[I posted this yesterday and then soon after seem to have inadvertently overwritten it with the Tuberville post, so I am reposting it. Apologies to ahcuah who commented on this post before it got over-ridden and thus his comment became irrelevant to the Tuberville post. Also apologies to Steve who responded to ahcuah’s comment and that also became irrelevant through no fault of his own.]
I was intrigued by this article by Jonathan Egid titled Forging philosophy about questions that have been raised as to whether a 17th century Ethiopian philosopher who was credited with writing an influential work really existed or whether he and his work were invented in the 19th century by an Italian monk.
The Ḥatäta [Zera Yacob], or ‘enquiry’ (the root of which, ሐ-ተ-ተ, in the ancient Ethiopian language of Geʽez literally means ‘to investigate, examine, search’ ) is an unusual work of philosophy for a number of reasons. It is not only a philosophical treatise but also an autobiography, a religious meditation and a witness of the religious wars that plagued Ethiopia in the early 17th century; it presents a theodicy and cosmological argument apparently independent of other traditions of Christian thought; it employs a subtle philosophical vocabulary that is virtually without precursors. Finally, and most perplexingly, the progenitor of these ideas, the Zera Yacob who is the subject of the autobiography and gives his name to the title, may never have existed.
Why might we think this? The text is composed in the voice of one Zera Yacob, a man born to poor parents in ‘the lands of the priests of Aksum’ in northern Ethiopia around the turn of the 17th century.
…The troubled afterlife of the text begins when the work is ‘discovered’ in 1852 by a lonely Capuchin monk named Giusto da Urbino in the highlands of Ethiopia. Before this date, there is no mention of the text in the historical record. The work was sent off to da Urbino’s patron back in Paris, the Irish-Basque explorer, linguist and astronomer Antoine d’Abbadie, and placed in the Ethiopian collections of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Over the next couple of decades, scholars flocked to consult this fascinating, seemingly unprecedented text. The Ḥatäta was edited and translated into Russian and Latin, and began to gain a wider readership among European intellectuals.