In the folk-Christian imagination of the highlands, shaped by the Kebra Nagast, King Solomon is less the biblical monarch than the wise progenitor of Ethiopia's sacred kingship. Renowned for a wisdom given by God, he receives the Queen of Sheba at his court and, by a stratagem involving a forbidden draught of water, wins her to his bed. Their son Menelik carries both the Solomonic blood and, in the epic, the tabot of Zion to Aksum, making Solomon the fountainhead of the dynasty that ruled the Christian highlands into the twentieth century.