We are told that “the original of this manuscript had remained seventeen hundred years in an island of Lake Zouai, whose inhabitants are still of the purest Jewish type, but they were Christianized at a very early date, and their religion has now degenerated into fetishism. They knew nothing as to the contents of the manuscript, which they nevertheless regarded as a very precious object.” Whatever may be the real antiquity of this document its existence and the importance attributed to it seem to give evidence of a tradition of great age, and this tradition offers a credible explanation of the fact that such a people as the Abyssinian is found in the mountains of East Africa. No doubt the Habashes are now, almost universally, a race of mixed blood, but they possess a national character which is quite distant from that of the neighbouring tribes. The Semitic invasion may have taken place immediately after the captivity of the Jews in Egypt or at an earlier or later date, but it was powerful enough to affect the whole polity and population of Ethiopia. Generally, writers upon Abyssinia ascribe the incursion to the reign of King Solomon, and this is in accordance with a legend that is believed throughout the country. The Queen of Sheba was, of course, the Queen of Ethiopia; her visit to the wise and much-married king provided her with an heir; “her son Menelek was in due time transmitted to his august sire. The young prince was duly instructed in all the mysteries of Jewish law and science, and being anointed king under the name of David, he was returned to his native land, escorted by a large suite of the nobles of Israel, and a band of her most learned elders under the direction of Ascarias, the son of Zadok, the High Priest. “The gates of the temple of Jerusalem were left unguarded, and the doors miraculously opened in order that the holy ark of Zion and the tables of the law might, without difficulty, be stolen and carried away. The journey was prosperously performed, and the Queen-Mother, on resigning the reins of authority to her son at her death, about nine hundred and seventy years before the birth of Christ, caused a solemn obligation to be sworn by all that henceforth no female should hold sway in the land; and that those princes of the blood royal upon whom the crown did not devolve should, until the succession opened to them or during the natural term of existence, be kept close prisoners on a lofty mountain; a cruel and despotic enactment which, through a long succession of ages, was jealously observed.”[123] “The impetuous zeal of the emigrants,” wrote Mr. Stern, “found ample scope for its loftiest inspiration in the new world to which they were transplanted, and in the course of a few years the worship of the God of Israel extensively supplanted the idolatries of Ethiopia.