CHAPTER 13

The Treasures
of Debre Damo

Northern Ethiopia, until the Twelfth Century

Debre Damo will not be the object of an attentive inspection anytime soon. Not only are women forbidden in the monastery; we also have to climb twenty meters by rope just to reach the summit of the amba, the flat-topped mountain where we find two permanent churches and clusters of huts for the monks. Furthermore, as is the case everywhere in Ethiopia, the testy Christian clergy and the rural communities attached to their churches are resistant to all investigation, which they view as intrusive. We must wait patiently to be shown a hidden part of the church or a manuscript, and some, not having this patience—which is, moreover, rarely sufficient—have on occasion resorted to unsavory maneuvers to penetrate the sanctuaries and lay their hands on the sacred objects.

The history of Debre Damo is as obscure as the apocryphal traditions of its origins are numerous. At most, we know from the acts of Ethiopian saints and the accounts of European travelers that a continuous monastic tradition existed here from at least the thirteenth century. And we assume, based on the presence of architectural elements (notably stone columns and capitals) reused in the principal church that it was preceded by a building from the ancient Aksumite (12) period. (The church is dedicated to Za-Mikael Aregawi, one of the country’s evangelist saints, who first climbed the mountain thanks to a serpent who let himself be used as a rope.) As for when it was built, whatever restoration it may have undergone thereafter, the chronological criteria are so uncertain that specialists oscillate between the seventh and the sixteenth century, with some of them appearing to agree to place it around the tenth.

Antonio Mordini, head of the colonial ethnographic service of Italian Africa, had the chance to visit Debre Damo several times during his country’s brief occupation of Ethiopia (1936–1941), a political context that, one can hazard, contributed to reducing potential resistance from the local people. Oral tradition among the “Ethiopianist” community maintains that the same Mordini, an Italian military intelligence officer during the war, found refuge at Debre Damo, which he knew well, while being pursued by a British counterpart. Whatever the case may be, we owe the principal observations of the site’s natural history and archaeology to him. The least we can say is that these observations revealed to the outside world the existence of exceptional treasures right at the moment they were about to be—or even worse, had just been—pillaged. Some of the ancient textiles found at Debre Damo were then sold on the illicit antiquities market at Cairo. Mordini discovered others in 1939 in the sacristy of the church as well as in a completely forgotten cache containing thousands of parchment leaves; there were pieces of Islamic fabric, some bearing Arabic inscriptions embroidered in silk, datable to the ninth to eleventh century. After the rains washed away the soil on the amba, monks frequently found gold or silver Arabic coins, which the community’s treasurer hurried to melt down. Mordini discovered numerous others during a small excavation he undertook in the community’s former cemetery: there were dirhams* and dinars* struck with the names of Umayyad and Abbasid caliphs (seventh to ninth century).

Early in 1940, a monk of Debre Damo stumbled upon a new treasure among the shreds of a small, gold-plated wooden coffer hidden in the crevice of a wall covered with earth in a cave located near the smaller of the site’s churches. The prior of the monastery, scarcely more alert than his treasurer to the historical value of such a find, took it to a goldsmith in Asmara, the administrative capital of Italian Eritrea. The goldsmith bought it, only to sell it in turn to an “informed” customer who told Mordini about it. That is how the latter was able to examine, before it disappeared on the collectors’ market, a batch of 103 gold coins bearing the names of Kadphises II, Kanishka I, Huvishka, and Vasudeva I. These were not Ethiopian kings, but sovereigns of the Kushans, a people of Greco-Buddhist culture, who ruled over an empire that covered large swaths of present-day India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan from the second to the beginning of the third century of our era.

