Older Amharic translations of the Ser'atä mängest and their contributions to the interpretation of the Ge'ez-version

by Manfred Kropp

As I.Guidi once pointed out many of the institutions and customs at the Gondarine royal court may have faded away and may be lost forever since the downfall of the monarchy at the beginning of the 19th century. Thus many paragraphs of the court ceremonial, the ser'atä mängest, offer difficulties for translation and interpretation, and some of them remain obscure and hardly intelligible. In fact, since its publication in 1916 by J. Varenbergh, the text has not been revised. The interpretation, however, was remarkably improved by I.Guidi, who based his study on a far better manuscript than those used by Varenbergh which belong to a very special branch of the textual tradition of the ser'atä mängest. Recent efforts in interpretation by H.Scholler and Bairu Tafla brought some valuable contributions; but the history of the text itself whose careful investigation should result in a critical edition has yet to be elucidated.

When preparing this edition on the basis of now more than 4o manuscripts, it became clear that there is not only one version. The ceremonial was indeed not a literary and fixed text, but served practical purposes and therefore developed with the changing customs at the court. The different versions are not only the true reflex of this juridical development (that of the court etiquette included) but indicate clearly the sensitive areas of rivalry between the court's dignitaries. Thus we get an interesting insight into the disputes concerning rank and jurisdiction.

When the ser'atä mängest was written down for the first time there was already a long oral tradition among the court officials and judges. We can identify azzazes and in some cases their names as an authoritative source for this tradition. Here we can relay on texts dating from the end of the 16th and the beginning of the 17th centuries. This means that the Ge'ez-version renders an official text at the court expressed entirely in Amharic which described the reality of everyday life. This is easily to be seen in the rather clumsy construction of the Ge'ez-phrases which are directly calqued on the underlying Amharic expressions and in the numerous technical terms in Amharic. There is even an example of a complete Amharic phrase which was completely taken over.

We may conclude that older Amharic translations, or should we better say, documents written down in the original language of the oral tradition, must be of great value for elucidating this difficult text. This led to a careful analysis of the older Amharic versions of the ser'atä mängest contained in the collections of C. Mondon-Vidailhet (Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris) and the EMML, Addis Abeba. Surprises and immediate solutions of textual problems did not fail to appear.

The Amharic is in many cases more natural and fluent, clearer and easier to understand. This is especially true for certain technical terms where the Amharic word is certainly the correct one, applied in direct speech, while the Ge'ez translation (note that the use of translation and original is at variance with the usage in the title of the paper) reveals an artificial and somewhat inadequate wordage. The language of the ser'atä mängest in the Ge'ez-version well may be compared to the use of Latin in Europe. We can even cite one fine example in the field of Ethiopian studies: When A. Dillmann in his Ge'ez-Latin lexicon tried to avoid ambiguities about the meaning of a technical word he quotes the respective German word printed in Gothic letters after the Latin term. It is in this way we must apply the Anharic versions of the ser'atä mängest for a better understanding of this important historical document.