Hiob Ludolf (June 15, 1624 – April 8, 1704) was a German

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

 orientalist

Oriental studies

Oriental studies is the academic field of study that embraces Near Eastern and Far Eastern societies and cultures, languages, peoples, history and archaeology; in recent years the subject has often been turned into the newer terms of Asian studies and Middle Eastern studies...

, and born at Erfurt

Erfurt

Erfurt is the capital city of Thuringia and the main city nearest to the geographical centre of Germany, located 100 km SW of Leipzig, 150 km N of Nuremberg and 180 km SE of Hannover. Erfurt Airport can be reached by plane via Munich. It lies in the southern part of the Thuringian...

. Edward Ullendorff

Edward Ullendorff

Edward Ullendorff FBA was a British scholar and historian, especially in Semitic languages and Ethiopia.-Biography:...

 rates Ludolf as having "the most illustrious name in Ethiopic scholarship

Ethiopian Studies

Ethiopian Studies refers to a multi-disciplinary academic cluster dedicated to research on Ethiopia within the cultural and historical context of the Horn of Africa. The classical concept of Ethiopian Studies, developed by European scholars, is based on disciplines like philology and linguistics,...

".

Life

After studying philology

Philology

Philology is the study of language in written historical sources; it is a combination of literary studies, history and linguistics.Classical philology is the philology of Greek and Classical Latin...

 at the Erfurt academy and at Leiden, he travelled in order to increase his linguistic knowledge. While searching in Rome

Rome

Rome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated city and comune, with over 2.7 million residents in . The city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, on the Tiber River within the Lazio region of Italy.Rome's history spans two and a half...

 for some documents at the request of the Swedish Court (1649), he became acquainted with one Gregorius, a monk from the Ethiopia

Ethiopia

Ethiopia , officially known as the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a country located in the Horn of Africa. It is the second-most populous nation in Africa, with over 82 million inhabitants, and the tenth-largest by area, occupying 1,100,000 km2...

n province of Amhara

Amhara province

Amhara was the name of a medieval province of Ethiopia, located in present day Amhara Region, and the pre-1996 province of Wollo...

, and acquired from him an intimate knowledge of the Ethiopian language.

In 1652 he entered the service of the duke of Saxe-Gotha

Saxe-Gotha

Saxe-Gotha was one of the Saxon duchies held by the Ernestine of the Wettin dynasty in the former Landgraviate of Thuringia. The ducal residence was erected at Gotha....

, in which he continued until 1678, when he retired to Frankfurt-am-Main. In 1683 he visited England

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

 to promote a cherished scheme for establishing trade with Ethiopia, but his efforts were unsuccessful, chiefly due to the resistance of the authorities of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. Returning to Frankfort in 1684, he devoted himself wholly to literary work, which he continued almost to his death. In 1690 he was appointed president of the Collegium Imperiale Historicum.

Works

The works of Ludolf, who is said to have been acquainted with twenty-five languages, include Sciagraphia historiae aethiopicae (Jena, 1676); and the Historia aethiopica (Frankfort, 1681), which has been translated into English, French and Dutch, and which was supplemented by a Commentarius (1691) and by Appendices (1693-1694). According to Ullendorff, Ludolf's

Ethiopic and Amharic dictionaries and grammars were of importance far transcending his own time and remained, for well over a century and a half, the indispensable tools for the study of these languages, while his monumental history of Ethiopia (with an extensive commentary) can still be read with profit as well as enjoyment.

Among his other works are:

• Grammatica linguae amharicae (Frankfort, 1698)
• Lexicon amharico-latinum (Frankfort, 1698)
• Lexicon aethiopico-latinum (Frankfort, 1699)
• Grammatica aethiopica (London, 1661, and Frankfort, 1702)

External links

• Pictures from a supplementary volume to Ludolf's Historia Aethiopica in Early Printed Books at St. John's College Library website.
• Psalterium Davidis aethiopice et latine at the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library (HMML).
• Hiob Ludolf in die Erfurt-Enzyklopädie website.
• Nouvelle histoire d'Abyssinie ou d'Ethiopie tirée de l'histoire latine -- a French translation of Ludolf's Historia aethiopica (Paris 1684) in Gallica, the digital library of the Bibliothèque nationale de France
  Bibliothèque nationale de France
  The is the National Library of France, located in Paris. It is intended to be the repository of all that is published in France. The current president of the library is Bruno Racine.-History:...
  
   (PDF).
• A new history of Ethiopia being a full and accurate description of the kingdom of Abessinia, vulgarly, though erroneously, called the Empire of Prester John by the learned Job Ludolphus, translated out of his learned manuscript commentary on this history (1684) available on Early English Books Online http://eebo.chadwyck.com/