Talk:Menelik II

Biography assessment rating comment

WikiProject Biography Summer 2007 Assessment Drive

Needs an infobox, but otherwise a B.

The article may be improved by following the WikiProject Biography 11 easy steps to producing at least a B article. -- Yamara 02:33, 3 July 2007 (UTC)

Cleanup!

This article really needs to be cleaned up -- ie. get rid of the (????), split it up into a few sections, etc. --68.68.234.19 21:30, 20 April 2006 (UTC)

Name

The name was decided to be "Menelek" in May 2005 and moved to that page, but "Menelik" is much more common (~568,000 google hits vs. ~30,700). I propose that we move it back to "Menelik II of Ethiopia" as this is the more common name. Yom 02:40, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

Disputed

Though I remain skeptical, I did find a source for the claim about Menelik and the electric chair. The Book of Lists, in a section titled "The People's Almanac's 15 Favorite Oddities of All Time". Number 3 is "The Abyssinian Electric Chair" (though it makes no mention about one of the chairs going to Lique Mequas Abate). I'll add a citation to the article. -- Gyrofrog (talk) 01:42, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

Thanks. I have to say I'd hoped for something a tad more scholarly when I placed the original "citation needed" notice - guess we'll just have to keep looking. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Mikedash (talk • contribs) 12:27, 19 December 2006 (UTC).

Just to add, I believe I heard this story on QI as well. Ryan4314 (talk) 10:08, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

Ah yes, here it is (Last bullet point in Elephant in the Room 1) Ryan4314 (talk) 10:15, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

religion

some one know what was his religion?
thank you —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 24.232.44.131 (talk) 20:45, 22 April 2007 (UTC).

He was Ethiopian Orthodox. 165.2.186.10 17:28, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

Did he eat the Book of Kings?

So this is a weird question, but there's a song by the Bastard Fairies that contains the following lyrics:

There once was a man
Who thought that if he ate
All the pages of the Bible
He could kill most anything.
In 1913, he died of a stroke
When he tried to eat
The Book of Kings.

The video says this is true and happened in Ethiopia in 1913. Subsequent searches on the Web say it was Menelik II who did this. But if true it seems fairly notable and I'd expect to see it on the main page. So...anyone know if this is a true story? --Replysixty (talk) 22:08, 20 January 2008 (UTC)

Of course not. He had the first stroke in 1906 and another in 1907 and his health continued to decline until his death in 1913. He didn't die from eating paper. Besides, if it were true, it would have been made of parchment, which isn't exactly toxic. — ዮም | (Yom) | Talk • contribs • Ethiopia 22:40, 20 January 2008 (UTC)

Uh, that URL you found is a post in someone's blog, which provides no source for this statement. While it is possible that someone close to Menelik was feeding him pages from a Bible because she/he thought it would keep him alive, there is no mention of this unusual practice in either of the two important works that cover Menelik's life -- Harold Marcus' The Life and Times of Menelik II or Chris Prouty's Empress Taytu and Menelik II. In fact, Marcus describes Menelik as being an intelligent and curious man, which leads me to conclude that he would have engaged in such superstition only if compelled to by a confidant or other close acquaintance. Then again, from about 1907 on, Menelik was in a vegetative state, brought on by years of bad living & the effects of circa-1900 medical practices, so whatever he thought at that point is unknowable. -- llywrch (talk) 07:11, 21 January 2008 (UTC)

There are earlier references to this that are not bloggish, including The Idiot's Guide to the Bible and The Emperor Who Ate the Bible. However, I couldn't find any scholarly references to this story being true. I too would be interested in knowing whether there are any. Ironwolf (talk) 01:31, 22 January 2008 (UTC)