Ethiopia’s Emperors Ruled for Centuries — Where Are Their Heirs Now?

On the morning of September 12, 1974, officers from the Coordinating Committee of the Armed Forces arrived at the palace to summon the Emperor of Ethiopia to his own library. He was 82 years old and had reigned for 44 years. His formal title was so extensive that it occupied four lines of official correspondence: His Imperial Majesty, Haile Selassie I, King of Kings, Lord of Lords, Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah, and Elect of God. The men standing before him presented a single sheet of paper and read a proclamation aloud. It accused him of abusing his authority, committing crimes against the Ethiopian people, and concealing a famine that had claimed the lives of 100,000 of his subjects in the northern provinces while the palace continued to host lavish banquets. The emperor listened intently and then offered a protest. He argued that he had served Ethiopia through both war and peace, that he had represented the nation before the League of Nations when no one else would, and that he had built the Organization of African Unity with his own hands. An awkward silence filled the room, but the officers did not engage him in debate. They had not come for a discussion.

Outside in the palace courtyard, a car was waiting. It was not the maroon Mercedes-Benz limousine that had transported the emperor through four decades of state occasions, but rather a simple blue Volkswagen Beetle. The vehicle had been chosen specifically for its small size, ensuring that no one on the streets of Addis Ababa would think to look inside it for the ruler of the oldest continuous monarchy in Africa. An officer pulled the front seat forward so that the aging emperor, who stood barely five feet tall, could fold himself into the back. When he asked about the small car, no one answered him directly; they simply helped him inside. As the Beetle pulled away from the Jubilee Palace, the emperor turned to look behind him, but his view was obstructed. Hundreds of students had gathered beyond the gates, shouting for his execution. He could hear them through the glass, but he could no longer see the building where he had been crowned, where he had received foreign heads of state, and where the lions he kept chained at the entrance had paced for decades. The lions were already gone, and the students had been waiting there since dawn.

Within hours, Radio Ethiopia announced the end of the Solomonic dynasty. The constitution was suspended, and parliament was dissolved. Seven hundred and four years of continuous rule—the longest-reigning royal house in African history—were terminated in the back seat of a Volkswagen Beetle on a Tuesday morning. The Crown Prince, Asfaw Wossen, who was paralyzed by a stroke in a Swiss hospital, would be named king in absentia, a title he refused to accept. Princess Tenagne Work, the emperor’s eldest surviving daughter, would spend 15 years as prisoner number one in Ethiopia’s central prison. Rear Admiral Iskander Desta, the emperor’s grandson, would be executed by a firing squad within 73 days. Prince Zera Yacob, the designated heir, would eventually live in modest circumstances in Manchester, England. Princess Seble Desta, an imperial granddaughter, would spend her post-prison years volunteering at a public library in the United States, teaching immigrants to read. As for the emperor himself, the Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah, he would be strangled in his bed and buried under a latrine.

What that morning erased was not merely a government. The Solomonic dynasty claimed descent from King Solomon of Israel and the Queen of Sheba through their son, Menelik I, who allegedly carried the Ark of the Covenant from Jerusalem to Ethiopia around 982 years before Christ. This claim was codified in the Kebra Nagast, or the Glory of Kings, a 14th-century Ethiopian national epic written in Ge’ez across 117 chapters. According to the text, the Queen of Sheba—known as Makeda in the Ethiopian tradition—visited Solomon in Jerusalem, conceived a son, and returned to Africa. With Menelik came the transfer of God’s favor from Israel to Ethiopia. Whether this origin story was historical or mythological mattered less than the fact that an entire civilization had organized itself around it for centuries. The emperor’s person was declared sacred by law, and his descent was declared unbroken by the constitution. The 1955 revised constitution stated explicitly: “The imperial dignity shall remain perpetually attached to the line of Haile Selassie I, descendant of King Sahle Selassie, whose line descends without interruption from the dynasty of Menelik I, son of King Solomon of Jerusalem and of the Queen of Ethiopia, known as the Queen of Sheba.”

