Madgwas: a Database of Ethiopian Binding Decoration

Ethiopia is home to the only remaining continuous tradition of widespread Christian scribal production, but the manuscripts produced by that tradition are little-studied and the resources for dating and describing Ethiopian manuscripts are few and poorly-developed compared to their European relations. Ethiopian manuscripts are an understudied but cognate part of the wider European/Mediterranean Christian manuscript tradition. Madgwas is a database for the identification, cataloguing, and dating of Ethiopian binding tools and decoration. It leverages European and international libraries’ increasing sharing of manuscript images through the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) manifests to produce a catalogue that links binding decoration, scribal tools, and individual manuscripts in a way that will serve a versatile set of researcher needs and drive research output for the project team. This poster will present the results of the first stage of project development, the ingest of the Ethiopian manuscripts hosted by the British Library’s Endangered Archives Program.