The Lost City of Solomon and Sheba

by Robin Brown-Lowe

  The ancient religious record perhaps most concerned with the gold trade is, of course the Bible; in fact, gold is the first metal mentioned in the Hexateuch, which includes Genesis, the narrative of which was probably first cast into a written form in the tenth century BC. A number of other clues hover around the start of this last pre-Christian millennium, including the gold-rich voyages of the Phoenicians, the Solomon and Sheba legends, including that of Sheba building a temple in southern Africa, and the Pharoah Rameses’ imperial leanings.

  Six foreign sources of gold are listed but not located in the Bible: Havilah, Ophir, Sheba, Midian, Uphaz and Parvaim. Then in Genesis 2: 10–12 it is recorded that a river went out of Eden, ‘and from there it was parted and became into four … the name of the first is Pison: that is it which compasseth the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold … and the gold of that land is good: there is berillium and the onyx stone.’ Zimbabwe has several large rivers including the mighty Zambesi which most certainly encompasses ‘the whole of the land’ and so convinced one of our witnesses, the first Curator of Great Zimbabwe, Richard Nicklin Hall, that he called his camp Havilah. Rhodes’ early prospectors soon discovered that Mashonaland is also extremely rich in precious stones.

  By the time of Solomon gold was the metal of ‘conspicuous consumption’ by the rulers of North Africa. One of the most conspicuous was the 18th Dynasty queen, Hatshepsut, who launched the famous Egyptian expedition to ‘Punt’. The whereabouts of Punt (which harbours a host of legends including that of a mystical African Christian King, Prester John) will be explored later but even a quick glance at Hatshepsut’s expedition demonstrates how important gold (and foreign trade) was to the pharaohs.

  Hatshepsut was a divine pharaoh having, as she put it about, been conceived by the hawk-headed god Amun-Ra. Her temple has paintings and inscriptions illustrating her birth and the extraordinary voyage she was so proud of. There is even the suggestion that the evocation of Ra, who was her celestial father, was a southern African who penetrated her mother’s body ‘with the flood of divine fragrance, and all the odours were those of the land of Punt’.

  As the historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto puts it, Hatshepsut needed ‘crowning glories’. Uniquely among women, she had proclaimed herself sovereign of Egypt, ergo she became a living god, which was not normally open to living women. She needed to demonstrate godlike prowess. ‘In antiquity,’ Armesto points out, ‘Riches – like pilgrims – gained imputed sanctity and power roughly according to the distance they travelled.’ We know that Hatshepsut’s fleet sailed down the Red Sea, and that they contacted an African tribe, and we are aware from the temple paintings that her traders went ashore to tropical conditions near the sea and traded for gold, incense, ivory, panthers (probably leopards or cheetahs), monkeys, turtles, giraffes, ebony and antimony – and of course, gold. All this exotic plunder they traded for Egyptian foodstuffs, and the natives were seemingly very content with the exchange.

  The temple inscriptions admittedly gloat about Egyptian sagacity which allowed them to trade gold ‘measured out with bull-shaped weights’ for ‘bread, beer, wine, meat and fruits’. Be that as it may, the spoils from this voyage gave Queen Hatshepsut ‘crowning glories’ sufficient for her lifetime and became one of the legends in the records of old Egypt in which gold plays a seminal part.

  The most enduring of these legends is that of the Phoenix, and there is an inevitable association with the sculptured birds found at Great Zimbabwe. The Phoenix lived in Africa and was immortal; indeed, it had neither a beginning nor an end. Its colour was a beautiful green. Several Zimbabwe birds carved from green soapstone have been found; in fact, green soapstone was the favourite material for what are considered religious artefacts found at Great Zimbabwe. The Phoenix of legend resembled an eagle, as do the Zimbabwe birds, and had bright golden wings, a golden tail, and a solid crest of gold upon its head. When it grew weary of life it built a nest of sticks and the broken limbs of trees, a process which took a considerable time. Eventually the bird dropped a golden egg that instantly set the nest aflame and it and the nest were consumed. The golden egg transformed into a shell from which a white worm emerged and instantly sprang into the full-sized rejuvenated Phoenix.

