Continuing with the education....
Ethiopia's rulers, befuddled by Western power and propaganda, had actually repudiated the reality of their African heritage and embraced the fabricated myth of a Caucasian identity. Misled by legend, pseudoscientific theories and anti-Negro indoctrination, Ethiopian leadership had sought to wash the color of the Abyssinian people white.
(W. R. Scott, "The Sons of Sheba's Race", 1993, p.206.)
Speaking about the genesis of "Kebra_Negest and Yukuno-Amlak," Mr Harold Marcus wrote,
As an usurper of power from the Zagwe Dynasty, the new monarch, Yukuno Amlak, encountered considerable resistance, and, in order to win over Tigray with its many Aksumite tradition, he and his supporters began to circulate a fable about his descent from King Solomon and Makeda, Queen of Shaba, and their son Emperor Menelik-I, a genealogy that, of course, gave him traditional legitimacy and provided him the continuity so honored in Ethiopian's subsequent national history.
("A History of Ethiopia," page 16)
Mr Marcus asserted in unmistakable terms the falsity of the document by saying, among other things:
It is a pastiche of legends conflated early in the fourteenth century by six Tigrayan scribes. Yishak, the chief compiler, claimed that he and his colleagues were merely translating an Arabic version of a Coptic work into Ge'ez. In fact his team blended local and regional oral traditions and style and substance derived from the Old and the New Testament, various apocryphal texts, Jewish and Islamic commentaries, and Patristic writings. The Kebra Negast's primer goal was to legitimize the ascendancy of Emperor Yukuno_Amlak and the 'restored' Solomonic line. Most of the book is therefore purposely devoted to the parentage of Emperor Menelik-I.
(See page 17)
Edward Ullendrof who was a through and through admirer of "Haile Sellassie & Greater Ethiopia" & immortally dedicated his book ("the Ethiopians") to Haile Sellassie- even writing it in Amharic and who translated Haile Sellassie's autobiography (Hiwettie'Na Ye'Ethiopia Ermiga - My Life and Ethiopia Progress) from Amharic into English and who cannot be accused for misrepresentation said this about the "Kebra Negast" in his book:
With a solemn assertion and word of force a British historian can summon, Mr. Ullendorff thundered by saying that
the historical fiction of uninterrupted line of Kings descended from Menelik-I, the son of King Solomon and Queen Sheba, has very deep roots in Ethiopia and must be one of the most powerful and influential sagas anywhere in the world.
Added Mr Ullendorff,
the historical kernel of this legend no doubt derives from the identification of the Ethiopian dynasty with Hebraic-Jewish elements in the Abyssinian past and their insistence on the Semitic, or at least Semitized, ethnic relationship.
(See page 61)
Continuing on the same vein, Mr. Ullendrof went on to say:
the Kebra Negest has as its 'piece de resistance' the legend of the Queen Sheba (based on the Bible's narrative in I Kings 10:1-13 and liberally amplified and embellished), how she visited King Solomon, accepted his religion, bore him a son (Menelik-I), and how the son visited his father and abducted the Arc of the Covenant, which was taken to Aksum, the new Zion. Apart from numerous quotations and paraphrase from the Old and the New Testament, we find generous borrowing from apocryphal literature, the Book of Enoch, the Book of the Pearl, from christological and patristic writing in Coptic, Syriac, Arabic, and Greek, from the testamentum Adami, Rabbinical literature as well as the Koran. The legend of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba has had a great vague tinge in many parts of ancient East. Details vary, especially the narrative of the King's seduction of the Queen, but all the principal ingredients can be found in the Targum Sheni of Esther or the Alphabet of Ben Sira, the Koran (Surah XXVII, 15-45), and many other sources. In fact, the main story must have had a very long period of gestation in Ethiopia and elsewhere and have possessed all the elements of a gigantic conflation of cycles of legends and tales. When it was committed to writing, early in the fourteenth century. Its purpose no doubt was to lend support to the claims and aspirations of the recently established Solomonic dynasty, its author, the Nubra'ed Yessaq of Aksum and his five helping scribes, were thus mainly redactors and interpreters of material which had long been known, but had not until then found a coordinating hand, an expository mind, and a great national need; such as Yukuna Amlak's legitimization.
(See page 138)
