Tabot & Ketab: Trajectories and Dilemmas of Ethiopian-Eritrean sacred artefacts

• In Event: The Fluid Lives of Objects: Diasporas of Black Sacred Material Culture

Description for Program

During the 19th and early 20th centuries, two genres of Ethiopian and Eritrean sacred material culture took different trajectories in how they reached and were integrated into western museum collections. Eleven sacred tablets called tabot (foundational to Orthodox Christian practice yet prohibited from view) were looted by Britain during its 1868 punitive Siege of Magdala (then-royal capital), then dispersed and repositioned as artefacts in the British Museum’s collection. Although these tabot are accessioned objects, a recognition of their sacred nature has kept them entirely off-view – arguably stalling the process of musealization for over a century. Separately, ethnographic collecting brought thousands of talismanic scrolls (ketab) into museums. Considered efficacious objects through their unique combinations of protective images and texts, they have successfully been subsumed as subjects of scholarly inquiry – reflected in their new titles as healing, magical, or prayer scrolls. This paper offers a preliminary consideration of these divergent experiences of translating the Ethiopian-Eritrean sacred. It explores “agentive” frameworks to theorize the current condition of the tabot and examine how its un-viewable quality is coming to the forefront of repatriation claims. It also considers the paradoxes and challenges surrounding the display and interpretation of works defined as intentionally unviewable and esoteric.

Author

• Helina Gebremedhen, New York University