Few women of the ancient world have inspired as much fascination as the Queen of Sheba.
She appears only briefly in the Hebrew Bible, yet her story grew across thousands of years and several religious and cultural traditions. She became a queen of extraordinary wealth, a seeker of wisdom, a challenger of King Solomon, an African royal figure in ancient and medieval traditions, and according to Ethiopia’s celebrated Kebra Nagast, the mother of a royal dynasty.
In Ethiopia she is remembered as Makeda.
In Islamic tradition, she became associated with the queen commonly called Bilqis.
The first-century Jewish historian Flavius Josephus described Solomon’s famous visitor as a ruler connected with Egypt and Ethiopia.
And in February 1994, Ebony magazine brought renewed attention to the African dimensions of the biblical world in its influential article “Blacks in the Bible.”
But who was the Queen of Sheba?
Was Sheba in Africa, Arabia, or part of an interconnected Red Sea world that makes our modern geographical boundaries inadequate for understanding her story?
The answer leads into one of antiquity’s most compelling historical mysteries.
Who Was the Queen of Sheba?
The Queen of Sheba enters the biblical narrative during the reign of King Solomon, traditionally placed in the 10th century BCE.
Her story appears principally in 1 Kings 10:1–13 and 2 Chronicles 9:1–12.
The biblical writers never provide her personal name. She is simply called the Queen of Sheba.
Yet she is no ordinary visitor.
She hears reports concerning Solomon's extraordinary wisdom and travels to Jerusalem to test him with difficult questions.
She arrives with an impressive caravan carrying camels, spices, precious stones and enormous quantities of gold.
This detail matters.
The Queen of Sheba does not appear as a powerless visitor approaching a great king. She arrives with the resources and diplomatic presence of a wealthy sovereign.
She questions Solomon.
Solomon answers her challenges.
She examines his palace, administration and prosperity and is overwhelmed by what she witnesses. The two monarchs exchange valuable gifts before the queen returns to her homeland.
The encounter is remarkably diplomatic.
It is a meeting between rulers.
And although the biblical account is relatively short, the mystery surrounding the queen's identity would grow for centuries.
The Queen of Sheba and the African World
One of the most important questions is also the most controversial:
Where was Sheba?
Many modern historians associate biblical Sheba with the ancient Sabaean kingdom of southern Arabia, centered in what is now Yemen.
There is substantial historical reason for this interpretation. Saba was a prosperous civilization connected to the lucrative trade in incense and other commodities moving through Arabia and the Red Sea.
But the story becomes considerably more complicated when Africa enters the picture.
The Red Sea was not an impenetrable barrier separating Africa from Arabia. It functioned as a corridor through which communities, merchants, languages, ideas and goods circulated.
Ancient populations on the African and Arabian sides of the Red Sea interacted for centuries.
This means the question “Africa or Arabia?” can sometimes impose a modern geographical distinction on an ancient interconnected world.
And there is another extraordinary piece of evidence.
Josephus Called Her a Queen of Egypt and Ethiopia
Centuries before the medieval Ethiopian Kebra Nagast was written, the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus discussed the Queen of Sheba.
Writing in the first century CE in his Antiquities of the Jews, Josephus described Solomon's visitor as a woman ruling Egypt and Ethiopia.
That statement is extremely significant.
It demonstrates that an explicitly African interpretation of the Queen of Sheba existed in antiquity, long before modern Afrocentric scholarship and long before the surviving medieval version of Ethiopia's Kebra Nagast.
Josephus portrays the queen as highly intelligent and deeply interested in Solomon's wisdom. She travels to investigate his reputation personally and tests him with difficult questions.
Josephus's geography should not automatically be treated as proof that the historical queen ruled modern Ethiopia or Egypt. Ancient geographical terminology—especially words translated as “Ethiopia”—does not correspond perfectly with modern national borders.
Nevertheless, his testimony is important because it establishes something frequently overlooked:
The association between the Queen of Sheba and Africa is ancient.
What Ebony Magazine Said About the Queen of Sheba
This African interpretation received renewed attention among African American readers in the February 1994 issue of Ebony magazine.
The issue contained an article by Lisa C. Jones titled “Blacks in the Bible.”
The article examined scholarship challenging the overwhelmingly European imagery through which biblical history had often been presented in Western art, cinema and popular culture.
Among the scholars discussed was Dr. Cain Hope Felder, then a professor at Howard University School of Divinity and an important scholar of African presence in the biblical world.
The article emphasized that Africans were not peripheral to biblical history.
Egypt.
Cush.
Ethiopia.
North Africa.
These regions and their peoples repeatedly intersect with biblical narratives.
Among the personalities highlighted was the Queen of Sheba.
The article presented her within an African framework and associated her with Ethiopia and Egypt, reflecting a tradition with roots much older than the twentieth century.
That point is important.
