Walda Heywat and the Continuation of Ethiopian Rationalism

Walda Heywat (Wäldä Heywat) is presented, within the Ethiopian rationalist corpus, as the son of Habtu, the merchant in whose household Zera Yacob lived and taught at Enfraz, and thus as Zera Yacob's direct pupil, someone who had absorbed his teacher's method of hatata at first hand rather than encountering it only as a finished doctrine. He is credited with composing his own treatise, likewise called a Hatata, addressed explicitly in places as advice to a son, which both continues and adapts the rationalist framework his teacher had articulated. Because the two texts survive together in the same manuscript tradition and share vocabulary, structure, and doctrine, they are conventionally treated as a single two-part corpus — Sumner's critical edition presents them side by side as companion works within the wider collection he titled Ethiopian Philosophy.