#makeda

The Painting "Queen of Sheba" by Edward C. Slocombe, 1907. Queen of Sheba or Saba, also known as Bilqis in Arabic or Makeda in Ge'ez, is a figure mentioned in the Hebrew Bible. According to the original story, she brings a caravan of valuable gifts to Solomon, king of Israel and Judah.

Stories about her exist extensively in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. She is one of the most famous legends in West Asia and Northeast Africa, including regions which have significant influences from Abrahamic religions. I personally know her from Islamic sources first because I was a Muslim.

The historicity of her is disputed among many historians and archaeologists because evidence of her existence has never been found except in religious sources themselves. However, because the Kingdom of Sheba or simply Saba did exist around 1000 BCE to around 275 CE, in Southern Arabia, mostly in modern-day Yemen, then she may have existed too.

If she ever existed, then blessed be she, for she was one of the wise figures who desired to know the knowledge and wisdom of Solomon.

The Queen of Sheba

Bilqis and the hoopoe (King Solomon's messenger). Iran, Qazvin Style miniature, ca. 1595, tinted drawing on paper [details]

Qazvin Style was developed during the Safavid dynasty (1501–1736). A Sufi religious order, that established Islam in Persia and thus founding rulers of modern Iran.

The Queen of Sheba, Bilqis in Arabic and Makeda in Ethiopian, is a figure first mentioned in the Hebrew Bible, Book of Deuteronomy, Second Book of Kings [scholars trace all or most of Deuteronomistic history to the Babylonian captivity, 6th c. BC]

The original story has undergone extensive elaborations in Judaism, Ethiopian Christianity, and Islam (in that order)

Modern historians and archaeologists place Sheba in one of the South Arabian kingdoms (pre-Islamic states in modern-day Yemen)

"In a massive desire to quench her thirst for knowledge, this legendary queen supposedly paid a visit to Israel's wise King Solomon in Jerusalem (an encounter found in all texts, Hebrew, Ethiopian and Arab). Written accounts suggest that she bore the king a son, Menelik, who would become the first Ethiopian king in the Solomonic dynasty"

The most extensive version of the legend appears in the Kebra Nagast (Glory of the Kings), the Ethiopian national saga, translated from Arabic in 1322. Here Menelik I is the child of Solomon and Makeda (the Ethiopic name for the queen of Sheba; she is the child of the man who destroys the legendary snake-king Arwe) from whom the Ethiopian dynasty claims descent to the present day

In the 19th century, explorers I. Halevi and Glaser found in the Arabian Desert the ruins of the huge city of Marib. Among the inscriptions found, scientists read the name of four South Arabian states: Minea, Hadramawt, Qataban, and Sawa*, confirming the residence of the kings of Sheba was the city of Marib (modern Yemen, South of the Arabian Peninsula. Assyrian documents of the 8th-7th c. BC, mention Arabian Queens in the far northern regions of Arabia.

In the 1950s Wendell Philips excavated the temple of the goddess Balqis at Marib (capital city of Marib Governorate, Yemen)

In 2005, American archaeologists discovered in Sana'a the ruins of a temple near the palace of the biblical Queen of Sheba in Marib (north of Sana'a). According to the American researcher Madeleine Phillips, they found columns, numerous drawings and objects dating back three millennia

*Koine Greek: βασίλισσα Σαβά, romanized: basílissa Sabá sounds closer to the Sawa

Yemen (green) - Territory queen probably came from and Ethiopia (red) - The country where her son may have ruled

Queen of Sheba

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