Kebra Nagast
Immanuel Velikovsky

Make-Ra
Solomon 		Senenmut
Female Pharaohs

The rivalry between the Arabian and Ethiopian traditions for the Queen of the South can be decided against the Arabian claim and in favor of the Ethiopian, but only to the extent that she was the "queen of Egypt and Ethiopia", which is the true description by Josephus; which does not necessitate an approval of genealogical claims embodied in the Ethiopian traditions.

Mohammed, who endorsed the Arabian claims, was obviously wrong. He put into the mouth of Solomon the following words:

"I have compassed what ye compassed not; for I bring you from Seba [Saba] a sure information: verily, I found a woman ruling over them, and she was given all things, and she had a mighty throne; and I found her and her people adoring the sun instead of God." [10] The Koran, Sura, XXVII (transl. Palmer]

The land of Saba (Hebr. Shwa), because of the similarity in name, had confused the writers on the Queen of Sheba even before Mohammed borrowed the last sentence of the quoted Sura from the Hebrew Haggada, which he probably had heard from the Jewish teachers in Medina.

The Ethiopians are not satisfied merely to claim the Queen of the South as their queen; they insist that a child was born of her liaison with Solomon; his son, Menelik, is the direct ancestor of the dynasties of Abyssinian monarchs whose last representative was `Emperor Haile Selassie' . [July 23,1894 - deposed September 11th, 1974; died 1975]

Being of David's seed, the son of Solomon and the Queen of the South, their legendary ancestor, is regarded by them as kindred to Jesus, who through Joseph, the carpenter of Nazareth, also traced his ancestry to David. [20]

Philip and the Ethiopian Eunuch To this we might add, that the visit or pilgrimage of an Ethiopian eunuch to Israel was a sort of memory trip for this man, to connect with the country whose history had something in common with his own native land. We read:

"And the angel of the Lord spoke unto Philip, saying, Arise, and go toward the south toward the way that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza, which is desert. And he got up and went: and, behold, a man of Ethiopia, an eunuch of great authority under Candace, Queen of the Ethiopians, who had the charge of all her treasure, and had come to Jerusalem to worship, was returning (on his way back home) and sitting in his chariot reading the book of Isaiah the Prophet." [Acts 8:26-28]

Venerating the Queen of the South, who returned from her visit pregnant with royal seed, the Ethiopians honor more than any other passage in the Gospels the words:

"He answered unto them ... An evil and adulterous generation seeks after a sign ... The queen of the south shall rise up in the judgment with this generation, and shall condemn it: for she came from the uttermost parts of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon; and behold, a greater than Solomon is here." [Matthew 12:42; Luke 11:31]

The Abyssinian (Ethiopian) tradition is put down in writing in Kebra Nagast or The Book of the Glory of Kings.[30] The existing version in Ethiopia is a translation from an Arabic text, which in turn was translated from a Coptic text. It contains quotations from the Gospels and is therefore a fruit of the time when Christianity had already found its way to the African continent, in an early century of the present era.

And so we showed above, Christianity found its way to Ethiopia via the eunuch, who had himself baptized into the faith of Jesus by his apostle Philip.

With colorful imagination Kebra Nagast recounts the bridal night of Solomon and the Queen of the South; among the presents he gave her there were "a vessel wherein one could travel over the sea, and a vessel wherein one could travel by air."

When the queen returned to her country, "her officials who had remained there brought gifts to their mistress, and made obeisance to her, and did homage to her, and all the borders of the country rejoiced at her coming ... And she ordered her kingdom aright, and none disobeyed her command; for she loved wisdom and God strengthened her kingdom."

This quotation from the Kebra Nagast resembles the story of the festival for the officials and for the whole rejoicing land, arranged by Queen Hatshepsut after her return

Festival words from her journey; so do the words that "she ordered her kingdom aright" and that she "loved wisdom", as she had it written:

"I conciliated them by love that they may give to thee praise ... because of thy fame in the countries. I know them, I am their wise lord ..." [40]

In the days of the successor to Makere, we learn from the inscriptions of Thutmose III that, despite his hatred of Israel before its division in the days of Jeroboam, it appears he had learned about law making from the leading law


makers of his era and the role of wisdom for he wrote:

"Behold, my majesty made every monument, every law, (and) every regulation which I made, for my father, Amon-Re, lord of Thebes, presider over Karnak, because I so well knew his fame. I was wise in his excellence, resting in the midst of the body ... " [50]

But there is nothing so extraordinary in these things as to compel the conclusion that Ethiopian tradition about the Queen of the South knows more than the Scriptures narrate. Even the romance might be borrowed from a Jewish source [60], which in a single line says that the king responded to the desire of the guest queen. In the Jewish tradition there is nothing about a child having been born of this intimacy. [70]

Of course that would have happened 9 months later, far away in the south of Egypt.

It would of course strengthen the claim to originality of the Ethiopian tradition if it disclosed some fact not contained in the Scriptures, which could be checked with the help of our knowledge about Queen Hatshepsut, and which would be more than an accidental coincident. Even in this case it would necessarily mean that - in the words of Kebra Nagast - Solomon "worked his will with her", and a child of that union was enthroned in Aksum, "the New Jerusalem"; but it would show that the Ethiopian legend about the Queen of the South going to Jerusalem is not entirely a fanciful addition to the scriptural story, like the legend of Bilkis, the Queen of Saba of the Arabian authors.

