The Lost City of Solomon and Sheba

by Robin Brown-Lowe

He was among the first of the treasure hunters to visit the Dholo Dholo ruin and his party immediately made extraordinary finds. These included two cannon, one Portuguese and the other a British naval gun. The pieces now guard the front door to Groote Schuur and I was able to repay something of my debt to the curator there by informing her of how and by whom they were found.

  Hans Sauer’s companion, Bradley, was examining Dholo Dholo’s daga platforms. Sauer wrote: ‘… when he stooped down and picked up an alluvial gold nugget weighing about an ounce. Searching further we all began to find small alluvial gold nuggets. We got our boys to flush the surface with buckets of water, and after washing away the dust and debris we collected about a hundred pounds worth of gold in two hours. The bulk of it was alluvial, but there were a few bits of ancient gold chains. I sent Rhodes most of the gold we had collected in the fort.’

  Sauer was understandably secretive about his gold finds but it is what comes next that casts a revealing light on the true nature of the treasure-hunting of the time and how much gold and prized artefacts were removed clandestinely. Or more to the point, how little was left for archaeologists like Randall-MacIver to discover.

  Returning to Bulawayo, now a frontier town of gold prospectors, Sauer was approached by two Americans – ‘brothers-in-law, of the Western-cowboy type. One of the pair who would not take no for an answer, ultimately proposed to me that if I would tell him where we found the gold, he and his friend would go and explore the locality and would hand over to us one half of any gold or treasure they found.’ Cutting this salutary story short, all Sauer ever saw from the deal was a copper axe, but:

  The next time I saw Rhodes he told me the following story. When in London the two Americans called upon him at his hotel rather late in the evening. They entered carrying a heavy brown leather bag between them. For some reason or other they seemed anxious not to be recognised by people outside the hotel.

  They had the appearance of conspirators with their overcoat collars turned up and their sombreros drawn over their faces. Having extracted a promise from Rhodes that he would not claim what they were about to show him they opened the bag which contained nearly £1,000 worth of alluvial gold, ornaments, beads, chains, bracelets and rings. All this treasure they had found in the ruins of the Insiza district, the bulk coming from the Dholo Dholo temple. They did not, however, tell Rhodes that one half of the treasure belonged to me!

  It was from this same zimbabwe that Rhodes’ licensed treasure hunters, Neal and Johnson, would later take another 700 oz of raw gold, plus gold beads, bangles and other items. As a very rough guide, the Dholo Dholo story indicates that only a fraction of the artefacts removed from the Rhodesian zimbabwes was declared or subsequently saw the light of day. Much of the worked gold was almost certainly melted down for ease of shipment and to disguise its origin.

  From these same floors Hans Sauer retrieved ‘an earthenware bead of a certain colour and shape which I recognised as Egyptian, having seen many similar ones in the museum in Cairo’. This so intrigued him he took it to London:

  I showed it to Flinders Petrie, at that time attached to University College [of London] in Gower Street, who at once declared that the bead was of the XII Egyptian dynasty. On my showing signs of disbelief, he took me into a room where I saw a large number of slanting desks, with numerous strings of Egyptian beads stretched over every one of them.

  The Professor then asked me to look at the end of the hole which pierced the bead, and examining this carefully, I noticed a small chip. I pointed this out to him, and he asked me to compare the beads on one of the desks which he designated. I found that all the beads on this desk had the chip at the edge of the hole and all resembled mine in size, colour and shape.

  Professor Petrie then told me that the chip on my bead was present only in the beads of the XII Egyptian dynasty. The bead had probably been brought into Rhodesia thousands of years ago by Egyptian traders.

  Let us assume for the moment that Hans Sauer is not inventing all this. The methodology fits all the archaeological criteria for a proper dating. Flinders Petrie is the top man in his field. His basis of comparison is a university collection of dated artefacts with a distinctive feature. Petrie’s dating is not a throwaway remark. He had taken time to examine Sauer’s bead and he takes Sauer to his comparative collection and obliges him to witness a singularity in this style of bead – a distinctive chip – that allows a positive identification.

  What of Dr Sauer’s motivation? He was an educated man from an important political family. As a medical practitioner his veracity and personal reputation were particularly important to him. He was a rich, well-known collector of African artefacts who never attempted to hide what he found on his trips to several zimbabwes; in fact, the ‘Conquistadors’ chapter in his book is devoted to describing such finds. His book enjoyed a wide international readership.

