Kebra Nagast

Kebra Nagast — Budge — Section 18

of the Kebra Nagast edited from the manuscript at Berlin (Orient. 395), which Lepsius acquired from Dom¬ ingo Lorda, and sent to the Konigliche Bibliothek in 1843. To the Berlin text he added the variant readings supplied .from the MSS. Orient. 818 and 819 in the British Museum by Professor W. Wright of Cambridge. In 1877 Wright published a full description of the MS. of the Kebra Nagast in the Makdala Collection in the British Museum. The work of Praetorius made known for the first time the exact form of the Ethiopian legend that makes the King of Ethiopia to be a descendant of Solomon, King of Israel, by Makeda, the Queen of ?Azeb, who is better known as the “ Queen of Sheba.” In August, 1868, the great collection of Ethiopic manuscripts, which the British Army brought away from Makdala after the defeat and suicide of King Theodore, was brought to the British Museum, and among them were two fine copies of the Kebra Nagast. Later these wTere numbered Oriental 818 and Oriental 819 respectively, and were described very fully and care¬ fully by Wright in his Catalogue of the Ethiopic MSS. in the British Museum , London, 1 877, 1 No. cccxci, p. 297, and in the 7,eitschrift der Deutschen M orgenldndischen Gesellschaft , Bd. xxiv, pp. 614-615. It was the fate of Oriental 819, a fine manuscript which was written in the reign of ’Iyasu I, a.d. 1682-1706, to return to Abyssinia, and this came about in the following manner. On 10 Aug., 1872, Prince Kasa, who was subsequently crowned as King John IV, wrote to Earl Granville thus : “ And now again I have another thing to explain to you : that there was a Picture called Qurata Rezoo, which is a Picture of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, 1 A description of the very ancient copy of the Kebra Nagast in the Bibliotheque Nationale, which Zotenberg assigned to the thirteenth century, was published by him in his Catalogue des MSS. Jstkiopiens, Paris, 1877, No. 5, p. 6. XXVI Introduction and was found with many books at Magdala by the English. This Picture King Theodore took from Gon- dar to Magdala, and it is now in England ; all round the Picture is gold, and the midst of it coloured.