Kebra Nagast

The Kebra Nagast ('Glory of Kings') is the Ethiopian national epic, not scripture: it recounts the Queen of Sheba's visit to Solomon, the birth of their son, and his removal of the Ark of the Covenant from Jerusalem to Aksum. Compiled in its present Ge'ez form around the 14th century from older Coptic and Arabic material, it has long served as the foundational text of Ethiopian royal and national identity -- but it is a legendary epic, not part of any church's biblical canon, including the Ethiopian Orthodox 'broader canon' church-order texts elsewhere in this corpus. Translated here by Sir E. A. Wallis Budge (1922).

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