- Length
- 180 pagesSumner, Ethiopian Philosophy vol. II, 1976 - Ge'ez text with English translation
- Reading
- OpenWritten for a general reader and readable without preparation
- Availability
- Specialist pressIn print from an academic publisher, priced accordingly
Hatata
A seventeenth-century Ethiopian text arguing that reason is available to everyone and that no revealed law is exempt from it - and the object of a hundred-year dispute about whether a nineteenth-century Italian monk wrote it. Both the philosophy and the controversy earn it a place.
- Date
- 1667
- Author
- Zera Yacob
- Region
- Ethiopia
- Language
- Ge'ez
- 1904 Latin, Enno Littmann The first European edition Attested
- 1905 Russian, Boris Turayev Followed within a year Attested
- 1976 English, Claude Sumner Ge'ez with translation; the standard version, in copyright Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Solitary — No documented reply on either side
- Form
- Treatise
- Method
- Narrative — Argument carried by story, image or confession
- Transmission
- Recovered — Lost to circulation and recovered from a surviving copy
- Standing
- Revived — Out of circulation and read again
Unknown outside Ethiopia until 1852, celebrated in Europe for sixty years, dismissed as a forgery from 1920, and the subject of an active reassessment since the 1970s.
What the book says
A short book, half autobiography and half argument, by a teacher who fled into the wilderness and worked out what he believed while living in a cave. The trouble begins with religious politics: the emperor has converted to Catholicism under Jesuit influence, everyone must follow, and Zera Yacob is denounced by a rival and runs. For two years he lives alone by a river, and thinks. What he arrives at is a method. Everyone says their own faith is the true one and all of them cannot be right, so the question is what tests a claim - and his answer is the intelligence God gave every person, which is available to anyone and needs no priest. He then applies it. Fasting until one collapses is not commanded by a creator who made us needing food. Celibacy contradicts the making of a creature that reproduces. The rules that keep women unclean, or permit one man several wives, or allow the buying and selling of human beings, all fail the same test: they treat as divine what is convenient for someone. He examines Christian, Muslim and Jewish law in turn and finds each partly reasonable and partly not. What survives is a creator known by reason, and prayer as a conversation rather than a transaction.
What it argues
That the intelligence given to every person is the test of every claim about God, and that the test is not optional because the alternatives cancel out. Christians, Muslims and Jews each hold that their own law is divine and the others are false; since they cannot all be right and each has the same kind of authority behind it, authority cannot be what settles it. What remains is what a person can work out - and what a person can work out includes that a creator who made human beings hungry did not command starvation, that a creator who made them in pairs did not command celibacy, and that rules privileging one sex or permitting slavery serve the people who made them. The positive doctrine is thin and deliberate: a creator exists, is known by reasoning from the order of things, and wants people to live according to the nature given them.
No work is recorded as the target of this book, and none is recorded as answering it.
How it argues
By narrative first and argument second, and the order matters. The reader is given a person, a persecution and a cave before being given a method, so that the case for reasoning alone arrives as something a particular man had to work out rather than as a thesis. The prose is plain, the questions are asked directly, and the answers are given without hedging. The companion text attributed to his pupil is more practical and more conventional, which some readers take as evidence of two hands and others as evidence of two purposes.
The moment
Ethiopia in the reign of Susenyos, who converted to Catholicism under Jesuit influence in the 1620s and tried to impose it, producing revolt and eventually his abdication. The Hatata's narrator is caught in exactly that: denounced to the emperor by a personal enemy, fleeing with what he could carry, and spending two years in a cave near the Takkaze river. The argument for private reason against imposed doctrine is written, on its own account, by someone whose life had been wrecked by imposed doctrine.
How it travelled
Out of Ethiopia in a single consignment, into celebrity, and then into disgrace. A Capuchin monk, Giusto da Urbino, came upon the text in the Ethiopian highlands in 1852 and sent it to his patron in Paris, the explorer Antoine d'Abbadie; it entered the national library there. Nothing in the historical record mentions it before that date. Latin and Russian translations followed in 1904 and 1905, and European scholars took it seriously as philosophy. Then in 1920 the Italian orientalist Carlo Conti Rossini published an article in the Journal Asiatique arguing that the whole thing was a forgery by its own discoverer. International interest collapsed for most of the century, and its recovery since the 1970s has been led substantially by Ethiopian scholars and by Claude Sumner's editions.
The strongest objection
The forgery thesis, taken at its strongest rather than at its weakest. Conti Rossini's case had real components: the manuscripts are recent, there is no trace of the work before 1852, and its discoverer knew Ge'ez well enough and had motive enough to make a reputation. Eugen Mittwoch added linguistic arguments in 1934. What weakens the case is what it was mixed with - Conti Rossini also argued that ideas like these could not be expected from Ethiopia, a claim about a whole culture rather than about a document, made by a man who had served as a colonial administrator in Eritrea and who received a state prize from Mussolini in 1937. Defenders since have answered on calendar evidence and on philology. The honest position is that neither side has closed it.
Why read it
Because it is short, direct and startling, and because the questions it asks - how do you test a revealed law, what do you do when every authority claims the same warrant - are asked more plainly here than in most European philosophy of the same century. Read it knowing the controversy; it changes what you are reading but does not make it less worth reading.
- First printed
- 1904
- First in English
- 1976
- Digitised
- Partial
The surviving manuscripts are relatively recent and were sent from Ethiopia to Paris in the 1850s; they are in the Bibliotheque nationale de France. A companion treatise by Walda Heywat, presented as the work of a pupil, travelled with it.
Latin and Russian versions appeared in 1904 and 1905. Claude Sumner's English of 1976 is the standard and is in copyright; recent translations have followed.
Where it stands
Revived and unresolved. It is taught as a founding text of modern African philosophy, it is the subject of conferences and of continuing archival work, and the authorship question remains genuinely open rather than politely open.
On quoting this book
The Ge'ez is public domain but the usable English translations are modern and in copyright, and the authorship question makes an attributed quotation doubly unwise. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
The authorship, and nothing else comes close. Conti Rossini's 1920 article named Giusto da Urbino as the forger, and recent archival work suggests the suspicion is older still, going back to an anonymous letter of 1856 probably written by an Ethiopian Catholic convert - which pushes the origin of the dispute back some sixty years and reframes it. Scholars arguing from testimony and from the politics of the text's reception tend to favour d'Urbino; scholars arguing from the calendar system used and from the Ge'ez itself tend to favour Zera Yacob. There is also the awkward observation that if it is a forgery, it is an extraordinary act of linguistic and cultural immersion, which is not a small thing to attribute to anyone either.