  It is frankly inconceivable that Dr Sauer would have invented so detailed a story. He had absolutely nothing to gain and much to lose, not least his and Flinders Petrie’s reputations; indeed, Petrie could have sued if the story was false. There are no rational grounds for disbelieving him. Reason demands, therefore, our acceptance of the fact that an identifiable artefact infinitely older than David Randall-MacIver’s Nanking porcelain was found at this most affluent of zimbabwes. This would make it the oldest identifiable alien article ever found at any zimbabwe. There are also those beads from Mapungubwe which now enjoy a modern classification as the work of ancient Egyptians. If Sauer’s bead was indeed Pharaoan Egyptian this story may have come full circle. We could be back in the time of Solomon and Sheba. At very least we are back to a time when the trade goods of the caravans of the old Moors included beads made well before the birth of Christ.

  David Randall-MacIver would not, of course, have subscribed to this, although I must confess to wondering whether he would have changed his mind had he known the story and Professor Flinders Petrie’s role in it. I am assuming he did not know because he would surely not have chosen to excavate at Dholo Dholo – indeed, base a dating of the Zimbabwe culture from artefacts found there – if he had known how extensively the treasure hunters had done the place over, Dr Sauer’s party in particular. All in all, Randall-MacIver’s monograph gives the impression of being a rushed job based, as he admits, on sites largely stripped of the materials he really needed. For the Shona school to regard it as their main plank of evidence in support of a stand-alone Karanga origin is, in my opinion, unsafe.

  Randall-MacIver’s work essentially adds nothing new to our enquiry because, while he affirms emphatically that the lost city is ‘typically African’, he says nothing about the origins of these Africans and their ancestral heritage. With hindsight I would even question that ‘typically African’ label. Virtually every corner of Africa has been explored since Randall-MacIver’s time and nothing resembling my lost city (that is not probably part of the Zimbabwe culture) has been found. Great Zimbabwe is not typical of anything. It is unique.

  But David Randall-MacIver did at least leave us with one new place to look. His work in Inyanga is, I think, the best and certainly the most revelatory. He observes, you will recall, that the Inyanga forts became less defensive in structure the further south of the Zambesi you go: ‘It looks as if the enemy against whom these people were defending themselves was in the north, not in the east or south, and the distribution of their buildings suggests the probability that they themselves first settled in the north, and later extended their range… . It was therefore, a Negro or Negroid race of Africans, coming I do not know from what quarter, but possibly north of the Zambesi, who made these buildings.’

  I have no problem with that; in fact it puts us right back on track.

  EIGHT

  Ophir Spinning

  Far from resolving the origin debate as the Rhodes Trustees had hoped, David Randall-MacIver’s dramatic conclusions provoked a decade of acrimonious debate. Battle lines were drawn, many of which are still in place today. Admitted
ly, Randall-MacIver had rubbed salt into long-open wounds by promoting his theory of a medieval lost city with almost evangelical arrogance.

  ‘Many no doubt will bewail that a romance has been destroyed,’ he lectured an audience in Bulawayo. ‘But surely it is a prosaic mind that sees no romance in the partial opening of a new chapter in the history of vanished cultures. A corner is lifted on that veil which has shrouded the forgotten but not irrecoverable past of the African Negro. Were I a Rhodesian I should feel that in studying the contemporary natives in order to unravel the story of the ruins, I had a task as romantic as any student could desire. I should feel that in studying the ruins in order thereby to gain a knowledge of the modern races, I had an interest that the politicians should support and that the scholar must envy.’

  This, in a country which had just bloodily suppressed the local Negroes, was either outrageously naïve or outrageously provocative. I suspect the latter.

  Public meetings were called by Richard Nicklin Hall and his supporters to condemn David Randall-MacIver as an upstart whippersnapper, and a number of European academics supported this view simply on the limited time Randall-MacIver had spent on his excavations. At the same time Hall began a massive tome of rebuttal entitled Prehistoric Rhodesia.

  Most damningly, Hall was also able to call into question Randall-MacIver’s scientific process, showing it to be self-serving and careless in key areas. Hall claimed straight away, quoting his excellent field records, that Randall-MacIver’s most important archaeological stratifications of a trench, for which he claimed an unbroken progression from the present to the most ancient past, was not a pristine site. Hall (as Garlake confirmed with a new dig in 1958) had already removed several feet of deposits from the top of it. Hall in fact enjoyed the support of almost the entire South African historical establishment and a number of senior European academics. At least three other learned treatises all proposing a different authorship for the Zimbabwe culture to Randall-MacIver’s were in preparation at this time.

  What is most intriguing, however, is that the smoke and fire of this dispute seems to have disguised the fact that none of David Randall-MacIver’s findings, or the conclusions of Richard Hall, added anything very revealing to the real origin debate. By that I mean the earliest beginnings of a stone-building phenomenon that has no precedent anywhere in south-central Africa was (and frankly, is still) a mystery to contemporary south-central Africans.