The African interpretation of Sheba was not simply invented by Ebony magazine. As we have already seen, Josephus had associated Solomon's mysterious visitor with Egypt and Ethiopia nearly two thousand years earlier.
The Ebony article belonged to a larger effort to recover African presence from biblical history after centuries in which Western religious artwork routinely transformed ancient African and Near Eastern populations into Europeans.
Queen Makeda: Ethiopia's Queen of Sheba
Nowhere did the Queen of Sheba become more culturally important than in Ethiopia.
In Ethiopian tradition, the Queen of Sheba is known as Makeda.
Her extraordinary story is preserved most famously in the Kebra Nagast, or Glory of the Kings, one of the great works of Ethiopian literary and religious tradition.
The surviving Ethiopic form of the Kebra Nagast dates primarily to the medieval period, particularly the 14th century, although scholars recognize that it incorporates older biblical, legendary and traditional material.
The text dramatically expands the short biblical encounter between Solomon and Sheba.
Here the queen is no longer simply an unnamed monarch who visits Jerusalem.
She becomes Makeda, Queen of Ethiopia.
And her meeting with Solomon changes the destiny of a kingdom.
Makeda Meets King Solomon
According to the Ethiopian narrative, Makeda hears of Solomon's extraordinary wisdom and travels to Jerusalem.
Their meeting becomes far more elaborate than the account in Kings.
Makeda is impressed not merely by Solomon's wealth but by his wisdom and his relationship with the God of Israel.
Eventually, the relationship between the two rulers becomes intimate.
When Makeda returns to Ethiopia, she is carrying Solomon's child.
That child becomes Menelik I.
This is one of the most consequential additions to the Queen of Sheba tradition.
The biblical books of Kings and Chronicles do not say that Solomon and the Queen of Sheba had a child.
The story belongs to the Ethiopian tradition preserved in the Kebra Nagast.
That distinction is essential when separating biblical text from later sacred and national tradition.
Menelik I and the Solomonic Dynasty
According to the Kebra Nagast, Makeda's son grows up in Ethiopia and eventually travels to Jerusalem to meet his father.
Solomon recognizes Menelik as his son and wishes him to remain.
Menelik ultimately returns to Ethiopia.
But his journey home introduces an even greater mystery.
The Ark of the Covenant.
According to Ethiopian tradition, Menelik and his companions carried the Ark from Jerusalem to Ethiopia, where it eventually came to be associated with the sacred city of Aksum.
The Ethiopian Orthodox tradition maintains that the Ark is preserved there.
Historians cannot independently verify the Ark tradition, but its cultural and religious importance to Ethiopia is immense.
The story also became fundamental to Ethiopian royal ideology.
For centuries, Ethiopian rulers of the Solomonic dynasty claimed descent through:
King Solomon → Queen Makeda → Menelik I → the Ethiopian royal line.
The tradition survived into modern history and was associated with Emperor Haile Selassie I, the last emperor of Ethiopia.
Thus a brief encounter recorded in the Hebrew Bible became part of one of Africa's most enduring royal traditions.
Was the Queen of Sheba Black?
The question requires historical care because modern racial categories cannot simply be projected backward three thousand years.
The Bible itself does not describe the Queen of Sheba's skin color.
Nor does it explicitly call her Ethiopian.
However, there are legitimate historical reasons she became identified as an African and Black queen.
Josephus associated her with Egypt and Ethiopia.
Later Ethiopian tradition unequivocally claimed her as Makeda, an Ethiopian monarch.
Early Christian interpretation also helped associate the Queen of Sheba with African and Ethiopian imagery.
Modern scholarship has consequently examined how geography, biblical interpretation, ethnicity and later ideas about race shaped representations of the queen.
Scholar Jillian Stinchcomb, for example, has examined precisely how the Queen of Sheba became one of the Bible's most recognizable Black queens through ancient and later traditions.
Therefore, saying simply that “the Bible says the Queen of Sheba was Black” would go beyond what the biblical text actually states.
A more historically accurate statement is:
The Bible leaves her ethnicity and physical appearance unspecified, but an African identification of the Queen of Sheba developed in antiquity and became especially powerful in Ethiopian tradition.
That distinction does not weaken her African legacy.
It allows us to understand where that legacy actually comes from.
Was Sheba in Ethiopia or Yemen?
Archaeology adds another layer to the mystery.
The ancient kingdom of Saba flourished in southern Arabia, particularly in present-day Yemen. Sabaean civilization became wealthy through regional and long-distance commerce, including the trade in valuable aromatics such as frankincense and myrrh.
This makes southern Arabia a strong candidate for biblical Sheba.
Yet Sabaean culture was also connected across the Red Sea with the Horn of Africa.
Ancient communities did not live according to today's national boundaries.
The waterways connecting northeast Africa and Arabia facilitated trade and cultural exchange rather than simply separating the two regions.
This has led some researchers to argue that the Queen of Sheba story should be understood within a wider African–Arabian Red Sea civilization.
