[mlinksva]

Thanks! I was just looking at it from a link in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zera_Yacob_(philosopher)

Do you know whether Yacob's writings have been continuously studied in Ethiopia or "lost" and then found, and how? I guess the latter since your "very brief introduction" includes "As Claude Sumner has said, Zera Yacob’s treatise is “an absolutely original work,” and if philosophy in Ethiopia starts with Zera Yacob it also ends with [his student] Walda Heywat." I see from your bibliography there is a 1904 Latin translation of Yacob's work. How did that come about?

[bhritchie]

As far as I can recall, the texts did not get any recognition within Ethiopia until the last century or so. A manuscript of the texts was originally found (in a monastery, I believe) and translated by an Italian scholar in the 19th century, and there were several translations and scholarly works discussions published over the next few decades. Then in the 20s and 30s a couple of scholars argued on textual and circumstantial grounds that this Italian scholar had in fact forged the original manuscripts himself. Basically everyone was convinced and lost interest at that point. Claude Sumner and some Ethiopian scholars have more recently taken up the whole issues again and argued that the texts are authentic, but they remain very obscure.

I probably should have talked about this a bit in my introduction, but none of that stuff is in English and I guess I found Sumner's discussion compelling. But really I'm not qualified to judge, and the forgery theory would certainly account for the sudden emergence.

[gwern]

> Then in the 20s and 30s a couple of scholars argued on textual and circumstantial grounds that this Italian scholar had in fact forged the original manuscripts himself. Basically everyone was convinced and lost interest at that point. Claude Sumner and some Ethiopian scholars have more recently taken up the whole issues again and argued that the texts are authentic, but they remain very obscure.

Wow, seriously? You know, I was reading this a few weeks ago when it first popped up, and I thought to myself, this smells a bit like an Afrocentrism hoax like 'Aristotle stole Greek philosophy from Africans in the Library of Alexandria who invented it all before him' - I've never seen it mentioned despite the considerable interest it should have, the sources are all ascribed to some very rare book you're told you have no chance of getting your hands on, the claimed views sound impossibly modern/anachronistic with no extremely weird claims thrown in (if you look at forward thinkers like Bentham or Lucretius, despite some extremely prescient arguments like defenses of sodomy, they still have some bizarre beliefs, they don't sound like a NYC liberal)... But I thought it would be rude to be skeptical because it's not like I know much about Ethiopian Christian philosophy so maybe they really did have a Greek tradition which could produce such a philosopher.

And now you tell me that not only is there no provenance of the original texts more recent than the 1800s, they've actually been debunked as European forgeries, and OP just happened to not see fit to mention these minor little details?!

EDIT: I see this comes up in the comments as well, and his arguments are mostly bluster: 'no one could have forged a genius book like this! Look at all the Enlightenment in there [but obviously it'd be easy for an Italian centuries later to write such a book...] There are peer-reviewed books on this topic! Peer-reviewed!'