Mäṣḥafä Qedär (መጽሐፈ፡ ቄደር): Critical Edition and Annotated Translation
No Thumbnail Available
Date
2021-09
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Addis Ababa University
Abstract
Mäṣḥafä Qedär (መጽሐፈ፡ ቄደር), produced in the 16th century, is a type of liturgical book
designed to purify people who have denied their faith and who have defiled their flesh with
unbelievers through sexual intercourse. However, MQ is one of the many Ethiopic texts that
have not been scientifically studied and critically edited. The main purpose of this study was to
reconstruct and approximate the text of MQ into its original content as much as possible, for the
text has lost its original content due to copyists errors either intentionally or unintentionally. In
order to do this, the medium-sized recension was selected, for the short and long recensions are
not analyzable due to their inadequacies for the task of critical edition. The specific reason I was
not able to work for the long recension was because it was problematic as መጽሐፈ፡ ባርቶስ
(Mäṣḥafä Barətos), another book, was embedded into MQ. Upon a preliminary reading of the
eight witnesses that were accessible, it was learnt that there existed differences among them.
Thus, a critical edition that employed the Neo-Lachmannian method was prepared followed by
an annotated translation of MQ from Geez into English. Consequently, the results from the
critical edition revealed the existence of variations among the different witnesses of MQ. Hence,
the hypothetical relationships of these families (α and β) and subfamilies (γ, δ and ε) to their
ancestors may be written as: Ω = (α (γ[A + H] + [D]) + β (δ[B + C] + ε[E + F + G])). The
emendation procedure followed this stemmatic formula.
Description
Keywords
Mäṣḥafä Qedär (MQ), critical edition, Neo-Lachmannian, annotated translation