Sheba

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WESTERN ARABIA AND THE SHEBA-MENELIK CYCLE
important part of the European economy, let alone become the center of
any powerful state. Despite the collapse of the old savannah empires, the
British colony of the Gold Coast at independence in 1957 chose the name
Ghana, claiming that migrants from the old empire had settled in its
territory. In 1960, a part of former French West Africa took the name Mali
from its own past. Later another territory that had taken the name Dahomey,
after a famous militaristic state in that area, changed it to Benin, the name
of an old empire very firmly centered far away in Nigeria’s midwest. The
history of western Africa’s empires and their legacies are therefore most
illuminating when considering the histories of Old Testament Judaism,
western Arabia, the rise of Islam, and the A.D. 1948 establishment of the
state of Israel. They contain the same ingredients – a prosperous trade with
shifting routes, a monotheistic religion that provided bureaucracy, literacy,
urban development, empire, and a divine mission. This was then followed
by external aggression, impoverishment, and decline. After a long period
there was a revival under the leadership of a close-knit highly educated
religious elite who appealed to their ethnic kinsfolk to take control of the
political and commercial process from which they had been excluded.
Lastly, after freedom from imperial alien rule, there was the pride in the
remote past, which encouraged the new communities to associate
themselves with prestigious empires with which they had an exceedingly
nebulous link.
The archaeological evidence reveals that Palestine in the era of
Solomon was a peripheral area in which petty chiefdoms vied for local
supremacy in a drought-afflicted land frequently plagued by maritime
raiders. In contrast, western Arabia not only possessed all the elements
associated with an empire’s prosperity – control of highly lucrative trade
routes and oases where urban areas developed and where wealth from trade
sustained a literate bureaucracy and high court culture - but also political
timing.
Solomon ruled one of the earliest Iron Age empires. His state was able
to assert itself because of the fluctuating political fortunes of its powerful
neighbors. The Egyptians had failed to inflict a decisive victory over the
Assyrians and had withdrawn to Africa. The Libyans were encroaching into
western Egypt while the Sea Peoples devastated the Levant and the Nile
Delta. Copper and silver supplies were cut off. Official documents of the
period frequently bore a sentiment reflecting widespread pessimism: “I am
all right today; tomorrow is in the hands of God.” In ca. 1075 B.C.E. Egypt
was split into two states with capitals at Tanis in the delta under the