The Ethiopian–Adal War and the Portuguese

I. The Christian Empire of Ethiopia

The Christian kingdom of Ethiopia was one of the oldest Christian states in the world. Its conversion is traditionally dated to the fourth century, when King Ezana of Aksum adopted Christianity under the influence of Frumentius, a Syrian Christian who was consecrated bishop by Athanasius of Alexandria. From that time the Ethiopian church was attached to the Coptic church of Alexandria, whose patriarch appointed its metropolitan, the abun, always an Egyptian monk.

The Ethiopian church preserved a distinctive tradition. Its liturgical language was Ge'ez, the classical language of Aksum, into which the Bible was translated between the fifth and seventh centuries. The Ethiopian Bible included books not found in the Hebrew canon or in the Bibles of the Western churches, such as Enoch and Jubilees, which survived complete only in Ge'ez. The church observed both the Sabbath and Sunday, practised circumcision, and kept dietary laws resembling those of the Hebrew Scriptures. Its practices reflect both its antiquity and the influence of Jewish traditions, a subject discussed in The Bible Canon.

From the late thirteenth century Ethiopia was ruled by the Solomonic dynasty, which claimed descent from King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba through their son Menelik. The legend, set out in the fourteenth-century Kebra Nagast, the Glory of the Kings, drew on the account of the queen's visit to Solomon in 1 Kings 10:1-13 and claimed that Menelik had brought the Ark of the Covenant to Aksum. The emperors of the fifteenth century, especially Zara Yaqob, who reigned from 1434 to 1468, strengthened the church and the monarchy and expanded the empire to the south and east.

The empire was also home to the Beta Israel, the Jewish community of the northwestern highlands, who had fought several wars against the Solomonic emperors in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Their history is told in The Beta Israel.

II. Monasticism and the Church before the War

The Ethiopian church of the fifteenth century was dominated by its monasteries. The two great monastic houses were Debre Libanos in Shewa, founded by Tekle Haymanot in the thirteenth century, and the community of the followers of Ewostatewos in the north, who had insisted on the observance of the Sabbath as well as Sunday. The dispute over the Sabbath had divided the church until Zara Yaqob, at the Council of Debre Mitmaq in 1450, ruled that both days should be observed. The decision reflected the strong influence of the Hebrew Scriptures on Ethiopian Christianity, and the commandment of Exodus 20:8-10 was cited by both parties.

Zara Yaqob also promoted the cult of the Virgin Mary, ordered the copying of liturgical books, and suppressed groups that he regarded as heretical, such as the Stephanites, who refused to prostrate themselves before images of the Virgin and the cross. His reign saw a flowering of Ge'ez literature, including the Mashafa Berhan, the Book of Light, attributed to the emperor himself. The rich libraries of the monasteries, many of which were destroyed in the war, were largely the product of this period.

The church was led by the abun, the Egyptian metropolitan, and by the head of the monastery of Debre Libanos, the ichege, who was the senior Ethiopian cleric. The emperors had great authority over the church and appointed its officials. The close relationship between church and monarchy meant that the imam's attack on the empire was also an attack on the church, and the destruction of churches and monasteries struck at the foundations of the Christian state.

III. The Muslim Sultanates

To the east and southeast of the Christian highlands lay a group of Muslim states. Islam had reached the Horn of Africa in the seventh century, and according to tradition some of the early followers of Muhammad took refuge at the court of the Christian king of Aksum. Over the following centuries Muslim merchants established themselves along the trade routes that linked the highlands with the ports of Zeila and Berbera on the Gulf of Aden, and Muslim states developed in the lowlands and the eastern plateau.

The most important of these states was the sultanate of Ifat, ruled by the Walashma dynasty. In the fourteenth century the emperors of Ethiopia defeated Ifat and forced its rulers to retreat to the east, where they founded the sultanate of Adal, with its centre first at Dakar and later at Harar. Adal controlled the trade route from the highlands to Zeila and was in contact with Arabia and the Muslim world. Its population included Harari, Somali and Afar peoples.

Relations between the Christian empire and the Muslim sultanates were marked by both trade and war. The emperors levied tribute from the Muslim states when they could, and the Muslim rulers raided the Christian provinces when the empire was weak. In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries Adal was strengthened by the arrival of firearms, by the support of the Ottoman and Arabian powers, and by the leadership of a series of military commanders, the imams or emirs, who preached jihad against the Christian empire.

