Text: Date: Thu, 2 Dec 1999 06:25:48 -0800 (PST) X-Sender: fegely@mail.earthlink.net Mime-Version: 1.0 To: esoteric@pyx.net From: fegely@montgomery19.com (Brian James Fegely) Subject: Esoteric: KEBRA NAGAST X-Rcpt-To: pgb@padrak.com You can't leave us hanging here...Please do go on with your story. Bro. Keeton, PM Harumph! well, now that I have poured my cup of Sidamo, settle back and I'll tell a tale of a most unusual book. "The Queen of Sheba and Her Only Son Menyelik" being a translation fo the Ethiopic 'Kebra Nagast' or 'Glory of Kings' was translated for Oxford Univ Press in 1921 by Sir E. A. Wallis Budge, perhaps the foremost Egyptologist and 'oriental' lingusit of the British Museum. I heard of this book about 1990 and determined to read same. I put in an interlibrary loan request and got a copy from Tulane Univ. and it was a very fine, almost poetic rendering of a magnificent Ethiopian legend concerning King Solomon and Queen Makeda/Bilquis; the copy was of the second edition 1928 and was missing some pages, razor-bladed out of the binding. Two chapters formed the lacunae: 'How Solomon recognized his first born Son' and 'The Plot to Steal the Ark from the Temple'. These being the most exciting parts, I typed up a notice of the lacunae for Tulane, and submitted a second loan request, this time coming from the Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary outside Boston. When it came in, I went straight to the 'missing parts' and found them razor-bladed out of this copy too. I notified them, through my library, of the missing parts, and then heard of African Islamic Mission Publications out of Brooklyn which had it still in print, so orderd in through a chain bookstore hereabouts. It took some months to arrive, and proved to be a photo-offset of a copy in the Library of Congress. Well! here at last was a whole copy..... not so, as at the SAME PLACES there were blank pages with notices stating "text missing in original"! There is one intact copy of which I am aware, in the Library of the Philadelphia Masonic Temple at #1 North Broad Street where I had photocopied the missing parts, so that my shelf copy is also complete; copies of the lacunae were also forwarded to Sister Kibbibbi of AIM but to my knowledge they have not been inserted in their edition. There is another translatio by Miguel Brooks and published by Red Sea Press, but is less fluent than Budge's earlier work, even if his commentary shows all the insensitivity of 19th Century colonialists. whew! Bro Brian Fegely hey, I'm off for Ethiopia as soon as the finances are in line.

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