CRG seminar: The Drewes collection of Amharic books in the African Library
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In 2024, the African Library received a collection of over 600 books from the estate of Abraham Johannes Drewes (1927–2007), a prominent Dutch scholar who specialised in Semitic languages and epigraphy from Ethiopia and South Arabia. The vast majority of the books and booklets (several of which are only about 12 by 17 cm in size) are in Amharic. Many were published in the 1950s and 1960s, sometimes as a second or later edition of books that had appeared earlier in the century, but there are also older works – not necessarily published in Ethiopia. The collection points to a thriving culture of publishing and reading in Amharic in both the first and early second half of the 20th century.
This CRG-ALA event is dedicated to the Drewes collection of Amharic books, which the library is still in the process of cataloguing. We will be discussing Drewes’s life and work, the contents of the collection, how it came to be housed in the African Library, and the cataloguing process, with contributions from, among others, emeritus professor of Afroasiatic in particular Berber and South Semitic languages Harry Stroomer, and Jos Damen, former head of the library of the African Studies Centre (now the African Library).
This seminar is organised by the Collaborative Research Group African languages archives.
This event will take place in person in Leiden. For registrants who cannot travel to Leiden, a link to an online platform will be sent before the start of the event.
Speaker
Jos Damen was Head of the Library and ICT at the ASCL from 2006 until 2025. He was in charge of library policy, planning and operations. He was also responsible for ICT support services, and a member of the ASCL’s Executive Board and vice-director of the ASCL.
Emeritus professor Harry Stroomer is a field-work oriented descriptive linguist focusing on linguistic diversity in North Africa and the Middle East. He has a warm interest in local cultures, material culture and linguistic anthropology. He did fieldwork in Egypt, Kenya, Somalia, Morocco and Yemen. He studied languages in the Semitic, Cushitic and Berber group of the Afroasiatic language family. He has also published monumental works such as Dictionnaire berbère tachelḥiyt – français.
Date, time and location
18 June 2026
14.00 - 16.00
Herta Mohr Building / Faculty of Humanities, Witte Singel 27a, 2311 BG Leiden
0:12
Registration
Posted on 18 May 2026, last modified on 18 May 2026