The Lost City of Solomon and Sheba

by Robin Brown-Lowe

  From the natives themselves, as is invariably the case with all South African natives in similar circumstances, we can glean no information whatever respecting these ancient relics under whose shadows they dwell; nor do they appear to entertain any superstitious reverence for them.

  They found them there, as did their forefathers, and there their interest in them and information about them begin and end.

  Perhaps upon the advent of the expected white they will begin (and judging from our experience the process seems to have already begun) to recognize their value as a medium of obtaining blankets, limbo and beads from the grateful and enthusiastic visitor. Then, at any rate, they will be led to regard them, at least from a practical and business point of view, much as the Egyptian Arabs regard their Pyramids, the Swiss peasant his glaciers, or the English verger his cathedral. It is satisfying to learn that efficient steps have been taken to protect them from both the thoughtlessness and the Philistinism of any prospector or adventurer.

  The Portuguese have suggested that these ruins form portions of the remains of the city and the palace of the Queen of Sheba, ‘in the land of Ophir’. Again ancient Portuguese records refer repeatedly to people in this part of Africa, whom they found to be established long before their own arrival, and whom they represent to work for gold in the far interior. To these people they give the name of Morisco [Moors?].

  With regard to the word itself – Zimbabye – its etymology and orthography, like most native names, it can be variously and equally correctly spelt Zinbawe, Zinboaoe, and Zinbabye. The Portuguese traveller Lacerda, in his journey through the Zambesi region in 1797, speaks of a tribe, Cazembe (near Lake Nyassa), who in answer to his enquiries regarding the course of a certain river, described it as running close by their Zinbawe, or royal residence. This fact, taken in conjunction with the existence of another Zimbabye in the Manica country, together with the ruins in this neighbourhood, would seem to fix the meaning of the word as palace or royal residence.

  Be this, however, as it may, whether these ruins are to be attributed to either Moorish or Phoenician origin, or whether the circular building was a temple or a palace, and the conical tower the Queen of Sheba’s tumulus, are questions which only the skilled antiquary and those versed in such matters should presume to decide.

  In the meantime, many of us have been privileged to set eyes upon a spectacle which, with the exception of Mauch, as far as we know, no white man has ever hitherto been fortunate enough to behold.

  This, by the standards of the time, was very balanced coverage – but it still left origin theorists with quite a narrow field of choice: Moors, Phoenicians or Solomon and Sheba.

  Other ‘considered’ articles of the time were much more decided. Great Zimbabwe was: ‘A fortified camp or station, established, it had hardly to be doubted, to control the enslaved population which worked the gold mines, and to protect the abler but scanty people which coerced and directed them and took away, like the Spaniards in Peru, all transportable fruit of their labour. Who they were may remain uncertain but there is no reason which makes it peremptory that they should have been indigenous.’

  Of all the contenders for this title – and over the next few months the Hindus who conquered and held Java for generations, the Malays who conquered Madagascar, and the Arab people who founded the Sabaean kingdom were nominated – the outright favourite was the Phoenicians, given their history of long sea journeys in search of minerals.

  For a truly Romantic view of the lost city, however, one only had to turn, then as now, to the ‘tabloids’:

  Who were these soldier workmen of a vanished civilisation?

  At whose bidding did they force their way into this barbarous place to dig for gold?

  The country is dotted with the strange ancient relics of their work. The furnaces that they built to smelt the ore, the strong round keeps which they raised against the alarms of some besetting foe, the great stones on which they scored in indecipherable characters the record of their labours, perhaps the clue to their prize – these things remain and move the awe of the Matabele and his Mashona vassal.

  Today, then, the Englishman is in the land of Ophir, opening afresh the treasure house of antiquity, equipped with resources of which the deft Phoenicians never dreamed.

  It may be that he will come upon such relics among the abandoned workings as will throw a new light upon the story of his predecessors, and re-write a page of the world’s history.