National Geographic has likewise examined the continuing debate between African and Arabian interpretations while noting the historical connections across the Red Sea.
There is therefore no universally accepted archaeological discovery identifying a particular historical woman as “the Queen of Sheba.”
No inscription has been discovered saying, in effect:
“I am the queen who visited Solomon.”
Her historical identity remains unresolved.
Could She Have Come From an Older African Civilization?
An intriguing modern proposal connects the Queen of Sheba with the wider commercial world of northeast Africa.
Scholar Wendy Laura Belcher has suggested considering connections with the ancient African land of Punt, known from Egyptian records centuries before the traditional age of Solomon.
Ancient Kemet traded extensively with Punt for valuable commodities including incense and other luxury goods.
The precise location and political geography of Punt remain debated, although scholars generally place it somewhere in the Horn of Africa/Red Sea region.
The suggestion does not prove that Makeda was a historical queen of Punt.
It does, however, remind us that sophisticated African trading societies existed in the region long before the rise of Aksum.
A wealthy African queen participating in international trade would therefore not have been inherently implausible.
The Queen of Sheba Was More Than Solomon's Visitor
Popular retellings sometimes reduce the Queen of Sheba to a beautiful woman fascinated by Solomon.
The oldest story gives us something much more interesting.
She is a ruler.
She controls enormous wealth.
She commands a major expedition.
She conducts diplomacy.
She asks difficult questions.
She seeks knowledge.
And she evaluates another monarch for herself.
The biblical story revolves around her intellectual curiosity almost as much as Solomon's wisdom.
She does not accept Solomon's reputation merely because others tell her about him.
She travels to investigate.
That makes the Queen of Sheba an extraordinary symbol of sovereignty, intelligence, curiosity and independent judgment.
The Ethiopian tradition magnifies those qualities further by making Makeda a foundational mother of the nation and dynasty.
Sheba, Kemet and the African Biblical World
The Queen of Sheba story also opens a larger conversation about Africa's place in biblical history.
Africa is not absent from the biblical world.
Ancient Kemet (Egypt) is everywhere in the biblical narrative.
Cush appears repeatedly.
African kingdoms interacted with the Levant through diplomacy, migration, warfare and commerce.
Moses' story is inseparable from Egypt.
Hagar is Egyptian.
The Hebrew Bible mentions Cushites repeatedly.
The New Testament's Acts of the Apostles famously describes an Ethiopian official traveling from Jerusalem.
The problem is therefore not that Africa is missing from biblical literature.
The problem is that generations of Western popular imagery often trained audiences not to see Africa even when Africa was explicitly present.
That was one of the important themes behind Ebony magazine's 1994 “Blacks in the Bible” article.
Recovering Africa's role does not require inventing history.
It requires examining the ancient sources more carefully.
The Queen Who Crossed Civilizations
Perhaps the greatest reason the Queen of Sheba remains so compelling is that no single tradition owns her.
In Jewish and Christian scripture, she is the mysterious Queen of Sheba who tests Solomon.
Josephus connects her with Egypt and Ethiopia.
Christian interpretation transforms her into a symbol carrying theological meaning.
Islamic tradition develops the story of Solomon and the Queen of Saba further.
Ethiopia knows her as Makeda, ancestral queen and mother of Menelik.
Arab traditions remember her as Bilqis.
African traditions turned her into one of antiquity's most celebrated queens.
And modern historians continue debating the historical kingdom behind the legend.
Her story crosses Africa, Arabia and the ancient Near East.
Perhaps that geographical complexity is not a weakness in the story.
Perhaps it is the key to understanding it.
The Queen of Sheba belongs to a period when the Red Sea connected powerful civilizations through commerce, migration and cultural exchange.
The Enduring Legacy of Queen Makeda
More than three thousand years after the era traditionally associated with Solomon, the Queen of Sheba remains unforgettable.
Her historical identity is still uncertain.
Her original name is unknown.
Her kingdom continues to be debated.
We cannot prove that she and Solomon had a son named Menelik, nor can archaeology currently verify the Ethiopian story of the Ark of the Covenant.
But some things are clear.
The Queen of Sheba was remembered in one of antiquity's most influential literary traditions.
An ancient Jewish historian explicitly connected her with Egypt and Ethiopia.
Ethiopia transformed her into Queen Makeda, one of the foundational figures of its national and religious memory.
And her legacy continues to challenge simplistic images of the ancient biblical world as a place disconnected from Africa.
The question may therefore be larger than “Was the Queen of Sheba African?”
Her story asks us to reconsider the interconnected world in which Africa, Arabia, Kemet and the ancient Near East encountered one another.
Behind the legends of gold, riddles, Solomon, Menelik and the Ark stands the image of an extraordinary queen who traveled across the ancient world in pursuit of wisdom.
Thousands of years later, Queen Makeda is still making the world ask questions.