African Rewritings of the Jewish and Islamic Solomonic Tradition: the Triumph of the Queen of Sheba in the Ethiopian Fourteenth-Century Text Kǝbrä Nägäst

AFRICAN REWRITINGS OF THE JEWISH AND ISLAMIC SOLOMONIC TRADITION: THE TRIUMPH OF THE QUEEN OF SHEBA IN THE ETHIOPIAN FOURTEENTH-CENTURY TEXT KƎBRÄ NÄGÄST Wendy Laura Belcher In the fourteenth century, scribes from what is now the modern East African nation of Ethiopia recorded their national narrative in the holy text of the Kәbrä Nägäst (The Glory of the Kings or, in the original script ክብረ ነገሥት).1 Written in their ancient scholarly language Geʾez (Ethiopic), this thick volume articulates Ethiopian myths of origin, parts of which were told for many centuries before the text’s redac- tion in the fourteenth century.2 Expanding on an anecdote found in the Tanakh about the Queen of Sheba’s visit to tenth-century BCE King Solomon,3 the Kәbrä Nägäst devotes forty chapters (of over one hundred total chapters)4 to reimagining the brief diplomatic encounter. The Kәbrä Nägäst envisions Solomon seducing and impregnating an Ethiopian woman called Makәdda (ማክዳ), the Queen of Saba (Sheba). This queen then gives birth to a son who takes the ark of the covenant from the Israelites and starts a new Zion through the unbroken descent of their emperors from Solomon and Makәdda. The mythical history 1 The title of the book is actually the title of the first chapter, which has been used as the title since the fifteenth century because the whole has no title, see Siegbert Uhlig (ed.), Encyclopaedia Aethiopica: Volume 3: He-N, 4 vols., vol. 3 (Wiesbaden: Harras- sowitz, 2007), 364. Also, the letters of the words Kәbrä Nägäst are a transliteration from Geʾez, which has its own orthography. The title is thus transliterated variously in English, sometimes Kәbrä Nägäst, Kәbrä Nägäst, Kebre Negast, Kebra Nagast, Kebre Nagast, Kibre Negest, kebranaghast, and so on. 2 To avoid confusion, I am referring to the peoples of the Kәbrä Nägäst as Ethiopians, although this is ahistorical and a conflation of various ethnicities and traditions. The peoples discussed in this paper are better called the Habasha or highland Ethiopians. In medieval and early modern documents in English, they were called Abyssinians. 3 In the Tanakh, the story is found in I Kings 10:1–13 (redacted around 600 BCE) and in II Chronicles 9:1–12 (redacted around 400 BCE). 4 Chapters 21–63, 84–94, 113–117 of the Kәbrä Nägäst address the Solomon and Makәdda story. The other chapters are as follows: the first twenty chapters are an introduction; chapters 64 to 67 describe Solomon’s misadventures with other foreign women and his dying regrets, chapters 68 to 83 relate the history of a number of other kings, and chapters 95 to 113 are unrelated prophecies. 442 wendy laura belcher of the Kәbrä Nägäst probably arises from Ethiopia’s actual history as the ruler of a succession of trade-based African empires in close con- tact with Jewish South Arabians starting in the first millennium BCE and as a Christian African nation since the fourth century CE. In this essay, I address how the Kәbrä Nägäst narrative varies from the bibli- cal, qurʾanic, and midrashic versions of the queen’s visit, particularly in its placement of a powerful and wise African woman at the center of the tale. The History of the Text of the Kәbrä Nägäst The remarkable Ethiopian narrative about Solomon and Makәdda “must be one of the most powerful and influential national sagas anywhere in the world,” writes the historian Edward Ullendorff.5 It enabled a seven-hundred year dynasty of 111 emperors (the Solomonic dynasty) and has lost no vigor despite the dynasty’s fall from power in 1974. The narrative has been retold continuously for at least a thousand years, is still widely believed by tens of millions of modern Ethiopians, and was written into the Ethiopian constitution of 1955 as historical truth.6 Tens of thousands in the African diaspora also believe in it, through the diasporic religion of Rastafarianism.7 When Solomonic dynasty member Haile Sellasie I was crowned emperor of Ethiopia in 1930, some saw this ascent as the fulfillment of Marcus Garvey’s prophecy that an African king would be crowned to save Africans around the world. Followers saw Ras Tafari (Haile Sellassie’s name before being crowned) as the true inheritor of the spiritual kingdom of King Solomon and the new Zion, and Solomon’s other lineal descendent, Jesus.8 Main elements of the story have become parts of twentieth-century popular culture, through the Indiana Jones films, the best-selling Da Vinci Code, and 5 Edward Ullendorff, The Ethiopians: An Introduction to Country and People, 2nd ed. (London, New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 64. 6 Revised Constitution of Ethiopia (Addis Ababa, 1953) Article 2, p. 3: “The Impe- rial dignity shall remain perpetually attached to the line . [which] descends without interruption from the dynasty of Menelik I, son of the Queen of Ethiopia, the Queen of Sheba, and King Solomon of Jerusalem.” Cited in Harold G. Marcus, A History of Ethiopia, updated ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 17. 7 Dereck Daschke and W. Michael Ashcraft, New Religious Movements: A Docu- mentary Reader (New York: New York University Press, 2005). 8 Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates (eds.), Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 1591–1593..

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