The Axumites of old were also renowned as fine builders and craftsmen, skilled in particular as masons and metal workers as will be evident to anyone visiting the city's antiquities, and especially in its small, but well worth visiting museum.

Axum's greatest significance, however, is as the epicentre of the Queen of Sheba dynasty, upon which rests the notion of the sacred kingship of the Semitic peoples of Ethiopia - a notion that links the recent past to ancient times in most unambiguous fashion. The 1955 Constitution introduced by the late Emperor Haile Selassie, for example, only reiterated what everybody then regarded as incontrovertible truth. It stated: "The Imperial Dignity shall remain perpetually attached to the line of Haile Selassie I, whose Line descends without interruption from the dynasty of Menelik I, son of the Queen of Ethiopia, the Queen of Sheba, and King Solomon of Jerusalem.... By virtue of His Imperial Blood, as well as by the annointing which He has received, the Person of the Emperor is sacred, His Dignity inviolable and His Power indisputable...."

Haile Selassie claimed to be the 225th monarch of the Solomonic line. His removal from power by junior army officers in 1974, and his death in obscure circumstances a year later, thus marked the end of an era - and the beginning of the end of an entire way of life.

The appeal to historical continuity is somewhat overstated in the 1955 Constitution. In fact, there were a number of interruptions to the rule of the Solomonic line - by no means the least important of which was the Zagwe dynasty which bequeathed to Ethiopia the priceless legacy of the Lalibela churches. Only late in the thirteenth century - after the intervention of a saint, Tekla Haimanot - was one of King Lalibela's successors persuaded to abdicate in favour of a candidate claiming Solomonic descent. That they should have abdicated at all, however, bears witness to the enduring mystique of the Solomon and Sheba legend.

Indeed, the power of this legend is such that it has infiltrated numerous cultures outside Ethiopia. The earliest written form still extant is preserved in two books of the Old Testament. These narrate that the Queen of Sheba, lured by Solomon's fame, journeyed to Jerusalem with a great caravan of costly presents and there communed with him of all that was in her heart. King Solomon, for his part, gave to the Queen of Sheba all her desire.... So she turned and went to her own land, she and her servants.