Ottoman intellectual culture was open to novel kinds of sciences and lore. In the midst of far-reaching change, Ottomans experimented with knowledge and narratives drawn from imagined pre-Islamic and non-Islamic pasts. This “ancient knowledge” was applied to contemporary situations in order make sense of the rapid political and social transformations of the early modern period. This presentation will explore the varied uses of one such repository of “ancient knowledge”: the narratives relating to King Solomon produced in Ottoman lands in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Several works focusing on the complex figure of Solomon appear between 1450 and 1580, each offering variations on the themes of empire-building, sedentarization, sacral kingship, and technological change. The first, the anonymous Dürr-i Meknun, written around the time of the conquest of Constantinople, presents an anti-imperial and critical vision, using Solomon and his subsequent disgrace to illustrate the risks of urbanization, imperial centralization and tyranny. The second, the Süleyman-name by the technically-inclined occultist Uzun Firdevsi, portrays Solomon in the image of Sultan Bayezid II, thereby idealizing the latter’s control over the eastern Mediterranean as both magical and technocratic. Finally, the accounts given by Ottoman bureaucrats and architects of the deeds of Sultan Süleyman, notably of the reconstruction of the Temple Mount and the construction of the Süleymaniye complex in Istanbul, show the Solomonic myth realized, consciously enacted by the state itself in full awareness of the myth’s deep multivalence. Together, these sources trace a trajectory whereby anxieties of early modernity are worked through using the vocabularies of Abrahamic sacred history, showing how Ottoman political history develops in sustained dialogue with this “ancient knowledge”. This presentation will close by suggesting that the use of such narrative models is a crucial component of early modern political thought in the Ottoman Empire and beyond. That is to say, the early modern present was built out of stories of an imagined past.