''Abba'' Bahrey ( Ge'ez: ባሕርይ ''bāḥriy'', "pearl") was a late 16th-century

Ethiopia Ethiopia, , om, Itiyoophiyaa, so, Itoobiya, ti, ኢትዮጵያ, Ítiyop'iya, aa, Itiyoppiya officially the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a landlocked country in the Horn of Africa. It shares borders with Eritrea to the ...

monk A monk (, from el, μοναχός, ''monachos'', "single, solitary" via Latin ) is a person who practices religious asceticism by monastic living, either alone or with any number of other monks. A monk may be a person who decides to dedica ...

historian A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the stu ...

, and

ethnographer Ethnography (from Greek ''ethnos'' "folk, people, nation" and ''grapho'' "I write") is a branch of anthropology and the systematic study of individual cultures. Ethnography explores cultural phenomena from the point of view of the subject o ...

, from the southern region of Gamo. He is best known for his 1593 work on the history of the Oromo and their migrations in the 16th century, the "History of the Galla" ("Galla" being a historical and now pejorative term for the Oromo; ዜናሁ ፡ ለጋላ ''zēnāhū lagāllā''). This short work is considered the ultimate source for information on the sixteenth century history of the Oromo:

Manuel de Almeida Manuel de Almeida (sometimes Manoel de Almeida, 1580–1646) was a native of Viseu who entered at an early age into the Society of Jesus and went out as a missionary to India. He is noted to have travelled to Ethiopia and Eritrea and Lake Tana ...

borrowed heavily from Bahrey in writing his history of Ethiopia, and

Hiob Ludolf Hiob or Job Ludolf ( la, Iobus Ludolfus or '; 15 June 1624– 8 April 1704), also known as Job Leutholf, was a German orientalist, born at Erfurt. Edward Ullendorff rates Ludolf as having "the most illustrious name in Ethiopic scholarship". L ...

derived much of his information on the Oromo from

Baltazar Téllez Balthazar, or variant spellings, may refer to: Arts, entertainment and media * ''Balthazar'' (novel), by Lawrence Durrell, 1958 * ''Balthasar'', an 1889 book by Anatole France * ''Professor Balthazar'', a Croatian animated TV series, 1967-1978 ...

's abridgment of Almeida's work.Herbert S. Lewis
"The Origins of the Galla and Somali", ''Journal of African History''
7 (1966), p. 32 n. 14 Bahrey may also have been the author of

Emperor An emperor (from la, imperator, via fro, empereor) is a monarch, and usually the sovereignty, sovereign ruler of an empire or another type of imperial realm. Empress, the female equivalent, may indicate an emperor's wife (empress consort), ...

Sarsa Dengel Sarsa Dengel ( gez, ሠርጸ ድንግል ; 1550 – 4 October 1597), also known as Sarsa the Great, was Emperor of Ethiopia, and a member of the Solomonic dynasty. His throne name was throne name Malak Sagad I (መለክ ሰገድ ). Biograp ...

's chronicle, "The History of King Sarsa Dengel."Baxter, Paul T. W., "Baḥrəy" in Uhlig, Siegbert, ''Encyclopaedia Aethiopica: A-C'' (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2003), p. 446.

References

See also