Introduction

Summary

After nearly two decades, blatta Ḫeruy Wäldä Śellasé (1878–1938) decided to return to an old endeavor. Years before, in 1911, he had attempted to produce a catalog of Ge’ez and Amharic literature, going so far as to visit the University of Oxford as part of his research, and now, in the late 1920s, he was ready to amend his youthful effort at panoptic bibliography. He had good reason. Since the publication of his pioneering 1911 work, the region had witnessed a veritable explosion of local language printing, and as a result, there was a host of new publications that needed to be included in a comprehensive catalog. There were also several older texts that had been omitted from the first project, and these too could be added to a new work. And finally, he now enjoyed a greatly improved perspective on his subject. A budding but still obscure young scholar at the time of his original study, Ḫeruy had become one of the preeminent intellectuals of his day. He was the author of more than twenty books on a variety of learned and popular topics; he had achieved the rank of Director General in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and advised Crown Price Täfäri Mäkonnen, the future Emperor Ḫaylä Śellasé; and he was easily among the most well-traveled Ethiopians of his generation, having visited Europe, the Middle East, and the United States. He was thus at the peak of his intellectual powers, and with his extensive network of personal and political connections, he was ideally situated to survey Ethiopia's changing textual landscape. To this end, he prepared a list of every Ge’ez and Amharic text he could locate, drawing upon his colleagues’ collective learning and resources, and he catalogued his findings by genre, author, and subject. When his research was finished, he completed the project with a concise introduction to Ethiopian intellectual history, thereby setting his texts in their proper context. In 1927, the Täfäri Mäkonnen Press of Addis Ababa published his work as Bä’ityop̣ya yämmigäñu bäge’ezenna bamariña q^wanq^wa yätäṣafu yämäṣaḥeft katalog, or Catalog of Books Written in the Ge’ez and Amharic Languages Found in Ethiopia.

A careful reader might compare blatta Ḫeruy's 1911 and 1927 works.