Kebra Nagast

Kebra Nagast — Budge — Section 16

Still fuller information about the contents of the Kebra Nagast was supplied by F. Balthazar Tellez (1595-1675), the author of the Historia general de Eth¬ iopia Alta ou Preste Jo da , Coimbra, 1660, folio. The sources of his work were the histories of Manoel Almeida, Alfonzo Mendez, Jeronino Lobo, and Father Pays. The Historia of Tellez was well known to Job Ludolf, and he refers to it several times in his Historia AEthiopica , which was published at Frankfort in 1681, but it is pretty certain that he had no first-hand knowledge of the Kebra Nagast as a whole. Though he regarded much of its contents as fabulous, he was prepared to accept the statement of Tellez as to the great reputation and popularity which the book enjoyed in Abyssinia. Little, apparently, was heard in Europe about the Kebra Nagast until the close of the eighteenth century 1 A French translation from the Spanish version of this work appeared in Paris in 1558, folio. 2 De Abassinorum rebus deque /Ethiopoe Patriarchis , Libri I— III, Leyden, 1615, Bvo, p. 35. XXIV Introduction