There’s a widely-circulated factoid about Ethiopian Emperor Menelik II that he ingested Bible pages as a healing method when ill, and that he died after (and possibly as a result of?) ingesting the entire Book of Kings. The Wikipedia article about him doesn’t mention any of this at all, and in fact doesn’t give a specific cause of death for him, so I added a comment three weeks ago on the Discussion page for the article that if someone can verify that claim that it should most definitely be added to the article. So far, no Wikipedians have responded, so I’ll ask here:
Can anyone verify the claim and cite a reliable source for it?
Why hasn’t anyone already added it to the Wikipedia article, isn’t that a bit odd?
If you can verify and cite sources for it, can someone add it please?
(edit: crap, that’s not a contemporary obituary, that’s an article from a fascinating 2013 website that aims to write a newspaper telling events that are exactly 100 years old. My bad!)
It mentions that he’d suffered for years from a paralytic stroke (other sources mention “a series” of paralytic strokes), so his cause of death doesn’t really seem that mysterious. The business about eating pages of the Bible is showing up on a variety of random websites, none of which seems remotely authoritative, so it also doesn’t seem at all odd that Wikipedia doesn’t include it.
My suspicion, given the lack of source for the claim, is that it’s a bit of racist superstition, invented by someone to mock Africans. But I have no more source for my suspicion than anyone else seems to have for the “eating the Bible” claim, so I don’t advise folks to put any weight behind either claim :).
The first time I encountered the claim was in the book The Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Bible published 1999. I don’t think he cites a source for it there, either.
Not in 1913 they weren’t! The side effects of consuming ink and industrially produced paper would be more of a concern. Though I guess the Ethiopian Orthodox Church may still have plenty of books written on animal skin parchment then
I think given how recent his death was (a couple after Edward VII) it’s safe to say this didn’t happen. We are not taking about some distance ancient ruler here.
It also sounds exactly the kind of rumor Europeans would spread about some crazy African monarch
I’m confident in saying its false. Its recent enough that it would well documented if it had happened. Accounts of his life would include that incident and none I’ve found do.
Of course googling something is not the same as actually researching it (especially nowadays as the algorithm has got much crapper particularly for more obscure things). If you really wanted to rule it out, and it was important to you, I’d go to a library and get a couple of books that discuss his life (there are a couple of biographies mentioned on Google). If those don’t mention it, then it didn’t happen.
Yeah, but even if it didn’t happen, I actually care 100% about the origin of the false claim, as in, who invented it, why, exactly when…
Like I said, I first heard the claim in the book The Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Bible, published around 1999. Let’s trace this sucker back to its roots, shall we? Maybe I should contact the Mikkelsons over at Snopes, huh?
Thats a pretty good place to start. Do the idiots guides include references? If it was removed in a particular edition that would also help track it down (though not sure how you’d pursue that). There’s also a pretty good chance a biography would mention the rumor if it’s well known.
My money is it coming from one of the colonial powers of the time, as an example of how dumb these crazy African rulers are.
