Francisco Maria Esteves Pereira (1854-1924) : un éthiopisant solitaire au Portugal

Abstract

The proposal of this article is to reconstruct and follow as closely as possible the itinerary of Francisco Maria Esteves Pereira, a Portuguese Orientalist scholar of the late 19th century. At the same time to his military career, he developed a passion for Ethiopian languages and became one of the best specialists in Portugal for his generation. It is through the military archives, on the one hand, and the study of European networks of Orientalist scholars, on the other, that we can better understand how he became a specialist in ancient and modern Ethiopian. By putting his scientific production and the processes that generated it into perspective, we can try to understand his interest in certain objects of knowledge, grasp his choices and the reasons for updating them at the end of the 19th century. It is an invitation to reread the sources on the relations between Portugal, the Jesuits and Ethiopia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, taking more into account the constructions of these objects of knowledge, which sheds light on the claims that animate them.