Abstract

Getatchew Haile begins by reflecting on his growing unease with the scholarly consensus concerning the identity of the author of the Ḥatäta and proposing to reopen the philological case for authenticity. His argument against the work being a simple forgery is complex. First, he rejects two widely held assumptions about the relation of the two manuscripts: that the Littmann edition is preferable to the Turayev and then that Abb215 is a better manuscript from which to work than Abb234. He argues that of these two manuscripts sent to Paris by Giusto da Urbino, neither is a faithful original or faithfully copied from an original. This postulation of a lost original leads to Getatchew Haile suggesting a tentative reconstruction of the Vorlage from which the two versions were taken. He suggests that a series of copying errors reveal that one copyist, likely to have been Giusto da Urbino, introduced errors owing to his imperfect grasp of Gǝʿǝz. He further elaborates the now-familiar argument that Giusto da Urbino did not know Gǝʿǝz well enough to use it without the help of an editor or co-author and that therefore if da Urbino is to be suspected of anything, it is of having changed the message of the author, not of hiding his own identity. The major upshot of this postulated “original text” is that until it or an authentic copy is located, the pure contents of the original Ḥatäta and the identity of its author may remain a mystery, meaning that the extant manuscripts cannot give us an entirely accurate understanding of the author’s philosophy. We are thus presented with an intriguing new possibility: that of a hybrid or mixed authorship of the texts, predating Giusto da Urbino’s “discovery” but modified by him and his Ethiopian collaborators.