The Lost City of Solomon and Sheba

by Robin Brown-Lowe

  Hall’s ‘clearances’ at Great Zimbabwe have been condemned as ‘ruining Great Zimbabwe for archaeology’. What has been forgotten or ignored is that Hall’s terms of reference from the BSAC required him to prioritise the ‘preservation of the building’ – or perhaps more accurately, the preservation of what had become Rhodes’ private ancient ruin. Ignoring ever-louder howls of protest from foreign archaeologists he indulged in clearances which involved not just a wealth of trees, creepers and undergrowth, but fallen stones round the walls, the spoil from the Bent and Willoughby digs, and at least 3, 5 and in places up to 12 feet of what the archaeologists called ‘stratified archaeological deposits’; that is, the layered history of the Zimbabwe culture, in particular the more recent stages of it.

  Hall was utterly unrepentant. His job as he saw it was to preserve the ancient ruin, make it safe and improve access to it and if that involved removing the ‘filth and decadence of the Kaffir occupation’, so be it. This was bad enough but Hall did not stop there. Once he had cleaned and opened up the lost city he set about looking for evidence of what he called ‘the ancients’. His predecessor, Bent, had already searched for and failed to find worthwhile grave sites. By the time Hall got to work, treasure hunters and white miners had located some 500 zimbabwes but they too found remarkably few graves. This was not for want of diligent desecration: everyone knew grave sites were the best places to find gold.

  The total number of graves found by the time Hall went to press was just forty, one per ten zimbabwes, which everyone agreed was peculiar. Even Theodore Bent, who only ever knew of twenty-three zimbabwes, was mystified by this, suggesting that perhaps the alien authors of the Zimbabwe culture had removed their dead for burial at sacred sites in their homelands as was the practice in places like Bahrein.

  Bent had gone on to suggest that ‘the ancients were but a garrison in the country’ but Richard Hall, now aware that he was in charge of the largest stone city south of the Pyramids, quickly rejected that view. The ancient gold mines, Hall pointed out, must have been worked by huge gangs of ‘slaves’, as was the custom in all the ancient countries of the world. A similarly large workforce would have been engaged in quarrying and transporting the millions of tons of rock for the buildings. A great deal of food would have had to be planted, processed and transported by and for a large indigenous workforce. ‘Such a vast slave population,’ Hall decided, ‘presupposes a vast population of the alien ancients to protect the town and the many and scattered gold mining districts.’

  He was determined to find cemeteries, at least those of the ‘Proconsuls or overlords … the chief stewards and taskmasters, or priests’, which he expected would provide rich rewards of gold as ‘the minimum amount of gold found with the remains of each ancient so far discovered has not been less than one and a half ounces.’ He also anticipated no difficulties separating modern (Mombo–Monomatapa) burials from those of his ancients. On the basis of the few graves he had opened he asserted that the ancients were buried on their sides at full length whereas the moderns were interred haphazardly, often sitting upright. ‘Ancients’ were always buried under the original cemented floors or under the first or second floors above the original cemented floors. Medieval and modern people were buried near the surface and many feet above the ancients.

  The presence of a considerable amount of solid gold ornaments decorated with old Zimbabwe patterns was an unfailing feature of an ancient burial, said Hall. Those of the Mombo–Monomatapa period had ornaments of iron and copper, sometimes banded with gold. The most recent burials only had copper, iron, brass and glass bead ornamentation. Hall further claimed that the pottery which he found invariably buried with the dead differed in design, glaze, ornamentation and material and that it deteriorated with each successive period until it became identical with the ‘coarse articles’ made by the natives of his day.

  Graves that had been found and opened revealed, Hall remarked, evidence of a turbulent and violent history. At the Umnukwana ruin, seven ‘undoubted ancients’ were found who had not been buried. Surrounded by their weapons, they were lying under the soil just outside the entrance, evidently in the positions in which they had been slain. Broken bangles of solid gold and torn bangles of gold wire were found on the same site. Hall condemned what he called ‘vandalism galore’, which had caused considerable damage to the ruins as a result of a false belief among treasure hunters that the ancients buried their dead in the walls.

