In 1920, the Italian Orientalist Carlo Conti Rossini asserted that the hatata texts were written by the Italian priest Guisto de Urbino himself. Rossini got support for his theory in 1934, when the German Eugen Mittwoch, also argued that the philosophical hatata texts could not have been written by an African. In his works of 1976, Sumner published a lengthy rebuttal of Rossini's and Mittwoch's claims. In the paper "Italian scientists and the war in Ethiopia" (2015), Professor Roberto Maiocchi points out that Rossini were among the most important scholars supporting Italy's invasion of Ethiopia in 1935: "(...) Carlo Conti-Rossini, Italy’s main expert in Ethiopian literature, published an article in September 1935, a few days before the beginning of the conflict: using arguments that could apply to any African country, he stated that Abissinia was incapable of evolution and civil progress, and therefore its conquest was justified." After the conquest of Ethiopia, Rossini received a prize from the Mussolini regime in 1937. Mittwoch, who had Jewish background, kept his position in Nazi Germany until December 1935, after the outbreak of the Italio-Ethiopian war, because of a special intervention by Mussolini with Hitler on behalf of Mittwoch, as Mussolini "saw Mittwoch as a potential asset for Italy's colonization of Ethiopia."