In the years since the Garrett donation, Ethiopic manuscript holdings have continued to grow by gift and purchase. The following year, Littmann led a German expedition to Aksum. Garrett acquired the bulk of his Ethiopic manuscripts from the eminent German philologist Enno Littmann, who led a Princeton expedition to Tigray in 1905.
Princeton's best Ethiopic manuscripts were collected by Robert Garrett, Class of 1897, and donated to Princeton in 1942.
There are also several manuscripts illuminated in the Second (or late) Gondar style, which emerged in the old imperial capital of Gondar in northern Ethiopia from the 1720s and 1730s. Text manuscripts include Gospel Books, Psalters, the Book of Enoch, homilies, liturgy, chant, saints’ lives and miracles, theology, law, and compilations of texts related to divination and popular magic. The Manuscripts Division has one of the largest collections of Ethiopic manuscripts outside Ethiopia, including nearly 180 codices (bound manuscripts) and more than 500 magic scrolls (amulets), dating from the 17th to 20th centuries, chiefly written in Ge'ez, the sacred language of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, with small amounts of text in Amharic.