Coin hoards have a paradoxical interest for the historian: they often come from the peripheries of the economic zone under consideration and not from its center (Roman coins more often come from Great Britain, Bulgaria, or India than from Italy). They testify less to the motivations behind economic exchange than to the motivations, which can be completely irrational, behind hoarding money; the occurrence they mark was not economic activity at its peak but its decline or its cessation. Thus they are less an illustration of the rule, the way things ordinarily functioned, than the exception, the contingent, and their meaning is that much more difficult to discern. But beyond the difficulty, in the present case, of interpreting the presence of Kushan or Arabic coins at Debre Damo, the conditions of their discovery have erased, as is often the case (one thinks of the weekend pillagers in the countryside of developed countries), most of the information that would have been useful to us. From the moment the find constituted a “hoard,” its material value (the weight of its metal) and its face value (for the collector or even the researcher) overtook its contextual value. We would have loved to inspect the coins’ hiding place and the cave, to examine and analyze what remained of the coffer, to radiocarbon-date the wood, to collect the ceramic fragments that, Mordini tells us, were associated with it. We would have loved to view the Kushan coins that Mordini saw and catalog them, which was never done. We would have loved to visit the storeroom containing the fabrics and the manuscripts; to visit it when it had just been opened, before its treasures were dispersed to experts and philologists—who could speak only about what had come to them. We would have liked to know the precise inventory of the monastery’s manuscripts, but it appears that they were destroyed in a fire in 1996. We would have liked to possess the layout of the excavations that uncovered the Arabic coins, to know what other remains (graves, ceramics, building elements, jewelry, etc.) were associated with them, what was the extent of the zone of the finds. We would have liked to survey the amba, to carry out archaeological testpits there, visit its cavities freely, and take samples for analysis.

Lacking all this information, and until more emerges, we are condemned to keep reexamining the meager observations that have come down to us, the scattered and incomplete pieces of a puzzle whose contours remain obscure. At the very least, the questions that can be asked help define some of the problems brought up by the site’s history: why, out of so much evidence for diverse periods present on this mountain, is so little of it attributable to the period from the fourth to the seventh century, which saw the hegemony of the kingdom of Aksum not only over the lands of northern Ethiopia and Eritrea but also over the coastal regions of both sides of the Red Sea? And what are we to make of the presence of Islamic coins and luxury goods in a country where Christianity had been present since the fourth century? Do they argue in favor of prolonged and regular contacts between the community of Debre Damo and the Coptic patriarchate of Egypt (which found itself under Islamic rule from the seventh century on), or are they evidence of a Muslim community in the vicinity of the monastery?

But most of all: why had so many treasures—Mordini’s, and how many others whose discovery did not have a Mordini for a witness—been buried at Debre Damo? To which we hasten to respond that if so many treasures have been found in this place, it’s because just as many were forgotten as soon as they had been dropped or hidden there. The results of memory gaps, these discoveries undoubtedly illustrate Debre Damo’s checkered history over the course of the first millennium of our era, much more than the long-distance relationships (first with the Indo-Iranian world, then with the Islamic) about which we know so very little. Are not these successive discontinuities, which have buried treasures all over Debre Damo, better testimony to the status of this high place than the treasures themselves?

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

The pages that David Phillipson, Ancient Churches of Ethiopia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), pp. 51–64, devotes to Debre Damo are a good introduction to the subject. The first collection of archaeological data at the site was undertaken by the Deutsche Aksum-Expedition and was published by Enno Littmann, Deutsche Aksum-Expedition (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1913), 2:168–194. A second collection, more systematic and implemented during a restoration campaign on the principal church there in 1948, was carried out by Derek Matthews. Most of the data collected independently by Mordini and Matthews have been conveniently brought together as a monograph: D. Matthews and A. Mordini, “The Monastery of Debra Damo, Ethiopia,” Archaeologia 97 (1959): 1–58 and 15 plates. The information about the discovery of the Kushan coins comes from Antonio Mordini’s Italian article “Gli aurei kushāna del convento di Dabra Dāmmò,” Atti del Convegno Internazionale di Studi Etiopici (2–4 avril 1959) (Rome: Accademia Nazionale des Lincei, 1960), pp. 249–254. Mordini describes some of the fabrics in “Un tissu musulman du Moyen Âge provenant du couvent de Dabra Dāmmò (Tigrai, Éthiopie),” Annales d’Éthiopie 2 (1957): 75–79. The parchment has been briefly studied by Carlo Conti Rossini, “Pergamene di Debra Dammó,” Rivista degli Studi Orientali 19 (1940): 45–57.