Ms Ethiopic 4 of the Collection of the India Office: A strayed Manuscript of Gadla Lālibalā

Abstract

In all likelihood it was the German missionary Johann Ludwig Krapf who commissioned a manuscript with hagiographic texts about King Lālibalā in the first decade of the nineteenth century, in Šawā. This manuscript was eventually used by August Dillmann for his Lexicon linguae aethiopicae published in 1865. More than eighty years later, the manuscript was catalogued by Enrico Cerulli in 1946 and was later lost somewhere on one of the numerous shelves of the collection of the India Office. It has recently been traced and is now to be found in the British Library under the shelf mark Ms Ethiopic 4.