Zera Yacob (philosopher)
Zera Yacob | |
---|---|
ዘርዐ ያዕቆብ | |
Born | Ge'ez | 28 August 1599
Zera Yacob (
For centuries, Ge'ez texts had been written in Ethiopia. Around 1510,
Zera Yacob's Inquiry goes further than these former texts, as he argues in following one's natural reasoning instead of believing what one is told by others. He was a contemporary of the female activist Walatta Petros, whose biography was written in 1672.
Biography
Yacob was born into a farmer family near
Refusing to adopt the Catholic faith, Yacob fled into exile with some gold and the Book of Psalms. On the road to Shewa in the south, he found a cave at the foot of the Tekezé River and lived in it as a hermit for two years, praying and developing his philosophy. He wrote of his experience, "I have learnt more while living alone in a cave than when I was living with scholars. What I wrote in this book is very little; but in my cave I have meditated on many other such things."[2]
After the death of the Emperor, Susenyos's son
Yacob became the teacher of Habtu's two sons, and at the request of his patron's son Walda Heywat, Yacob wrote his famous 1667 treatise investigating the light of reason. Little is known of Yacob's later life. However, it is believed that he lived a fulfilled family life in Emfraz, and remained there for the next 25 years. He died there in 1692. Yacob's year of death was recorded by Walda Heywat in an annotation to the Treatise.
Philosophical work
Yacob is most noted for this
In chapter 5 of Hatata, he criticizes slavery saying, "what the Gospel says on this subject cannot come from God. Likewise, the Mohammedans said that it is right to go and buy a man as if he were an animal. But with our intelligence, we understand that this Mohammedan law cannot come from the creator of man who made us equal, like brothers, so that we call our creator our father." At the time, slavery was widely practiced in Ethiopia.
Authorship controversy
The authorship of the Hatata was challenged by Carlo Conti Rossini in 1920, who claimed it was forged by father Giusto d'Urbino, an Italian scholar who worked in Ethiopia. The arguments are extrinsic, based on the manuscripts' recent age, his knowledge of Ethiopic language and culture, the information on Islam also being known by d'Urbino, and the fact that he discovered the two extant manuscripts. In 1934, Eugen Mittwoch put forward linguistic arguments for the inauthentic nature of the Hatata, and scholarly interest in the work waned. Amsalu Aklilu and Ato Alemayyehu Moges argued for the authenticity of the work, based on its nonreligious contents, sentence structure, and the particularity of the Ge'ez used. Claude Sumner wrote in favor of the Inquiry's authenticity in 1976 with statistical evidence showing the duality of authors in their differing Biblical quotations, using five newly found letters of d'Urbino in Rome. Sumner also argued that d'Urbino had worse knowledge of Ge'ez than originally presented, and that he did not share the ideas of the Hatata at the time he was supposed to have written it.[3]
See also
- Walda Heywat, his successor
References
- ^ a b "Yacob and Amo: Africa's precursors to Locke, Hume and Kant – Dag Herbjørnsrud | Aeon Essays". Aeon. Retrieved 2019-06-16.
- ^ a b Sumner, Claude. "Ethiopian Philosophy" (PDF). Retrieved June 16, 2019.
- ^ Sumner, Claude (1985). Classical Ethiopian Philosophy. Commercial Printing Press.
Further reading
- Teodros Kiros, "Zera Yacob and Traditional Ethiopian Philosophy," in Wiredu and Abraham, eds., A Companion to African Philosophy, 2004.
- Enno Littmann. Philosophi Abessini. Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium, Vol. 18, Scriptores Aethiopici, Presses Républicaines, 1904. Contains the Ge'ez text of Zera Yacob's treatise.
- Claude Sumner, Ethiopian Philosophy, vol. II: The Treatise of Zara Yaecob and Walda Hewat: Text and Authorship, Commercial Printing Press, 1976.
- Claude Sumner, Ethiopian Philosophy, vol. III: The Treatise of Zara Yaecob and Walda Hewat: An Analysis, Commercial Printing Press, 1978.
- Claude Sumner, "The Light and the Shadow: Zera Yacob and Walda Heywat: Two Ethiopian Philosophers of the Seventeenth Century," in Wiredu and Abraham, eds., A Companion to African Philosophy, 2004.
External links
- Brendan Ritchie, "Ethiopian Philosophy: A Brief Introduction with Bibliography and Selections"
- Dag Herbjørnsrud, "The African Enlightenment," AEON, 13 December 2017
- Ethiopian Philosophy - A blog with commentary on Zera Yacob's treatise.