Progress and Achievements of the Colored People / Containing the Story of the Wonderful Advancement of the Colored Americans—the Most Marvelous in the History of Nations—Their Past Accomplishments, Together With Their Present-day Opportunities and a Glimpse Into the Future for Further Developments—the Dawn of a Triumphant Era. A Handbook for Self-improvement Which Leads to Greater Success

by Kelly Miller; Joseph R. Gay

THE ETHIOPIANS CONQUERED EGYPT

To diverge a few lines: Napoleon Bonaparte was a deep student, and when attempting the conquest of Egypt, he pointed his soldiers to the great Pyramids saying: “Soldiers of France, forty centuries are looking down upon you,” he uttered a truth of history, and established an Ethiopian empire a thousand years before Solomon. The reason is this: The Ethiopians conquered Egypt, or erected it into a province, and built the great Pyramids that still exist.

But to return to the Queen of Sheba.

She found a knowledge of God in her visit and carried it back to her people, because we find His worship beginning to make its appearance upon the monuments and inscriptions.

Now a singular circumstance is presented by the claim of Ethiopian kings and princes after the visit of the Queen of Sheba to Solomon.

It was claimed by the princes of Axoum, in Ethiopia, which was evangelized by the Empress Helena, consort of the Roman Emperor Constantine, in the year 324 of the Christian era, that the Queen of Sheba bore a son to King Solomon, and that he was the founder of a dynasty, the annals of the kingdom giving a long list of the kings descended from him, and relating that they governed for centuries without interruption. Pieces of their money still in existence and the inscriptions on recently unearthed monuments furnishing evidence of this fact.

In a history of Alexander the Great, translated from the Ethiopian, it is related of another Queen of Sheba, who, in the year 332 before the Christian era, resisted that mighty conqueror with so much vigor, that he capitulated to her charms, as she was a most beautiful woman, and left her kingdom in peace. She laughingly reproached him for his weakness, so the story goes: “You, the mighty conqueror who have never been defeated by man, have been captured and defeated by a woman.”