The Kebra Nagast

The Kebra Nagast — the Glory of Kings — is the national epic of Ethiopia, written in Ge’ez and attributed to Nebure Id Yeshaq of Aksum, who compiled it in the early fourteenth century (about 1314–1322).

It tells how Makeda, the Queen of Sheba, travelled to the court of King Solomon in Jerusalem; how their son Menelik I returned as a man and brought the Ark of the Covenant — the Tabot — to Aksum; and how Ethiopia thereby became a second Israel.

The book did real work in the world: it grounded the Solomonic dynasty that ruled until 1974 and remains a treasury of Ethiopian national and religious sentiment. Scholars read it as a fourteenth-century work that legitimised that dynasty; many Ethiopian Christians receive it as reliable history. As you read, you can hold both at once.

The narrative is built as a journey and a transfer. Makeda hears of Solomon’s wisdom and travels to Jerusalem; she is won to the God of Israel; and her son, returning years later, carries the Ark from the Temple to Aksum, where — in the telling — it remains. Around this spine the compiler gathered prophecy, genealogy, and typology, reading the whole of Scripture as pointing toward Ethiopia’s election.

For the Ethiopian Church the Kebra Nagast is not merely literature. Every church shelters a tabot, a consecrated tablet representing the Ark; the book gives that daily practice its founding story. To read it is to stand inside the imagination of a people who understood themselves as keepers of the Ark and heirs of Israel.