The verified record was more modest but still extraordinary. The dynasty’s documented founding dates to 1270, when a nobleman named Yekuno Amlak overthrew the last Zagwe king at the Battle of Ansata and claimed Solomonic ancestry to legitimize his coup. From that year until September 12, 1974, a span of 704 years, the Solomonic line held the Ethiopian throne. The traditional regnal list claimed 225 monarchs stretching back three millennia. A 1922 compilation prepared for the future Haile Selassie listed 313 numbered rulers beginning in 4530 BCE. The verified count was between 50 and 60 emperors, which was remarkable enough. No European dynasty came close; the Habsburgs managed for 640 years, and the Capetians for 341. The House of Solomon ruled longer than any of them, and it did so on a continent that European cartographers routinely left blank.

At its peak under Emperor Menelik II, who reigned from 1889 to 1913, the empire encompassed approximately 790,000 square kilometers, roughly the size of modern Ethiopia and larger than France and Germany combined. Menelik founded Addis Ababa in 1894 and won the Battle of Adwa on March 1, 1896, routing approximately 17,000 Italian and Eritrean auxiliary troops with a force of 100,000 Ethiopians. It was the first decisive defeat of a European colonial power by an African army, and it secured Ethiopia’s status as the only African nation, besides Liberia, to resist the scramble for Africa entirely. When the rest of the continent was carved into European possessions at the Berlin Conference of 1884, Ethiopia was the exception that proved the rule—an empire that fought back and won.

Haile Selassie’s 1930 coronation, a five-hour ceremony at St. George’s Cathedral in Addis Ababa on November 2, was the most elaborate investiture Africa had ever produced. Attended by representatives of 72 nations and preceded by seven groups of seven priests chanting nine Psalms for seven days, the event was a spectacle of global proportions. The emperor received seven sacred ointments, a gold sword, a diamond ring, an imperial scepter, and finally the crown. The Duke of Gloucester represented the British Crown, while the Marshall of France represented the Republic. National Geographic devoted 60 pages to the event, the longest story the magazine had ever published up to that point. In Jamaica, the coronation of a black emperor with the title “King of Kings” inspired the founding of the Rastafari movement, a faith that would eventually count over one million adherents worldwide.

By the early 1970s, the empire governed approximately 30 million people. The Lion of Judah appeared on the flag, the currency, and every imperial decree. Haile Selassie presided over the founding of the Organization of African Unity in Addis Ababa in 1963, the first continental body to unite the newly independent African states. Millions of Rastafarians across the Caribbean and the Americas revered the emperor not merely as a leader, but as a messianic figure—a living incarnation of divinity. All of it—the claim to Solomon, the seven centuries of verified rule, the only uncolonized throne in Africa, the sacred person of the emperor, and the divine status conferred by millions of believers on another continent—was abolished in a single season by 120 men, most of them below the rank of major, who called themselves a committee.

The collapse arrived through a chain of catastrophes that the emperor could have interrupted at almost any point, but chose not to. Beginning in 1972, a famine devastated the northern provinces of Wollo and Tigray, killing approximately 100,000 people over the following three years. The imperial government attempted to conceal the scale of the disaster. This concealment failed when a British television crew for Jonathan Dimbleby’s documentary, “The Unknown Famine,” juxtaposed footage of skeletal villagers with footage of palace feasts and Haile Selassie hand-feeding raw meat to his pet dogs from a silver platter. The broadcast was smuggled into Ethiopia and played to military audiences, and the effect was incendiary.

Military mutinies began in January 1974. Rank-and-file troops at the Negele Borana garrison in the south seized the emperor’s personal envoy and forced him to eat the same rations they survived on—a deliberate humiliation of the crown. Enlisted men at the Fourth Division in Addis Ababa revolted over pay and conditions, while Air Force technicians at Debre Zeyit seized their base. By February, university students, taxi drivers, teachers, and Muslim communities had all joined the revolt. The Prime Minister, Aklilu Habte Wold, resigned on February 28, but the gesture was already too late. The officers who coalesced into the “Derg”—Amharic for “committee”—formally organized around June 28, 1974. They professed loyalty to the crown while systematically arresting aristocrats, generals, and ministers throughout the summer in a process they called a “creeping coup.”