  It may even be he will stumble into chambers of subterranean wealth such as Mr Haggard had imagined, secured with labyrinths like those of the Pyramids, with sliding stones, and all the appropriate witchcraft of an age when human life and human labour were of no account.

  At least, before many years are out, we may expect to see the image of Queen Victoria stamped on the gold with which King Solomon overlaid his ivory throne and wreathed the cedar pillars of his temple.

  For the far-sighted Rhodes, all this purple prose was of great help with fund-raising for the British South Africa Company. Moreover, he had already anticipated the huge public appetite for a more expert opinion on the true origins of the lost city. Mr and Mrs J. Theodore Bent were even now preparing to set sail from England armed with the credentials of the Royal Geographical Society and the British Association for the Advancement of Science.

  THREE

  Dreams of Avarice

  In spite of all these intriguing leads, the thousands of mines scattered across the land of the Karanga have remained no more than mute evidence of an ancient eldorado. And for more than a century now not a single record, inscription, cryptogram, tablet or stela has ever been found at any of the grand zimbabwes to record the output of ancient mines or the people who worked them.

  Perhaps one should say there is no ‘Rosetta stone’ here which has allowed a reading of the many inscribed columns, plinths, statues and a miscellany of stone objects found by Theodore Bent and others at Great Zimbabwe. Nor, as Bent much regretted, is there a trace of an oral tradition about gold.

  When Bent asked these very questions of the natives in the area and on the actual site, it was as if gold had never been produced in Mashonaland. The Karanga, as we have heard, were completely ignorant of a gold industry ancient or modern and, as a result, made no attempt to gather the precious metals themselves. This is actually extraordinary and, so far as I know, unprecedented, for people still living among monumental works of this splendour. Yet the Karanga were also aware of the thousands of ancient gold workings dangerously littering the bush. How did they explain all this to themselves?

  All the early explorers, dos Barros, Mauch and Bent, heard myths of ancient mining and building activities conducted by gods or, in one case, a white race. But these were no better supported than the tales told to dos Barros that godlike creatures had in ancient times been able to raise such monuments when the stones were still soft.

  This ignorance of the value of gold and the tradition of ancient mining has been a problem for the Shona school. Their explanation – that the Karanga did so well from cattle they had no need of gold and were quite happy to barter with foreigners for tools and trinkets which they did value – is in my opinion simplistic, a modern myth no more viable than the old ones. Were the Karanga deaf to the pleadings of early prospectors like Adam Renders who must have revealed the white man’s hunger for gold, if only to his two Karanga wives?

  If you believe the Shona school then it also has to be true that this complacency cost the Karanga their country. The gold in the dust beneath their feet would certainly have bought every man a Mauser and instruction in its use sufficient to free them of enslavement by the Matabele, the Boers, the Portuguese and even Rhodes. The great irony here is that it was Karanga gold, or the promise of it at ‘Ophir’, that bought Rhodes the breech-loading rifles and Maxims that he eventually used to suppress the Matabele and the Shona.

  I prefer to believe that the Karanga were, at least originally, innocently ignorant of the international val
ue of gold even if it does open the door to a currently politically unacceptable suggestion that ancient mining, certainly deep mining, was imported and directed by a foreign trading cartel using local, and not necessarily Bantu, labour. In the same way, perhaps, as these traders were ignorant of the economics and skills of cattle-raising.

  The fact remains that it is pointless seeking information about ancient gold production from the Shona. It occurs, therefore, that the riddle might only be solved from the customer’s end. More simply, thousands of tons of Shona gold went somewhere. Who at the time of Solomon, or before, had demonstrated a conspicuous consumption of gold? Solomon and Sheba both only ruled very small kingdoms in the North African hegemony.

  My first lead came from an unexpected (and surely coincidental) source. Rhodes’ bird, the stone statue he worshipped and used so successfully to raise money for the occupation of ‘Ophir’, thereafter Rhodesia, wears a pendant necklace. At least two of the other birds have them too. No explanation has ever been given for this singular piece of decoration. I have long doubted the prevailing notion that no cryptograms or meaningful inscriptions have ever been found at Great Zimbabwe; I simply cannot conceive of a piece of art that is totally absent of meaning and there is a great deal of art in the various zimbabwes. I prefer the idea that we have simply not learned to read the cryptograms that are there, particularly the meaning of the extensive and varied decorative additions to the Zimbabwe birds.

