E thiopia at the Crossroads is the new exhibition now at the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) in Salem, Mass., though it’s organized jointly by the Peabody, the Walters Art Gallery, and the Toledo Museum of Art. Each has a history of collecting art from Ethiopia — that exotic, pivotal place very much at the intersection of ideologies, religions, trade, and empires. It’s a difficult exhibition but rewarding if you stick with it and skim its dead spots, tangents, and weird jump into the realm of living artists. The show and its catalogue are, taken together, essential in thinking about this place of wonders.

The PEM is one of my favorite museums and a unique trove. It’s in Salem, so prepare for a bewitching, but in its heyday around 200 years ago, it was the center of business with China and Japan. Lots of money and art accrued. It has a new strategic plan and, sad to say, made an ugly, sour hash from its new mix of its superb colonial and Federal art collection, its Hudson River School works, its Modernist art, Native American art, and contemporary African-American art.

As an example of its riches, it displays Steve Locke’s Homage to the Auction Block, from 2019, a riff on Josef Albers’s Homage to the Square. Yes, he embeds in Albers’s pure formalist square an auction block where slaves were sold. It would be merely trite if it weren’t psychotic. It’s in the permanent-collection exhibition On This Ground: Being and Belonging in America. After seeing it, I was delighted to be transported to Ethiopia, as far away from it as I could get.

Ethiopia at the Crossroads is over 250 objects, so it’s big. On view are processional crosses, icons, historic and contemporary paintings, scrolls, baskets, textiles, sculptures, body adornments, coins, manuscripts, photographs as well as a scent gallery, a space on object conservation, and a section on the country’s ancient language, still used as the official language of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church.

Ethiopians call their country the “Land of Origins,” and they’re not wrong. Lucy is Ethiopian, after all. Known in Ethiopia as Dink’inesh, meaning “you’re marvelous,” she’s the 3.2-million-year-old skeleton found on Ethiopia’s Afar Triangle in 1974 by a paleoanthropologist from the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. She was bipedal, walked upright, had a not-very-tiny brain, was no Ava Gardner but was named after a Beatles song — “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds — and, about 20 years ago, had a multi-city tour of American museums.

Still the stuff of lore, the Bible, and “Page Six” are the Queen of Sheba, Ethiopia-born and -raised, and her fling with King Solomon. Ethiopia was the second country, after Armenia, to adopt Christianity as its official religion, beating Constantine’s Rome. Then there’s the Kingdom of Kush, occasional Venetians, and moments of Byzantium.

Fast-forward to Haile Selassie (1892–1975), Ethiopia’s modernizing emperor and an international celebrity. He was famous for resisting the Italian Fascists, promoting Ethiopia as a strategic crossroads, and making capes a fashion item. He was the 225th emperor of what we know as Ethiopia and a descendant, it’s thought, of the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon via their love son, Menelik, who, by the by, is said to have brought the Ark of the Covenant to Aksum, once the capital of a kingdom in northern Ethiopia. Whatever they have is still in a church there and can’t be seen, not even by the top brass in the Orthodox Church.

At the PEM, an introductory gallery tells us how big and challenging “Ethiopia” is as a topic. The country’s got 75 ethnicities, and it’s an anchor for Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It’s twice the size of Texas, and that doesn’t count Eritrea, once part of Ethiopia, but, following a recent civil war, now its own country.

We’re told that Ethiopia has never been colonized, to use that bugaboo term, but this isn’t strictly true. Over the centuries, it has invaded other countries, been invaded, and was itself an imperial power. It survived the Scramble for Africa among European powers in the late 19th century, though Italy did briefly rule it, and lots of the modern architecture in its big cities is Italian Art Deco. In the late 1970s, 500,000 people died in the Ethiopian Red Terror, its moment of Communist rule, Pol Pot style. A famine in the 1980s killed a million more.

In the first few galleries, we learn about its regions and about Ethiopia before Christianity. Fossil-rich southwest Ethiopia, bordering Kenya, is a stelae-belt with lots of megalith sites. In the exhibit, two wooden Konso grave markers, intricately woven baskets made by Jewish craftsmen, and sculptures with Egyptian and Arabian influences point to intricate, polyglot cultures.

I kept wanting more art. I wish, for example, that the PEM treated these stone funerary monuments but, alas, they’re only mentioned. The book flirts with them but focuses on the tiresome issue of illicit trade in monoliths. “The arts of the southwest are an integral part of Ethiopia’s rich cultural heritage,” I read in the catalogue, and I don’t doubt that “their beauty and diversity” deserve recognition, but teach me something about them, please. Visitors want to learn about what the unique people who lived in Ethiopia made, art-wise, not read about Susan Sontag’s thoughts on colonial power and the extraction of Ethiopian art. Until modern times, the story of the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon wasn’t, I learned, much developed visually but, rather, stayed in the sphere of text. I’d like to learn more about architecture in Ethiopia’s medieval era, chiseled-from-rock churches in the northwestern part of the country. They’re fantastic. In fact, over and over I asked myself where the grandeur was.

I’m puzzled by a section called “Judaism in Ethiopia” and its companion section in the book, “Ethiopian Jews: Glorious History and Current Reality,” by Getachew Metaferia. Ethiopia is home to the oldest Jewish community aside from the geographic region of Palestine/Canaan/Judea/Israel, where Jews have lived for thousands of years. Possibly the art doesn’t exist, but what’s on view is modest and entirely from the 20th century. We see, for instance, a cartoony pillow sham and three baskets, all of which point to a curatorial belief that Jews in Ethiopia made only folk art.

