A platform for research: civil engineering, architecture and urbanism
A platform for research: civil engineering, architecture and urbanism
Bastions of the cross : medieval rock-cut cruciform churches of Tigray, Ethiopia
"In the late eleventh century, Ethiopian masons hewed great cruciform churches out of mountains in the eastern highlands of Tigray, Ethiopia's northernmost province. Hitherto unparalleled in scale, these monuments were royal foundations, instruments of political centralization and re-Christianization that anticipated the great thirteenth-century churches at Lalibela. Bastions of the Cross, the first monograph devoted to the subject, examines the cruciform churches of Abreha wa-Atsbeha, Wuqro Cherqos, and Mika'el Amba and connects them to one of the great architectural movements of the Middle Ages: the millennial revival of the early Byzantine aisled, cruciform church. These were also the first to incorporate vaulting, and uniquely did so in the service of a centralized spatial hierarchy. It was through resuscitated pilgrimage networks that Ethiopian craftsmen revisited architectural types abandoned since Late Antiquity, while Islamic mercantile channels brought precious textiles from South Asia that inspired trans-material conceptions of architectural space. This study reveals the eleventh century, in contrast to its popular reputation as a "dark age," to be a forgotten watershed in the architectural history of Ethiopia and Eastern Christianity"--
Bastions of the cross : medieval rock-cut cruciform churches of Tigray, Ethiopia
"In the late eleventh century, Ethiopian masons hewed great cruciform churches out of mountains in the eastern highlands of Tigray, Ethiopia's northernmost province. Hitherto unparalleled in scale, these monuments were royal foundations, instruments of political centralization and re-Christianization that anticipated the great thirteenth-century churches at Lalibela. Bastions of the Cross, the first monograph devoted to the subject, examines the cruciform churches of Abreha wa-Atsbeha, Wuqro Cherqos, and Mika'el Amba and connects them to one of the great architectural movements of the Middle Ages: the millennial revival of the early Byzantine aisled, cruciform church. These were also the first to incorporate vaulting, and uniquely did so in the service of a centralized spatial hierarchy. It was through resuscitated pilgrimage networks that Ethiopian craftsmen revisited architectural types abandoned since Late Antiquity, while Islamic mercantile channels brought precious textiles from South Asia that inspired trans-material conceptions of architectural space. This study reveals the eleventh century, in contrast to its popular reputation as a "dark age," to be a forgotten watershed in the architectural history of Ethiopia and Eastern Christianity"--
Bastions of the cross : medieval rock-cut cruciform churches of Tigray, Ethiopia
Muehlbauer, Mikael (author)
2023
xv, 239 pages
Originally presented as the author's thesis (Ph.D.)--Columbia University, 2020
Includes bibliographical references and index
Digital preservation by Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg
Book
English
DDC:
726.50963
“Bastions of the Cross”: Medieval Rock-Cut Cruciform Churches of Tigray, Ethiopia
| BASE | 2021
| Online Contents | 2013