Essay
The Hatata Inquiries
Hatâta
Zera Yacob · 1667
Synopsis
A man born near Aksum, steeped in the Scriptures, tells how, under King Susenyos, a convert to Catholicism, he was accused and had to flee south with the Psalms of David as his only book. Withdrawn to a cave near the Tekezé, he meditates there on God and on the harm men do to one another, and draws from this a philosophy of a reason given to all: he seeks proofs of the existence of God, criticises the religious laws of Christians, Muslims and Jews, and defends the equality of men and women.
Context
Dated 1667, the text is known only from a manuscript that the Capuchin Giusto d'Urbino had copied around 1852 for Antoine d'Abbadie, whose collection entered the Bibliothèque nationale in 1902; Enno Littmann edited it in 1904 with a Latin translation. In 1920, Carlo Conti Rossini attributed it to Giusto himself; Claude Sumner, Getatchew Haile and then the team of Wendy Laura Belcher defended its authenticity, which Anaïs Wion and Fasil Merawi still contest. A complete English translation appeared in 2023, and a collective volume was devoted to it the following year.
Who it is for
For reading a seventeenth-century Ethiopian treatise on reason and faith, in French extracts or in English translation.
Prizes and reception
Aeon presents him as an African forerunner of the Enlightenment, and Oxford notes that he meditates at the time Descartes is writing.
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