Kebra Nagast

Kebra Nagast — Budge — Section 24

and fifty-four years (a.d. 914-1268) and reigned at Aksum. Written accounts of the descent of the kings of Ethiopia from Solomon must have existed in Ethiopia before the close of the ninth century a.d. and these were, no doubt, drawn up in Ethiopic and in Arabic. During the persecution of the Christians in Egypt and Ethiopia by the Muhammadans in the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries, many churches and their libraries of manuscripts perished. We may, however, be sure that the Solomonic kings, who settled in the province of Shoa during the period of the Zague domination, man¬ aged to preserve chronological lists and other historical documents that contained the Annals of their prede¬ cessors. The second part of the Colophon mentions Abu ’1-Tzz and Abu ?1-Faraj as being concerned with trans¬ lating the book into Arabic, and makes one Isaac (?), who was apparently the Ethiopian translator, ask why they did not translate it into Ethiopic. In answer to this question he says that the Kebra Nagast appeared during the period of the Zague rule, when it is obvious that the publication of any work that supported the claims of the Solomonic kings would meet with a very unfavourable reception, and cause the death of its editors and translators. Therefore it is fairly certain that the Kebra Nagast existed in Arabic in some form during the three and a half centuries of the Zague rule, and that no attempt was made to multiply copies of it in Ethiopic until the restoration of the line of Solomonic kings in the days of Yekuno ’Amlak (a.d. 1270-1285). The Ethiopic work as we know it now is probably in much the same state as it was in the days of Gabra Maskal (‘Amda Seyon) in the first half of the fourteenth century of our era. Of Isaac we unfortunately know nothing, but there seem to be no good grounds for attributing the complete authorship of the Kebra Na- XXXll Introduction