In 1923, wäyzäro Mänän Asfaw—the wife of Crown Prince Täfäri Mäkonnen— made a momentous journey from Ethiopia to the Middle East. Joined by a small group of companions, she set out from Addis Ababa to the French port of Djibouti, boarded a steamship to Suez and Port Said, and then traveled by train to British Mandate Palestine, where she visited many of the colony's dignitaries, religious leaders, and historic sites. On her return, she stopped in newly independent Egypt for tours of Cairo and Luxor before continuing home. Wäyzäro Mänän was accompanied on this adventure by then-blatta Ḫeruy, whose account of their journey offers occasional hints of the tremendous significance he believed it possessed. In one episode, Ḫeruy wrote that as wäyzäro Mänän and her entourage passed from the familiar landscape of the Ethiopian highlands and the Red Sea littoral to the comparatively foreign world of the Levant, the travelers took comfort in the fact that they were retracing the itinerary of an august predecessor. As they arrived in the Holy Land, Ḫeruy noted that they had reached the very “Gaza of Solomon” once visited by Makedda, or Queen Azéb—the ancient Ethiopian interlocutor of the wise Israelite king. The pilgrims were thus in the hallowed setting of the Kebrä nägäśt. Through this allusion to the sacred past, Ḫeruy carefully positioned the journey as history in the remaking: a modern would-be empress was following in the footsteps of Ethiopia's ancient founding mother.

Some years later, in the early 1930s, Ḫeruy—by now blattén géta and Emperor Ḫaylä Śellasé's Minister of Foreign Affairs—again turned to the ancient tale of Makedda as he reflected upon his travels abroad. This time, it was in connection to his 1931 diplomatic mission to Japan, which he saw as the beginning of Ethiopia's historic rapprochement with East Asia after centuries of fraught relations with Europe. In the introduction to his account of the voyage, Ḫeruy characteristically offered his readers— for context—a survey of Ethiopia's interactions with the wider world, and this account naturally began with the familiar story of that first intrepid Ethiopian seeker of knowledge, the Queen of Sheba, and the son she conceived with Solomon.