Until recently, the oldest known source of Kambaata language data was from the end of the 19th century, namely the vocabulary of the French explorer Jules Borelli (1890). Borelli had travelled along the Omo River in 1887/88 (Imperato 2003) and collected, among others, words and phrases of the Xambaaro variety of Kambaata. When a digitalization and transcription project of the field notes of the French explorer Antoine d’Abbadie was started in 2020/21 at the French National Library (cf. Alain 2021), it soon became clear that they do not only contain information on Geez, Amharic, Saho and Xamtanga, which was published during or after his journey (1843; 1859; 1872; 1881), but also a huge amount of unpublished data from a variety of other Ethiopian languages. In the period from 1837-48, Antoine d’Abbadie spent several years in Ethiopia. He was driven by the wish to find the source of the White Nile, which he assumed to be in Ethiopia. Even though he had primarily a geographical interest, he also took extensive notes about the history, the cultures and the languages of the people he encountered and/or interviewed. Some of the word lists that he assembled constitute the very first sources of Ethiopian languages – sources that are hitherto unexplored, as they were not known to exist. His field notes contain, among others, a list of about 25 pages of (mostly) words and (a small number of) phrases of the Kambaata language, translated into Oromo as well as French. This paper presents selected examples from this fascinating source from the first half of the 19th century, explains how and where d’Abbadie found his consultants, analyzes his transcription choices and tries to reconstruct his data collection methodology.