The Victoria and Albert Museum, or V&A, is a museum of art, design and performance based in South Kensington, London. It was established in 1852, following on from the 1851 “Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations” spearheaded by Prince Albert. The museum's collections today number over 2.7 million objects, amassed over the past 150 years through active collecting. Amongst them is a small but very significant collection of Ethiopian material, which tells a story about the complex relationship between Britain and Ethiopia during the 19th century, as well as prompting much discussion about how African collections and objects associated with military expeditions are displayed and interpreted by UK museums today.

Archives have significant value as primary sources for a broad range of academic disciplines. In areas where published texts are lacking, such as Ethiopia, archives elucidate the history and culture of the society and clarify the current situation of that society. However, the meaning and influence such archives provide for the people in the society must be discussed.

This paper aims to discuss new perspectives by combining archival research and anthropology. It focuses on the Kafa culture, the collections of Friedrich Julius Bieber (subsequently referred to as F. J. Bieber), recognised as the foremost authority on ethnological research dealing with Kafa in southwestern Ethiopia, and the significance of establishing archives from collections.

The paper first discusses Kafa and its history. After examining previous Kafa research, it concludes that the Kafa people refer to foreign researchers’ work when explaining their own history and culture.

The aim of this article is to discuss the value of Polish collections of Ethiopian art conceived in Poland in the 20th century and to describe the times and lives of their creators. In most cases, these collections are associated with the figures of three very distinguished and famous Poles who were the precursors of research studies which were concentrated on the rich and diverse Ethiopian art and culture. These three renowned researchers whom I would like to present and discuss are as follows: Waciaw Korabiewicz, Stefan Strelcyn and Stanislaw Chojnacki. When considering the topic of Ethiopian art collections, we must not forget about the archetypal European colonial system, which can be seen as the policy of a nation seeking to extend or retain its authority not only over other people and territories but also in the sphere of culture.

The aim of this article is to present one of the biggest world collections of Ethiopian crosses and the man who was responsible for it - a Polish medical doctor Wactaw Korabiewicz who devoted much of his life to revealing the complicated system of symbolism of the crosses. Over the decades Wadaw Korabiewicz collaborated with different museums around the world. However, it was the National Museum in Warsaw (Muzeum Narodowe w Warszawie (MNW)) and its collection of Ethiopian crosses which Korabiewicz partly donated, partly offered as a perpetual deposit, which were the most important for the collector and to which he had the most emotional connection. This collection is today one of the biggest among the world collections of Ethiopian crosses, and also one of the most interesting. Apart from being a collector, Korabiewicz's ambition and great passion was research on the symbolism of a cross.

Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography/Muzei antropologii i etnografii im. Petra Velikogo RAN (Kunstkamera) includes a few photograph collections dedicated to Ethiopia. Amongst them, a considerable quantity refers to the period of-1896-1913 characterised by the active work of the Russian diplomatic mission. This cluster of visual material has not been interpreted in a proper manner. This article is an attempt to arrange this material so as to make it suitable for further research. With this purpose, the inventory numbers of the photos are given to assist searching on the official website. The survey is based on the analysis of inventories of the Museum's collection mentioned in the text.

The subject of this article is the unique and extensive visual documentation of Southern Ethiopia that is today preserved in the archives of the Frobenius Institute. The article will start by giving an overview on the research expeditions of Frobenius Institute members to southern Ethiopia in the years between 1934 and 1974. Then the methods and scope of the visual documentation created during these expeditions will be discussed, with a focus on two artists, who made the largest contribution to this exceptional material. Finally, I will describe the current efforts of the Frobenius Institute to make this visual documentation visible and freely accessible via online databases.

The major purpose of this article is to document the exhibition “African Scribes: Manuscript Culture of Ethiopia” (hereafter “African Scribes”), which opened on 6 February 2018 in the Sir John Ritblat Treasures of the British Library Gallery in London.

Items in the Sir John Ritblat Treasures of the British Library Gallery range from the 4th century Codex Sinaiticus to John Lennon's letters. The display tells the I literary history of Europe, Asia and the Middle East. Out of the 240 items on permanent display, there are only two items from Ethiopia representing Africa.

The main objectives of the “African Scribes” exhibition were to pay tribute to unknown Ethiopian scribes and artists and also, to a certain extent, to direct attention to some diverse and significant items in the British Library collection that had never been on display before. The display explored the art, binding and calligraphy of manuscripts of Ethiopia.

There is a general understanding that Ethiopia runs counter to other African countries, where basically books were introduced by the Europeans to ‘civilise’ the ‘illiterate’ people during the colonial period. This colonialist point of view is problematic for it obliterates the pre-existence of notable centers of Islamic learning located in the continent, for example Timbuktu and Harar. Moreover, Ethiopians, even before the introduction of Christianity, were already equipped with a writing system of their own for more than 3,000 years (Ayele, 1997), and books were not new when Europeans set foot in the country in the 16th century. In Ethiopia, where Christianity arrived long before the European advent, literacy was provided to a limited range of people seeking clerical careers. Thus, pre-modern education was primarily religious in terms of personnel, textbooks, and places. Clerics taught those children who wished to pursue a clerical career, using religious books at classrooms attached to churches and monasteries.