Sheba

QUEEN OF SHEBA AND BIBLICAL SCHOLARSHIP 117
and reinstated the Semitic Solomonid dynasty under a leader named
Yekunno Amlak.
The final part of the Kebra Nagast was written in the first years of the
fourteenth century shortly after Yenno-Amlak’s reign for a purpose similar
to that when the bulk of the Caleb Cycle was written 800 years earlier. The
leader of the team responsible for drawing up the final edition of the Kebra
Nagast was Isaac, a senior church official in Aksum who knew Arabic
almost as well as Ge’ez and worked with four other translators and
redactors named Yemharana Ab, Andrew, Philip, and Mahari Ab. Isaac
acknowledged inspiration from Gregory Thaumaturgus, Domitius of
Antioch (or maybe Constantinople) and from Cyril of Alexandria. The
work had been commissioned by the governor of Aksum, Yabika Egzi, and
from its references it is certain that the document was put together between
A.D. 1314 and 1321, during the regency of Amda Seyon, the last ruler
mentioned in the king list. Its purpose was to prove that the king of
Ethiopia (the successor state of Aksum) was divinely ordained not only as
the inheritor of the Israelite royal tradition but also as the world’s most
respected Christian monarch, the keeper of the True Faith (Monophysitism).
It seems that Isaac’s team added very little to the Sheba-Menelik Cycle or to
the Caleb Cycle. Isaac states that his team translated it from an Arabic
original that had come to the kingdom during the reign of Gabra Maskal
(Lalibela), the famous Zagwe ruler responsible for enhancing Ethiopian
Christianity. Isaac stated that the document was not translated into Ge’ez
during the days of the Cushitic Zagwe because of its message that Semitic,
not Cushitic, monarchs were God’s chosen rulers. Other researchers have
claimed that the Sheba-Menelik Cycle was discovered in Nazret in Ethiopia
as an Arabic text at the end of thirteenth century, and that Isaac and his
team used it to write what became known as the Caleb Cycle. However,
this theory is untenable given the nature of the content of the Caleb Cycle,
which is so obviously from the end of the fifth century and beginning of the
sixth century. Had Isaac and his team written an original document in the
early fourteenth century they would have dealt with contemporary
theological and political issues such as usurping the Zagwe kingship, and
the Muslim threat. By A.D. 1314 Byzantium’s political alliances quoted in
the Kebra Nagast had no value, and it became a remote and almost
irrelevant power, falling in 1453. Despite the tradition that Isaac undertook
the production of the Kebra Nagast, it seems most likely his team merely
copied out an older text, half of it already translated from Arabic, and then
added the last section of the Kebra Nagast, probably chapters 113, 116, and