CALL FOR PAPERS: ICES 22: Panel: New Approaches to the Ethiopian Archival TraditionHawassa University, 29 September – 03 October 2025

30 May 2025

In addition to its rich history of producing and translating literary works, Ethiopia is home to a longstanding tradition of archival practices, as evidenced by documentary notes found in the ʾAbbā Garimā
gospel books, the Golden Gospel of Dabra Libānos in Ḥam, and the gospel book of ʾIyasus Moʾa, to
mention just a few. These documents concern administrative, legal, and economic topics, ranging from
regulations for monastic communities to royal land donations, and have served as important sources for
the history of the country. Unsurprisingly, many of these documents have received sustained scholarly
attention since at least the late nineteenth century. New evidence and approaches, however, have led to
reconsiderations of long-established scholarly assumptions, especially in relation to conceptual
frameworks, terminology, and levels of detail. Accordingly, this panel invites scholars who work on
archives and archival documents from Ethiopia and Eritrea to present their ongoing research and join this
debate to identify extant gaps and promising directions for future research. We invite contributions that
examine different aspects of archives and archival documents in the Ethiopian context, including but not
limited to:
● Terminology
● (Re)editing and annotating archival documents
● Production and preservation of archival
● Arrangements of the archive
● Conceptual Frameworks

Panel Organizers:

DIRBWORK Bitsu Kassa (Univ. Hamburg), Michael HENSLEY (Univ. Hamburg), Nafisa VALIEVA (Univ. Hamburg), and Anaïs WION (CNRS)

Contacts: Proposals for papers, in English, should be sent to dirbwork.kassa@uni-hamburg.de (dirbwork.kassa"AT"uni-hamburg.de)and
michael.hensley"AT"uni-hamburg.de by 30 May 2025.