This, it should be remembered, occurred more than a thousand years before the birth of Christ, or to bring the years down to date, it was two thousand nine hundred and twenty-eight years ago—nearly thirty centuries. THE ETHIOPIANS CONQUERED EGYPT To diverge a few lines: Napoleon Bonaparte was a deep student, and when attempting the conquest of Egypt, he pointed his soldiers to the great Pyramids saying: “Soldiers of France, forty centuries are looking down upon you,” he uttered a truth of history, and established an Ethiopian empire a thousand years before Solomon. The reason is this: The Ethiopians conquered Egypt, or erected it into a province, and built the great Pyramids that still exist. But to return to the Queen of Sheba. She found a knowledge of God in her visit and carried it back to her people, because we find His worship beginning to make its appearance upon the monuments and inscriptions. Now a singular circumstance is presented by the claim of Ethiopian kings and princes after the visit of the Queen of Sheba to Solomon. It was claimed by the princes of Axoum, in Ethiopia, which was evangelized by the Empress Helena, consort of the Roman Emperor Constantine, in the year 324 of the Christian era, that the Queen of Sheba bore a son to King Solomon, and that he was the founder of a dynasty, the annals of the kingdom giving a long list of the kings descended from him, and relating that they governed for centuries without interruption. Pieces of their money still in existence and the inscriptions on recently unearthed monuments furnishing evidence of this fact. In a history of Alexander the Great, translated from the Ethiopian, it is related of another Queen of Sheba, who, in the year 332 before the Christian era, resisted that mighty conqueror with so much vigor, that he capitulated to her charms, as she was a most beautiful woman, and left her kingdom in peace. She laughingly reproached him for his weakness, so the story goes: “You, the mighty conqueror who have never been defeated by man, have been captured and defeated by a woman.” BLACK QUEENS WHEN CHRIST WAS BORN The reign of the Sheban dynasty was followed by that of the queens of Candace, who were ruling Ethiopia at the date of the birth of Christ, indeed, one of them is mentioned in the New Testament, Matthew 12:42, and her story is related in another chapter of this book. Among the many evidences of high civilization in Ethiopia, are its literary productions. There are several hundred books in the various public libraries of Europe which show a remarkable condition of development. In the way of history, there are the annals of ancient chronology by Georges Ibn-al Amid, which follows the genealogy of David from Adam, and a list of the kings of Israel and Judea, together with the principal events of their reigns. To this is added a chronology of the reigns of the Roman Emperors, and the Consuls.