The Constitutional History of Ethiopia

Abstract

Between 1959 and 1961 I worked with an Ethiopian research student, Gētāčaw Takla Māryām, on the constitutional history of Ethiopia from the Aksumite period (first to fourth centuries A.D.) to the end of the seventeenth century. So far as could be discovered, no serious attempt has yet been made to deal with this subject by means of strict documentation. The first step therefore has been to collect from printed Ethiopic material (mainly written in Ge‘ez) and from Ge‘ez manuscripts a body of documents and charters which will ultimately form the basis of a constitutional history. The aim has been to produce something like Stubbs's Select Charters, for some such basis is an essential preliminary in a field in which be one of the resultes of our study. For place-names the position is a little better, since Conti Rossini produced many years ago an index to names in material published up to 1894; and not long ago I compiled one for the historical texts published in the Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium (CSCO).The work on constitutional history, which is still in progress, has involved the study and translation of four categories of document written in Ge'ez; these are:(1) The early Ge'ez (and Greek) inscriptions of the Aksumite period.(2) The Lives of the Ethiopian saints (gadla qedusān) of the sixth, thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, including the Synaxarium (senkesār) or general collection of lives of saints.(3) The land charters and other documents in the Book of Aksum, from the tenth to seventeenth centuries, with a few attributed to kings from the fourth to ninth centuries.(4) The Chronicles, now mostly available in printed form, either in the CSCO, or published individually; some are to be found in periodicals.