In the highlands of Ethiopia, there is a sacred text that is guarded in the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion in Axum, where only one monk (the appointed guardian) may look upon it. This text is the Kebra Nagast, the Glory of Kings, written or compiled in the fourteenth century but drawing on oral and written traditions far older, and it narrates the origin of the Ethiopian royal dynasty. At the center of this narrative is the Queen of Sheba (Makeda, in the Ethiopian tradition) and her encounter with Solomon, King of Israel. The story as the Kebra Nagast tells it begins with Makeda, queen of a vast and prosperous southern kingdom, who hears reports of Solomon's wisdom and travels to Jerusalem to encounter it for herself. When she arrives and experiences Solomon's court, the famous temple, and the king's conversation, she is transformed: she abandons the worship of the sun and moon and accepts the God of Israel.
Solomon, captivated by Makeda, asks her to spend the night. She agrees on one condition: that he will not take anything from her by force. He agrees, on the symmetric condition that she will not take anything of his without asking. She accepts. In the night, she wakes desperately thirsty and reaches for water, and Solomon, waking, reminds her of her oath. The water, he says, is his. She may have it only by releasing him from his vow to her. She agrees, drinks, and their son, Menelik I, is conceived.
Menelik grows up in Ethiopia, becomes known for his extraordinary gifts, and eventually travels to Jerusalem to meet his father. Solomon recognises him immediately, is overjoyed, and asks him to stay and become his heir. Menelik refuses: his place is in Ethiopia, with his mother's people. Solomon accepts this but asks that Menelik take with him a copy of the Ark of the Covenant. What Menelik actually took, the Kebra Nagast says, was not a copy but the original, because the first-born sons of Solomon's priests replaced the original Ark with a replica during the night, and it was the original Ark of the Covenant that went to Ethiopia.
The Ark is understood by the Ethiopian Orthodox tradition to be in Axum today, guarded by a single monk appointed for life who may never leave the church compound after his appointment. Whether or not one accepts this claim at face value, its significance as a theological statement is immense: Ethiopia understood itself as the inheritor of the covenant between God and Israel, as the throne of David's descendants, as the earthly location of the divine presence.
The Kebra Nagast's vision of Ethiopia's place in sacred history shaped Ethiopian identity and politics for centuries. The claim of Solomonic descent was the central legitimating principle of the Ethiopian imperial dynasty. Haile Selassie, who took the throne name meaning 'Power of the Trinity,' was identified by the Rastafari movement in Jamaica as the returned messiah, partly on the basis of the Kebra Nagast's vision of Ethiopia's sacred status. The text written in a fourteenth-century Ethiopian monastery became, through this chain of reading and reinterpretation, the foundational scripture of a Caribbean religious movement.
The figure of Makeda deserves attention in her own right. She is presented in the Kebra Nagast as a genuinely powerful figure, a woman who negotiates with kings from a position of equality. Her decision to travel to Jerusalem is an act of autonomous agency. Her conversion is presented as a reasoned response to evidence rather than as coercion. Her negotiation with Solomon portrays her as his peer.
The archaeology of the Axum kingdom offers partial corroboration of elements of the Kebra Nagast's setting. The Axumite civilisation, which flourished from roughly the first through seventh centuries CE, was genuinely a powerful trading state with connections to Arabia, Egypt, and the Mediterranean. Its monumental obelisks (several of which still stand in Axum, and one of which was removed by Italian forces in 1937 and returned in 2008) represent an extraordinary architectural tradition.
For contemporary Ethiopia, the Kebra Nagast and the Makeda/Menelik narrative remain living resources for national and religious identity. The Ethiopian Orthodox Church, which has maintained the tradition with remarkable continuity across millennia, continues to regard the Ark's presence in Axum as a sacred reality. Pilgrims from across Ethiopia and the diaspora travel to Axum to be near it, even if they cannot see it.
The Queen of Sheba belongs, in different versions, to multiple traditions. She appears in the Hebrew Bible, in the Quran, in Ethiopian tradition, and in various African and South Asian folk traditions. But nowhere is she more fully herself than in the Ethiopian telling, where she is not merely a visitor at another king's court but the mother of a dynasty and the initiator of a covenant that defines an entire civilization's sense of its place in the sacred order of things.
