Bilqis, Makeda, and the Ark at Aksum

The Qur'an gives the episode a full narrative. Sulayman, who has been taught the speech of birds and commands jinn as well as people, reviews the birds and finds the hoopoe missing; it returns with news of a kingdom ruled by a woman with a mighty throne, whose people prostrate to the sun. A letter is sent, the queen consults her nobles and observes that kings when they enter a town ruin it, and sends a gift instead, which is refused. Sulayman then asks which of those present can bring him her throne, and one who has knowledge of the book says he will do it before his glance returns to him, and it is there. Invited into the palace, she takes the polished floor for a pool and uncovers her legs, and on being told what it is says that she has wronged herself and submits with Sulayman to the Lord of the worlds. Later Islamic tradition names her Bilqis; the Qur'an does not.

The Ethiopian Kebra Nagast, compiled in Ge'ez and reaching its surviving form in the fourteenth century, tells the visit as the origin of a dynasty. The queen is Makeda; Solomon obtains her by a trick involving a spiced meal and a promise about taking nothing without asking; and their son Menelik, returning to Jerusalem as a young man, leaves with the Ark of the Covenant, brought to Aksum where the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church holds that it remains. The claim of descent from that union was written into the Ethiopian constitution and was the formal basis of the Solomonic line until the deposition of Haile Selassie in 1974, which makes this one of the few cases where a narrative about Solomon operated as constitutional law within living memory.