Stories
the narratives it tells itself
Makeda, Solomon, and the son who took the Ark.
In the Kebra Nagast the queen of Sheba visits Solomon, bears him a son, and that son Menelik returns to Jerusalem as a young man and leaves with the Ark — with the connivance, the text says, of the firstborn sons of Israel's priests. The story made Ethiopia the second Zion and its kings the house of David; the 1955 constitution still traced Haile Selassie's line to Menelik I. The dynasty ended in 1974 and the story did not.
Read it in full — context →
The Scriptures
the texts that carry the stories — and everything elseThe Ge'ez Bible in eighty-one books
The Book of Enoch
The Kebra Nagast
The Fetha Nagast — the law of the kings