Deux almanachs conservés à Harar (Éthiopie) : Circulation et usages des savoirs et des textes

When it comes to handwritten texts, religious texts statistically dominate in Ethiopia. The database from the ERC project “Islam in the Horn of Africa,” 2013–2018, refines this initial observation and reveals that prayer books and mystical compendiums are by far the most numerous. It is uncommon to find works on positive sciences, such as arithmetic, geometry, or astronomy. The two graphs studied here represent exceptional material: they are almanacs digitized in Harar, raising questions about their sources and uses. The two pieces presented here are: Musée Abdullahi Sharif, Harar City, ms. Cat. 426, and Musée Abdullahi Sharif, Harar City, ms. Cat. 435, 001.

These two almanacs provide a fine example of the circulation of knowledge and texts within the Ethiopian scholarly tradition. They are shared with the Yemeni scholarly tradition, and it is highly likely that some elements originate from there. However, what seems to have captivated Ethiopia, where written transmission attests to the importance of religious and mystical texts, often “popular” ones such as prayer collections for mawlids, is a magical and perhaps divinatory application of these almanacs. The text has indeed circulated among mystics, among whom talismanic practices are often prevalent. In this case, it is not so much the circulation of texts that makes sense, but rather their selection and usage.