Aksumite eraRIÉ 263

RIÉ 263 / ZM 237, Geʿez fragment at Ẓafār

A nine-line Geʿez fragment from Himyar preserves isolated phrases from an Aksumite report; no continuous sentence survives.

Date: sixth century CE
Place: Ẓafār, Yemen
Language: Geʿez
Script: Ethiopic

01 · Original text

Geʿez

Ethiopicall surviving lines 1–9

Transliterated reading

1 … [word dividers] … 2 … nə wa-ʾābəḥ … 3 … [hāy]mānota ʾab … 4 … ʾangabenāy la … 5 … [K]rəstos yəma[wwəʾ] … 6 … qa ba-ṣərʾ ba-sa[lām] … 7 … nāwi wa-baṣaḥku … 8 … [waʿa]lku samuna ʿəla[ta] … 9 … yəśśənu śa …

The photograph and scholarly transliteration preserve the available reading; no native-script transcription is supplied here.

02 · Translation

English reading

1 … 2 … and that I authorize … 3 … the faith of the Father … 4 … noble … 5 … [C]hrist will [conquer] … 6 … in Byzantium in p[eace] … 7 … and I reached … 8 … I spent eight da[ys] … 9 … that they prophesy/practise divination …

Project English rendering of Walter W. Müller's line-by-line German translation, Aethiopica 15 (2012), p. 14.

Müller 2012 and Drewes 2019 differ in several fragmentary readings; this display preserves Müller’s line-aligned interpretation and cites Drewes separately rather than silently conflating them.

Sources

Editions & references

Follow the record back to the edition, catalogue, or image source used here.

RIÉ 263
RIÉ I (Bernand, Drewes and Schneider 1991), page 350-351; RIÉ I (Bernand, Drewes and Schneider 1991), page 350—351; RIÉ II, plates (Bernand, Drewes and Schneider 1991), plate 175; RIÉ III.B (Drewes 2019), page 357—358
Ẓafār fragments
Walter W. Müller, ‘Äthiopische Inschriftenfragmente aus der himjarischen Hauptstadt Ẓafār’, Aethiopica 15 (2012), pp. 7–21.

Habesha History corpus

Abraham J. Drewes, Recueil des inscriptions de l’Éthiopie III.B (2019), pp. 357–358