Hatata (Inquiry)

Introduction

The Hatata is a short treatise in Geez, the classical language of Ethiopia. Its narrator tells how he fled persecution under King Susenyos, who favoured Catholicism, lived for two years in a cave and there arrived at his rational faith. The text is known from copies that the Capuchin missionary Giusto da Urbino supplied to the collector Antoine d’Abbadie in the 1850s; no older manuscript has been found. Enno Littmann edited it with a second Hatata, attributed to the pupil Walda Heywat, in 1904. In 1920 Carlo Conti Rossini argued that Giusto wrote both himself. Claude Sumner and others defended a seventeenth-century origin, and the question remains open.