Origins According to the
colophon attached to most of the existing copies, the
Kebra Nagast originally was written in
Coptic, then translated into
Arabic in the "year of mercy" 409 (dated to AD 1225), and then into
Ge'ez by a team of clerics in Ethiopia—Yəsḥaq, Yəmḥarännä ˀAb, Ḥəzbä-Krəstos, Ǝndrəyas, Filəp̣p̣os, and Mäḥari ˀAb—during the office of
Abuna Abba Giyorgis and possibly at the command of the governor of
Enderta Ya'ibika Igzi'. Based on the testimony of this colophon, "Conti Rossini, Littmann, and
Cerulli,
inter alios, have marked off the period 1314 to 1321–1322 for the composition of the book". During the time of the
Zagwe dynasty, the chief of Enderta played a major role in supporting the Solomonids along with the chief priest of
Aksum by the name of Tekeste Birhane; the two are listed among the most influential dignitires on the side of
Yekuno Amlak. Other sources put it as a work of the fourteenth century Nebura’ed Yeshaq of Aksum. The central Solomonic narrative of the text is thought to derive from the
Zagwe dynasty, who believed the
Axumites were descended from
Solomon. Because of this, the Solomonic myth might be rooted in half remembered oral traditions of an ancient Eurasian back migration into Ethiopia. Alternatively, this may have been due to a sort of Axumite philosemitism, with Ezana calling himself a follower of the "god of Israel" and the later king
Israel of Axum. "Makeda" might have its origins in multiple terms.
Sabaean inscriptions mention (, "queen"); furthermore, Sabaean tribes knew the title of (, "high official"). Alternatively
Makueda, the personal name of the queen in Ethiopian legend might be interpreted as a popular rendering of the title of . The tradition that the biblical Queen of Sheba was an ingenuous ruler of Ethiopia who visited King Solomon in Jerusalem is repeated in a 1st-century account by the Roman Jewish historian
Josephus. He identified Solomon's visitor as a queen of Egypt and Ethiopia. Other historians consider parts of the Kebre Negast date to as late as the end of the sixteenth century, when Muslim incursions and contacts with the wider Christian world made the Ethiopian Church concerned with asserting its character and Jewish traditions. Some historians have been suspicious of the statement on the colophon and have suggested that the authors of the original text itself were Ethiopian scribes. Historian Stuart Munro-Hay stated that there is no record of Ethiopian monarchs claiming descent from
Solomon before the 13th century. The
Kebra Nagast itself claims that the original text was found by the
Archbishop of Rome (i.e.
Constantinople) in the
Church of Saint Sophia and that he read the manuscript claimed the world belonged to the
Emperor of Rome and the
Emperor of Ethiopia. Hubbard details the many sources that the compiler of the
Kebra Nagast drew on in creating this work. They include not only both Testaments of the Bible (although heavier use is made of the
Old Testament than the
New), but he detects evidence of
Rabbinical sources, and influence from
deuterocanonical or
apocryphal works (especially the
Book of Enoch and
Book of Jubilees, both canonical in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, and such
Syriac works as the
Book of the Cave of Treasures, and its derivatives the
Book of Adam and Eve and the
Book of the Bee). Marcus thus describes it as "a
pastiche of legends ... [that] blended local and regional oral traditions and style and substance derived from the Old and New Testaments, various apocryphal texts, Jewish and Islamic commentaries, and
Patristic writings".
Early European translations One of the earliest collections of documents of Ethiopia came through the writings of
Francisco Álvares, official envoy which king
Manuel I of Portugal, sent to
Dawit II of Ethiopia, under Ambassador Dom Rodrigo de Lima. In the papers concerning this mission, Álvares included an account of the Emperor of Ethiopia, and a description in
Portuguese of the habits of the Ethiopians, titled
The Prester John of the Indies, which was printed in 1533. The Jesuit missionary
Pedro Páez included a detailed translation of the
Kebra Nagast through Menelek's return to Aksum with the Ark of the Covenant in his
História da Ethiópia. Completed in the early 1620s, the manuscript was not published in Páez's lifetime. However, it provided the foundation for many of the Jesuit accounts of Ethiopia that came after his, including those of Manuel de Almeida and Balthazar Telles. Additional information on the
Kebra Nagast was included by the Jesuit priest
Manuel de Almeida in his
Historia de Etiopía. Almeida was sent out as a missionary to Ethiopia, and had abundant opportunity to learn about the
Kebra Nagast at first hand, owing to his excellent command of the language. His manuscript is a valuable work. His brother, Apollinare, also went out to the country as a missionary and was, along with his two companions, stoned to death in
Tigray. In the first quarter of the 16th century, P.N. Godinho published some traditions about
King Solomon and his son
Menelik, derived from the
Kebra Nagast. Further information about the contents of the
Kebra Nagast was supplied by
Baltazar Téllez (1595–1675), the author of the
Historia General de Etiopía Alta (Coimbra, 1660). The sources of Téllez's work were the histories of Manuel de Almeida,
Afonso Mendes and
Jerónimo Lobo.
Modern scholarship It was not until the close of the eighteenth century, when
James Bruce of Kinnaird, the famous
Scottish travel writer, published an account of his travels in search of the sources of the
Nile, that information as to the contents of the
Kebra Nagast came to be generally known among European scholars and theologians. When Bruce was leaving Gondar, Ras
Mikael Sehul, the powerful
Inderase (regent) of Emperor
Tekle Haymanot II, gave him several of the most valuable Ethiopic manuscripts. Among them was a copy of the
Kebra Nagast. When the third edition of Bruce's
Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile was published in 1813, a description of the contents of the original manuscript was included. In due course these documents were given to the
Bodleian Library (
shelfmark Bruce 87).
August Dillmann prepared a summary of the contents of the
Kebra Nagast, and published its colophon, but no substantial portion of the narrative in the original language was available until F. Praetorius published Chapters 19 through 32 with a Latin translation. Another 35 years passed before the entire text was published, by
Carl Bezold, with commentary, in 1905. The first English translation was prepared by
E. A. Wallis Budge, and was published in two editions in 1922 and 1932. Modern scholarly opinion is that there is no historical evidence supporting the legends relating to the claimed origins of the Solomonic dynasty in the
Kebra Negast. There is no credible basis to the claims that the
Aksumite royal house was descended from Solomon (or that any Aksumite king even claimed such an ancestry) or that Yekuno Amlak, the 13th century founder of the dynasty, was descended from the Aksumite royal house. Solomon is dated to the 10th century BCE, hundreds of years before the founding of Aksum. Historian Harold G. Marcus describes the stories of the
Kebra Nagast as a "pastiche of legends" created to legitimize Yekuno Amlak's seizure of power.
David Northrup notes that The
Ethiopian regnal list from 1922 takes much from the national epic, and claims that an "
Ag'azyan" dynasty had reigned from 1985 to 982 BC. The dynasty was allegedly founded by a man named Akbunas Saba (
Sheba), "of the posterity of the kingdom of
Joctan," a descendant of
Shem (ሴም, Sēm), and the last ruler of this line was
Makeda (the queen of Sheba). The term Madrā
Ag'azi also appears in the Gädlä Marqorewos (Conti Rossini 1904, 27 (text); 38, tr.) as the realm of King
Mənəlik I). == See also ==