Johannes Potken
Johannes Potken was a German scholar, papal secretary and printer from Cologne, active at the beginning of the sixteenth century. In 1513 he had the Psalterium David et Cantica aliqua printed in Rome, in the Ge'ez language. It was a collection of psalms and other canticles.
Potken had learned Ge'ez from the Ethiopian Abba Thomas Walda Samuel, a pilgrim to Jerusalem and guest of Pope Leo X. This was the beginning of European publishing of Ethiopian literature. The work included a syllabary, Alphabetus, seu potius Syllabarius literarum Chaldaearium. The font was cut by Marcellus Silber, a printer in Regensburg.
He was in Rome as a long term papal protonotary; he became provost of the church of St. Georg in Cologne. Potken also edited the quadrilingual Psalterium in quatuor linguis Hebraea Graeca Chaldaea Latina, which appeared in 1518, with Johann Soter. He was a correspondent of Sebastian Brant and Johannes Reuchlin.
