Ethiopic — The Ethiopicist

The Ethiopicist — Aksum to the scriptoria: Enoch, Jubilees, and the Geʿez Bible.

The Ethiopic (Gǝʿǝz) desk in the Oriental-Christian neighborhood: the Beta maṣāḥǝft transcriptions (the Geʿez Bible, 1 Enoch, Jubilees, the Kebra nagast, royal chronicles), Dillmann’s Lexicon, and the TraCES analyzed corpus with its Aksumite inscriptions — riding beside the biblical hat by design.

The desk opens with the Beta maṣāḥǝft Works transcriptions (Hamburg): the Geʿez Bible at verse grain — near-complete OT, all four Gospels — beside 1 Enoch and Jubilees, books that survive complete only in Geʿez, the Kebra Nagast, and the royal chronicles. Dillmann’s Lexicon (13,727 entries) and the TraCES analyzed corpus (75,440 morph-annotated tokens, lemma-linked into Dillmann’s entries) complete the trio as their syncs land.

New here? The Quickstart sets up the library in minutes.

The shelves

A source wears every desk it serves — these three answer this desk. Holdings are read live from the catalog and dated; a shelf with nothing synced yet says so.

Languages on this desk (live doc-or-entry counts as of 19 September 2026): gez 17,516 · amh 22.

The desk’s instruments

• Verse-grain citations: the Works TEI carries upstream verse numbering, so urn:nabu:betamasaheft-works:LIT2711Mark:1.1 is Mark 1:1, citable and shown with its per-document transcription credit.
• The dictionary crosswalk: TraCES tokens carry lex links into Dillmann entry ids — lemma to lexicon in one ecosystem (both shelves nc-classed, held locally, MCP-excluded).

Working the ethiopic desk

The generic axis surfaces — every desk answers to these, in working order (enable once, sync, then query):

nabu enable ethiopic               # first time: put this desk's shelves in this box's profile
nabu sync ethiopic                 # fetch/refresh the desk's enabled members
nabu list --axis ethiopic          # the shelf census, this desk only
nabu axis ethiopic                 # the desk card: members, holdings, gold coverage
nabu search WORD --axis ethiopic   # a query scoped to this desk's shelves

This desk’s own surfaces:

nabu show urn:nabu:betamasaheft-works:LIT2711Mark:1.1  # Mark 1:1 in Geʿez — ቀዳሚሁ፡ ለወንጌለ፡ …
nabu search ወንጌል --lang gez           # the word 'gospel' across the Geʿez shelf, fold-aware

Terminal setup

• Ethiopic script (gez): fidäl needs a font with Ethiopic coverage — install font-noto-sans-ethiopic (or fill the terminal’s non-ASCII slot with a Noto face). The script is NFC-stable; nabu stores it byte-faithful with its explicit word dividers (፡) intact.

The full guidance, per script, is on the display page.

One of the twenty-five research desks; the flat shelf map is The Library and the reasoning is docs/axes.md.