Hatata (; Geʽez: ሐተታ ḥätäta "inquiry") is a Geʽez term describing an investigation or inquiry. The hatatas are two 17th century ethical and rational philosophical treatises from present-day Ethiopia: One hatata is written by the Abyssinian philosopher Zara Yaqob (Zär'a Ya'eqob/Zera Yacob, in his text also named Wärqe, 1600–1693), supposedly in 1668. The other hatata is written by his patron's son, Walda Heywat (Wäldä Hewat) some years later, in 1693 or later. Especially Zera Yacob's inquiry has been compared by scholars to Descartes'. But while Zera Yacob was critical towards all religions, including his "own" Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, Descartes followed a more traditional religious perspective: "A major philosophical difference is that the Catholic Descartes explicitly denounced 'infidels' and atheists, whom he called 'more arrogant than learned' in his Meditations on First Philosophy (1641)."
In late 2023, De Gruyter published the first English translation of the texts outside of Ethiopia, "The Hatata Inquiries: Two Texts of Seventeenth-Century African Philosophy from Ethiopia about Reason, the Creator, and Our Ethical Responsibilities".
Zara Yaqob was religious, but he had survived religious persecution and he was skeptical about the claims of organized religion. The treatise's criticism of religion targets in particular Christianity, Islam, Judaism and the Indian religions. He criticizes the Mosaic law as misogynistic and against nature, because (in his view) it impedes marriage and the entire life of a woman, it prevents the upbringing of children, and it destroys love.
Contents of the two Hatatas/Inquiries According to the first Inquiry (Hatata), the teacher and scribe Zara Yaqob developed his thinking as an investigation of the light of reason after he had to flee his hometown of Aksum in ca. 1630, because of the religious persecution by the Portuguese Jesuits and the Ethiopian Emperor Susenyos I, who had converted from Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity to Catholicism in 1622. Zara Yaqob writes that he lived in a cave for two years, while he penned down the text more than thirty years later, in 1668.
Zara Yacob is most noted for this philosophy surrounding the principle of harmony. He asserted that an action's morality is decided by whether it advances or degrades overall harmony in the world. While he did believe in a deity, whom he referred to as God, he criticised several sets of religious beliefs. Rather than deriving beliefs from any organized religion, Yacob sought the truth in observing the natural world. In Hatata, Zera Yacob applied the idea of a first cause to produce a proof for the existence of God, thus proposing a cosmological argument. "If I say that my father and my mother created me, then my parents’ creator and their parents’ creator must still be searched for, until arriving at the first ones who were not conceived like us, but who came into this world in another way, without parents. For, if they were conceived, I don't know where their genealogy begins unless I say, ‘There is one being who created them out of nothing, one who was not created, but rather already existed and will exist forever."
Hence, Zara Yaqob concludes that there has to be a creator god: "I said, 'Therefore, there is a creator', because if there were no creator, then the creation would not have existed. Because we exist and are not creators but rather are created, we have to say that there is a creator who fashioned us. Further, this creator who fashioned us with the faculties of reason and speech cannot himself be without these faculties of reason and speech, because from the abundance of his reason he created us with the faculty of reason. 'He understands all things, because he created all things, and he sustains all things'."
After he left his cave, as peace was restored in Ethiopia, Zara Yaqob proposed marriage to a poor maiden named Hirut. In his inquiry he states that "husband and wife are equal in marriage". Hence, the global historian of ideas Dag Herbjørnsrud writes: "In chapter five, Yacob applies rational investigation to the different religious laws. He criticises Christianity, Islam, Judaism and Indian religions equally. For example, Yacob points out that the Creator in His wisdom has made blood flow monthly from the womb of women, in order for them to bear children. Thus, he concludes that the law of Moses, which states that menstruating women are impure, is against nature and the Creator, since it 'impedes marriage and the entire life of a woman, and it spoils the law of mutual help, prevents the bringing up of children and destroys love'. In this way, Yacob includes the perspectives of solidarity, women and affection in his philosophical argument."
Upon Zara Yaqob's death in 1693 his pupil Walda Heywat updated the work to include his death, in addition to writing his own Hatata. Heywat's inquiry has been described as more traditional. Belcher summarizes the two texts as thus: "Sometimes exuberant, sometimes curmudgeonly, these texts delight in surprising the reader. They fiercely celebrate what is human and criticize pious cant. They put desire above asceticism, love above sectarianism, and the natural world above its uses. They advocate for the rights of women and of animals, plead for religious and cultural tolerance, and condemn slavery and warfare. They give advice on how to be happy in life, work, and marriage. They offer ontological proofs for God and explore the nature of being, as well as the human, ethics, and the divine. They ask epistemological questions about what we can know and how we know it, while establishing the right methods for evaluating evidence and discerning the truth. And they insist that we the reader must use our own reason to test ideas, rather than simply accepting others' beliefs because we were told we should."
