They were organized first at the instigation of the historian Richard Pankhurst, founder of the Institute of Ethiopian Studies (IES) at Addis Ababa University, and Stanislaw Chojnacki, keeper of the IES Museum until the revolution, who were both prolific writers on Ethiopian art and history. First focusing on Christian art, the proceedings of these conferences addressed very specific points and do not provide any general overviews. They show, however, a field of study and how this field is pragmatically defined. If these conferences have not always gathered every art historian who is a specialist on Ethiopia, they do give good insights into scholars interested in the field at least at one point in their careers, and thus provide a list of scholars to follow. Even if the articles published in these proceedings are of very different quality, they may be mined for information. Intervals between the conferences have been irregular. To date, ten conferences have met, and proceedings were published for six of them.
Finally the “I don’t need a man” mantra may be doing your more harm than good. It is true that a woman does not need a man to feel special and successful but if she wants one and goes around with this attitude, she is unlikely ever to find a partner. It is good to love yourself but if you don’t want to be left alone, it is even better to love yourself and have some loving left over to give to another.
While the need to get the jerk out of your system is understandable, there is a time and place for such negative expressions against a former partner. If your current date notices that you keep ranting against your ex, he will deduce, and correctly too, that you still haven’t got over your past relationship and therefore emotionally not yet ready for a new one. After this realization, there is little that he is going to have to do with you unless you display signs of emotional maturity and let go of the past.
Christian art forms have been studied more than other material, but in this bibliography they will be proportionately less represented in order to provide sources for various other fields that have received less scholarly attention. Therefore, this bibliography reflects neither the number of surviving artworks nor the number of the studies done. Furthermore, there is no general overview of all the topics addressed in this bibliography, but such overviews are sometimes existing for subtopics. It must be noted that while Ethiopian names are composed of a personal name followed by the name of a person’s father, in publications and library catalogs the personal name is sometimes taken on as a surname, while sometimes the father’s name is used in this way. Systems of transcription also vary, so diverse spellings will appear in this bibliography.
