Kebra Nagast

Kebra Negast (Ge'ez: ክብረ ነገሥት, kəbrä nägäśt), or The Glory of the Kings, is a 14th-century[1] national epic of Ethiopia, written in Geʽez by the nebure id Ishaq of Aksum.

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".

[8] The Kebra Nagast is divided into 117 chapters, and is clearly a composite work;[citation needed] Ullendorff describes its narrative as "a gigantic conflation of legendary cycles".

After this, the archbishop Dĕmâtĕyôs[a] reads from a book he had found in the church of "Sophia", which introduces what Hubbard calls "the centerpiece" of this work, the story of Makeda (better known as the Queen of Sheba), King Solomon, Menelik I, and how the Ark came to Ethiopia (chapters 19–94).

This company of young men, upset over leaving Jerusalem, smuggled the Ark of the Covenant from Solomon's Temple and out of the kingdom (chapters 45–48) without Menelik's knowledge.

The king attempts to pursue Menelik, but through the Ark's mysterious power, his son, with his entire entourage, is miraculously flown home to Ethiopia before Solomon can leave his kingdom.

These chapters seek to prove by Old Testament allegories and proof-texts the Messianic purpose of Jesus, the validity of the Ethiopian forms of worship, and the spiritual supremacy of Ethiopia over Israel".

According to the colophon attached to most of the existing copies, the Kebra Nagast originally was written in Coptic, then translated into Arabic in the "year of mercy" 409 (dated to AD 1225),[12] and then into Ge'ez by a team of clerics in Ethiopia—Yəsḥaq, Yəmḥarännä ˀAb, Ḥəzbä-Krəstos, Ǝndrəyas, Filəp̣p̣os, and Mäḥari ˀAb—during the office of Abuna Abba Giyorgis and at the command of the governor of Enderta Ya'ibika Igzi'.

[18] Other historians consider parts of the Kebre Negast date to as late as the end of the sixteenth century, when Muslim incursions and contacts with the wider Christian world made the Ethiopian Church concerned with asserting its character and Jewish traditions.

[d] Old Testament scholar David Allan Hubbard identified Patristic, Qur'anic, Rabbinical and Apocryphal texts as sources for the Kebra Nagast.

[e] Marcus thus describes it as "a pastiche of legends ... [that] blended local and regional oral traditions and style and substance derived from the Old and New Testaments, various apocryphal texts, Jewish and Islamic commentaries, and Patristic writings".

In the papers concerning this mission, Álvares included an account of the Emperor of Ethiopia, and a description in Portuguese of the habits of the Ethiopians, titled The Prester John of the Indies, which was printed in 1533.

The Jesuit missionary Pedro Páez included a detailed translation of the Kebra Nagast through Menelek's return to Aksum with the Ark of the Covenant in his História da Ethiópia.

Further information about the contents of the Kebra Nagast was supplied by Baltazar Téllez (1595–1675), the author of the Historia General de Etiopía Alta (Coimbra, 1660).

[citation needed] It was not until the close of the eighteenth century, when James Bruce of Kinnaird, the famous Scottish explorer, published an account of his travels in search of the sources of the Nile, that information as to the contents of the Kebra Nagast came to be generally known among European scholars and theologians.

When Bruce was leaving Gondar, Ras Mikael Sehul, the powerful Inderase (regent) of Emperor Tekle Haymanot II, gave him several of the most valuable Ethiopic manuscripts.

Modern scholarly opinion is that there is no historical evidence supporting the legends relating to the claimed origins of the Solomonic dynasty in the Kebra Negast.

[3] Historian Harold G. Marcus describes the stories of the Kebra Nagast as a "pastiche of legends" created to legitimize Yekuno Amlak's seizure of power.