IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 295

Lalibela is a small town in the highlands of northern Ethiopia, standing at an altitude of about 2,500 metres among dry, eroded hills. It would be unremarkable were it not for what lies beneath the surface of its rocky ground. Here, in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, craftsmen cut eleven churches out of the living volcanic rock. They did not build upwards with blocks of stone; they cut downwards, removing tonnes of material to leave free-standing buildings, complete with roofs, windows, pillars and internal furnishings, still attached to the bedrock at their bases.

The work is traditionally credited to King Lalibela, the most celebrated ruler of the Zagwe dynasty, which governed much of what is now Ethiopia and Eritrea from about the 1130s until 1270. The Zagwe kings had displaced the older Aksumite state, whose capital lay far to the north and whose rulers had adopted Christianity in the fourth century. By Lalibela's time the Ethiopian church was well established, monasteries were numerous, and pilgrimage to the holy places of the Christian world was an important expression of faith.

Later tradition explains the churches as the product of a divine command. According to the best-known version, Lalibela was poisoned by a half-brother jealous of his position and fell into a sleep so deep that he appeared to be dead. During this sleep he was carried to heaven, shown a city of churches carved from rock, and told to reproduce it on earth. On waking he set about the task. The story adds that the workers laid down their tools each evening and found in the morning that twice as much had been completed as they had managed during the day. Historians treat such accounts as evidence of how later generations understood the site rather than as records of what actually happened.

The eleven churches fall into three clusters, separated by a seasonal stream that runs through the site. The northern group includes Bete Medhane Alem, the largest of the eleven and often described as the biggest monolithic church in the world, and Bete Maryam, whose interior is decorated with carved capitals and paintings. To the west stands Bete Giyorgis, dedicated to Saint George, which many visitors consider the most elegant: it is cut in the shape of a Greek cross and is the best preserved of the group. The eastern cluster contains several further churches, linked to one another by passages and courtyards.

Scholars have long argued about the purpose of the site. Lalibela lies far from Jerusalem, and pilgrimage to the Holy Land was difficult in an age when travel was slow and the political control of routes uncertain. Several features of the town seem designed to evoke the holy city: one of the streams is known as the Jordan, a nearby hill is called Golgotha, and the churches are associated with the tomb of Adam and with the manger at Bethlehem. Some historians therefore interpret the complex as a replacement Jerusalem, built so that Ethiopian Christians could make a pilgrimage without leaving home.

The churches were carved from tuff, a soft volcanic rock formed from compacted ash, which hardens on exposure to the air but can still be cut with iron tools. The technique was to mark out a rectangle on the surface and cut a deep trench around it on all four sides, leaving a solid block standing proud of the ground. Carvers then worked downwards from the top, shaping the roof first and gradually hollowing out the interior, so that the building emerged from the block like a sculpture. Because they were cutting into a solid mass, they needed no scaffolding, and the spoil they removed was simply tipped into the surrounding ground.

The buildings are more than isolated monuments. They are joined by a network of tunnels, some cut as corridors open to the sky, others running dark beneath the surface. There are cisterns to collect rainwater, channels to carry it away from the foundations, and small cells cut into the rock where monks and hermits could live. The whole complex works as a single design, a sacred landscape rather than a collection of separate buildings.

Lalibela has never been abandoned. Priests still celebrate the liturgy in several of the churches, pilgrims arrive in great numbers for the major festivals, and the people of the town regard the monuments as their own. In 1978 the site was inscribed on UNESCO's World Heritage List, in recognition of a combination of architecture, art and continuing religious life that has no close parallel elsewhere.

Conservation, however, is difficult. Tuff is soft, and centuries of rain, groundwater and biological growth have eroded surfaces and weakened roofs. Temporary shelters erected over several of the churches in the past two decades have themselves been controversial, with critics complaining that they spoil the appearance of the site, and the buildings also stand in an earthquake zone. Because the churches are in daily use, any intervention has to be agreed with the clergy and the local community as well as with architects and conservators.

Even the dates are disputed. No contemporary document describes the construction, and the churches have been repaired and altered for eight centuries. Some scholars have argued that certain structures are older than Lalibela's reign, or that existing caves were adapted; others see a single, coherent programme of work. The evidence is stylistic and stratigraphic, and it is unlikely ever to be conclusive.