The 82-year-old emperor was the last to go. By September, he was isolated; his personal guard was disarmed, his telephones were cut, and his palace was surrounded. The legal dismantling proceeded in stages after his removal. Proclamation Number One, issued September 15, suspended the 1955 constitution and transferred all state power to the Derg. On March 21, 1975, the Derg formally abolished the monarchy, all imperial titles, and all noble titles by decree. No provisions were made for the family’s rights, property, or future. The comprehensive nationalizations that followed made such provisions unnecessary. The rural land reform proclamation of March 4 nationalized all rural land without compensation, effectively stripping the imperial family and the aristocracy of the vast estates they had held for centuries. The urban land proclamation of July 26 seized all urban land, and banks, insurance companies, and nearly every major enterprise followed suit. The Jubilee Palace was renamed the National Palace, and the crown, the coronation robes, and the imperial regalia were locked in a small museum inside the building from which the emperor had just been removed in the back of a Volkswagen Beetle.

Haile Selassie spent the last year of his life as a prisoner in a small pavilion on the grounds of the Menelik Palace. He was permitted only two elderly servants and a television set, and he was strictly forbidden from having any outside contact. The Derg interrogated him repeatedly about money they believed was hidden in European bank accounts—Swiss accounts, British holdings, and gold reserves—but the emperor denied their existence. On August 27, 1975, the government announced that the 83-year-old former emperor had died of circulatory failure following a prostate operation. The truth emerged three decades later. During the trial of former Derg members in 2006, testimony established that on August 23, the regime’s leadership had resolved that the emperor should be killed because he remained the symbolic head of the feudal system they had dismantled; his continued existence was, in their judgment, a political liability.

A palace servant described the emperor’s final hours: he wept, he prayed, and he asked whether it was not true that he had always strived for the well-being of his people. The next morning, he was found with his face discolored, a bandage around his neck, and different bedclothes from the ones he had worn to sleep in. His personal physician, Professor Asrat Woldeyes, testified that the emperor had been in excellent health and that no prostate surgery had ever been performed. The trial court convicted the Derg leadership of strangling Haile Selassie in his bed. Mengistu Haile Mariam, the Derg’s chairman, was convicted of genocide in absentia in December 2006 and sentenced to death on appeal in May 2008. He remains in exile in Harare, Zimbabwe, which has refused every extradition request.

They buried the emperor vertically, sealed in concrete beneath a latrine on the palace grounds. It was a deliberate act of desecration. The body remained there for 17 years until workmen exhumed it on February 17, 1992, nearly a year after the Derg’s own fall from power. On November 5, 2000, the remains were reburied at Holy Trinity Cathedral in Addis Ababa, but the government of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi refused to grant a state funeral, calling Selassie a tyrant who had brutally and extremely oppressed the Ethiopian peasants. Approximately 3,000 mourners attended what was officially designated a private ceremony. Aging veterans of the Imperial Bodyguard wore lions’ mane headdresses and carried seven-foot spears alongside the coffin. When it reached the granite tomb that had been waiting for half a century, it did not fit, and stonemasons had to chip away at the interior while the coffin waited outside.

The Derg did not stop at the emperor; it attempted to destroy the dynasty entirely. On the evening of November 23, 1974, remembered in Ethiopia as “Black Saturday,” 60 former officials of the imperial government were executed by machine gun at Kerchele Prison in Addis Ababa. A document later made public showed that Mengistu Haile Mariam had handwritten a very urgent order dispatching a bulldozer to dig a pit at 8:00 in the evening, with prisoners to be loaded onto military vehicles and put to death together by bullets at 2:00 in the morning. The Derg had voted on each name individually. The victims were buried in a mass grave with their hands tied behind their backs; there was no trial, no charges, and no legal process of any kind. Among the dead were two former prime ministers and 16 generals.

But the names that matter here are three: Rear Admiral Iskander Desta, the emperor’s grandson and son of Princess Tenagnework, who was 40 years old and deputy commander of the Imperial Ethiopian Navy; Leul Ras Asrate Kassa, a senior prince of the blood and president of the Crown Council, one of the most respected aristocrats in the empire; and Lieutenant General Abebe Abebe, the emperor’s son-in-law and widower of the late Princess Tsehai. The broader family had already been swept into prison. On September 11, one day before the emperor was deposed, the Derg arrested the imperial family en masse. They were initially held at the late Duke of Harar’s residence, then transferred to Alem Bekagn—a name that translates to “I have had enough of this world”—the central prison in Addis Ababa. Princess Tenagnework, the emperor’s eldest surviving daughter, was designated “prisoner number one” in all of Ethiopia.