  After five years of excavations, his own and those of Neal, Hall felt qualified to offer a detailed description of the ancient burial practices of the Zimbabwe culture:

  On the death of an ancient a grave was sunk through the cemented floor, apparently under his own dwelling, and the grave was made apparently without any reference to the points of the compass. As all original floors have a layer of ashes underlying them, the ashes in the grave were removed and replaced by some sort of red earth in which the body was laid always on one side or the other.

  His gold ornaments were buried on his person, and his cakes of gold still remained in the pouch on his waist, while, as in ancient Egyptian and present-day Kaffir burials, earthenware pots probably once containing grain, were placed beside him.

  These pots of the ancients were of the finest clay, beautifully glazed, very thin, and engraved in the best style with the oldest Zimbabwe patterns.

  His head either rested on a pillow of water-grooved stone as at Chum Ruins, or on a wooden pillow very similar to those seen in Egyptian museums and in ancient paintings of Egyptian tombs, resembling in shape and patterns the best of pillows used by the Kaffirs of today.

  The wooden pillow was frequently covered with beaten gold fastened on by solid gold tacks weighing 3 dwt each, or were beautifully worked on both sides in gold wire with patterns of the oldest chevron decoration.

  By his side if he were a great man, was laid his rod of office with the beaten gold head embossed with the Phallic sun image, and with solid gold ferrule six to eighteen inches long and weighing 1½ oz.

  In these same Chum ruins, Neal found a ‘giant’. One shin bone was over 2 feet in length. Hall speculated about the ‘Tombs of the Giants’ created by the builders of the ancient stone monuments known as nauraghes on Sardinia which Theodore Bent had also compared with Zimbabwe stone structures.

  Hall, it should be noted, quickly donned the mantle of antiquarian and was also in the process of formulating his own rules of archaeology for Great Zimbabwe. These have subsequently been much maligned, in my view unfairly. The ‘science’ of archaeology as we know it was still being invented when Hall worked at Great Zimbabwe and Hall implemented an early system of ‘stratification’ – layers of human activity – based on that suggested by Flinders Petrie in the same decade from his digs in Palestine. It may be that Hall interpreted his stratification to support his Romantic theories – most archaeologists do to a degree – but it also demonstrates that he was aware of and sought to practise scientific method. Hall was the first to spot ‘a great waste of the precious metal [gold] which was so noticeable on every hand’, and to extrapolate from this a material difference in the attitude to gold of modern Africans and the aliens he was now convinced had run the gold industry.

  Gold in the form of broken bangles, tacks, and pellets were found on the original floors of the ruins ‘as plentifully as nails can be picked up from the floors of a modern carpenter’s shop’. Debris heaps of sweepings from the ruins produced gold pellets in profusion. At Khami, Neal, using his small dry-crushing machine on the debris heaps had produced an average of 16 oz of gold per month.

  Based on the graves he had examined Hall insisted that the ‘ancients’ respected gold far more than the recent African kingdoms like Mombo and Monomatapa: ‘With the exception of the Mombo chief buried in the rudely constructed stone circle at M’telegwa, very few of the Mombo skeletal remains had gold ornaments of any value, the gold generally being in bands at intervals on iron bangles, or gold beads at intervals on copper bangle
s. In these periods copper and glass beads appear to have been the favourite ornaments.’

  Respect him or not (Hall was observably racially prejudiced), the fact remains that he had his hands on the lost city exclusively for more than two years – the longest full-time study ever – and he was both zealous and a good record-keeper. He saw things no one else would or could see. The vociferous condemnation of Hall by the archaeology lobby disguises the fact that even allowing for Hall’s destructive housekeeping, modern archaeologists have provided few definite answers to key Zimbabwe riddles, not least what happened to the bodies of what must have been a large elite.

  Perhaps Hall’s greatest contribution to the debate is the extent to which his discoveries proved clear alien influence in the Zimbabwe culture even though such influence is still essentially denied by the Shona school. Hall alone made enough alien finds to make nonsense of that denial including, near to several furnaces, a lump of bronze ‘slag’, as well as melted-down tin for mixing with copper to produce bronze.