IV. Imam Ahmad ibn Ibrahim

Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi was born around 1506, probably in the region of Hubat near Harar. He was known to the Ethiopians as Gragn, the left-handed, and to the Somalis as Gurey. He rose to power in Adal in the 1520s as a military leader and took the title of imam, while the sultan of the Walashma dynasty remained as a nominal ruler. He married Bati del Wambara, the daughter of the emir Mahfuz, who had been killed fighting the Ethiopians in 1517, and she accompanied him on his campaigns.

Ahmad united the Muslim peoples of the region, including Somali clans and Afar groups, under his leadership and inspired them with the ideal of jihad. He refused to pay tribute to the Ethiopian emperor and prepared for war. His army, which consisted of infantry and cavalry armed with spears, bows and swords, was strengthened by a small number of firearms and by Arab and Ottoman mercenaries.

The principal source for the imam's campaigns is the Futuh al-Habasha, the Conquest of Abyssinia, written in Arabic by Shihab al-Din Ahmad ibn Abd al-Qadir, known as Arab Faqih, a Yemeni who accompanied the imam. The work, which covers the campaigns up to 1537, describes the battles, the destruction of churches and the conversion of Christians in detail, and it is one of the most important sources for the history of the Horn of Africa in the sixteenth century. It was translated into English by Paul Lester Stenhouse in 2003.

V. Shimbra Kure 1529

The emperor of Ethiopia at the time of the imam's rise was Lebna Dengel, who had come to the throne as a child in 1508. In 1527 Ahmad attacked the Christian province of Dawaro, and in March 1529 the two armies met at Shimbra Kure, near the modern town of Mojo. The Ethiopian army, much larger than the imam's, was defeated after a hard fight. The Futuh al-Habasha describes the battle at length and gives the names of the Muslim warriors who distinguished themselves.

The victory at Shimbra Kure opened the highlands to the imam. In the following years his armies invaded the provinces of Shewa, Amhara, Lasta and Tigray, destroying churches and monasteries and seizing their treasures. The emperor's armies were defeated in a series of battles, and Lebna Dengel was forced to retreat to the mountains, moving from place to place with a small following. By the mid-1530s the imam's forces controlled most of the Christian highlands.

The destruction of churches was described in both Muslim and Christian sources. The Futuh al-Habasha describes the burning of the church of Atronsa Maryam in Amhara, which contained the tombs of emperors, and of the monastery of Debre Libanos in Shewa, one of the main centres of Ethiopian monasticism. The imam's forces reached Aksum, where they destroyed the cathedral of Saint Mary of Zion. Many manuscripts, icons and treasures were lost.

VI. Conversion and Resistance

The imam's conquest was accompanied by widespread conversion of the Christian population to Islam. The Futuh al-Habasha records that many Christians, including nobles and soldiers, accepted Islam to avoid death or captivity, and that the imam appointed Muslim governors over the conquered provinces. Ethiopian sources record that a large part of the population converted, though many returned to Christianity after the imam's death.

Some Christians resisted. Monks and nobles fled to the mountains, especially to the inaccessible fortress-mountains, the ambas, where the imam's forces could not reach them. The royal mountain of Amba Geshen, where the princes of the royal family were kept, was taken in 1531 and its treasures plundered. The island monasteries of Lake Tana preserved some of the manuscripts of the church, and other manuscripts were hidden in caves and remote churches.

The Beta Israel of the Semien mountains were drawn into the conflict. According to some sources they at first supported the imam against the emperors, who had persecuted them, but later turned against him when his forces attacked them. Their position in the Semien mountains, one of the strongholds of the region, gave them some protection.

VII. The Emperor in Flight

The years between 1531 and 1540 were the darkest period of the war for the Christian empire. Lebna Dengel moved from one mountain refuge to another, pursued by the imam's forces. His son Fiqtor was killed in battle, another son, Minas, was captured and sent to Arabia, where he was later ransomed, and his family and followers suffered hunger and hardship. The Futuh al-Habasha describes the imam's forces pursuing the emperor through the highlands, and the Ethiopian chronicle describes the emperor's sufferings as a test of faith.

