Origins
According to the colophon attached to most of the existing copies, the Kebra Nagast originally was written in Coptic, then translated into Arabic in the Year of Mercy 409 (dated to AD 1225) by a team of Ethiopian clerics during the office of Abuna Abba Giyorgis, and finally into Ge'ez at the command of the governor of Enderta Ya'ibika Igzi'. Based on the testimony of this colophon, "Conti Rossini, Littmann, and Cerulli, inter alios, have marked off the period 1314 to 1321-1322 for the composition of the book.". Marcus, (1994), indicated that the religious epic story was conflated in the fourteenth century by six Tigrayan scribes. Other sources put it as a work of the fourteenth century Nebura’ed Yeshaq of Aksum. Recent historians to consider the evidence place it as late as the end of the sixteenth century, when Muslim incursions and contacts with the wider Christian world made the Ethiopian Church concerned to assert its character and assert Jewish traditions.
Careful study of the text has revealed traces of Arabic, possibly pointing to an Arabic vorlage, but no clear evidence of a previous Coptic version. Many scholars doubt that a Coptic version ever existed, and that the history of the text goes back no further than the Arabic vorlage. On the other hand, the numerous quotations in the text from the Bible were not translated from this hypothetical Arabic vorlage, but were copied from the Ethiopian translation of the Bible, either directly or from memory, and in their use and interpretation shows the influence of patristic sources such as Gregory of Nyssa.
Hubbard details the many sources that the compiler of the Kebra Nagast drew on in creating this work. They include not only both Testaments of the Bible (although heavier use is made of the Old Testament than the New), but he detects evidence of Rabbinical sources, influence from deuterocanonical or apocryphal works (especially the Book of Enoch and Book of Jubilees, both canonical in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, and such Syriac works as the Book of the Cave of Treasures, and its derivatives the Book of Adam and Eve and the Book of the Bee). Marcus thus describes it as "a pastiche of legends ... blended local and regional oral traditions and style and substance derived from the Old and New Testaments, various apocryphal texts, Jewish and Islamic commentaries, and Patristic writings".
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