British Library Or 485: A Complete Geʽez Witness to 1 Enoch

The manuscript's early Ethiopian history is less fully documented than its modern catalog history. It entered the British Museum's Oriental manuscript collection and was described by William Wright in the nineteenth-century catalog of Ethiopic manuscripts; the collection is now held by the British Library. Modern digitization made the codex available folio by folio, and Beta maṣāḥəft re-described its contents, physical dimensions, binding, dating, and textual units using current manuscript-catalog standards. The Enoch work begins at folio 102r and continues to folio 190r, after Jubilees. A note near the end and almost-effaced writing on folio 190v remind readers that even a substantially complete textual witness remains a used and altered physical book. The record therefore distinguishes present shelfmark and foliation from an undocumented original place of production.

Or 485 is a parchment codex approximately 8.88 by 7.25 inches with wooden board binding. Its first textual unit is Jubilees; the Book of Enoch occupies folios 102r–190r in Geʽez script. The opening page at folio 102r, used as the hero image, presents dark Ethiopic writing in ruled columns on light parchment and begins the Book of Enoch itself. The codex is not an illuminated reconstruction, modern Amharic Bible, or generic Ethiopian Gospel book. It is the cataloged manuscript page tied to this witness. Because the image shows only the opening folio, the full-text extent comes from the institutional and scholarly catalogs rather than from an inference based on a single photograph.

The manuscript hand is dated to about 1500–1525. That date belongs to this physical copy and is more than a millennium later than the oldest Aramaic Enoch fragments from Qumran. The Ethiopic translation is generally understood to descend through a Greek transmission layer, but individual readings may preserve agreements with Greek or Aramaic witnesses that require textual-critical assessment. Or 485 belongs to a living Ethiopian manuscript culture in which Enoch and Jubilees continued to be copied rather than merely quoted in antiquarian notes. Beta maṣāḥəft also flags features that may bear on a Beta Israel connection, including the absence of certain Christian formulas, but presents that relationship as a catalog observation requiring further study rather than a settled provenance label.