The emperor's authority survived only in a few remote regions. Many nobles had submitted to the imam, and others had been killed. The church had lost its principal monasteries, and the abun had died. Yet the imam's rule over the highlands was not secure. His governors faced revolts, and his army was dispersed across a large territory. The imam himself established his headquarters near Lake Tana, at a distance from Adal, and he relied on the loyalty of converts whose commitment was uncertain.

VIII. Lebna Dengel's Appeal to Portugal

Lebna Dengel had been in contact with the Portuguese since the beginning of his reign. His grandmother, the empress Eleni, who acted as regent during his minority, had sent an Armenian envoy named Mateus to Goa and Lisbon in 1512 to propose an alliance against the Muslims. The Portuguese embassy that came in response, led by Rodrigo de Lima, arrived in Ethiopia in 1520 and remained for six years. Its chaplain, Francisco Álvares, wrote the True Relation of the Lands of Prester John of the Indies, published in Lisbon in 1540, which described the churches, monasteries, customs and court of Ethiopia.

At the time of the embassy Lebna Dengel, who had won a victory over Adal in 1517, showed little interest in a military alliance. After the disasters of the 1530s, however, he appealed to Portugal for help. He sent a Portuguese physician who had remained in Ethiopia, João Bermudes, to Lisbon and Rome. Bermudes later claimed that he had been consecrated as patriarch of Ethiopia by the abun and confirmed by the pope, a claim that was doubted by contemporaries and is not accepted by historians.

Lebna Dengel died in 1540 at the monastery of Debre Damo, a mountain fortress in Tigray reachable only by a rope, where he had taken refuge. He was succeeded by his son Gelawdewos, known to the Portuguese as Claudius, who was about nineteen years old and continued the struggle from the mountains.

IX. The Portuguese Expedition 1541

In 1541 the Portuguese governor of India, Estêvão da Gama, led a fleet into the Red Sea to attack the Ottoman fleet at Suez, as described in Portugal against the Mamluks and Ottomans in the Indian Ocean. On his return he landed a force of about four hundred Portuguese soldiers at Massawa in July 1541, under the command of his younger brother Cristóvão da Gama, to help the Ethiopians. The force included about a hundred and fifty musketeers, some artillery, and craftsmen.

The expedition is known from the account of one of its members, Miguel de Castanhoso, whose narrative was published in Lisbon in 1564, and from the account of João Bermudes. Castanhoso describes the march of the Portuguese from the coast into the highlands, their meeting with the queen mother Seble Wongel, the widow of Lebna Dengel, who joined them at Debarwa, and the battles that followed.

The Portuguese spent the rainy season of 1541 in Tigray and then marched south to join the emperor. In April 1542 they met the imam's army at Baçente and at Jarte, in the region of Tigray, and won two victories with the help of their musketeers and artillery. The imam was wounded in the second battle. The Portuguese firearms, used in disciplined volleys, gave them an advantage over the imam's forces, which had few guns.

The queen mother Seble Wongel played an important part in the campaign. She had held out on the mountain of Debre Damo after her husband's death, and when the Portuguese arrived she joined their march, bringing her household and a small Ethiopian escort. Castanhoso describes her as a woman of great dignity who encouraged the Portuguese and acted as an intermediary between them and the local nobles. Her presence gave the expedition legitimacy in the eyes of the Ethiopians, many of whom joined the Portuguese as they advanced.

The Portuguese also hoped to find the emperor quickly, but Gelawdewos was in Shewa, far to the south, and communication between the two forces was slow. The delay meant that the Portuguese fought their first battles largely alone, with the help of local levies, and it contributed to the disaster at Wofla.

X. Wofla and the Death of Cristóvão da Gama

After his defeats the imam appealed to the Ottoman governor of Zabid in Yemen for help, and he received about nine hundred musketeers, mostly Turks and Arabs, and ten cannon. With these reinforcements he attacked the Portuguese at their camp at Wofla, near Lake Ashenge, on 28 August 1542. The Portuguese were defeated, losing about half their number, and Cristóvão da Gama was wounded and captured.

According to Castanhoso, Cristóvão was brought before the imam, who tortured him and demanded that he convert to Islam. When he refused, the imam beheaded him with his own hand. His death was presented by the Portuguese as a martyrdom, and later traditions recorded miracles at the place of his death. The surviving Portuguese, about a hundred and twenty men, escaped and joined the emperor Gelawdewos.

