Bilqis (Queen of Sheba)

Who is Bilqis (Queen of Sheba)?

Bilqis, known in the Western tradition as the Queen of Sheba, is the legendary ruler most closely associated with the ancient Kingdom of Saba (Sheba), whose heartland lay in the highlands of present-day Yemen around the city of Marib, home to the great Marib Dam and hundreds of surviving Sabaean inscriptions. She appears in the Hebrew Bible (1 Kings 10) as a queen who traveled to Jerusalem to test King Solomon's wisdom with hard questions, and in the Quran (Surah An-Naml) as a wise ruler who corresponds with Solomon and eventually accepts his faith. Both Yemeni and Ethiopian traditions claim her as their own, and while archaeology confirms that a wealthy, sophisticated Sabaean civilization flourished in Yemen during roughly the era in which she is placed, no inscription has yet identified a historical queen by this name, so most historians treat Bilqis as a legendary or quasi-historical figure rather than a documented one. She remains a powerful symbol of Yemeni antiquity, wisdom, and the wealth of the ancient incense trade routes that passed through southern Arabia.

Sources: 1 Kings 10 (Hebrew Bible) · Quran, Surah An-Naml (27:22-44) · St John Simpson (ed.), Queen of Sheba: Treasures from Ancient Yemen, British Museum Press (2002)