  So over the last three years I have spent what might be termed ‘quality’ time with Rhodes’ bird at his house, Groote Schuur, in Cape Town, which is now the official residence of the State President. I had always assumed that his original bird, along with half a dozen others which had ended up in South African museums, had been returned to Zimbabwe in the 1980s. When I called the Curator of Groote Schuur, Alta Kriel, to make arrangements for the necklace to be professionally photographed, however, she told me this fascinating story – Rhodes’ bird had not gone home. There are copies at Groote Schuur, but the black stone bird which sits on Rhodes’ wardrobe in a corner of his bedroom is the original, thanks to the wife of former President Vorster. Apparently Mrs Vorster took an unusual interest in the house, which was not shared by other State Presidents; Nelson Mandela is said to have moved out of the old place, concerned at the damage his lively grandchildren might do. But Mrs Vorster recognised that they were treasures and when South Africa was minded to send the Zimbabwe birds home she had Rhodes’ will re-examined by lawyers. As she had suspected, Rhodes had stipulated that his private collection should not be broken up or disseminated, so this seminal bird, although indubitably stolen for Rhodes by the hunter-prospector Willie Posselt, still sits in his bedroom, unknown to the general public, to this day. In African terms this is quite the equal of the saga of the Elgin Marbles.

  But to return to the necklace that Rhodes’ bird – and others collected by Theodore Bent at Great Zimbabwe – wears… .

  In the course of my research into the ‘ancient Moors’ who for as long as records exist have dominated the trade between the Middle East and East Africa, I came across an intriguing name for the most ancient Egyptian word for gold, a name used several thousand years before the birth of Christ and a millennium before Solomon and Sheba.

  That word is nub. Nub was produced from mines in the deserts of ancient Egypt but they were small in number and never prolific. Seemingly when the demand for gold exceeded the Egyptians’ own supply, they took over the kingdom of Nubia – the ‘kingdom of gold’ – to the south. Egyptian imperialism, and the trade which came from it, was from then on almost always in a southerly direction.

  The earliest Egyptian hieroglyph for nub is a symbol which the eminent Egyptologists, Rossellini and Lepsius, believe represents a bag or cloth with hanging ends through which alluvial gold was separated. There is a picture of this process on a building at Thebes. Auriferous sand was placed in a bag made of sheepskin with the woolly side inwards; water was then added and the bag vigorously shaken by two men. The earth particles were carried away while the heavier particles of gold stuck to the fleece. One such mythical golden fleece was, I assume, pursued by Jason and the Argonauts.

  To get back down to earth – to earth with specks of gold in it in fact – alluvial gold is without doubt the first form in which Zimbabwe gold was traded to foreigners. As we shall see there are many accounts of Hottentot bushmen trading it with ‘old Moors’, having carried it to the coast in vultures’ quills.

  The Egyptians were well aware of the difference between alluvial and mined gold. The former was called nub-en-mu, ‘gold of the river’, while mined gold was called nub-en-set, ‘gold of the mountain’. Mined gold obviously eventually came to dominate the market and in the course of the thousands of years we are considering, the hieroglyph for gold (the bag with strings) was replaced with another sign more representative of the use to which refined gold was being put – a necklace of pendant beads.

  At least five Zimbabwe birds wear pendant necklaces that have never been explained. Moreover, the only other view on this change of hieroglyph from fleece to necklace, advanced by the Egyptologist Elliot Smith, actually strengthens our speculative Zimbabwe–Egyptian connection. Elliot Smith believes that the necklace hieroglyph was the determinative of Hathor, the hawk-headed goddess who had the responsibility for gold mines in Egypt and abroad!