The imam, believing that the Portuguese threat was over, dismissed most of his Ottoman musketeers, keeping only about two hundred, and withdrew to his camp near Lake Tana. This decision proved fatal, as the Portuguese survivors joined forces with Gelawdewos and prepared to resume the war.

XI. Wayna Daga 1543

In early 1543 Gelawdewos and the Portuguese marched against the imam. The armies met on 21 February 1543 at Wayna Daga, near Lake Tana. The emperor's army numbered several thousand infantry and a few hundred cavalry, with the surviving Portuguese musketeers. The imam's army was larger, with his remaining Ottoman musketeers.

The battle was decided by the death of the imam. According to Castanhoso, he was mortally wounded by the shot of an unnamed Portuguese musketeer; later Portuguese accounts credit João de Castilho, who was himself killed by the imam's guards. Ethiopian sources attribute the killing to an Ethiopian soldier. When the imam fell, his army broke and fled, and many of his soldiers were killed. His wife Bati del Wambara escaped with her son. The Ottoman musketeers were almost all killed.

The death of the imam brought the collapse of his conquest. The Muslim governors of the highland provinces were killed or expelled, and many of the Christians who had converted to Islam returned to Christianity. Gelawdewos spent the following years restoring his authority over the empire, rebuilding churches and recovering territories. The battle of Wayna Daga is regarded as one of the decisive battles of the history of the Horn of Africa.

XII. The Aftermath and the Death of Gelawdewos

The war did not end with the death of the imam. His widow, Bati del Wambara, sought revenge, and in 1559 the imam's nephew, Nur ibn Mujahid, the emir of Harar, who married her, led an army against Gelawdewos. At the battle of Fatagar on 23 March 1559 the emperor was killed. According to tradition his head was carried to Harar and displayed. Nur built the walls of Harar, which still stand.

Both the empire and Adal had been exhausted by the decades of war. In the second half of the sixteenth century both were subjected to the migrations of the Oromo, a pastoral people from the south who moved into the provinces of both states and settled there. The Oromo migrations transformed the demography of the region and contributed to the decline of Adal, whose capital moved from Harar to the oasis of Aussa in the 1570s.

The Ottomans, who had supported Adal, established a province of Habesh on the Red Sea coast in 1557, with Massawa and Suakin, cutting the empire off from the sea. Ottoman forces tried to advance into the highlands and were defeated by the emperor Sarsa Dengel in the 1570s and 1580s.

The emperor Sarsa Dengel, who reigned from 1563 to 1597, restored the authority of the monarchy and fought campaigns against the Ottomans on the coast, the Oromo in the south and the Beta Israel in the Semien mountains, whose resistance he crushed in the 1580s. His chronicle, like that of Gelawdewos, presents his wars in Biblical language and describes him as a defender of the faith.

XIII. The Jesuit Mission

The Portuguese alliance led to an attempt to bring the Ethiopian church into union with Rome. In 1555 the pope appointed a Jesuit patriarch for Ethiopia, João Nunes Barreto, and a group of Jesuits led by Andrés de Oviedo arrived in 1557. Gelawdewos received them courteously but refused to accept the authority of Rome. In 1555 he wrote a Confession of Faith, defending the doctrines and practices of the Ethiopian church, including the observance of the Sabbath and circumcision, which he explained as customs rather than as obligations of the law of Moses.

The Jesuit mission continued under difficult conditions. Under the Spanish Jesuit Pedro Páez, who arrived in 1603, it achieved greater success. Páez learned Ge'ez and Amharic, built churches and a palace for the emperor, and won the confidence of the emperor Susenyos, who converted to Catholicism in 1622. Páez also wrote a History of Ethiopia that is a valuable source for the country's history and geography.

Susenyos's conversion and his attempt to impose Catholicism provoked a civil war. The Jesuit patriarch Afonso Mendes, who arrived in 1625, demanded the rebaptism of the clergy, the reconsecration of churches and the abolition of the Sabbath and circumcision. The resulting revolts forced Susenyos to restore the Ethiopian faith in 1632 and abdicate in favour of his son Fasilides, who expelled the Jesuits and closed the country to Catholic missionaries.

