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This talk examines some aspects of Italy’s colonial relationship with Ethiopia in the 20th century, and how it can be brought to bear to the debate around the authorship of the Ḥatäta Zär’a Ya‛ǝqob, with especial reference to Carlo Conti Rossini, the Italian Ethiopianist who wrote an influential refutation of its attribution to the seventeenth-century Ethiopian thinker Zera Yacoub. The history of the text’s reception by Conti Rossini, a prominent 20th century Orientalist and Ethiopianist, can be traced back to the origins of the Italian colonial enterprise in the Horn of Africa and its discursive justifications for conquest that rested on the appropriation of knowledge about Ethiopia and surrounding region. Conti Rossini’s argument that the text was a forgery by Giusto D’Urbino, the 19th century Italian Capuchin monk who purportedly “discovered” the text, is underpinned by a European civilizational worldview which he projected onto his understanding of Ethiopian literature and philosophy. Conti Rossini can be defined as a “scholar-functionary”, having worked as a civil servant in the new Italian colony of Eritrea from 1899 to 1903. His understanding of Ethiopian society and culture become more ideologically racist after the advent of fascism and the invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. His refutation of the authenticity of the Hatata is prior to this period, however, and drew on his immense knowledge of Ethiopia and its languages. But it is an orientalist interpretation of societal and cultural evolution that posits a “stagist” view of history onto the Ethiopian past. He thus considered it to be improbable for the Hatata to be a work of Ethiopian philosophy because it did not fit his teleological, Eurocentric view of intellectual progress. This position by itself does not disprove his argument about the text’s authorship, of course, but it does suggest that his interpretation is profoundly influenced by the intellectual paradigms he uncritically applies to his reading.