  Finally, there is even a possible element of dating in the fact that the Zimbabwe birds who stood guard over a countryside riddled with gold mines wear nub necklaces rather than golden fleece nubs. If there was a gold trade between the ancient Egyptians and the foundling Zimbabwe culture it would more likely have come into existence during the last millennium of the Egyptian dynasties, when trade via the Indian ocean was more advanced, rather than 3,000 years earlier. Be that as it may, I was no longer in any doubt that if I had to look for ancient markets for Zimbabwe gold, markets so old that the Karanga of the late twentieth century could no longer remember them, ancient Egypt had to be my prime choice. Once that had been established, the research proved easy.

  To say that the Egyptians were obsessed with gold is to understate the case. They worshipped it from the beginning of their civilisation 4,000 years ago with a passion which never faded even when the empire became a Graeco-Roman colony. The earliest worked gold was from alluvial sources, but the Egyptians soon went on to mining proper with a transitional stage of ‘open cast’ extraction from surface outcrops which soon became trenches and then underground mines as the seams were traced down. Gold production in a desert is not a popular line of work and the more powerful countries dominated the trade because they were able to put slaves, convicts and prisoners of war to such hard labour.

  Pictograms, inscriptions and stelae detailing the State hard at work producing gold litter Egypt’s ancient sites. By the time of Menes (c. 3100 BC) a ‘gold standard’ (‘one part of gold is equal to two and a half parts of silver measure’) was already in existence. By c. 1320 BC the Egyptians were already working gold abroad, confirmed by an epistle from the sun-god, Ra, to Pharaoh Seti I: ‘I have given thee the gold countries.’ If, as seems to have been the case, Zimbabwe was at least potentially the most prolific gold country south of Egypt on the increasingly familiar Red Sea route, it has to be a strong possibility that Mashonaland was in the hawk-headed sun-god’s gift.

  Turin Museum even has a Rameside papyrus map, the famous Carte de mines d’or, which shows quarries, auriferous mountains, gold mines, and miners’ houses. These have always been thought to describe Egyptian desert mines, but the site is not located and could just as easily be the Inyanga mountains where dozens of ancient mines and hundreds of residential zimbabwes have been found.

  The same applies to the way gold was worked. Diodorus Siculus wrote a detailed account of these in the first century BC, a time when ‘ancient Moor’ traders were known to be working their way down Africa and would certainly have heard of the gold of the Shona hinterland. Theodore Bent believed he had found a connection
between ancient Egyptian and ancient Karanga gold-working systems when he found mortars and crushing stones in lines near ancient workings. Similar mortars and crushing stones in lines near ancient workings were found in the recent excavations of the fifth-to sixth-century Egyptian mining town of Bir Umm Fawakhir in the Eastern Desert. Diodorus may also have given us an answer to another outstanding Zimbabwe enigma – why were the mining shafts so narrow?

  The gold-bearing earth which is the hardest, they first burn with a hot fire, and when they have crumbled it … they continue the working of it by hand … the entire operations are in charge of a skilled worker who distinguishes the stone and points it out to the labourers. The boys there who have not yet come to maturity, entering into the tunnels formed by the removal of the rock, laboriously gather up the rock … piece by piece and carry it out into the open to the place outside the entrance. Those who are about thirty years old take this quarried stone from them and with iron pestles pound a specified amount of it in stone mortars, until they have worked it down to the size of a vetch [fine grain].

  These descriptions are from the last centuries of dynastic Egypt. But from the very beginning – c. 3000 BC, perhaps even earlier – there are records of gold becoming the reserved and spiritual currency of the pharoah.

  From c. 2900 BC onwards, metals seem to have been monopolies of the court. The management of quarries and mines was entrusted to the highest court officials and sometimes the sons of the pharoahs. Often these responsibilities were handled by the priesthood; indeed, it seems most likely that the metallurgical sciences, and alchemy, first saw the light of day in the laboratories of the Egyptian priests. This priestly connection with gold from time immemorial will also have a bearing on this story.