Aksumite eraRIÉ 264

RIÉ 264 / ZM 308, Geʿez fragment at Ẓafār

A five-line Geʿez fragment from Himyar mentions Ethiopians and sanctuaries, but the surviving phrases do not form a continuous narrative.

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

01 · Original text

Geʿez

Ethiopicall surviving lines 1–5

Transliterated reading

1 … [ʾa]gʿāzə[yān] … 2 … [ma]kʷrābāta … 3 … na ḥaba … 4 … ʾada … 5 … qata(la)/qata(l)[ku] …

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

02 · Translation

English translation

1 … [Ethiopia]ns … 2 … the sanctuaries … 3 … at/to … 4 … 5 … [he] killed / [I] killed …

Project English rendering of Walter W. Müller's line-by-line German translation, Aethiopica 15 (2012), p. 18.

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

Edition, catalogue, and image records used for this entry.

RIÉ 264
RIÉ I (Bernand, Drewes and Schneider 1991), page 351; RIÉ III.B (Drewes 2019), page 358—359
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. 358–359