"[3] According to the first Inquiry (Hatata), the teacher and scribe Zara Yaqob developed his thinking as an investigation of the light of reason after he had to flee his hometown of Aksum in ca.
Hence, the global historian of ideas Dag Herbjørnsrud writes: "In chapter five, Yacob applies rational investigation to the different religious laws.
For example, Yacob points out that the Creator in His wisdom has made blood flow monthly from the womb of women, in order for them to bear children.
"[7] The Hatatas became accessible in Europe in 1904, when the Italian scholar Enno Littmann published the original texts in Ge'ez in addition to a Latin translation.
[8] The texts were first rediscovered, in the summer of 1903, by Boris Turayev in the archives of the collector Antoine d'Abbadie, who had received the Hatatas from the Jesuit monk Guisto da Urbino in 1853-54.
[10] An abridged translation in English, of Zera Yacob's inquiry only, appeared in New Times and Ethiopia News (London) from 5 February until 4 March 1944.
In 1965, Lino Marchiotto presented his doctoral thesis on the Hatatas, and he included an Italian translation based on Littmann's Latin version.
Sumner states on the inquiry by Zera Yacob: "Being in possession of one basic principle, the author extends its application to the various branches of knowledge, and in particular, to theodicy, to ethics, and to psychology.
(...) It exhibits not only independence of thought, but even rationalistic and radical traits (...) Zär'a Ya'eqob is a real philosopher in the strictest sense of the word.
[12] In 2023, a critical English translation, by Ralph Lee, Wendy Laura Belcher, and Mehari Worku, in cooperation with Jeremy R. Brown, was published by De Gruyter.
[14] Rossini got support for his theory in 1934, when the German Eugen Mittwoch, also argued that the philosophical Hatata texts could not have been written by an African.
[15] In his work of 1976, Sumner published a lengthy rebuttal of Rossini's and Mittwoch's claims, and in 2017, received support from the Ethiopian-American philologist Getatchew Haile (1932-2001), widely considered the foremost scholar of the Ge'ez language and literature.
"[16] In the paper "Italian scientists and the war in Ethiopia" (2015), Professor Roberto Maiocchi points out that Rossini were among the most important scholars supporting Italy's invasion of Ethiopia in 1935: "(...) Carlo Conti Rossini, Italy’s main expert in Ethiopian literature, published an article in September 1935, a few days before the beginning of the conflict: using arguments that could apply to any African country, he stated that Abissinia was incapable of evolution and civil progress, and therefore its conquest was justified.
"[18] Rossini argued that the Franciscan Jesuit monk Urbino did not send the original manuscripts to the collector d'Abbadie, but instead sent "copies" he had made by his own hand.
Rossini also claimed that a monk, Tekle Haymanot, had heard other people say that Urbino might have written the treatise in cooperation with other Ge'ez scholars in Ethiopia.
Those who hold it to be rather impossible that an Italian priest, with a couple of years training in Ge'ez, could have written both the texts of Zara Yaqob and Walda Heywat, two rather different texts supposedly from the 17th century, while he visited Ethiopia, include the Canadian Professor Claude Sumner, the American scholar and philosopher Teodros Kiros, and several others.
Inspired by a 2007 thesis, written by Luam Tesfalidet, and after reading Wion's articles, he writes, under the headline Sources: "(...) I am now firmly inclined to believe that the original Hatata is the work of an Ethiopian debtera who lived, as he claimed, during the era of the Catholics (reign of Emperor Susenyos, 1607-32).
Accordingly, it makes more sense to suspect the influence of Catholic teaching on the thinking of Zera Yacob than to ascribe his Hatata to da Urbino.
For instance, she takes as given Conti Rossini’s overvaluation of Giusto da Urbino’s skills, while Sumner has dozens of pages of proof showing that they were weak.