  Rameses II, arguably the greatest of all the pharaohs (dubbed ‘the Great’ by nineteenth-century Egyptologists), is often exemplified with a Phoenix by his right hand, although by Graeco-Roman times this had become an eagle. In fact, there are raptor-like birds on virtually every stela, bas-relief and decorative panel of ancient Egypt, and nowhere more numerous than in the vast array of stone monuments raised by Rameses the Great. His uniquely long rule of almost a hundred years is also (and perhaps significant to this story) the era in which Egypt became an imperial power in southern, ‘black’ Africa, imperialism motivated in no small part by the royal lust for gold.

  Rameses the Great had some 200 wives and concubines and he acknowledged 96 sons and daughters. He outlived the first 13 of his heirs. His imperial ambitions were fostered in his youth when he accompanied his father (Seti I) on numerous campaigns in Libya and the gold-rich kingdom to the south, Nubia. As a builder in stone employing the mortar-less techniques also found at Great Zimbabwe, Rameses the Great engaged in an orgy of conspicuous consumption of his gold reserves, even though by the time of the Middle Kingdom (c. 1307–1196 BC) Egyptian mines were contributing less and less. Nubia, now part of the Egyptian empire, added to Rameses’ coffers but neither of these sources could surely have provided the gold to pay for the construction of the following:

  In Nubia (Nilotic Sudan), six temples, of which the two carved out of a cliff side at Abu Simbel, with their four colossal statues of the king, are the most magnificent.

  On the west bank of the Nile at Luxor (Thebes), Rameses completed his father’s funerary temple and then built one for himself, which is known as the Rameseum and is the best known of Rameses’ accomplishments.

  In the Wadi Tumilat, he built a border town Per-Atum (biblical Pithom) as a store city and customs post on the trade route from Nubia.

  In Egypt he completed the great hypostyle hall at Karnak (Thebes) and continued the work on a large temple Seti I had been building at Abydos. He built a temple for himself at Abydos, his resident city, and endowed the town with four more major temples and a number of lesser shrines.

  His most notable secular work is arguably the sinking of a deep well in the eastern desert on the route to the Nubian gold mines.

  In truth there are few ancient Egyptian sites of any importance that originally did not at least exhibit the name of Rameses. He was determined that the world should recognise his prosperity, and apart from his own constructions he was not above inscribing his name on the monuments of his predecessors.

  During his long reign, until the later part of the 20th Dynasty, Egypt and Rameses enjoyed suzerainty not only over Nubia but also Palestine, Syria and other adjacent territories of the Hittite Empire. Thereafter, under the weak kings that followed Rameses III, internal decay ended Egyptian power beyond its borders. Rameses II also must have known of Queen Hatshepsut’s spectacular voyage down Africa in the dynasty which preceded his own. I have always found it very difficult to accept that a king of Rameses’ expansionist inclinations, colonial ambitions and appetite for gold did not himself exploit this prime source of African gold. He was certainly the pharaoh who elevated the significance of gold in the Egyptian ideology of kingship. The pharoah’s divine status as both ‘Living Horus’ (the falcon god) and son of Ra (the sun-god) was symbolised by his golden jewellery and regalia. In Gold of the Pharaohs by Hans Wolfgang Muller and Eberhard Thiem, published by the scholarly Cornell University Press, the authors (without apparently recognising it) offer another intriguing link to the stone birds at Great Zimbabwe. Reminding us that the Egyptian hieoroglyph for gold is a beaded necklace, Muller and Thiem observe that this is often augmented by ‘a falcon or solar disk to signify “Golden Horus” or “Gold Sun”.’ A cursory examination of the
Zimbabwe birds shows that several of them are carved with both necklaces and solar disks.

  The New Kingdom, c. 1550–1070 BC, of which Rameses II’s reign was the most glorious part, saw gold and precious stones becoming a royal monopoly. During the 18th and 29th Dynasties private citizens started to be rewarded with golden gifts by the pharaohs. Generals and officials received, as marks of special favour, golden swords, vessels, military decorations and chains of ‘gold of honour’. The flow of gold to service this largesse must have been huge and it was still a flood a thousand and more years later in the Graeco-Roman period (c. 332 BC–AD 642). The Ptolemaic Dynasty was notorious for its displays of gold as an expression of the pharoah’s wealth and divine status. Ptolemy II, Philadephus, was described as ‘the Golden’ and, according to Muller and Thiem, ‘the mountain of gold that brightens all the lands’. They add: ‘The visual climax of the pompe of Ptolemy II was a family portrait group in solid gold: golden statues of Ptolemy II and his deified parents, Ptolemy I Soter and Berenike I, stood in golden chariots set atop golden columns.’ And this did not end with death; even more gold was required to see the pharaohs through to the afterlife.

