Hatata is a 1667 ethical

Ethics

Ethics, also known as moral philosophy, is a branch of philosophy that addresses questions about morality—that is, concepts such as good and evil, right and wrong, virtue and vice, justice and crime, etc.Major branches of ethics include:...

 philosophical treatise by Ethiopian

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...

 philosopher Zera Yacob

Zera Yacob

Zera Yacob was a seventeenth century Ethiopian philosopher. His 1667 treatise, known in the original Ge'ez language as the Hatata, has often been compared by a handful of non-traditional scholars to Descartes' Discours de la methode in...

, written at the request of his patron's son Walda Heywat

Walda Heywat

Walda Heywat was an Ethiopian philosopher. He was the student of Zera Yacob, whose Work he continued in his "Treatise of Walda Heywat" . He was the son of Habta Egziabher , a friend of Zera Yacob in the town of Emfraz, where Zera Yacob spent the second part of his life...

. The philosophy is theistic

Theism

Theism, in the broadest sense, is the belief that at least one deity exists.In a more specific sense, theism refers to a doctrine concerning the nature of a monotheistic God and God's relationship to the universe....

 in nature and came during a period when African philosophical literature was significantly oral in character. It has often been compared by scholars to Descartes' Discours de la methode (1637).

Yacob wrote Hatata as an investigation of the light of reason. Yacob is most noted for this philosophy surrounding the principle of harmony. He asserted that an action's morality

Morality

Morality is the differentiation among intentions, decisions, and actions between those that are good and bad . A moral code is a system of morality and a moral is any one practice or teaching within a moral code...

 is decided by whether it advances or degrades overall harmony in the world. While he did believe in a deity, whom he referred to as God, he rejected any set of religious beliefs. Rather than deriving beliefs from any organized religion, Yacob sought the truth in observing the natural world.

In Hatata, in following in the footsteps of the Church fathers, Yacob applied the idea of the first cause to his proof for the existence of God. "If I say that my father and my mother created me, then I must search for the creator of my parents and of the parents of my parents until they arrive at the first who were not created as we [are] but who came into this world in some other way without being generated."

However, the knowability of God does not depend on human intellect, but "Our soul has the power of having the concept of God and of seeing him mentally. God did not give this power purposelessly; as he gave the power, so did he give the reality."

Upon Yacob's death in 1692 his pupil Walda Heywat updated the work to include his death.