เครื่องรางคัมภีร์ม้วนเครื่องรางเอธิโอเปีย (คิตาบ)Ethiopian talismanic scrollክታብ

The scroll is the size of its owner. That is the first fact anybody who handles one notices, and it is the fact that explains the rest: this is not a text about a person, it is a stand-in for one.

It is made by a dabtara — an unordained cleric of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church who has gone past memorising the Psalms into poetry, liturgy and writing. In Ethiopia the power to write includes the power to write prayers and spells, so the word carries a second sense as well. The making involves the sacrifice of an animal, usually a goat or a sheep, standing for the person the scroll is for; the patron is rubbed by and bathed in the contents of the animal, and the hide becomes the parchment.

The writing is Ge'ez, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church's liturgical language. Because few speak it now, a scroll does not work by being owned: a third party literate in Ge'ez has to read it aloud to the afflicted person. Inference — that makes the scroll one of the few amulets in this atlas that needs another human being present to function at all.

What it is against runs from the small to the fatal. The range the source gives is bed bugs, home intruders, smallpox. It treats the spiritual cause; homeopathic medicines are used alongside it for the physical symptoms. Historical manuscripts show the majority were made for conditions of women's reproductive health.

The oldest surviving examples are sixteenth-century, though the practice is held to go back to the tenth. The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds several, including an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century scroll of parchment, pigments and cotton.

An animal is sacrificed for the person the scroll is for. The hide is soaked for several days, dried, stretched, then scraped, washed and dried again into parchment. The dabtara writes the prayers and the mystical names and paints the talismanic figures in the six standard colours. A personal scroll is cut to the owner's height, though it may be made longer. It is rolled, often kept in a leather case, and carried; a larger one hangs. To work, it is read aloud in Ge'ez by somebody who can read Ge'ez.

Still made and still commissioned, and still being collected. The Museum of Witchcraft and Magic in Boscastle publishes one, and the Metropolitan Museum publishes several. As of 2026 the split between scrolls made for a patron and scrolls made for the trade in old Ethiopian manuscripts is not something this project has read a figure for.