Historians of trade have always relied on numbers: customs rolls, account books, insurance registers and price lists. Yet some of the richest evidence of how commerce actually worked survives in a different form — the private letters that merchants wrote to one another. Such letters record orders and prices, but they also record worry, irritation, gossip and affection. They are, however, among the most difficult sources to interpret, because what survives is a small and unrepresentative fraction of what was written, and because a letter is a performance as much as a report. A single bundle of letters can illuminate a whole network of credit that no ledger describes.

The oldest large collection comes from central Anatolia. About four thousand years ago, Assyrian merchants from the city of Assur established a trading colony at Kanesh, near the modern Turkish village of Kültepe. Archaeologists have recovered more than twenty thousand clay tablets from the houses of the merchants, many of them letters. They describe a family business: men travelled with tin and textiles to sell in Anatolia and returned with silver, while wives, sons and partners managed affairs at home. Some letters are complaints — about a consignment that never arrived, a debt unpaid, a brother who had failed to write. Because the tablets were baked hard in the fires that destroyed the settlement, they survived when ordinary documents would have crumbled.

A very different archive comes from Old Cairo. For centuries the Jewish community of Fustat deposited worn-out manuscripts in a storeroom, or geniza, attached to the Ben Ezra synagogue, because paper carrying the name of God could not simply be thrown away. The room was eventually walled up and forgotten. When scholars began to examine its contents in the late nineteenth century, they found not only religious texts but a great heap of everyday documents, later counted in the tens of thousands, including the letters of merchants who traded across the Mediterranean and sometimes as far as India. These letters describe shipments of spices, textiles and metals, the arrangement of partnerships and the settling of disputes. Their survival depended on a religious accident: had the community emptied the storeroom, almost nothing would be known of this trade.

The largest surviving archive of a single medieval merchant belongs to Francesco di Marco Datini, who was born in Prato, near Florence, around 1335 and died there in 1410. Datini traded first in Avignon and then in Italy, dealing in cloth, armour, spices and much else, and organising a network of partners and agents in several cities. He kept the letters he received and copies of many that he sent — around 150,000 in all, together with hundreds of account books. The papers survived because Datini left his fortune to a charitable foundation in Prato, which preserved his house and everything in it. His wife Margherita, who managed the household while he was away, wrote to him regularly, and her letters are among the most frequently quoted documents of the period.

Letters answer questions that ledgers cannot. An account book records that a consignment of saffron was sold at a loss; a letter explains that the agent had been ill, that the roads were unsafe, that a rival had spread a rumour about the quality of the goods. Correspondence shows how trust was built between men who might never meet, and how reputation functioned where enforceable law was distant. A ledger says nothing about why a partner was trusted with a cargo worth a year's income. Letters also reveal the emotional register of business life: anxiety, anger, flattery and relief.

The difficulties begin with survival. Letters are preserved only where someone kept them: inside institutions, in the houses of wealthy families, or by accident, as at Kanesh. The correspondence of small traders, itinerant pedlars and the poor has almost entirely vanished, and with it the experience of the great majority of people who bought and sold. Most merchants were literate, but their clerks and servants often were not, and many letters were dictated; the voice we hear may therefore be filtered through a scribe. Some archives contain letters written by women, though historians disagree about how far these represent women's own voices.

A second problem is that we usually have only one side of the conversation. Datini's archive is exceptional in containing both letters received and drafts of letters sent; elsewhere the replies are missing, and the historian must infer a quarrel from a single angry page. Letters were also written to persuade. A merchant describing a delay to his partner had every reason to present himself as the victim of circumstance rather than as careless. To read a letter as a transparent window onto the past is therefore a mistake.

Scholars have responded in different ways. Some treat the letters as data, extracting prices, routes and credit instruments and building statistical pictures of trade. Others read them as literary texts, attentive to rhetoric and to the presentation of the self, and the two approaches have not always been on friendly terms. Digitisation has transformed the field, allowing collections in Prato, Cambridge and Istanbul to be compared from a desk anywhere in the world. But the old caution remains: letters tell us what merchants chose to write down, to whom and why — not a complete record of commerce, and certainly not a neutral one.