XIV. The Ge'ez Bible and the Destruction of Manuscripts

The war caused immense destruction of the manuscript heritage of the Ethiopian church. The churches and monasteries burned by the imam's forces had held libraries of manuscripts in Ge'ez, including Bibles, liturgical books and the writings of Ethiopian saints. Many of the surviving Ethiopian manuscripts date from after the war, when the churches were rebuilt and the libraries restored by copying the books that had been saved.

Despite the losses, the Ge'ez Bible survived. The oldest known manuscripts of the Ethiopian Gospels, the Garima Gospels preserved in the monastery of Abba Garima near Adwa, have been dated by radiocarbon analysis to between the fourth and seventh centuries, making them among the oldest illuminated Christian manuscripts in the world. They survived the war in their monastery. The Ethiopian version of the Greek Scriptures is one of the ancient versions described in Ancient Versions of the Greek Scriptures.

The Ethiopic Book of Enoch, which is quoted in Jude 14, survived complete only in Ge'ez manuscripts. European scholars first learned of it through manuscripts brought from Ethiopia by the Scottish traveller James Bruce in 1773, and it was translated into English by Richard Laurence in 1821. The discovery of Aramaic fragments of Enoch among the Dead Sea Scrolls confirmed the antiquity of the work. The survival of the Ge'ez manuscripts through the war of the sixteenth century made this recovery possible.

XV. Firearms and the Changing Character of War

The Ethiopian–Adal war was one of the first wars in sub-Saharan Africa in which firearms played an important role. The imam's early victories were won largely with traditional weapons, but the small numbers of matchlock muskets and cannon that he obtained from Arabia and the Ottomans gave him an advantage in some battles. The Portuguese musketeers of 1541 and the Ottoman musketeers of 1542 transformed the war, and the decisive battles of Wofla and Wayna Daga were fought between forces in which firearms were central.

After the war both the Ethiopian emperors and the rulers of Harar sought to acquire firearms. The surviving Portuguese soldiers remained in Ethiopia, married Ethiopian women and served the emperors as musketeers, and their descendants formed a distinct community in the highlands for several generations. The Ottomans controlled the coast and restricted the import of arms to the highlands. The emperors of the seventeenth century, such as Susenyos and Fasilides, built up corps of musketeers, but firearms remained scarce in Ethiopia until the nineteenth century.

The war also changed the political geography of the region. The Christian empire, whose centre had been in Shewa and Amhara in the fifteenth century, moved its centre northwards to the region of Lake Tana, where Fasilides founded the city of Gondar in the 1630s. The castles of Gondar, built in a style that combined Ethiopian, Portuguese and Indian elements, reflect the cultural contacts of the period.

XVI. The Ottoman Role

The Ottoman support for Adal formed part of the wider Ottoman strategy in the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. After the conquest of Egypt in 1517, the Ottomans sought to secure the Red Sea against the Portuguese and to establish control of its ports. They supported Muslim rulers in Yemen, the Horn of Africa and India against the Portuguese, and the musketeers sent to the imam in 1542 came from the Ottoman province of Yemen.

The Ottoman province of Habesh, established in 1557 by Özdemir Pasha, included the ports of Massawa, Suakin and Zeila and, for a time, parts of the highlands of Eritrea. Özdemir Pasha took Debarwa, the seat of the Christian governor of the coastal province, the Bahr Negash, and the Ottomans held it intermittently in the following decades. The Ottoman presence on the coast cut Ethiopia off from direct contact with the Portuguese and the outside world for most of the seventeenth century.

The Ottoman and Portuguese interventions in Ethiopia made the war part of the global conflict between the two powers. For the Ottomans, Ethiopia was a frontier of the Muslim world; for the Portuguese, it was the kingdom of Prester John, the long-sought Christian ally. Both powers intervened with small forces, but their contribution was decisive at critical moments.

The Ottoman soldiers who served the imam were few in number, but they were well trained and well armed, and their presence at Wofla was decisive. Their withdrawal after that battle shows the limits of Ottoman commitment to a war far from the centres of their power.

XVII. Somali, Harari and Afar Memory

In the Muslim regions of the Horn of Africa, Imam Ahmad is remembered as a hero. Somali tradition regards him as a national figure, and his statue stood in Mogadishu in the twentieth century. In Harar, which became the centre of Islamic learning in the region, he is remembered as a defender of the faith. The Futuh al-Habasha was copied and studied in the Muslim scholarly centres of the region.

