Makeda

Makeda, known throughout the Christian highlands as the Queen of Sheba, is the central heroine of the Kebra Nagast, the fourteenth-century national epic of Ethiopia. Drawn by her merchant Tamrin's account of Solomon's wisdom, she journeys to Jerusalem, is won by a stratagem into the king's bed, and conceives a son. Returning to her own land she abdicates in his favour and, in the epic's telling, turns her people from the worship of the sun to the God of Israel, becoming the ancestress of the Solomonic kings who claimed her descent until 1974.

Children

• Menelik I

Domains

• sovereignty
• wisdom

Powers

• founds the Solomonic royal line of Ethiopia

Epithets

• ንግሥተ ሳባ

Relations

• lover: Solomon
• child: Menelik I
• companion: Tamrin

Sources

• E. A. Wallis Budge (trans.), The Queen of Sheba and Her Only Son Menyelek (Kebra Nagast) (London: Oxford University Press, 1922), chs. 21–34.
• Encyclopaedia Aethiopica, s.v. 'Kebra Nagast' and 'Makǝda' (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2007).