  The mummies and the funerary trappings of the pharaohs, as we know especially from the fabulous New Kingdom tomb of Tutankhamen, were festooned with gold jewellery, amulets, gold masks, gold coffins, gold accessories and gilded furniture. By Graeco-Roman times this use of gold as the flux of transition to a comfortable afterlife (as we know from the gilded mummies of the Bahariya Oasis) was no longer limited to the royal circle.

  The desire to acquire gold, in a sense an addiction that could never be assuaged, spread out to encompass the whole of North Africa; indeed, it and other ‘luxury’ marine imports could be said to have created a unique society of marine traders, the Phoenicians, not just the best-known king and queen of ancient history. This trading nation occupied a strip of Mediterranean land covering a total area of about 4,000 square miles (less than the area of some English counties). Initially they were known as the Sea People but as their little nation grew into a world power the Sea People acquired territory on the Mediterranean and named it the Palm Land (Phoenicia).

  The Phoenicians are pivotal to the early origin theories of the Zimbabwe culture because their deep-keeled ships allowed them to trade worldwide. Similarly, they seminally influenced their neighbour to the east, another little state called Netu (Palestine) ruled by a king called Solomon. Fabled for many things, in particular his wisdom, Solomon’s driving passion was gold. His lover of legend, the Queen of Sheba (Yemen) had similar appetites and was an adept and highly successful import–exporter.

  For Solomon to have had any involvement in the trade which resulted in the Zimbabwe culture – what H. Rider Haggard who rode with Rhodes into Mashonaland would immortalise in King Solomon’s Mines – we need a rough idea of when Solomon and the Phoenicians were trading partners. Unfortunately, Solomon’s era and the fabled Exodus of the Jews from Egypt are both the subject of running disputes as to when they occurred. Some say the Exodus was 1,200 years before the birth of Christ (which would lay it in the lap of the 19th Dynasty of Seti and Rameses I and II), others that it was 300 years later, others still that the whole story of David and Solomon was fiction made up in about AD 400. The two main schools of thought have Rameses II witnessing the departure of the Jews (c. 1290–1225 BC) or, 200 years earlier, Amenhotep II (c. 1490–1436) credited with the title ‘Pharaoh of the Exodus’. There is even intriguing speculation that Queen Hatshepsut, whose fleet later brought back all the ‘luxuries’, including gold, from Punt, may as a princess have reared Moses.

  There was definitely a time window between 1200 BC and 900 BC when the great empires of Assyria, Egypt and the Hittites did not dominate the Middle East and mini-kingdoms could have arisen. Be that as it may, there can be little doubt that over a thousand years before the birth of Christ a minor king called Solomon whose dreams went beyond the bounds of avarice ruled for some forty years a little Middle East country which is now Israel, and that he and a Phoenician king, Hiram of Tyre, made a much-publicised voyage down the Indian Ocean coast of Africa, returning with 43 metric tons of gold. Even accepting that biblical stories of great derring-do are apocryphal and boastful, this is an incredible hoard; indeed, even in the face of the compelling evidence that Solomon’s dreams did go beyond avarice, it is still hard to countenance.

  But why then quote the tonnage (in the measures of the time) so specifically? Admittedly speculating (with a little help from a mining friend), but if we allow the Shona gold collectors a ton a month, which is a huge amount if it is accepted that the first gold was alluvial, we are still talking almost four years of output. It is inconceivable how many eagles’ quills would be needed to ship that amount! My mining friend then considered the primitive nature of the extraction processes in the ancient Zimbabwe fields, and opined that a few tons a year would be his preferred guesstimate. But then we would be talking about the production of decades, which is equally ridiculous. Unless, of course, there were more people collecting gold than has been acknowledged before.

