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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 January 2009
Between 1959 and 1961 I worked with an Ethiopian research student, Gētāčaw Takla Māryām, on the constitutional history of Ethiopia from the Aksumite period (first to fourth centuries A.D.) to the end of the seventeenth century. So far as could be discovered, no serious attempt has yet been made to deal with this subject by means of strict documentation. The first step therefore has been to collect from printed Ethiopic material (mainly written in Ge‘ez) and from Ge‘ez manuscripts a body of documents and charters which will ultimately form the basis of a constitutional history. The aim has been to produce something like Stubbs's Select Charters, for some such basis is an essential preliminary in a field in which be one of the resultes of our study. For place-names the position is a little better, since Conti Rossini produced many years ago an index to names in material published up to 1894; and not long ago I compiled one for the historical texts published in the Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium (CSCO).The work on constitutional history, which is still in progress, has involved the study and translation of four categories of document written in Ge'ez; these are:
(1) The early Ge'ez (and Greek) inscriptions of the Aksumite period.
(2) The Lives of the Ethiopian saints (gadla qedusān) of the sixth, thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, including the Synaxarium (senkesār) or general collection of lives of saints.
(3) The land charters and other documents in the Book of Aksum, from the tenth to seventeenth centuries, with a few attributed to kings from the fourth to ninth centuries.
(4) The Chronicles, now mostly available in printed form, either in the CSCO, or published individually; some are to be found in periodicals.
1 ‘Catalogo dei nomi propri di luogo dell'Etiopia’, Atti del primo Congresso Geografico Italiano (1894), 11, 387–439. (There is a photographed copy of this in the library of the School of Oriental and African Studies.)Google Scholar
2 There is a typed copy of this in the library of the School of Oriental and African. Studies.Google Scholar
3 Alvares, The Prester John of the Indies, Hakluyt Society (1961); Almeida (Book 1), Some Records of Ethiopia, 1593–1646, edited by Beckingham, C. F. and Huntingford, G. V. B., Hakluyt Society (1954).Google Scholar
4 Translated by Budge, E. A. Wallis, The Queen of Sheba and her only son Menyelek (Cambridge, 1922).Google Scholar
5 The Ethiopians (1960), 144.Google Scholar
6 Fetha Nagaśt (Rome, 1897, 1899), edited by Guidi, I., text and translation, two vols.Google Scholar
7 The Ge'ez text of the land charters is printed in Liber Axumae, edited by Conti Rossini, CSCO, LIV. On the charters, see The Prester John of the Indies, 17–22.Google Scholar
8 On the Zāguē see Guidi, I., ‘Il Be'ela Nagast’, in Oriental Studies presented to Paul Haupt (Baltimore/Leipzig, 1926);Google ScholarRossini, Conti, ‘Gadla Iyasus Mo'a’, Rend. R. Accad. d. Lincei, 5 ser. (1921), xxx;Google ScholarBasset, R., Études sur l'histoire d'Éthiopie (Paris, 1881, the Paris Chronicle);Google ScholarRossini, Conti, ‘Gadla Takla Hāymānot’, Atti R. Accad. d. Lincei, 5 ser. (1894);Google ScholarPerruchon, J., Vie de Lalibala (Paris, 1892);Google ScholarRossini, Conti, ‘La caduta della dinastia Zague’, Rend. R. Accad. d. Lincei (1922).Google Scholar
9 Some Records of Ethiopia, LVI.Google Scholar
10 See Ullendorff, E., The Ethiopians, 61.Google Scholar
11 Other texts of this on which I have worked are Cambridge Oriental 1873 (Ullendorff, Catalogue of Ethiopian Manuscripts in the Cambridge University Library, no. lxiii); Bodleian Bruce 88; and Bodleian Bruce 93.Google Scholar