Make-da and Make-ra

There is a detail in the Ethiopian legend which only by a rare chance could have been invented. The Ethiopians call the Queen of the South Makeda. The royal name of Queen Hatshepsut, mentioned throughout the Punt reliefs, is Make-ra. "Ra" is the divine name of an Egyptian god. The main part of the Egyptian queen is identical with the first two syllables in the name of the Queen of the South. It was preserved in the Ethiopian tradition; it did not come from the Scriptures.

One can imagine that if the name was not handed down by an uninterrupted tradition it could have been disclosed by some Copt, who might have lived in early Christian times in Egypt, seen the Punt texts in Deir el Bahari, and been able to read them, and in this way might have identified Hatshepsut with the Queen of Sheba ahead of the present author. There may have been a chronological reason, too, for such a hypothetical Copt to identify Hatshepsut with the Queen of the South, or he might have heard a legend that the reliefs of Deir el Bahari do represent a voyage to Jerusalem. The same theory could be applied to Josephus, who might have written "queen of Egypt and Ethiopia" on the basis of the scenes of the bas-reliefs at Deir el Bahari; he might have mentioned the kussiim (blacks) because they were in the picture. This is a forced construction since Josephus never was in Egypt; on the other hand, the historical facts known to Josephus and not preserved in the Scriptures must have been transmitted by some means during the 1000 years which separate Josephus from Solomon.

The Son

Thutmose I, father of Hatshepsut, conquered the northern part of Ethiopia known as Nubia. It is of interest that in Egyptian documents the viceroy of Ethiopia (Nubia) was called "king's son", which is supposed to be only a title, without implying blood relationship with the Egyptian king. [80] The name of the "king's son" in the time of Hatshepsut is not preserved; in the days of her successor, Thutmose III, the viceroy of Ethiopia was named Nehi.

Another incident in the Ethiopian legend - the robbing of the Temple in Jerusalem - we also deal with at this website. The actual successor to Hatshepsut on the Egyptian throne was the one who sacked the Temple, a deed attributed to the putative son of Solomon and the Queen of the South.

The Haggada

We took a short leave of the historical material to investigate the Ethiopian legend, and now we should like also to take a look at one or two Hebrew legends about the Queen of Sheba. Having become acquainted with the historical person, we are interested to know what stimulated the folk fantasy and how it worked.

We have already mentioned the divine command heard by Queen Hatshepsut compelling her to undertake her expedition to the Divine Land. On the murals, in the coronation scene and in other scenes, Hatshepsut is portrayed before the god Horus with the head of a hawk; a serpent of Lower Egypt or a vulture of Upper Egypt, as royal emblems, are also often pictured with her. [90]

A curious legend in the Haggada [100] narrates that the Queen of Sheba, while on her way one morning to pay homage to the god of the sun, received a message from a bird summoning her to visit Solomon in Jerusalem.

In the inscriptions Hatshepsut is called king; the pronoun used for her is sometimes "she" and sometimes "he"; on the pictures her raiment is that of a king. She is called the daughter of Amon, but in the picture of her birth a boy is molded by Khnum, the shaper of men. It was unusual, and contrary to the political and religious conceptions of the Egyptians, to have a woman ruling on the throne, therefore she disguised herself and assumed the attributes of a man. On many of her statues and bas-reliefs she is portrayed with a beard.

Rabbi Jonathan ca. 300 AD maintained that it was a king and not a queen of Sheba who visited Solomon. Egyptologist of the 1st half of the 19th century pictured and described Hatshepsut as a king, being misled by some of her statues and the masculine pronoun she applied to herself.

Could it be that, a few centuries after Hatshepsut, the pictures of Deir el Bahari, seen by visitors to Egypt, gave rise to these two strange legends?


Notes & References

[010] The Koran, Sura, XXVII (transl. Palmer.
[020] "They never doubted that Solomon was the father of the son of the Queen of Sheba. It followed as a matter of course that the male descendants of this son were the lawful kings of Ethiopia, and as Solomon was an ancestor of Christ they were kinsmen of our Lord, and they claimed the reign by divine right." [Budge, `Kebra Nagast', p. x] Today, as it has for some centuries before, this `divine right' is also claimed by another, unrighteous, persecuting and despotic power as we show here.
[030] "The Kebra Nagast is a great storehouse of legends and traditions, some historical and some of a purely folklore character, derived from the Old Testament and the later Rabbinic writings, and from Egyptian (both pagan and Christian), Arabian and Ethiopian sources. Of the early history of the compilation and its maker, and of its subsequent editors we know nothing, but the principal groundwork of its earliest form was the tradition that were current in Syria, Palestine, Arabia, and Egypt during the first four centuries of the Christian era." [Budge, pp. XV-XVI]
[040] Records, Vol. II, Sec. 288.
[050] Breasted, `Records', Vol. II, Sec. 568.
[060] Alphabet of Ben Sira 21b, Ginzberg, `Legends', VI, 289.
[070] Alphabet of Ben Sira 21b also states that Solomon married the queen of Sheba.
[080] G.A.Reisner, `The Viceroys of Ethiopia', Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, Vol. VI (1920), p. 31.
[090] E. Naville, `Deir el Bahari', Pt. II, Plates 35, 38, 39; idid., Pt. III, Plate 58, etc.
[100] Ginzberg, `Legends', Vol. IV, p. 143.
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