Translations of the texts The Hatatas became accessible in Europe in 1904, when the German scholar Enno Littmann published the original texts in Geʽez in addition to a Latin translation. The texts were first rediscovered, in the summer of 1903, by Boris Turayev in the archives of the collector Antoine d'Abbadie, who had received the Hatatas from the Jesuit monk Guisto da Urbino in 1853-54. The texts were given to France's National Library in Paris in 1902, after d'Abbadie's death, and Turayev translated the first extracts in December 1903 (St. Petersburg). The Oriental Section of the Archeological Society held a meeting in Paris, on 25 Sept. 1903, dedicated to Turayev's report on the Hatatas.Claude Sumner, Ethiopian Philosophy, vol. II: The Treatise of Zara Yaecob and Walda Hewat: Text and Authorship, Commercial Printing Press, 1976, pp. 1-2.
Littmann presented a German translation in 1916."Zara'a Jacob, ein einsamer Denker in Abessinien, mit einer Einleitun von Benno Erdmann." An abridged translation in English, of Zera Yacob's inquiry only, appeared in New Times and Ethiopia News (London) from 5 February until 4 March 1944. In 1955, Zamanfas Kidus Abreha published both an Ethiopic version (based on Littmann) and an Amharic translation. In 1965, Lino Marchiotto presented his doctoral thesis on the Hatatas, and he included an Italian translation based on Littmann's Latin version.
A breakthrough came in 1976, when the Canadian born scholar Claude Sumner - Professor and Chairman of the Department of Philosophy at the Addis Ababa University - published the first complete English translation (it was published in Ethiopia, and it was based on his translations in Ekklastikos Pharos in 1971/1974). Sumner states on the inquiry by Zera Yacob: "Being in possession of one basic principle, the author extends its application to the various branches of knowledge, and in particular, to theodicy, to ethics, and to psychology. (...) It exhibits not only independence of thought, but even rationalistic and radical traits (...) Zär'a Ya'eqob is a real philosopher in the strictest sense of the word."Sumner 1976:61.
In 2016, the two texts were translated from Geʽez to Norwegian, by the scholar Reidulf Molvær, and published in Norwegian by a renowned publisher. In 2023, a critical English translation, by Ralph Lee, Wendy Laura Belcher, and Mehari Worku, in cooperation with Jeremy R. Brown, was published by De Gruyter.
Controversy over authorship
In 1920, the Italian orientalist Carlo Conti Rossini claimed that the Hatata texts were written by the Italian priest Guisto de Urbino himself.Conti Rossini, Carlo: "Lo Hatatā Zar’a Yā‛qob e il Padre Giuso da Urbino". Rendiconti della Reale Accademia dei Lincei, 1920 (5, 29: 213-23). Rossini got support for his theory in 1934, when the German Eugen Mittwoch, also argued that the philosophical Hatata texts could not have been written by an African.Mittwoch, Eugen. 1934. "Die amharische Version der Soirée de Carthage mit einer Einleitung: Die angeblichen abessinischen Philosophen des 17. Jahrhunderts," Abessinische Studien, 2. Berlin and Leipzig. In his work of 1976, Sumner published a lengthy rebuttal of Rossini's and Mittwoch's claims, and in 2017, received support from the Ethiopian-American philologist Getatchew Haile (1931–2021), widely considered the foremost scholar of the Geʽez language and literature.
In 2023, the team of modern Geʽez scholars concluded: "As translators and editors, Ralph Lee and I have spent several years deep in these two texts, feeling our way, word by word, sentence by sentence, chapter by chapter, through their language, concerns, and styles. Mehari Worku and Jeremy R. Brown joined us later and spent many months doing the same. From these extended encounters, we are all confident that two Ethiopians named Zara Yaqob and Walda Heywat composed these two texts. In this, we stand with dozens of other scholars, including the late Getatchew Haile."
In the paper "Italian scientists and the war in Ethiopia" (2015), Professor Roberto Maiocchi points out that Rossini were among the most important scholars supporting Italy's invasion of Ethiopia in 1935: "(...) Carlo Conti Rossini, Italy’s main expert in Ethiopian literature, published an article in September 1935, a few days before the beginning of the conflict: using arguments that could apply to any African country, he stated that Abissinia was incapable of evolution and civil progress, and therefore its conquest was justified."Roberto Maiocchi, "Italian scientists and the war in Ethiopia". Accademia Nazionale delle Scienze detta dei XL Memorie di Scienze Fisiche e Naturali 133° (2015), Vol. XXXIX, Parte II, Tomo I, pp. 127-146 (p. 128). After the conquest of Ethiopia, Rossini received a prize from the Mussolini regime in 1937. Mittwoch, who had Jewish background, kept his position in Nazi Germany until December 1935, after the outbreak of the Italio-Ethiopian war, because of a special intervention by Mussolini with Hitler on behalf of Mittwoch, as Mussolini "saw Mittwoch as a potential asset for Italy's colonization of Ethiopia."