The Queen of Sheba, King Solomon, and the Ethiopian Legend of Menelik I

The biblical Book of Kings and Second Chronicles describe a queen of Sheba who travels to Jerusalem to test King Solomon’s famed wisdom with hard questions, bringing with her gold, spices and precious stones. The biblical text says nothing about a romantic or dynastic relationship between the two rulers, and it never names her country of origin beyond “Sheba,” a kingdom most historians place in what is now Yemen or, in some readings, the Horn of Africa. It is later tradition, not the Hebrew Bible itself, that transforms this brief diplomatic visit into the founding story of a royal line.

The fullest version of that tradition comes from the Kebra Nagast, or “Glory of Kings,” an Ethiopian text compiled by scholars and clergy in Axum sometime between 1314 and 1322 CE, though its authors claimed to be translating and compiling far older Coptic and Arabic source material. In its account, the queen, given the Ethiopian name Makeda, visits Solomon in Jerusalem and, after being drawn into a night with him through a trick involving a shared meal and a vow, returns home pregnant. She gives birth to a son, Menelik, who as a young man travels to Jerusalem to meet his father. Solomon, according to the text, recognizes him, anoints him, and sends him home as king, together with the firstborn sons of Israel’s leading families, one of whom secretly removes the Ark of the Covenant from the Temple and carries it back to Ethiopia. The Kebra Nagast holds that the Ark has remained in Ethiopia ever since, ultimately enshrined in the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion in Axum, and that Menelik I became the first emperor of a dynasty, the Solomonic line, that Ethiopian tradition traces forward for nearly three thousand years to Haile Selassie, deposed in 1974.

The link between the queen and Africa is older than the Kebra Nagast. The first-century Jewish-Roman historian Flavius Josephus, in his Jewish Antiquities, introduces Solomon’s visitor as “a woman queen of Egypt and Ethiopia,” using “Ethiopia” in its broad ancient Greek sense to mean the lands south of Egypt rather than the modern nation-state’s borders. Josephus does not name her himself; he identifies her with a queen he says Herodotus called Nicaule, and reports the tradition that the balsam growing in Judea in his own day descended from a root she gave Solomon. Neither detail appears in the biblical text.

Historians treat the Kebra Nagast as a work of religious and political legitimization rather than history. It was compiled during a period when Ethiopia’s ruling dynasty, having recently displaced the Zagwe line, needed a genealogy that linked its authority to biblical kingship, and the text served that purpose for centuries as the ideological foundation of Ethiopian monarchy. No archaeological or independent textual evidence confirms Menelik I as a historical figure, and the Ark’s presence in Axum has never been independently verified; the church that claims to house it does not permit outside examination of the relic, restricting access to a single guardian monk. The legend nonetheless remains central to Ethiopian Orthodox Christian identity and to Rastafarian theology, which draws directly on the Solomonic lineage in its veneration of Haile Selassie.