The Queen Of Sheba

Page 5 of 7

• 1. Layers of the legend
• 2. Jewish legend
• 3. Unpicking the clues
• 4. Islamic tradition
• 5. Ethiopian tradition
• 6. An enigma
• 7. Find out more
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Ethiopian tradition

Of all the stories of the Queen of Sheba, those of Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa are those that probably retain the most resonance today with the people who tell them. The stories are immortalised in the Ethiopian holy book - the Kebra Nagast - where we find accounts of the queen's hairy hoof, her trip to Solomon and her seduction. But these tales go further. Here, the queen returns to her capital, Aksum, in northern Ethiopia, and months later gives birth to Solomon's son, who is named Menelik, meaning 'Son of the Wise'.

The story goes that years later Menelik travelled to Jerusalem to see his father, who greeted him with joy and invited him to remain there to rule after his death. But Menelik refused and decided to return home. Under cover of darkness he left the city - taking with him its most precious relic, the Ark of the Covenant. He took it back to Aksum, where it still resides today, in a specially built treasury in the courtyard of St Mary's Church.

The importance of the queen, the Ark of the Covenant and the Kebra Nagast in Ethiopian history cannot be overstated. Through their reading of the Kebra Nagast, Ethiopians see their country as God's chosen country, the final resting place that he chose for the Ark - and Sheba and her son were the means by which it came there. Thus, Sheba is the mother of their nation, and the kings of the land have divine right to rule because they are directly descended from her. Emperor Haile Selassie even had that fact enshrined in the Ethiopian Constitution of 1955.

Haile Selassie was not, however, the first Emperor to publicly declare the importance of the Kebra Nagast. London's National Archives contain letters dating from 1872, written by Prince Kasa (later King John IV) of Ethiopia to Queen Victoria, in which he writes (translated):

There is a book called Kebra Nagast which contains the law of the whole of Ethiopia, and the names of the shums (governors), churches and provinces are in this book. I pray you will find out who has got this book and send it to me, for in my country my people will not obey my orders without it.

On Victoria's permit, the book was returned to Ethiopia, and it is now kept in Raguel Church in Addis Ababa, where a front page inscription explains its history.

Ultimately though, there is no primary evidence, archaeological or textual, for the queen in Ethiopia. The impressive ruins at Aksum are a thousand years too late for a queen contemporary with Solomon - at least on his traditional dating to the tenth century BC. And the great Sabaean kingdom in southern Arabia, for which we do have textual evidence, lists names of ruling kings at the time when Sheba is supposed to have sat on the throne.

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Published: 03-02-2005