From the Ethiopian Bible to Artificial Intelligence: Marwa Ibrahim Eid Brings Gəʿəz Manuscripts into the Digital Age

One of the World's Great Ancient Christian Literary Traditions

The classical Ethiopian language Gəʿəz preserves one of the most significant manuscript traditions of ancient and medieval Christianity. The Ethiopic textual world includes biblical translations, canonical and apocryphal literature, hagiography, chronicles, theological works, poetry and liturgical traditions transmitted across centuries in manuscripts.

For scholars of biblical textual history, early Christianity, Semitic languages and manuscript culture, this corpus offers evidence that cannot always be recovered from Greek, Latin, Hebrew or Syriac sources alone.

At Cairo University, Prof. Dr. Marwa Ibrahim Eid Mohamed specializes in Ethiopic literature and the literary heritage of Gəʿəz. Her official faculty profile in the Faculty of Arts identifies her academic rank as Professor and lists her specialization in Ethiopic language and literature.

From Manuscript Heritage to Digital Memory

What makes Eid's current research particularly relevant is its intersection with digital preservation and artificial intelligence. Her work has addressed the role of artificial intelligence in preserving Ethiopian literature, while her EHJ 2026 presentation develops this direction through discussion of:

• manuscript digitization
• digital preservation
• artificial intelligence
• natural-language technologies
• neural machine translation
• preservation and revitalization of Gəʿəz literary heritage

The central problem is both scholarly and practical: how can a literary tradition transmitted for roughly two millennia survive, become searchable and remain usable for future generations?

Why Gəʿəz Matters for Biblical Studies

Gəʿəz is not only important for Ethiopian history. It preserves a distinctive biblical and Christian textual world. The Ethiopian tradition is especially important for scholarship on biblical reception, apocrypha and pseudepigrapha because important ancient works survived fully or substantially through Ethiopic transmission. The best-known example is 1 Enoch, but the larger manuscript tradition extends far beyond a single book.

For this reason, study of Gəʿəz intersects with Hebrew Bible, Septuagint, early Christianity, manuscript studies, textual criticism, Semitic languages, Jewish–Christian literary interaction and the history of biblical reception.

Within the EHJ conference program, Marwa's presentation connects naturally with related Institute research on Ethiopian biblical and Gəʿəz manuscript traditions, creating a strong internal topical cluster for Gəʿəz, Ethiopian Bible and manuscript scholarship.

Egypt, Ethiopia and Connected Literary Worlds

Eid's scholarship also examines connections between Ethiopic and Coptic literary traditions and the broader transmission of Christian literature between Egypt and Ethiopia. Her research background includes work on Ethiopic and Coptic literary relations, Ethiopian Christian literature, saints and hagiography, Amharic literary development, Ethiopian historical memory, Beta Israel / Falasha literature, Semitic languages and the digital preservation of Ethiopic texts.

This makes her EHJ contribution relevant not merely to Ethiopian Studies but to the broader study of the Ancient Near East, African Christianity, biblical transmission and comparative Semitic culture.

From Biblical Tradition to Digital Memory at EHJ 2026

On 9 November 2026 at 22:00 CET, Prof. Marwa Ibrahim Eid will present "The Ge'ez Language and Literature: From Biblical Tradition to Digital Memory" at the European Hebrew Journal International Scholarly Online Zoom Conference.

Her presentation connects ancient textual traditions with one of the most contemporary questions in humanities research: Can artificial intelligence help preserve ancient languages without flattening the philological complexity that makes them historically valuable?