The conditions were specific in their cruelty. A room approximately 15 feet by 12 feet held 10 royal women. Rats fell from torn ceiling cloth onto beds at night. Rations consisted of injera and watery stew. Medical care was rudimentary and intermittent. The electric light in the cell was never turned off, not once in 14 years. Young women imprisoned alongside the princesses were reportedly subjected to torture and assault. Princess Ijigayehu, the emperor’s granddaughter and Crown Prince Asfaw Wossen’s daughter, died in prison in early 1976 from medical neglect. She was in her early 30s. She had requested treatment for what appeared to be a treatable condition, but the request was denied. Sege Mariam Abebe Retta, Princess Tenagnework’s daughter, committed suicide by slitting her own throat in prison in 1975; she was the mother of young children.

The women were released in 1988 and 1989 after international pressure, including a 1988 Spectator article titled “Princesses in Prison,” drew attention to their case. The men were released in 1989 and 1990 as the Derg regime weakened under military pressure from Eritrean and Tigrayan rebel forces. The total imprisonment lasted 14 to 15 years. No formal charges were ever filed, no trial was ever held, and no explanation was ever given for why they were held or why they were released. The women walked out of Alem Bekan into a country they no longer recognized; the Marxist state that had imprisoned them was itself on the verge of collapse.

Before the revolution reached them, the dynasty had already been marked by premature death. Haile Selassie fathered seven children with Empress Menen Asfaw, whom he married in 1911. Four of the seven died before the age of 33, and each death deepened the isolation of the emperor who survived them all. Princess Romanework, the eldest daughter from the emperor’s first marriage, stayed behind when the family fled the Italian invasion in 1935. Her husband, Dejazmatch Beyene Merid, was captured and executed by the Italians in 1937 during the reprisals that followed the attempted assassination of Italian Viceroy Graziani. Romanework and her young sons were deported to the prison island of Asinara, off the coast of Sardinia. She contracted tuberculosis in captivity and died in a hospital in Turin at approximately 27 years of age. Her remains have never been returned to Ethiopia; she is still buried in Italian soil.

Princess Zenebework died suddenly in Mek’ele at the age of 16, most likely from complications in childbirth. Her husband, Dejazmatch Haile Selassie Gugsa, later defected to the Italians during the invasion, one of the most infamous acts of betrayal in Ethiopian history. Princess Tsehai trained as a nurse at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London during the family’s wartime exile from 1936 to 1941, working 56-hour weeks on an annual salary of 20 pounds. She was the only member of the imperial family to take a practical profession, and she chose the one that would put her closest to suffering. She nursed civilians during the London Blitz. After the liberation of Ethiopia, she returned home, married Colonel Abiye Abebe, and died of childbirth complications in the remote town of Nekemte at the age of 22. A memorial hospital was named for her. Her widower was among those executed on Black Saturday 32 years later.

Prince Makonnen, Duke of Harar—reportedly Haile Selassie’s favorite child, the one groomed for a public role—died at the age of 32 in a car accident on the road near the town of Debre Zeyit in 1957. The car collided with an oncoming truck. Some contemporaries believe that crash was an assassination. The emperor, who had already buried two daughters, wept openly at the funeral; it was the only time in his reign that the public saw him lose his composure. Prince Sahle Selassie, the youngest child, was educated at the University of Cambridge and reportedly the most intellectually gifted of the siblings. He died at approximately 30 years of age from liver disease complicated by pneumonia in 1962, just months after the death of his mother, Empress Menen. These were two deaths in quick succession, the last of the young.

That left two of the emperor’s seven children alive to face the revolution. Crown Prince Asfaw Wossen had suffered a massive stroke in 1973 that left him permanently paralyzed on one side, unable to speak clearly, and dependent on constant medical care. He was abroad in Switzerland for treatment when the Derg seized power and never returned to Ethiopia. From London, he denounced the Black Saturday executions through a broadcast on the BBC. In April 1989, he proclaimed himself Emperor Amha Selassie I in exile, backdating his succession to the date of his father’s murder. He later moved to McLean, Virginia, near the growing Ethiopian diaspora in the Washington area. He reconstituted the Crown Council of Ethiopia in exile in 1993 and founded the “Moa Anbessa” movement to promote constitutional monarchy. He died on January 17, 1997, in Virginia at the age of 80, never having recovered from his stroke and never having set foot in Ethiopia again. His body was eventually returned and buried at Holy Trinity Cathedral beside his father.