  Hiram’s expedition certainly returned home and shared with Solomon an enormous hoard of gold. Had anything like it been seen before it would not have featured so large in the Bible. And if 43 tons is a dubious return from gold-rich Mashonaland it is even more questionable from the two other gold-producing countries, Ethiopia and Somalia, where Hiram’s ships might have called. Then there is the problem of transporting gold in these quantities. This little band of Phoenicians and Jews could certainly not, on their own, have trekked up to Mashonaland and carried back 43 tons of gold through tsetse-fly and malaria-infested bush which, centuries later, almost brought Rhodes’ expedition to its knees. Unless there had been some kind of gold market, collecting point or trading post with access to porters.

  Was the easily defended acropolis hill community which preceded the grand zimbabwes a very early gold market or trading post? Did the Phoenicians, or possibly even earlier Moorish traders, set it up? An intriguing fact to support this idea will emerge shortly; Great Zimbabwe in medieval times certainly had buildings from which foreigners sold imported goods.

  The Phoenicians were after all the old world adepts at trading with primitive people. We know they went to markets in southwest England to buy Cornwall’s tin, and some believe their unique ships took them as far afield as South America. As for porterage, Ezekiel 27:12 specifically mentions that the Phoenicians were slave-traders. In the earliest days of slave-trading, this human cargo was usually previously employed in the transportation of heavy goods, like ivory, to the coast.

  That Solomon enjoyed close relations with the Phoenician King is confirmed frequently in the Old Testament, suggesting that in the beginning the two countries were operating almost as one. They had, initially, similar polytheistic religions and shared gods like Baal, Astoreth and Moloch, all of whom were worshipped amid sacred stones, pillars, towers and high places. Later, of course, the Hebrews came to worship just one god.

  Apart from the joint expedition to Punt, the Bible is littered with references to the intimate early trading relationship which, given the size of his kingdom, brought Solomon disproportionately great riches, and a legend to match; II Chronicles 2:13 says that King Hiram’s father was a Phoenician, his mother a daughter of the Jewish tribe of Dan. In the same book Hiram is reported as supplying Solomon with materials for his famous temple and ornaments to decorate it. I Kings 5 and Ezra 3:7 describe the Phoenician trade with Hebrews, the latter supplying wheat, honey wine and oil for various Phoenician luxuries like gold and the famous cedar trees (which Mauch thought he had found at Great Zimbabwe).

  It is also recorded that Solomon married a Phoenician princess, that the daughter of the King of Tyre and High Priest of Astoreth married Ahab, King of Israel, and that Athaliah, daughter of Jezebel, a Phoenician princess, married Ahaziah, King of Judah, and so on.

  I think we can accept with reasonable confidence that these t
wo little nation states had strong blood ties and mutual trading interests, more than sufficient to support the biblical stories that they were partners in the expedition to Ophir that returned with tons and tons of gold. Moreover, this intimate Jewish partnership with the far-ranging Phoenicians will acquire considerable significance as this story reaches its climax. I am further convinced, even though he grew to be more and more enigmatic, that Theodore Bent regarded the Phoenicians and the Hebrews as one, specially in matters of trade and influence in south-central Africa. If that is the case, he was uncannily prescient.

  Sadly, however, there is a seminal problem with all these Romantic theories that has in the past always stopped them dead in their tracks. A thousand or so years before the birth of Christ the expert opinion is that there were no resident natives in Zimbabwe. Or rather I should say, no ‘Bantu’ here. For the Zimbabwe culture to be an all-Bantu construct in line with the current ‘definitive’ origin theory, everything we have been talking about needs to have happened about 1,500 years later.

  Contemporary Bantu are understandably implacable in their insistence that these unique stone works were raised by their ancestors, and them alone. But are they right? There are indications from almost every quarter that other influences were at work here, influences which increase in number the further back you go. Could this impasse, which has been holding the truth at bay for a century, be broken if, as I have suggested, the originators of the Zimbabwe gold trade and the authors of the Zimbabwe monuments are regarded, at least for the sake of argument, as different? It is surely obvious that the former must date from earlier times; indeed, the only question is how much earlier?

  In his respected treatise Africa: its People and their Cultural History (New York, McGraw-Hill), Professor G.P. Murdock says that the Bantu only reached the northeast African coast from the interior between AD 575 and 879. This broad band is generally accepted. Others have pointed out that since the Bantu in southern Africa came down from the north as part of a general movement of expansion it is unlikely that they could have reached Mashonaland and further south in any large numbers before the sixth to the ninth centuries AD.