Menelik I

Menelik I is the traditional founding figure of Ethiopia's Solomonic dynasty, said in the Kebra Nagast, a fourteenth-century Ethiopian national epic, to be the son of the biblical King Solomon of Israel and Makeda, the Queen of Sheba. According to this tradition, he traveled to Jerusalem as a young man to meet his father and, on his return journey to Ethiopia, brought back the Ark of the Covenant, which Ethiopian Orthodox tradition holds is still kept in the city of Aksum. His historical existence is not independently verified by archaeological or contemporary written evidence, and modern scholarship generally treats him as a legendary or traditional figure rather than a documented historical one, but the Solomonic descent claimed through him remained a central legitimizing myth for Ethiopian monarchs into the twentieth century.