Kebra Nagast

Kebra Nagast — Budge — Section 23

or authors of the Ethiopic version stated that the original source of their work was a Coptic archetype in order to give it an authority and importance which it would not otherwise possess. On the other hand, Wright merely regarded the Kebra Nagast as an “ apo¬ cryphal wrork,” and judging from the list of kings at the end of the work in Oriental 818, fol. 46B, which ends with Yekweno ’Amlak, who died in 1344, concluded that it was a product of the fourteenth century (Cata¬ logue, p. 301, col. 2). A careful study of the Kebra Nagast, made whilst translating the work into English, has convinced me that the opening statements in the Colophon are substan¬ tially correct, and that it is quite possible that in its original form the Arabic version of the book was trans¬ lated from Coptic MSS. belonging to the Patriarchal Library at Alexandria, and copies of this Arabic trans¬ lation, probably enlarged and greatly supplemented by the scribes in the various monasteries of Egypt, would soon find their way into Ethiopia or Abyssinia, via the Blue Nile. The principal theme of the Kebra Nagast, i.e. the descent of the Kings of Ethiopia from Solomon, King of Israel, and the “ Queen of the South,” or the “ Queen of Sheba,” was certainly well known in Ethio¬ pia for centuries before the Kebra Nagast was com¬ piled, but the general treatment of it in this work was undoubtedly greatly influenced by supplementary legends and additions, which in their simplest forms seem to me to have been derived from Coptic and even Syrian writers. It is well known that the Solomonic line of kings con¬ tinued to rule over Ethiopia until that somewhat mythi¬ cal woman Esther, or Judith as some call her, succeeded in dethroning Delna’ad and placing on the throne Mara Takla Haymanot, the first of the eleven Zague kings, who dispossessed the Solomonic kings for three hundred xxxi f Introduction