Under the title ‘The American Dilemma on the Horn’, Bereket Habte Selassie published in this Journal, Vol. 22, No. 2, June 1984, pp. 249–72, a lawyer's presentation of a client's case: that of the Eritrean separatists. Although my views do not necessarily represent those held by the régime in Addis Ababa, they do indicate why Ethiopians resolutely continue to defend the territorial integrity of their motherland with a degree of unity only admitted by a few writers.

A few uears ago, Roger Cowley edited an interesting text of the Tamhartä haymanot in older Amharic with an English translation under the title given above. The text is of special value to te study of the history of Amharic: it is relatively lengthy (14 fols., 2 cols., 12 lines to a column and 6–8 characters to a line), in prose, and shows most of the features of archaic Amharic known so far. In spite of the fact that, to use the author's own words.

Our information to date about the possible existence of a work known as ṭomaräǝsbǝ't or ‘Epistle of Humanity’, by Emperor Zär'a Ya'ǝqob (1434–68) comes from the works of the Emperor himself. It is important that we study closely his description of this work in order to determine whether the contents of a given manuscript could be at least part of the so-called ṭomaräǝsbǝ't, or .