BACKGROUND
In 1852, two newly discovered manuscripts written in Ge’ez were sent by the Capuchin missionary Giusto da Urbino to his patron in Paris, the famed explorer and scientist Antoine d’Abbadie. The manuscripts contained two treatises quite unlike anything else in Ethiopian literature. The Ḥatäta Zär’a Ya‛ǝqob, was an autobiographical and philosophical meditation, telling the story of the freethinker Zär’a Ya‛ǝqob through his childhood, exile and philosophical musings in a mountain cave; the text elaborated a philosophical system of considerable depth and subtlety. The Ḥatäta Walda Heywat was composed by a disciple. A less theoretical work, it represented a transition from metaphysics to social ethics, applying the master’s insights to daily life.
The Ḥatäta Zär’a Ya‛ǝqob appeared to be not only the earliest autobiography from sub-Saharan Africa, but also the region’s first philosophical work, a strikingly unified and powerful exposition of original ideas. The work includes autobiographical details closely related to the political circumstances of his day: Zär’a Ya‛ǝqob was born in 1599 ‘in the lands of the priests of Aksum’, forced to flee his home and take to the hills due to religious strife in Ethiopia and the enmity of a powerful courtier; he eventually found shelter in a cave wherein he lived for the next two years, reciting the psalms of David and contemplating the ways of man and God. The author insists on a self-reliant, critical outlook that would later be seen to characterise European thinkers such as Descartes and Kant. He develops a theodicy, a cosmological argument for the existence of God and a theologically-naturalistically derived ethics based on the ‘principle of the goodness of natural creation’. The work is also a religious polemic which evaluates established religious doctrines against the aforementioned principles and finds them wanting; the author criticises Judaism, Islam and the various forms of Christianity, offering instead a novel, proto-deistic vision of a life lived in harmony with God and nature.
Having arrived in Paris via Khartoum and Cairo, the manuscripts were catalogued by d’Abbadie (1859) and deposited in the Bibliothèque nationale de France upon his death in 1902. Within a decade, two critical editions and translations were produced by Turayev (1905) and Littmann (1909, 1916), both of which celebrated the Ḥatäta as significant contributions to human thought. However, in 1916 and 1920, two articles by Conti Rossini severely undermined the belief that the texts were composed in the 17th century by an Ethiopian freethinker. Deploying a range of arguments, from eyewitness accounts to textual analysis, Conti Rossini alleged that rather than discovering the Ḥatäta manuscripts, Giusto da Urbino had in fact composed it himself. Dissent from Ethiopian scholars such as Alkilu and Moges notwithstanding, Conti Rossini’s argument was accepted as the scholarly consensus for the next half century (e.g. Mittwoch (1934)), until Claude Sumner rehabilitated the authenticity of the Ḥatäta in the second of his five volume Ethiopian Philosophy (1974-78).
Scholars remain divided on the question of authenticity, with sceptics disputing and traditionalists upholding the Ḥatäta Zär’a Ya‛ǝqob's and the Ḥatäta Walda Heywat's authorship. This conference is the first opportunity to bring scholars from both camps, and from across disciplinary boundaries together to discuss these fascinating texts and their provenance.
Further Readings
L’histoire d’un vrai faux traité philosophique / The History of a Genuine fake Philosophical Treatise - Anaïs Wion
- Introduction - Enquête sur une enquête. Now available in English translation.
- Part I - Le temps de la découverte. De l’entrée en collection à l’édition scientifique (1852-1904) / The time of discovery. From being part of a collection to becoming a scientific publication (1852-1904). Now available in English translation.
- Part II - Le temps de la démystification et la traversée du désert (de 1916 aux années 1950) / Time of demystification, time in the wilderness (from 1916 to the 1950s). Now available in English translation.
- A summary of the nature and importance of ZY's philosophy, from his greatest scholar
- Essay on Zera Yacob as philosopher of 'African Enlightenment
- Article comparing the philosophies of Zera Yacob and René Descartes
Podcast on Walda Heywat from The History Of Philosophy Without Any Gaps - Peter Adamson and Chicke Jeffers