  A complete ensemble of metal-working tools were found in hut ruins near the entrance to the conical tower including three gold crucibles, six pottery scorifiers, a pair of tongs, two shallow cross-shaped soapstone moulds, a drawplate for gold wire and, nearby, eight smooth river pebbles used to burnish gold sheets. Some 200 oz of gold beaten into metal sheets were found, as was gold wire and devices for drawing the wire. Hundreds of spinning whorls, mostly pottery but some of soapstone, were found in a single trench outside the Elliptical Building. Oral tradition suggests that cotton clothing was worn by the elite of the Zimbabwe culture, some threaded with fine gold wire.

  Hall found Posselt’s hidden soapstone birds and some new ones. A half-bird he unearthed fits the lower half of a broken bird in a museum in Berlin. And in the so-called Phillips ruin in the valley, Hall found the last whole Zimbabwe bird. Rider Haggard, who would use his experiences in Mashonaland as the basis for his novel King Solomon’s Mines, coined his own theory about the religion the birds represented: they were ‘sacred birds, figured, however, not as the Cypris, but as the vulture of her Sidonian representative, Astarte’.

  Hall also accumulated huge piles of loose stelae, carved and plain, some perhaps door lintels. Many were still precariously decorating crumbling walls and as his job was to make the place safe he simply hauled them out and piled them out of harm’s way.

  Towards the end of his tenure, Hall called his camp at Great Zimbabwe ‘Havilah’ after the land from which, according to the Bible, Ophir’s gold came. Here, in 1904, he compiled the second edition of his book which described his finds, his digs and his own, entirely Romantic view of the origins of the Zimbabwe culture. It is a slow, pedantic read but it was an immediate best-seller and is the only book on the Zimbabwe culture which has remained in print for a century. It enjoyed the support of several high academics, including Professor A.H. Keane, FRGS, late Vice-President of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. Professor Keane summarised Hall’s work in four scholarly articles, collectively entitled The Gold of Ophir: Whence Brought and by Whom? that included this condensed theory of the origin of the Zimbabwe culture:

  Ophir was not the source, but the distributor of the gold and other costly merchandise brought from abroad to the courts of David and Solomon.

  Ophir was the emporium on the south coast of Arabia which has been identified with the Mosha or Portus Nobilis of the Greek and Roman geographers.

  Havilah [as named in the Bible] was the auriferous land whence came ‘the gold of Ophir’, and Havilah is here identified with the Rhodesias, the mineralised land between the lower Zambesi and the Limpopo – Mashona, Matabili, and Manica lands.

  The ancient gold-workings of this region were first opened and the associated monuments erected by the South Arabian Himyarites, who were followed, not before the time of Solomon, by the Phoenicians, and these very much later by the Moslem Arabs and Christian Portuguese.

  Tharshish [another Biblical reference] was the outlet for the precious metals and precious stones of Havilah, and stood probably on the site of the present Sofala.

  The Himyaritic and Phoenician treasure-seekers reached Havilah through Madagascar, where they had settlements and maintained protracted commercial and social intercourse with the Malagasy natives. With them were associated the Jews, by whom the fleets of Hiram and Solomon were partly manned.

  The Queen of Sheba came by the land route and not over the seas, to the court of Solomon. Her kingdom was Yemen, the Arabia Felix of the Ancients, the capital of which was Maraiaba Bahramalakum. Her treasures were partly imported (the precious metals and precious stones) from Havilah and its port of Tharshish to Ophir, and partly (frankincense and myrrh) shipped at Ophir from the neighbouring district of Mount Sephar.

  Sephar was confused by the Alexandrian authors of the Septuagint with Ophir, which was the chief emporium of the Sabaean empire.

  In a word the ‘gold of Ophir’ came from Havilah [Rhodesia], and was worked and brought thence first by the Himyarites [Sabaeans and Minaeans], later by the Phoenicians, the chief ports engaged in the traffic being Ezion-geber in the Red Sea, Tharshish in Havilah, and mid-way between the two, Ophir in South Arabia.

