Kebra Nagast
The Kebra Nagast, or The Glory of the Kings, is a 14th-century national epic of Ethiopia, written in Geʽez. In its existing form, the text is at least 700 years old and purports to trace the origins of the Solomonic dynasty, a line of Ethiopian Orthodox Christian monarchs who ruled the country until 1974, to the biblical king, Solomon and the Queen of Sheba.
Modern scholarship considers it not to have any historical basis and that its stories were created to legitimize the dynasty's seizure of power in Ethiopia in the 13th century. Nevertheless, many Ethiopian Christians continue to believe it is a historically reliable work.
The text contains an account of how the Queen of Sheba met king Solomon of Jerusalem and about how the Ark of the Covenant came to Ethiopia with their son Menelik I. It also discusses the conversion via missionaries of Ethiopians from the worship of the Sun, Moon, and stars to that of the "Lord God of Israel". As the Ethiopianist Edward Ullendorff explained in the 1967 Schweich Lectures, "The Kebra Nagast is not merely a literary work, but it is the repository of Ethiopian national and religious feelings".
It has been described as “an Abyssinian politico-religious epic” and "medieval-era mythology". Nadia Nurhussein wrote that "The Kebra Nagast gave textual authority to a then newly articulated mythology of Abyssinia’s long imperial history, legitimizing a “Solomonic” dynasty' that claimed to reach back three thousand years earlier to the union of King Solomon and the supposedly Ethiopian Queen of Sheba." It enabled the overthrow of the Zagwe Dynasty.
Summary of contents
The Kebra Nagast is divided into 117 chapters, and is clearly a composite work; Ullendorff describes its narrative as "a gigantic conflation of legendary cycles". This account draws much of its material from the Hebrew Bible and the author spends most of these pages recounting tales and relating them to other historical events. The document is presented in the form of a debate by the 318 "orthodox fathers" of the First Council of Nicaea.Opening (chapters 1–20)
These fathers pose the question, "Of what doth the Glory of Kings consist?" One Gregory answers with a speech which ends with the statement that a copy of the Glory of God was made by Moses and kept in the Ark of the Covenant. After this, the archbishop Dĕmâtĕyôs reads from a book he had found in the church of "Sophia", which introduces what Hubbard calls "the centerpiece" of this work, the story of Makeda, King Solomon, Menelik I, and how the Ark came to Ethiopia. Although the author of the final redaction identified this Gregory with Gregory Thaumaturgus, who lived in the 3rd century before this Council, the time and the allusion to Gregory's imprisonment for 15 years by the king of Armenia make Gregory the Illuminator a better fit.The Queen of Sheba and Menelik (chapters 21–95)
Queen Makeda learns from Tamrin, a merchant based in her kingdom, about the wisdom of King Solomon, and travels to Jerusalem to visit him. She is enthralled by his display of learning and knowledge, and declares "From this moment I will not worship the sun, but will worship the Creator of the sun, the God of Israel". The night before she begins her journey home, Solomon tricks her into sleeping with him, giving her a ring so their child may identify himself to Solomon. Following her departure, Solomon has a dream in which the sun leaves Israel.On the journey home, she gives birth to Menelik in Bala Zädisareya.
At 22, Menelik travels to Jerusalem through Gaza, seeking Solomon's blessing, and identifies himself to his father with the ring. Overjoyed by this reunion, Solomon tries to convince Menelik to stay and succeed him as king, but Menelik insists on returning to his mother in Ethiopia. King Solomon then settled for sending home with him a company formed from the first-born sons of the elders of his kingdom. This company of young men, upset over leaving Jerusalem, smuggled the Ark of the Covenant from Solomon's Temple and out of the kingdom without Menelik's knowledge. He had asked Solomon only for a single tassel from the tekhelet-coloured travel cloth covering the Ark, and Solomon had given him the entire thing.
During the journey home, Menelik learns the Ark is with him, and Solomon discovers it is gone from his kingdom. The king attempts to pursue Menelik, but through the Ark's mysterious power, his son, with his entire entourage, is miraculously flown home to Ethiopia before Solomon can leave his kingdom. King Solomon then turns to solace from his wife, the daughter of the Pharaoh, and she seduces him into worshiping the idols of her land.
Stories of Kings
After a question from the 318 bishops of the Council, Domitius continues with a paraphrase of Biblical history. Specifically, he focuses on the central element of lineage and royal bloodlines that were prevalent then. He discusses the intermixing of the royal families to preserve their power and ensure their bloodline survives. He does this by using each chapter to describe a specific family line, such as discussing the family tree of Constantine or to describe two separate seeds of Shem. In chapter 90, we see a heavy emphasis on God's law and the rules he sets forth for his believers to follow, which he presents by choosing the house of Jacob to reign as kings and spread God's message. The author then describes Menelik's arrival at Axum, where he is feasted, and Makeda abdicates the throne in his favour. Menelik then engages in a series of military campaigns with the Ark, and "no man conquered him, on the contrary, whosoever attacked him was conquered". After chapter 94, the author takes a step back and describes a more global view of what he had been describing in previous chapters.Prophecies (chapters 96–117)
After praising the king of Ethiopia, the king of Egypt, and the book Domitius was found, which has established not only Ethiopia's possession of the true Ark of the Covenant, but that the Solomonic dynasty is descended from the first-born son of Solomon. Gregory then delivers an extended speech with prophetic elements, forming what Hubbard calls a "Patristic collection of Prophecies": "There can be little doubt that chapters 102–115 are written as polemic against, if not an evangel to, the Jews. These chapters seek to prove by Old Testament allegories and proof-texts the Messianic purpose of Jesus, the validity of the Ethiopian forms of worship, and the spiritual supremacy of Ethiopia over Israel". Hubbard further speculates that this selection from the Old Testament might be as old as Frumentius, who had converted the Kingdom of Axum to Christianity.The Kebra Nagast concludes with a final prophecy that the power of Rome will be eclipsed by the power of Ethiopia, and describes how king Kaleb of Axum will subdue the Jews living in Najran, and make his younger son Gabra Masqal his heir. Yishaq adds "the churches of ethiopia and rome were identical for 130 years until Rome 'corrupted the faith of christ by introducing into it the herassies of Nestorius, Arius, and others.' referring to the Chalcedonian Schism."
History
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, 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 ; furthermore, Sabaean tribes knew the title of . 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.
Careful study of the text has revealed traces of Arabic, possibly pointing to an Arabic Vorlage, but no clear evidence of a previous Coptic version. Many scholars doubt that a Coptic version ever existed, and that the history of the text goes back no further than the Arabic vorlage. The numerous quotations in the text from the Bible were not translated from this hypothetical Arabic vorlage, but were copied from the Ethiopian translation of the Bible, either directly or from memory, and in their use and interpretation shows the influence of patristic sources such as Gregory of Nyssa.
Old Testament scholar David Allan Hubbard identified Patristic, Qur'anic, Rabbinical and Apocryphal texts as sources for the Kebra Nagast. The Kebra Nagast itself claims that the original text was found by the Archbishop of Rome 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, but he detects evidence of Rabbinical sources, and influence from deuterocanonical or apocryphal works. Marcus thus describes it as "a pastiche of legends... 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".