Kebra Nagast

The Kebra Nagast (Ge'ez: ክብረ ነገሥት, Kəbrä Nägäśt), or The Glory of the Kings, is a 14th-century national epic of Ethiopia, written in Geʽez by Nebure Id Yeshaq of Aksum. 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 through Menelik I and thus how the Ethiopian Emperors purportedly descended from the Davidic line as did Jesus.

Modern scholarship considers its stories to have been largely created to legitimize the dynasty's rise to 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 (Queen Makeda of Ethiopia) met king Solomon of Israel and about how the Ark of the Covenant came to Ethiopia with their son Menelik I (Menyelek). 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".