Makeda reine de Saba Chronique Éthiopienne traduite pour le première…

Folio (328 × 250 mm), [4], xiii, [1], 84, [1] pages, six plates (one a frontispiece) and one vignette illustration by Barbier (all hand/pochoir coloured), illustrations (some colour), six sepia plates (uncoloured) by Michel Engueda-Work, numerous vignettes and ornaments by Louis Popineau, decorative borders. All plates and illustrations with lighter paper guards with printed captions. Original pale blue wrappers preserved in early red morocco by Joly, fils, with onlaid interlace cornerpieces, gilt borders and spine panels, silk and marbled endpapers, top edge gilt, other uncut. Marbled slipcase. Upper joint very slightly tender at head, spine just a little faded. A super copy.

First Barbier edition, copy number 7 of 100, of this sumptuously illustrated version of the story of the Queen of Sheba, combining illustrations by Barbier and the Abyssinian artist Michel Engueda-Work all printed as gravures by Manzi, Joyant and Cie. French scholar, traveller and diplomat, Hughes Le Roux had transcribed parts of the Ethiopian chronicle Kebra Nagast in 1904, with the help of local scholars, from a manuscript looted by the British at Maqdala and subsequently returned. The Kebra Nagast or ‘The Glory of the Kings,’ is a fourteenth-century national epic of Ethiopia, written in Geʽez by the nebure id Ishaq of Aksum. In its existing form, the text is at least 700 years old and purports to trace the origins of the Solomonic dynasty, a line of Ethiopian Orthodox Christian monarchs who ruled the country (until 1974), to the biblical king, Solomon and the Queen of Sheba.

The story of the text’s survival is interesting. The Battle of Maqdala, the last struggle in the British Expedition to Abyssinia, led to significant looting by the victorious British forces, who took Emperor Tewodros II’s crown along with ceremonial crosses, chalices, weapons and the holy icon Kwer’ata Re’esu along with two fine manuscripts of the Kebra Nagast which found their way to the British Museum (catalogued as Oriental MS 818 and 819 respectively). 819 was returned to Ethiopia in 1872 on the request of the Abyssinian king, who identified it as a fundamental source of law. Hugues Le Roux, a French envoy from the President of the French Republic to Menyelek II, King of Ethiopia, later went to Addis Alem in order to see this manuscript and to obtain his permission to transcribe it. He notes in his introduction here the inscription ‘This volume was returned to the King of Ethiopia by order of the Trustees of the British Museum, Dec. 14th, 1872’. Of the artist Michel Engueda-Work who is referred to elsewhere as an ‘Abyssinian artist’, almost nothing else is known, but his illustrations are of course far truer to the Ethiopian style than Barbier’s highly exoticised and eroticised interpretations, in which Sheba is portrayed (following long tradition) as a white woman. The text had appeared in English in an edition of 1907 (New York and London, Funk and Wagnalls) together with versions of Engueda-Work’s illustrations.