Princess Tenagne Work endured every wave of the catastrophe the dynasty produced and outlasted every one of them. Her first husband, Ras Desta Damtew, was captured and executed by the Italians in 1937. Her son, Eskinder, was executed on Black Saturday. Her father was strangled in his bed. Her daughter committed suicide in prison. She herself spent 15 years as prisoner number one in Alem Bekagn, sleeping in a room with nine other women under a light that never went out, eating what the guards decided to provide, and watching members of her family die one by one from the inside of a cell. She was released in 1989 at the age of 77. She settled briefly in Virginia, then returned permanently to Ethiopia in 1999. She attended her father’s reburial in 2000, standing upright at the ceremony. She died in Addis Ababa on April 6, 2003, at the age of 91. She had been a princess for 15 years, a prisoner for 15 years, and free for 14.

The grandchildren scattered across three continents, and the distance between what they had been and what they became is the measure of how completely the Derg attempted to erase them. Prince Zera Yacob Amha Selassie, born August 17, 1953, son of Crown Prince Asfaw Wossen, is the current head of the Imperial House of Ethiopia. Educated at Eton, the University of Oxford, and the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, he was designated acting Crown Prince by his grandfather in 1974 after his father’s stroke. He assumed the headship of the dynasty upon his father’s death in 1997. A 1998 magazine profile described him living in modest circumstances in Manchester, England, where Rastafarians periodically visited to pay their respects to the heir of the man they considered divine. He was once denied a United States visa to attend his own father’s funeral because he could not demonstrate a permanent residence outside America. The heir to a dynasty that claimed 3,000 years of unbroken sovereignty could not prove to an embassy clerk that he had a home.

Princess Ada Desta, Tenagnework’s eldest daughter, born in 1927, chose to remain with her family when the Derg came. She spent 14 years in Alem Bekagn, sleeping on a mattress on the floor under a light bulb that burned without interruption for the entirety of her imprisonment, while her husband, Leul Ras Mengesha Seyoum, escaped the country and founded the Ethiopian Democratic Union to fight the Derg from the outside. She never saw him during those 14 years. After her release, she divided her remaining decades between Virginia and Addis Ababa. She died in 2013. Princess Sophia Desta, born in 1934, survived 14 years in the same prison, where she was, in her own family’s words, mistreated and humiliated throughout. Her husband had already been killed defending the emperor during an earlier coup attempt in 1960. After release, she settled in Geneva, then in London. She founded the Entoto International School in Ethiopia before her death in 2021 at the age of 87.

Princess Seble Desta, born in 1932, lost her grandfather, her brother Iskander, and her husband during her 14 years of imprisonment. After her release, she moved to the United States and spent her years volunteering to teach English as a second language at her local public library. A woman who had been an imperial princess, who had dined with heads of state, and who had lived in a palace with lions at the gate, spent her free years helping immigrants learn to read. She died in early 2023 at the age of 91. Her funeral was held at Holy Trinity Cathedral in Addis Ababa with services led by Patriarch Abune Mathias I. Prince Dawit Makonnen, one of the six sons of Prince Makonnen, Duke of Harar, died under unclear circumstances in Switzerland in 1989. He was 37 years old. The male members of the imperial family were released from Alem Bekagn within days of his death; he never saw his family walk free. His brother, Prince Paul Wossen Seged, survived 15 years in Derg prisons and lived until 2021. Another descendant of the Makonnen line, Joel Dawit Makonnen, a great-grandson of the emperor, would grow up in the United States, educated at Columbia and Oxford, and become an entrepreneur—his imperial heritage visible only in the family name.

In 1977, at the height of the Red Terror, when the Derg security forces were killing thousands of suspected opponents across Addis Ababa—many of them students—leaving bodies in the streets with signs warning that anyone who moved them would be shot, two American missionaries named Jody and Denton Collins organized the secret extraction of 10 of Haile Selassie’s great-grandchildren from Ethiopia. They flew the children out in two small aircraft, routing them through Kenya and Sweden to the United States, where they were placed with families and given new lives under assumed identities. The operation was later documented in the Collins’ book Code Word Catherine. The children were between 2 and 12 years old; some of them did not learn their real names for years.