  This central position of Ophir explains how it became the intermediate emporium whither the fleets of Hiram and Solomon sailed every three years from Ezion-geber for the gold imported from Havilah and for the spices grown on the slopes of the neighbouring Mount Sephar, not far from the deep inlet of Moascha, round which are thickly strewn the ruins of Ophir.

  These and the other Himyaritic ruins of Yemen show striking analogies with those of Rhodesia, while the numerous objects of Semitic worship and the fragments of the Himyaritic script found in Zimbabwe and elsewhere south of the Zambesi leave no reasonable doubt that the old gold workings and associated monuments of this region are to be ascribed to the ancient Sabaeans of South Arabia and their Phoenician successors.

  Thus the eminent Professor Keane places Solomon and Sheba firmly back in the ring, this time with a clear Madagascar connection and a further hint of a Jewish involvement.

  Need we go further? A Royal Geographical Society report, the Curator of Great Zimbabwe with more time on site than any other person, and a professor of the Royal Anthropological Society have now spoken almost with one voice. Is this not proof enough?

  Again, the answer is an emphatic no.

  The Rhodes Trust fired Richard Nicklin Hall, his work vilified by the British scientific establishment, after his patron’s death. Waves of British university-trained archaeologists descended upon the ruins. They contemptuously discarded virtually everything about the authors of Great Zimbabwe that had been proposed thus far.

  SEVEN

  The Debunkers

  If, as some Romantics have suggested, there is a Great Zimbabwe curse at work on those who desecrated the lost city in the first decade of the twentieth century, we find it hard at work. What’s more, it is strikingly in chronological order. Carl Mauch is dead, having failed to get the scholastic position he felt his discoveries had earned him. He was forced to take a lowly job in a cement works and later ‘fell’ from the window of his lodgings.

  Rhodes also met an early end and is buried in the Matopos hills in Matabeleland. Ambition finally spent, he insists on the simplest of epitaphs – ‘Here lie the remains of Cecil John Rhodes’.

  Lobengula is also dead. No granite tomb for him. He died, it is said, of hypothermia suffered while fleeing into the wilderness after his offers of truce were ignored. To this day the place of his death has never been established, although many have searched because he is known to have been carrying gold to trade for peace.

  J. Theodore Bent is dying of a fever caught on another African expedition, still obsessively hunting the authors of the Zimbabwe culture.

  Richard Nicklin Hall, once Curator of Great Zimbabwe, is out of work and embittered.

  The row between the Romantic and Shona schools of origin theory rages on, not
least over Rhodes’ blatant use of Romantic images to fund his imperial ambitions and his financing of the Royal Geographical Society expedition. The Trustees of Rhodes’ estate decide there is urgent need of damage control to protect their patron’s name and they agree to fund a second scientific expedition under the supervision of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Their brief is to lay the ghosts of authorship once and for all and they hand the responsibility to an energetic but unknown junior don from Worcester College, Oxford, David Randall-MacIver, aged thirty. He makes what amounts to a lightning tour of seven grand zimbabwes in five months and, in a book produced within the same year, rejects every theory we have heard so far.

  His book, Mediaeval Rhodesia, rather than resolve matters, pours fuel on a fire that will blaze for the next decade. Randall-MacIver, largely through arrogance, polarises the two main schools of thought on the Zimbabwe culture for ever. Obviously well aware that he is about to stir the hornet’s nest, Randall-MacIver admittedly starts in a conciliatory vein. He reminds his readers that he has nine years’ experience in Egypt and the Orient and that ‘nothing would have been more attractive to me than the prospect of extending my Oriental studies to SouthEast Africa’. But the boot is not long in coming: ‘It has been necessary to abandon this dream, because it has proved to be incompatible with any respect for science and the logic of observed facts’.

  To ensure there is no misunderstanding of where this boot is aimed, Randall-MacIver affirms that he is happy to have his ‘wholly independent and original’ report judged upon its own merits and that no reference has been made to ‘various books which it is impossible to praise and would have been invidious to criticize’. That means all the books on the subject to date with the exception of Dr Theal’s Records of South Eastern Africa which Rhodes paid for: ‘Apart from the collection of documents embodied in that admirable work, there exists no bibliography with which the student need be troubled.’