traditionsEthiopian scroll craftደብተራ

said the maker is a dabtara, däbtära

also: dabtara craft · Ethiopian healing scrolls · kitab making

traditionEast Africa and the HornEthiopiaconfidence mediumneeds checking

This one is not fully ours to publish

No text from a scroll is printed here, and no formula. The prayers, the mystical names and the incantations are the dabtara's craft, and the tradition's own arrangement keeps them behind a reader: the scroll has to be read aloud in Ge'ez by someone trained to read it. This record prints the craft, not its contents. — the practice as described in the source, in which writing is the dabtara's training and the scroll requires a Ge'ez-literate reader to work

The atlas prints the restriction and stops. Why.

The making of painted parchment scrolls by dabtaras — unordained clerics of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church — for named people, cut to their height, written in Ge'ez, and read aloud to them by someone who can read it. The craft sits beside the church without being inside its orders.

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When

surviving scrolls from the sixteenth century; the craft is held to be older still carried cited

Period	sixteenth century to the present
How the date is known	a dated example survives
Note	from_year is the earliest extant examples. The source's claim that the scrolls have been in use since the tenth century is not carried into the years, because no tenth-century scroll survives to date it by.

Years are stored astronomically — 1 CE is 1, 1 BCE is 0, 500 BCE is −499 — and printed the way a reader says them. How these dates are made.

The thing itself

Form	Scroll
Made of	Parchment and vellum · Ink · Cloth · Leather and hide
Goes	At the neck · On a wall · In a pocket or a bag
Made by	a dabtara — an unordained cleric of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, trained past the Psalms in poetry, liturgy and writing
Colour	black · white · red · blue · green · yellow

What its carriers say it stops

Reported, attributed, not tested here. Each row below is somebody's claim, with their name on it.

The evil eye — harm carried by a look, often an admiring one citedsaid by the scrolls' own texts, which the source says offer protection or cure against the Evil Eye
Ghosts and hungry spirits citedsaid by the same texts, against malevolent spirits
Illness — sickness in general, where no cause is named citedsaid by the source, whose published range is 'bed bugs, to home intruders, to smallpox'
Death in childbirth citedsaid by the historical manuscript record, in which most scrolls were made for women's reproductive health conditions

The story

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.

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How it is made and carried

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.

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Now

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.

inference

Where you can see one

The Metropolitan Museum of Art — Ethiopian healing scrolls in the collection
Wellcome Collection — amulet material from the collection Henry Wellcome assembled

An accession number appears here only where it was read off a catalogue page that is linked. No link, no number.