The national epic of Ethiopia, written in Ge'ez and usually dated in its surviving form to the early fourteenth century. It tells how the Queen of Sheba visited King Solomon, bore him a son, Menelik I, who carried the Ark of the Covenant from Jerusalem to Aksum, moving the covenant's sacred center to Ethiopia. The text became the charter of the Solomonic dynasty, which ruled until 1974, anchored the Ethiopian Orthodox claim to hold the original Ark, and later shaped the Rastafari movement. Its world effect runs through dynasty, church, and crown across seven centuries, independently of any single author.
Most royal families trace their power to a conquest or a treaty. Ethiopia's traced theirs to a love affair between the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon, and to a son who stole the Ark of the Covenant from his own father. The book that tells this story did more than entertain. It told Ethiopians that God had moved his covenant from Israel to their land, that their kings were Solomon's heirs, and that the true Ark of the Covenant rested in a church at Aksum. For nearly seven centuries, an emperor's right to rule depended on that claim. When the last emperor fell in 1974, an ancient promise written on parchment fell with him.