The paper offers a re-edition of a valuable first-hand account concerning sixteenth-century Sudan, recorded in Gǝʿǝz by the Ethiopian monk Takla ʾAlfā during his stay at Dongola in 1596. Notably, Takla ʾAlfā was the only known Ethiopian visitor to post-medieval Dongola to leave an account of his visit. The colophon, MS Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. et. 44, 71v–76v, is preceded by hymns composed by the monk and offers insights into the circumstances of their creation. The text, which represents an expanded colophon with autobiographical elements, has received limited scholarly attention, but has a number of remarkable features. It sheds light on some philological practices and indicates a connection between the fast of our Lady Mary of the Mount of Qwǝsqwām and king Śarḍa Dǝngǝl. The newly identified reference to ǧǝlābā merchants in the colophon is the earliest known mention of the term in primary sources concerning Sudan. While the reference to a light in the sky remains vague, it adds to the corpus of Ethiopic narratives featuring celestial apparitions as meaningful quasi-supernatural elements or signs.

In the present article a list of Arabic animal names copied in a codex kept in a collection in the town of Agaro (Jimma Zone, Oromia Region) is published and analyzed. Together with the Arabic words, the short text contains also explicatory glosses and translations into Amharic and Oromo. The authors describe the origin and the function of the text, setting it into the wider framework of the production of lists and glossaries in the manuscript traditions of Ethiopia. They then study the structure and content of the list from zoological and linguistic points of view, highlighting the interpretational issues that the author of the text had to face and solve.

Book review

Catholic nun and historian, Kirsten Pedersen (1932–2017), also known as Kirsten Stoffregen Pedersen and Sister Abraham, is renowned for her scholarly work on the history of Ethiopian Christianity. Located in Jerusalem, her archives (books and documents) were inventoried by the Centre de recherche français à Jérusalem (CRFJ) in 2023 and then donated to the library of the École Biblique et Archéologique (EBAF) in Jerusalem. The aim of this article is firstly to provide an overview of Pedersen’s archives to encourage all researchers to consult them. Providing biographical and bibliographical elements about Pedersen, this paper describes the more interesting books and printed materials owned by her as well as provides a short description of the archival boxes, highlighting the most remarkable documents. Furthermore this paper aims to show the scientific interest of these archives, suggesting some of the research prospects open to researchers thanks to the documents preserved in them.

Book review

There is no consensus among Ethiopists on the question of whether the Harari enclitic possessive suffix 3sg. m. -zo is an eroded form of the personal pronoun azzo (Appleyard, Huehnergard and Pat-El) or whether azzo emerged from -zo by being prefixed with another morpheme (Cerulli, Leslau). The present article attempts a solution to this problem by considering it against the background of the overall development of the pronominal system of Harari (personal, possessive and demonstrative pronouns), on the one hand, and the historical areal context, on the other. The author considers -zo as the more likely starting point and proposes a fivestage development for the emergence of azzo. In the final section, however, the reverse process, the development of -zo from azzo, is briefly discussed as a possible alternative.

Book review

Dissertation abstract

Dissertation abstract

An edition, with English translation, is provided of an Ethiopic ‘Homily on Peter’, attributed to Ephrem the Syrian (d.373), which is uniquely attested in MS Ethio-SPaRe UM-046, fols 148v–151v. This Ethiopic homily ultimately goes back—undoubtedly via Arabic—to a Syriac stanzaic poem (soḡiṯā) recently edited by S. P. Brock.