page_title: Habesha peoples
section_title: Indigenous theory
hierarchical_section_title: Habesha peoples / Origins / Indigenous theory
caption_attribution_description: English: Nigist (Queen) Makeda of Sheba
context_page_description: Habesha peoples is a term most frequently employed to refer to Semitic language-speaking Christian peoples of highland Ethiopia and Eritrea. Recently, the term has been applied by some within diasporic communities to refer to all people of Eritrean or Ethiopian origin.
context_section_description: The Imperial family of Ethiopia (which is currently in exile) claims its origin directly from descent from Solomon and the Queen of Sheba (Ge'ez: ንግሥተ ሣብአ nigiśta Śabʿa), who is named Makeda (Ge'ez: ማክዳ) in the Ethiopian account. The Ethiopian narrative Kebra Negast ("Glory of Kings"), written in 1225 AD contains an account of Makeda and her descendants. Solomon is said in this account to have seduced the Queen, and sired a son by her, who would eventually become Menelik I, the first Emperor of Ethiopia. The tradition that the biblical Queen of Sheba was an ingenuous ruler of Ethiopia who visited King Solomon in Jerusalem is repeated in a 1st-century account by the Roman Jewish historian Josephus. He identified Solomon’s visitor as a queen of Egypt and Ethiopia. There is no primary evidence, archaeological or textual, for the queen in Ethiopia. The impressive ruins at Aksum are a thousand years too late for a queen contemporary with Solomon, based on traditional dates for him of the 10th century BC.
  In the past, European scholars including Hiob Ludolf and Carlo Conti Rossini postulated that the ancient communities that evolved into the modern Ethiopian state were formed by a migration across the Red Sea of Semitic-speaking South Arabians around 1000 BC, who intermarried with local non-Semitic-speaking peoples. Both the indigenous languages of Southern Arabia and the Amharic and Tigrinya languages of Ethiopia belong to the large branch of South Semitic languages which in turn is part of the Afro-Asiatic Language Family. Even though the Ethiosemitic languages are classified under the South Semitic languages branch with a Cushitic language substratum, Edward Ullendorff and Carlo Conti Rossini's theory that Ethioemitic-language speakers of the northern Ethiopian Highlands were ancient foreigners from Southwestern Arabia has been disputed by most modern indigenous Horn African scholars like Messay Kebede and Daniel E. Alemu. Ethiopian scholars specializing in Ethiopian Studies such as Messay Kebede and Daniel E. Alemu generally disagree with this theory arguing that the migration was one of reciprocal exchange, if it even occurred at all.
  Kebede states the following:
  
  This is not to say that events associated with conquest, conflict and resistance did not occur. No doubt, they must have been frequent. But the crucial difference lies in the propensity to present them, not as the process by which an alien majority imposed its rule but as part of an ongoing struggle of native forces competing for supremacy in the region. The elimination of the alien ruler indigenize Ethiopian history in terms of local actors.
  Scholars have determined that the ancient Semitic language of Ethiopia was not derived from an Old South Arabian language such as Sabaean. There is evidence of a Semitic-speaking presence in Ethiopia and Eritrea as early as 2000 BC. There is also evidence of ancient Southern Arabian communities in modern-day Ethiopia and Eritrea in certain localities, attested by some archaeological artifacts and ancient Sabaean inscriptions in the old South Arabian alphabet. However, Stuart Munro-Hay points to the existence of an older D'MT kingdom, prior to any Sabaean migration c. 4th or 5th century BC, as well as evidence that Sabaean immigrants had resided in Ethiopia for little more than a few decades at the time of the inscriptions. Archeological evidence has revealed a region called Saba in Northern Ethiopia and Eritrea; it is now referred to as "Ethiopian Saba" to avoid confusion.
  Essentially no archaeological evidence supports the story of the Queen of Sheba. "In the 21st century, scholars have largely discounted the longstanding presumption that Sabaean migrants had played a direct role in Ethiopian civilization." Munro-May and related scholars believe that Sabaean influence was minor, limited to a few localities, and disappearing after a few decades or a century. It may have represented a trading colony (tarding post) or military installations in a symbiotic or military alliance between the Sabaens and D`MT.
  In the reign of King
caption: Nigist (Queen) Makeda of Sheba
exif: {}