After this, the archbishop Dĕmâtĕyôs reads from a book he had found in the church of "Sophia", which introduces what Hubbard calls "the centerpiece" of this work, the story of Makeda (better known as the Queen of Sheba), King Solomon, Menelik I, and how the Ark came to Ethiopia (chapters 19–94). These fathers pose the question, "Of what doth the Glory of Kings consist?" One Gregory answers with a speech (chapters 3–17) which ends with the statement that a copy of the Glory of God was made by Moses and kept in the Ark of the Covenant. The document is presented in the form of a debate by the 318 "orthodox fathers" of the First Council of Nicaea. This account draws much of its material from the Hebrew Bible and the author spends most of these pages recounting tales and relating them to other historical events. The Kebra Nagast is divided into 117 chapters, and is clearly a composite work Ullendorff describes its narrative as "a gigantic conflation of legendary cycles". Nadia Nurhussein wrote that "The Kebra Nagast gave textual authority to a then newly articulated mythology of Abyssinia’s long imperial history, legitimizing a “Solomonic” dynasty' that claimed to reach back three thousand years earlier to the union of King Solomon and the supposedly Ethiopian Queen of Sheba." It enabled the overthrow of the Zagwe Dynasty. It has been described as “an Abyssinian politico-religious epic” and "medieval-era mythology". As the Ethiopianist Edward Ullendorff explained in the 1967 Schweich Lectures, "The Kebra Nagast is not merely a literary work, but it is the repository of Ethiopian national and religious feelings". It also discusses the conversion of Ethiopians from the worship of the Sun, Moon, and stars to that of the "Lord God of Israel". The text contains an account of how the Queen of Sheba (Queen Makeda of Ethiopia) met King Solomon and about how the Ark of the Covenant came to Ethiopia with their son Menelik I (Menyelek).
It is considered to hold the genealogy of the Solomonic dynasty, which followed the Ethiopian Orthodox Church.
The text, in its existing form, is at least 700 years old and is considered by many Ethiopian Christians to be a historically reliable work.
Kebra Negast ( Ge'ez: ክብረ ነገሥት, kəbrä nägäśt), or The Glory of the Kings, is a 14th-century national epic from Ethiopia, written in Ge'ez by Nebure Id Ishaq of Axum, by the office of Abuna Abba Giyorgis and at the command of the governor of Enderta Ya'ibika Igzi'.
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