สายความเชื่องานคัมภีร์ม้วนเอธิโอเปียEthiopian scroll craftደብተራ

The dabtara is the whole tradition in one job description. He is a liturgical specialist who has gone past memorising the Psalms into courses in poetry, liturgy and writing. In Ethiopia the power to write includes the power to write prayers and spells, so the same word carries a second sense.

The scroll is made for one person and stands in for them. An animal, usually a goat or a sheep, is sacrificed as a substitute for the patron; the patron is rubbed by and bathed in its contents; the hide is soaked for days, dried, stretched, then scraped, washed and dried into parchment. The dabtara writes on it and paints it, and it is cut to the same height as the person it is for, though it may be made longer. A larger one hangs on a wall instead.

The writing is Ge'ez, the church's liturgical language, and the texts combine Christian prayers invoking saints and the Trinity with mystical names of God and with incantations. Because few speak Ge'ez, the scroll does not work by being owned: a third party literate in Ge'ez must read it to the afflicted person for its properties to take effect. Inference — that requirement is rare in this atlas. Most charms are worn and forgotten; this one needs a second human being in the room every time it is used.

The painted signs are their own vocabulary: crosses, eight-pointed stars, the gätsä säb'e — a face inside an eight-pointed star — and eyes, in geometric pairs, rimmed in red. The palette is fixed at six colours: black, white, red, blue, green, yellow.

What the scrolls are for runs from the trivial to the lethal — the range published is bed bugs, home intruders, smallpox — and they treat the spiritual cause while homeopathic medicines are used for the physical symptoms. In the historical manuscript record, most were made for conditions of women's reproductive health.

The earliest surviving scrolls are sixteenth-century. The practice is held to go back to the tenth, which is five hundred years this project cannot put an object behind.

Sacrifice, then parchment, then writing, then reading. The animal stands in for the patron; the hide becomes the surface; the dabtara writes the prayers and paints the figures; the finished scroll is rolled, kept, and read aloud in Ge'ez when it is needed.

Living. Scrolls are still made and still commissioned, and they are also collected: the Metropolitan Museum of Art holds several, and the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic in Boscastle publishes an example in Ge'ez on vellum. As of 2026 this project has read no figure for how many dabtaras work, or for what a scroll costs.