When you first search for “Ethiopian watches” the first few pages of google are going to either be fake watches for sale in Ethiopia or just a watch and no connection with Ethiopia. After a few pages of this you will most probably end up with the most famous watch with an Ethiopian connection; a black dial Patek Philippe 2497. This famous watch once belonged to H.E. Emperor Haile Selase and was auction by Christie’s in 2017. So, for the past year I’ve been searching for anything I can find on a piece I stumbled upon on eBay. A beautiful manual wind Omega pocket watch from 1906/8. On the dial of this typical looking watch were the words Addis Abeba / Bole. This doesn’t really mean a lot to people in the watch community, and truthfully it’s just the name of a city and neighbourhood in Ethiopia. Even more obscurely these words are written in Amharic using the Ge’ez alphabet, the native alphabet of Ethiopia. So far this pocket watch would, at best, garner mild curiosity from a few watch admirers. A great cure for that would be to flip the pocket watch to reveal the intricate engraving on the back.

On the back of this small 48mm pocket watch stands a lion, but not merely any lion, The Lion of Judah. This lion, with a crown on its head and holding the cross sceptre looks as if it’s standing in grass, an iconic symbol of past Ethiopian Emperors. Being Ethiopian myself I recognised the language, the lion, and if it was real, the importance of owning a little bit of history. Not knowing anything about pocket watches or of the existence of any Ethiopian market watches I bought the watch and had it sent off to Omega immediately. I’m not gonna lie, I don’t think they really knew much about it. Omega sent it off to their valuation company and it came back with basic information, but to me that was so much more than I knew about it at that point.

I came to learn the manufacture year for the case, 1906-08, that sadly the hands are broken and that the watch had been serviced. Since they could not really tell me why or for whom it was produced I began my tedious search to find out myself. Finding any form of written information about this type of watch really seemed impossible. Form the age of the watch, to it being Ethiopian, there seemed to be nothing really written about a watch that could resemble this one.

At this point I would just like to thank google for doing the impossible for me, I found a reference to the Ethiopian watch market on a 1929 USA commerce report. About 6 paragraphs on the state of the Ethiopian watch market at that time and in one of these paragraphs the author, General Council Addison E. Southerland, lists the popular pocket watches of the time. And this list is the only written mention of a pocket watch that could resemble mine, at least that I’ve managed to find. While finding any form of scholarship on this watch is pretty much laughable at this point, it has not meant I haven’t seen a few examples floating around the Internet.

There is one that I’ve seen that is in impeccable condition, while most of the rest are hurt by very obvious redials. While I am not that great at spotting redialed watches based on their pictures, and since the people selling them don’t speak Amharic the writing on the dial is sometimes upside down. I recently managed to pick up one new pocket watch, almost identical to my previous one, except this has the Lion Of Judah embossed on the back. This is just to say the search for these watches and any information about them doesn’t seem to be stopping.