To consult a medieval manuscript in a library reading room is to be reminded how little of a book is visible on a screen. The volume is heavy; the parchment is thicker and stiffer than paper; the sewing gives slightly as the book opens; the surface catches the light differently in every quire. A reader who has handled the object knows things that no photograph conveys. Yet every consultation costs the manuscript something, and it is now possible to argue, as some librarians and some scholars do, that almost all research could be done from digital images.

The argument for restriction rests on a simple observation: use is damage. Opening a book flexes the spine and pulls at the sewing; each turning of a page abrades an edge; fingers leave grease, and skin carries moisture. Pigments are often the weakest part of a manuscript. Copper greens such as verdigris flake away from the parchment, lead white darkens, and iron gall ink can eat through the surface on which it was written. Damage of this kind is cumulative and irreversible, and the conservator who repairs a torn leaf can never restore the information that was lost with the missing fragment.

Digitisation also answers a question of justice. A manuscript in a European library is, in practice, available to those who can afford to travel and to stay. Scholars in poorer countries, students at institutions without research budgets and the merely curious have all been excluded. Major libraries have now published images of hundreds of thousands of manuscripts, and common technical standards allow pages held in different cities to be placed side by side. A medievalist in Addis Ababa or Buenos Aires can examine a book in Paris without leaving home.

Digital methods also reveal things the eye cannot. Multispectral imaging, which photographs a page under light of different wavelengths and combines the results, has recovered erased texts from beneath later writing in palimpsests. It has made legible the faint undertext of the Archimedes Palimpsest and of several biblical manuscripts, and it can distinguish inks that look identical in ordinary light. No reader, however patient, could achieve this in a reading room. In such cases the image is not a substitute for the object; it is a more powerful instrument than the object.

Yet the image is a construction. Someone chose the lighting, the resolution, the colour balance and the framing. Digitised pages are usually photographed flat, with the book opened wide and pressed into a cradle; the gutter disappears into shadow, and the structure of the binding, which is evidence in its own right, is not shown at all. Colour is notoriously difficult: two photographs of the same leaf may differ markedly depending on the equipment and the calibration used. A scholar who works only from images is therefore trusting decisions that are rarely documented and often invisible.

The physical book also records its own history in ways that general photography does not capture. The pricking holes that guided the ruled lines, the chain lines and watermarks of paper, the offsets left by ink on the facing page, the stains from candles and the fingerprints of readers: these are the raw material of codicology, the study of how books were made and used. Some of these traces can be recorded with raking light or transmitted light, but only if someone decides in advance to look for them.

It is possible, though, to overstate the case. The claim that handling a manuscript yields a unique understanding is difficult to test, and it can shade into romance. Much of what a codicologist needs can be photographed deliberately and published alongside the images of the pages. Digitisation projects have sometimes recorded sewing structures, offsets and watermarks on purpose, and such images are more useful than any general photograph of a page. Where a specific question requires the object, the answer is an appointment, not a general principle.

Conservation practice itself has changed. Cotton gloves, once mandatory, are now discouraged by many institutions for bound manuscripts and paper, because they dull the sense of touch and make readers clumsy; clean, dry hands are preferred. Readers are taught to support the spine, to use weights rather than press down on a page and to ask for help with a fragile binding. Such training is cheap, and it reduces damage far more effectively than a blanket ban.

My own view is that the two positions are not symmetrical. For most purposes, most of the time, the digital image is enough. Libraries should therefore be under a duty to publish complete, high-quality images of everything they hold, freely accessible to anyone with an internet connection. But a research library that cannot produce the object when a genuine question demands it has abandoned part of its purpose. Physical consultation should be rationed and supervised, and the burden of proof should rest on the researcher rather than on the library.

There is a further danger. Digitisation can be used to justify cutting reading-room hours and staff, and images can be locked behind subscriptions. A screen that nobody is permitted to look at, or that only a wealthy university can afford to open, is no improvement on a book in a locked case. Both dangers are arguments for scrutiny of digitisation programmes, not against digitisation itself.