The Amharic Letters of Emperor Theodore of Ethiopia to Queen Victoria and Her Special Envoy.

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Emperor Theodore of Ethiopia (reigned 1855-1868) is one of the founders of the modern Ethiopian polity, He was a man of remarkable character, gifts, and temperament.

When the Emperor failed to receive a reply to letters despatched to Queen Victoria and the British Government, his suspicion and anger were aroused and he imprisoned the British Consul as well as a number of European missionaries and artisans. As soon as the British Govern­ment received news of these events, it despatched a reply, signed by the Queen herself, to the Ethiopian monarch’s earlier letters and sent it by the hands of Mr. Rassam and two other emissaries. The thirty-three Amharic. letters (as, well as three in Arabic) from Emperor Theodore to Queen Victoria or to her emissary, Hormuzd Rassam, form the substance of the present monograph.

After a short introduction on the historical background of these letters and the language in which they are couched, photographs of the original documents appear on the left-hand page, with the trans­lation into English and brief annotation on; the facing right-hand page.

Ato Girma-Selassie Asfaw served for three years as Assistant in Amharic in the Africa Department of the School of Oriental and African Studies, London University, where he obtained the degree of M.Phil. in 1978.

Dr. David L. Appleyard holds degrees from London University where he studied Amharic and Linguistics at the School of Oriental and African Studies. He is at present Lecturer in the Languages of the Horn of Africa at SOAS and has carried out research, in Ethiopia and at Jerusalem, on the Semitic and Cushitic languages of the Horn of Africa.

Edward Ullendorff is a graduate of the Universities of Jerusalem and Oxford and, after war service in Eritrea and Ethiopia, held academic appointments in the Universities of Oxford and St. Andrews. He was for some years Professor of Semitic Languages in the University of Manchester and, since 1964, has been successively Professor of Ethiopian Studies and Professor of Semitic Languages at the School of Oriental and African Studies in the University of London; He is a Fellow of the British Academy and has published many books and articles on Semitic languages and Ethiopian studies.

Biblethiophile, 02.08.2025