Metafaria’s four-page essay deals largely with life now for the tens of thousands of Ethiopian Jews airlifted in 1991 by Israel from Addis Ababa to what these Jews considered the Promised Land. These new Israelis have had trouble assimilating, possibly because of a mistily defined “history of racism and exclusivity.” Possibly true, but certainly irrelevant to thousands of years of Judaism in Ethiopia. Ethiopia, after all, is the topic of the exhibition.

Edward Gibbon described medieval Ethiopia as an insular place “that slept for a thousand years, forgetful of the world, by whom it was forgotten.” This wasn’t true in terms of trade with Ethiopia’s neighbors, but artistic development seems to have happened in a very narrow range. Religious ritual art is prescribed, which means it doesn’t change much but is distinctive.

Daniel Seifemichael Feleke’s essay on liturgy and practice in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church is fascinating. Everything in church architecture has symbolic meaning, I read, from where doors are located, to the format of crosses, all with seven arms, each holding a stylized ostrich egg. An egg will hatch new life, and an ostrich watches its eggs constantly, as God watches us. Cross shapes elsewhere are strictly regulated in shape. The tabot, or a specially blessed duplicate of the Ark of the Covenant, is sacred. Censers, bells, ceremonial umbrellas, fly whisks, and liturgical spoons are among the many ritual objects whose shapes are prescribed by dogma.

This is an exhibition in itself. There are lots of ritual objects in the exhibition in different sections, but we tend to lose the big picture. Ethiopia seems to never have had a Renaissance experience. It was never part of the Roman Empire. It didn’t have an Enlightenment. As far as I can see, there are no Baroque or Rococo or Mannerist phases. Still, what doesn’t evolve is still riveting. A folding processional icon in the shape of a fan or accordion, owned by the Walters Art Gallery, is a high point. It’s from the late 15th century and ink and paint on parchment, and 15 feet wide when extended. Each fold portrays a single figure.

The figure style lasts hundreds of years. There’s a bit of ornament above and below each figure. Garments are simple robes and cloaks, alternating from figure to figure, some patterned, some in vertical stripes, some in solid colors. The palette’s simple, too, with alternating yellow, blue, red, and green. Heads are big and round. Eyes are big and black, like the Egyptian Eye of Horus. Each figure has a halo. It’s a distinctive look. The faces vary, with some having beards, some are women, with hand gestures varying and heads turning in different directions. They’re animated but otherworldly, hieratic and conversational.

I understand why curators and conservators want the printed catalogue to feature technical studies of, say, metalwork and coins. It’s a book, and, after the exhibition’s over, the book is the record that survives in libraries, bookshelves at home, and coffee tables. That said, how coins from the ancient kingdom of Aksum were made, or the copper content of processional crosses, or the format and hinges of icon paintings are ultra-specialist topics. Technical study in some of these fields, the book correctly contends, is very much in its initial phases. Why not publish it virtually? On a website, specialists aren’t confined to a limited number of illustrations and charts. Online, more people would see their work, too.

Why not focus on dissemination on a website rather than clubbily confine the scholarship to book buyers? This material is the stuff of science and technique, not aesthetics, which interest museumgoers more. Generalists, art appreciators, and art novices want to learn more about the culture than about binding media and alloys.

This technical material slows the narrative, too, and the pages devoted to it are pages taken from juicier topics. As it is, chapters on Ethiopia’s connections to the Italian Renaissance, Ethiopian stories about Marian miracles, the Evil Eye, and the Rastafari are only four or five pages long. Dropping esoterica would have given these subjects more space. The art about Mary is bizarre.

The exhibition’s section on the Evil Eye, magic scrolls, and recipe books couldn’t be too big, in my opinion. How often have I wanted to cast an Evil Eye? How many stars are in the sky, times the size of the budget deficit, that’s how often. Monks, priests, midwives, and physicians could deliver looks that might not kill but could deliver a very bad day. Why not art critics?

Ink and paint scrolls from the 19th or 20th centuries, most from the Walters’s collection, look like they mean business. Close-ups of characteristic faces from Ethiopian art emphasize those big, black eyes. They’re set in cartouches featuring single eyes, daggers, hourglasses, and animals I’d hesitate to pet. They’re text-heavy, too, but we don’t learn whether the text is a “how-to” guide or a “what-for” itemization of grievances. Some of these texts aren’t meant to harm but to protect. Like good trouble and bad trouble, there are good spells and bad spells. As is the case for many subjects covered in the exhibition, not much is known. Part of the excitement in seeing Ethiopia at the Crossroads is discovering topics that themselves need a closer look.

I enjoyed seeing good work by living artists such as Julie Mehretu (b. 1970), who was born in Ethiopia but is American, Wosene Worke Kosrof (b. 1950), and Aïda Muluneh (b. 1974), who lives in Addis Ababa and is a photographer. There’s a big Ethiopian diaspora, mostly in America and especially in Washington, D.C. As much as I liked this contemporary work, I found it a distraction and the stuff of a separate exhibition. This raises two problems with the PEM version of the project. The museum wants to do African programming, which is good, but the contemporary art feels very shoe-horned in, and the shoes really don’t fit. In a quest for black faces, the exhibition covers too many topics. The PEM seems to have a race obsession that warps its judgment.

This is possibly related to a second problem. With three organizing institutions, lots of curators, nearly 30 catalogue authors, and at least one community-input committee, Ethiopia at the Crossroads lacks focus. Too many chefs can spoil the doro wot, my favorite Ethiopian dish. An exhibition of, for instance, 3,000 years of French culture in 250 objects would be impossibly rambling as well as skin-deep. Ethiopia is even vaster and more inscrutable since it’s not Western. We start with a flimsier baseline of knowledge and intuitive feeling.

My quibbles aside, it’s a very good exhibition, and kudos to the three museums, especially the Walters, for bringing Ethiopian culture and art to the foreground. Everyone needs to know more about this fascinating history and people. The show and book will stimulate more research and, I hope, more exhibitions.