Birth of Menelik

At a Glance

• Central figures: Makeda, queen of the south, ruler of a kingdom stretching from Aksum; Solomon, king of Israel, builder of the Temple in Jerusalem; and Menelik, their son, first of the Solomonic line of Ethiopian kings.
• Setting: Jerusalem under Solomon’s reign, and the highland kingdom of Makeda, as told in the Kebra Nagast, the Ethiopian national epic compiled in Ge’ez from older sources.
• The turn: Solomon, having sworn not to take Makeda by force, extracts from her an oath not to take anything in his house - then sets a trap of thirst and spiced food so that she reaches for water in the night, breaking the oath and releasing him from his.
• The outcome: Makeda conceives a son, Menelik, who is born after her return south, and who will grow to manhood bearing the face of his father.
• The legacy: Menelik’s birth established the Solomonic dynasty of Ethiopia, the royal line that traced its descent from Solomon and Makeda through more than two thousand years of Ethiopian kingship.

Tamrin the merchant could not stop talking. He had gone north to Jerusalem with six hundred camels loaded with gold, black wood, and sapphires from the southern mines, and he had come back changed. Every evening he sat before Makeda’s court at Aksum and spoke of what he had seen. The temple that Solomon had built, its cedar pillars tall as old trees, its bronze sea held up by twelve oxen. The throne with six steps and two carved lions. The judges who spoke only when the king inclined his head. The servants who moved in silence, who ate in order of rank, who dressed in linen so fine it shone.

Makeda listened. She asked Tamrin to repeat certain details - the pillars, the judgments, the way Solomon answered riddles that other kings could not frame. She sat with this for many days. Then she told her caravan masters to prepare provisions for a journey north, a long one, through desert and across borders. Her counselors questioned the expense. She did not explain.

The Queen’s Arrival in Jerusalem

The caravan that entered Jerusalem was enormous - seven hundred and ninety-seven camels by one count in the Kebra Nagast, loaded with spices and gold and precious stones. Solomon received Makeda with full ceremony. He gave her a palace near his own. He gave her food from his own table. He gave her linen and myrrh and ointments. And then, because he was Solomon, he began to talk.

They spoke for days. Makeda put questions to him and he answered every one. She tested him with riddles and hard sayings, and he unraveled each. She had governed her own kingdom well and was no fool, but Solomon’s wisdom was different in kind - it did not merely solve problems, it saw through them to the structure underneath. She told him so. She told him that the God who had given him this wisdom was greater than the gods her people had served, and she praised the God of Israel in his court.

Solomon, for his part, watched the queen closely. She was tall and dark and carried herself as a ruler. He desired her. But he had given his word - publicly, before witnesses - that he would not take her by force. So he set his mind to another method.

The Oath and the Water

On Makeda’s last night in Jerusalem, Solomon prepared a feast. The food was rich and heavily spiced - pepper and cumin and salted meats, dishes designed to build thirst. He seated Makeda beside him and they ate together, and the conversation went long into the night.

When the meal was done, Solomon proposed an exchange of oaths. He would swear again not to take her by force. She, in turn, would swear not to take anything in his house without permission. Makeda looked around the room. She saw nothing she wanted that she had not already been given. The oath seemed easy. She swore it.

Solomon had a pitcher of water placed beside her bed.

In the deepest part of the night, Makeda woke. Her throat was dry from the spiced food. The room was dark, and the water was there, cool in its pitcher. She reached for it and drank.

Solomon stepped from behind a curtain.

You have broken your oath, he said. Water is the most precious thing in my house, and you have taken it.

Makeda looked at him. She looked at the water in her hand. She understood what had been done to her - the food, the oath, the pitcher placed just so. She was a queen and no one’s fool, and she saw the trap for what it was. But the oath was the oath. She had sworn before God, and she had broken it. Solomon was released from his.

They lay together that night.

The Ring and the Road South

In the morning, or in the days that followed - the Kebra Nagast does not linger on the interval - Solomon gave Makeda a ring. He told her: if you bear a son, send him to me with this ring, and I will know him.

Makeda gathered her caravan and began the long journey south. The desert crossing was hard. Somewhere on the road, she knew she was carrying a child.

She reached her kingdom. She resumed her throne. And in the time appointed, she bore a son. He was a boy with his father’s face - the Kebra Nagast is specific about this, that anyone who had seen Solomon would see Solomon again in the child’s features. Makeda named him Menelik, which the text renders as Ibn al-Hakim, son of the wise man, though the name itself passed into the Ethiopian tradition in its own form.

The Boy at Aksum

Menelik grew in his mother’s court. He was raised as a prince of the south, taught the governance of the kingdom and the ways of the highland people. But he knew who his father was. Everyone knew. The ring was kept, and the story was not hidden.

Makeda did not send him north as a child. She kept him with her, trained him, let him grow into the frame of a young man. He learned to lead soldiers and to judge disputes. He learned the landscape of his mother’s kingdom - the escarpments, the high plateaus, the lowland routes where the caravans moved. He grew into someone who could hold a throne.

When he was old enough - the Kebra Nagast places him at perhaps twenty years - he told his mother he wanted to see his father. Makeda gave him the ring. She gathered a retinue worthy of Solomon’s son and sent him north on the same road she had traveled years before.

That journey, and what Menelik brought back from Jerusalem, would change the kingdom forever. But on the day he was born, what mattered was simpler than that. A queen who had crossed a desert to hear wisdom had returned carrying a son, and the son bore his father’s face, and the line that would rule Ethiopia for more than seventy generations had its beginning in a pitcher of water reached for in the dark.