Modern historians have debated the ethnic composition of the imam's army and the relative roles of Harari, Somali and Afar groups. The Futuh al-Habasha names several Somali clans, such as the Marehan, Harti and Gerri, among the imam's followers, and some modern writers have presented the war as a Somali national struggle. Other historians emphasise that the imam's army was multi-ethnic and that its unity was provided by religion and the leadership of the imam rather than by ethnicity.

In Ethiopian memory the imam is remembered as a destroyer of churches and an invader. The Ethiopian chronicles of Gelawdewos and later emperors present the war as a divine punishment for the sins of the Christians and the victory as a sign of divine favour. The memory of the war has been invoked in modern conflicts between Ethiopia and Somalia, and both sides have used it to shape national identity.

XVIII. The Chronicles and the Biblical Frame

The Ethiopian royal chronicles, written in Ge'ez by court clergy, drew heavily on the Bible. The chronicle of Gelawdewos compared the emperor with David and Judas Maccabeus, and it described the war against the imam in the language of the wars of Israel against its enemies. It quoted the Psalms, including passages such as Psalm 79:1, in which the nations have defiled the holy temple and laid Jerusalem in ruins, to describe the destruction of the churches.

The chroniclers also interpreted the sufferings of the war as a consequence of sin. The chronicle of Lebna Dengel presented the emperor's defeats as a punishment for his pride and for the sins of the people, echoing the prophetic interpretation of the fall of Jerusalem in the Hebrew Scriptures. The restoration under Gelawdewos was seen as a sign of divine mercy following repentance.

The Futuh al-Habasha used the language of the Quran and the history of the early Islamic conquests. Its title recalled the classic histories of the conquests of Syria, Egypt and Persia, and it presented the imam as a successor of the early caliphs. Both sides thus described the war in religious terms, though both chronicles also record the role of plunder, ambition and political rivalry.

XIX. Ethiopian Scholarship after the War

The restoration of the Ethiopian church after the war was accompanied by a revival of scholarship. The monasteries and churches that had been destroyed were rebuilt, and new manuscripts were copied. In the seventeenth century, under the emperors of Gondar, Ethiopian scholars produced commentaries on the Bible, the andemta, which explained the Ge'ez text in Amharic and preserved traditional interpretations.

The controversy with the Jesuits stimulated Ethiopian theological writing. Ethiopian scholars defended the doctrines of their church against the Catholic teaching on the two natures of Christ, and the debates led to internal controversies within the Ethiopian church that lasted until the nineteenth century. The Ethiopian monk Abba Gorgoryos, who went to Europe in the 1650s, helped the German scholar Hiob Ludolf to compile a grammar and dictionary of Ge'ez and a history of Ethiopia, laying the foundations of Ethiopian studies in Europe.

Ludolf's works, published in Frankfurt between 1661 and 1702, introduced European scholars to the Ethiopian Bible and its canon. The Ethiopian Psalter had already been printed in Rome in 1513 by Johannes Potken, and the Ethiopian Greek Scriptures in 1548 and 1549 by Ethiopian monks in Rome, one of the first printed editions of the Greek Scriptures in an Eastern language.

XX. Legacy

The Ethiopian–Adal war was one of the most destructive wars in the history of the Horn of Africa. It devastated the Christian empire, destroyed much of its cultural heritage and threatened its existence. The intervention of the Portuguese, small in numbers but decisive at a critical moment, helped the empire to survive, and the alliance led to the attempt of the Jesuits to bring the Ethiopian church into union with Rome, which ended in the expulsion of the Jesuits and the isolation of the country.

The war also weakened Adal, which never recovered its former power, and opened the way for the Oromo migrations that transformed the region. The empire and the Muslim states that survived were reshaped by these changes, and the religious and ethnic map of modern Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia reflects in part the events of the sixteenth century.

For the history of the Bible, the war is significant as a moment in which the ancient Ge'ez manuscript tradition was threatened with destruction and survived. The Ethiopian Bible, with its distinctive canon, and the communities that preserved it, including the Beta Israel described in The Beta Israel, form part of the wider history of the transmission of the Scriptures.

XXI. Bibliography

The following studies, editions and reference works underlie this account.