Chronicle of King Gälawdewos (1540-1559)

The Chronicle of King Gälawdewos (r. 1540–1559), reporting the nineteen
years of the king’s reign, is one of the most useful and significant
historical sources for the history of Christian-Muslim relation in the
sixteenth century of Ethiopia and the Horn. It represents a peculiar
text in Gǝʿǝz historiography both because of its narrative structure and
the underlying sources used by the chronicler. Numerous Arabisms appear
in the text, which eventually suggest that the Chronicle was written by
a person with an outstanding knowledge of Arabic, in 1561. The book
presents a new critical edition based on all available manuscripts and
provides some detailed introductory notes and an English translation.
The new edition yields philological findings concerning the Chronicle of
King Gälawdewos in particular and new inputs that call for re-editing
the Ethiopian royal chronicles in general. It also adds valuable by now
not recorded items for Gǝʿǝz lexicography and corrects historical
distortions resulted from the previous edition. Above all, the work
provides a text-critically established edition of the Chronicle of King
Gälawdewos accompanied by an up-to-date concisely annotated translation,
which offer new insights into the late medieval history and
historiography of Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa.