The Chronicle of King Śarḍa Dǝngǝl (r.1563‒1597): A Critical Edition with annotated English Translation

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The Chronicle of King Sarda Dengel (1563-1597) is one of the best Gǝʿǝz historiographic works of Ethiopia, written during the reign of the king. It is unique both in terms of the abundant historical data it contains and the literary quality it maintains. This Chronicle is an indispensable primary historical source for the study of the history of Ethiopia and Horn of Africa as well for the understanding of the medieval world literature. The earlier (1907) edition (and French translation) of the Chronicle by Conti Rossini was based on three manuscripts but neglected five more manuscripts that are very important witnesses in establishing the text close to the original written by the author. The project, funded by the German Research Foundation has two main objectives. First, to prepare a critical edition of the Chronicle applying the so called Neo-Lachmannian (stemmatic reconstructivist) method based on eight manuscripts. Second, to translate the Ge’ez critically established text of the Chronicle into English and annotate it. As of January 2021, the project has undergone a variety of activities to reconstruct the new updated re-edited Ge’ez text of the chronicle. In this regard, a manual collation of eight manuscripts of the chronicle was completed in the first year of the project, (which indeed took much time more than it was planned). The result of the collation helps to identify clearly the various textual features of each of the manuscript witnesses and many types of errors, including polygenetic and monogenetic errors, as well as conjunctive errors that is helpful in establishing the family relation of the manuscripts. Based on textual criticism principles, conjunctive errors were examined and analyzed to group manuscripts into families, sub-families, and archetypes, all of which are parts of stemma codicum. A classical text editor is used for the presentation of the edition, which contains three apparatuses for the edited text: variant apparatus, punctuation apparatus, and source apparatus. The editing work is still in progress, which will be accomplished at the end of 2023. Aside from the main work of the edition, other parallel activities including analyzing the text and studying the textual tradition and presenting the results of the project at conferences, submitting article for publication, and conducting research visits were also accomplished. As part of this ongoing project, an international workshop will be held on June 29 to 30, 2023. Preparatory work has already completed. Due to the complex and time-consuming work of collation and edition, the project will not be completed within three years as planned. The task of translating and annotating the Chronicle, which must follow the completion of the edition, is scheduled in the new timetable for 2024, which means that the project will need one year, 2024, to be funded.