Monument to the Lion of Judah patriot and national hero. The work was made by the French sculptor Georges Gardet in 1930, on the occasion of the coronation of Emperor Hailé Selassié on November 2, 1930. At the end of the so-called March of the Iron Will (in italian: "Marcia della ferrea volontà") that led to the occupation of Addis Ababa by the Italian army, the statue was transported to Rome, Italy in 1935 at the end of the Second Italo-Ethiopian War. The Lion of Judah sculpture was placed just beyond Piazza dei Cinquecento, under the obelisk of the Italian Heroes of the Battle of Dogali
Lion of Judah many years, and as Jerusalem was the capital of the Kingdom of Judah, in 1950 it was included in the Emblem of Jerusalem. Ethiopia's history as recorded and elaborated in a 13th-century treatise, the "Kebre Negest", asserts descent from a retinue of Israelites who returned with Makeda, the Queen of Sheba from her visit to King Solomon in Jerusalem, by whom she had conceived the Solomonic dynasty's founder Menelik I. As Solomon was of the tribe of Judah, his son Menelik I would continue the line, which according to Ethiopian history was passed directly down from king to king until