Two members of the dynasty represent distinct responses to what exile demanded of them. Prince Ermias Sahle Selassie, born June 14, 1960, the only son of Prince Sahle Selassie, is the most publicly active member of the imperial family and has served as president of the Crown Council of Ethiopia since 1993. He was 14 years old when his grandfather was murdered. He was educated at the University of California at Santa Barbara and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. He lives in the Washington area with his wife, Princess Saba Kebede, and they have twin sons born in 1992. Ermias has spent three decades building the Crown Council into a cultural and humanitarian organization, founding the Water Initiative for Africa, and in October 2024, establishing the Royal Ethiopian Trust as a registered nonprofit focused on heritage preservation and educational development. In November 2022, he received a Pan-African award from Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, honoring Haile Selassie’s role in the founding of the Organization of African Unity. It was the most significant official recognition of the dynasty by an Ethiopian government since the abolition of the monarchy in 1975. He led efforts to repatriate Ethiopian artifacts looted by the British at the Battle of Magdala in 1868, and he maintains close ties with the global Rastafari community. He has done what the dynasty’s mythology always claimed it would do: endured, adapted, and continued to act in the name of Ethiopia from a distance of 8,000 miles.

Yeshi Kassa, a great-granddaughter of Haile Selassie, whose father was among those executed on Black Saturday, was at a boarding school in Wales when the revolution began. Her schoolmates had no idea of her background. Nobody at the school knew she was connected to a dynasty until the news arrived on television and the other girls slowly worked out who her family was. By the time they figured it out, all they really cared about was that she was good at hockey. Decades later, she executive produced the 2023 documentary Grandpa Was an Emperor, directed by Constance Marks and also executive produced by Cynthia Erivo. It was the first time the imperial family publicly examined the events of 1974 on film. The girl whose grandfather was buried under a latrine made a film about it, and the critics did not find a single thing wrong with it.

The House of Solomon exists today in a condition that would have been incomprehensible to the dynasty at any point in its 700-year history. Prince Zara Yacob holds the title of head of the imperial house. Prince Ermias operates the Crown Council from a residence in the suburbs of Washington. Several dozen living descendants are spread across multiple branches—the Asfaw Wossen line, the Makonnen line, the Tenagnework line, and the Sahle Selassie line—living in Ethiopia, the United States, Britain, and continental Europe. The family’s relationship with modern Ethiopia has passed through three distinct phases. Under the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front government from 1991 to 2018, the family was tolerated but deliberately marginalized; they were permitted to return and accorded princely titles as a courtesy, but they were denied a state funeral for Haile Selassie and granted no legal standing.

Under Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, the relationship has shifted in ways that would have been unthinkable a decade earlier. A statue of Haile Selassie was unveiled at the African Union headquarters in 2019, formally acknowledging the emperor’s role as the institution’s founder. Imperial-era heritage sites have received restoration funding. The 2022 Pan-African Award to Prince Ermias marked the most direct engagement between the government and the dynasty since the abolition of the monarchy. The legacy remains contested and violently so. In June 2020, following the killing of Oromo singer Hachalu Hundessa, demonstrators destroyed statues of Haile Selassie in Harar and in London—the Wimbledon statue was smashed and toppled in broad daylight. The destruction reflected the view held by many Oromos and Southern Ethiopians that the Solomonic emperors were conquerors who built their empire through the subjugation of peoples who never consented to Solomonic rule and never shared in its glory. For these communities, the dynasty’s legacy is not one of African sovereignty, but of internal colonialism—of Amhara dominance imposed at gunpoint over cultures and languages that the empire spent centuries attempting to absorb or erase.

The Crown Council advocates for constitutional monarchy and democratic governance, but acknowledges publicly that there is no active movement toward restoration, and that any future role for the dynasty would require the consent of the Ethiopian people expressed through democratic means. Ethiopia’s 1995 constitution confirms the country as a federal democratic republic. The Jubilee Palace is now the National Palace and the seat of the Prime Minister’s office. The Imperial Crown sits in a glass case inside the same building where an old man was strangled in his bed half a century ago. Prince Ermias’s twin sons were born in 1992 in the United States; they carry the name Sela Selassie, their grandfather’s name and their great-great-grandfather’s throne name. A dynasty that claimed descent from Solomon and Sheba, that ruled from mountain fortresses and from a palace with lions chained at the gate, that was strangled and buried under a latrine, and that was imprisoned for 14 years under a light that never went out, exists today simply because it refused to stop existing.