A manuscript copy of Kebra Negast (The Glory of the Kings) is now held by Gonville & Caius College Library, having been presented by Emeritus Fellow Professor David Phillipson FBA (Archaeology and Anthropology 1961). 

This copy, of a codex held in the Cathedral Treasury at Aksum, Ethiopia, was commissioned from a Deacon at Aksum by Professor Phillipson, and is finely bound in embossed leather over wooden boards in the traditional Ethiopian style.  Such bindings continue a style, often misleadingly designated ‘Coptic’, developed in Egypt in the mid-first millennium AD.

The Kebra Negast, in the Ethiopian ecclesiastical language, Ge’ez, is discussed in Professor Phillipson’s book Foundations of an African Civilisation: Aksum and the northern Horn, 1000 BC – AD 1300 (Currey 2012).  He concludes that, although probably rendered in its current form (as in the Caius copy) in the early 14th century, it incorporates material dating back a further 700 years. Together with much theological discourse on both Old- and New-Testament themes, it includes a detailed account of the visit by Makeda, Queen of Sheba, to King Solomon of Israel, of the birth of their son – Solomon’s first, who became King Menelik I of Ethiopia – and of the latter’s subsequent appropriation of the Ark of the Covenant which he brought to Aksum.

Over the years, the Kebra Negast was accorded great importance as an account on which successive Ethiopian emperors based their claim to legitimate rule. Most recently, the last Emperor, Haile Sellassie I, imposed on his country a constitution which stipulated that rule was permanently controlled by the descendants of Menelik I, son of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. When a copy of the Kebra Negast was captured in 1868 by a British punitive expedition and lodged in the British Museum, the Trustees complied with Queen Victoria’s instructions that it be returned to the King of Ethiopia.