tana and Gunda Gunda. Examination of the illuminated books these communities produced reveals a cetain unity of artistic practice. Before the mid-sixteenth century, Ethiopian illuminators regularly composed their miniatures, or paintings, on blind-ruled grids. These lines, which are often visible beneath the paint, created a compositional structure specific to each illumination. Becausescribes similarly used ruled lines to arrange their texts, this method of making pictures suggests a fundamental connection between writing and illumination. The marriage between the structural disipline of the scribe and the graphical sensitivity of the painter resulted in pictures of exceptional vitality. Later painters, particularly those working in the environs of Gondar, which emerged as the center of the imperial court toward the end of teh seventeenth century, abandoned this approach, and instead combined pictures and texts on the same page without ruling the parchment specifically for illumination.