  The Romantic and the Shona schools of thought had got stuck trying to date the grand zimbabwes – the jewels of what was, by the time they were all up, a highly developed Zimbabwe culture funded by a sophisticated gold industry. Hall had settled for his Phoenicians in league with King Solomon, although he had not a shred of hard evidence to support this idea of a large Semite occupation. Randall-MacIver believed the oldest remains in the country ‘appear to be those of the northern district between Inyanga and the Zambesi’ and on the strength of another piece of stoneware found near Umtali, affirms that the ‘site may be considered to belong to the fifteenth century’.

  Great Zimbabwe, he insists, is later (early sixteenth century) and the earliest possible date (his emphasis) is two centuries before this. His evidence is that Sofala, on the east coast, was at this time a flourishing port inhabited by a colony of Arabs who traded with the interior for gold: ‘As Zimbabwe, being the great distribution centre, must have owed its very existence to the trade with the coast first opened up by the Arabs of Magadoxo, the earliest possible date for any settlement there [Zimbabwe] is the eleventh century AD.’

  This method of dating the genesis of the very first stone structures is dubious. Arab settlements on the coast – even the earliest ones like that of Magadoxo – would only have become ‘settlements’ once trade with the hinterland had become reliable and sustainable. It takes hundreds, sometimes thousands, of years for settlements to grow into stone cities devoted to trade. So an eleventh-century Magadoxo or a ‘flourishing’ port at Sofala in the fifteenth century actually dates the start of the trade that created and sustained them to a much earlier period.

  We are anyway not primarily concerned with the Arabs, Negroes and Swahilis who serviced the Zimbabwe/Magadoxo/Sofala trade between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries. I am now looking for the traders or tribes (or both) who first found gold and other valuable trade goods in the Shona hinterland and who built the very first stone enclosures for their cattle, or as protection for their camps and caravans. These are the original founders of the Zimbabwe culture. Romantic guesses about a Phoenician occupation certainly do not take us back as far as we need to go and Randall-MacIver’s ruminations based on imported ceramics from a time when Great Zimbabwe was already a mighty monument are of even less help.

  Even though they did not realise it (or admit to it), Hall and Randall-MacIver actually had a belief in common which should have caused them to recognise that the gold trade and the building of the grand zimbabwes had different evolutionary histories. They both believed the best buildings were built after invasions, albeit different invasions. In other words the construction of many of the best buildings had not been as a result of ‘natural gradual evolution’ but the other way around.

  This could not have been the way it was with the gold trade. Nobody really disputes that it started before the arrival of the Bantu, with bushmen trading alluvial gold. It then went through major technological change from this alluvial gold-collecting industry based on barter, to deep-reef mining in long runs of deep shafts. There was also an associated gold-processing industry manufacturing gold bars and cast ingots, jewellery and art objects like the Mapungubwe rhino.

  But neither Randall-MacIver nor Hall believed that the Zimbabwe culture’s better buildings were the product of a similar slow evolution of style and craftsmanship. Hall visualised an invasion by Phoenicians who enslaved the natives to put up the grand zimbabwes. The society then became decadent and the quality of building declined. Randall-MacIver believed in an invasion across the Zambesi by Bantu from the northeast. Their best buildings – strong hill forts with fortified cellars – were the first to go up, ‘protected behind one of the vastest series of entrenchment lines to be found anywhere in the world’. Later Inyanga buildings were inferior as the culture grew more secure.

  Essentially, whether you believe either of them or not, Hall and Randall-MacIver are both saying that invaders imported the necessary skills. That for me is perhaps the most important thing the pair of them have to say; indeed, Hall may well have identified the genesis of the gold trade, Randall-MacIver the stone-builders. I am probably the first to suggest that both Richard Nicklin Hall and David Randall-MacIver, in this sense, did sterling work. All that has been remembered of their relationship, though, is the row, and it just went on and on. Even so it would be another twenty years before the Rhodes Trustees recognised that Randall-MacIver had not put the ghosts of the lost city to rest and that they needed to try again.

  In 1929 they appointed Gertrude Caton-Thompson, another Oxbridge archaeologist who had also learned her trade under Flinders Petrie. Again a member of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, she dug more thoroughly than any of her predecessors, on nine ruin sites. I have no wish to denigrate Ms Caton-Thompson’s work by giving it short shrift here; indeed, I am advised that it was an exemplary piece of early twentieth-century archaeology. But sadly she has little of a revelatory nature to add to our tale as she and David Randall-MacIver were to be contradicted in a decade or so on the crucial issue of dates by the new techniques of Carbon-14 dating.

  Caton-Thompson dug an interesting trench under the conical tower, proving it was solid. This enigmatic tower evidently attracted her and she allowed a comparison with a minaret at Zanzibar, thought to be ancient, which also had a double chevron pattern built into its walls. Otherwise she largely supported Randall-MacIver’s datings and his theories of how the people who did the work at Great Zimbabwe were housed. Like him she also avoided speculation on enigmas such as the stone bi
rds. Indeed, she avoided speculation on any of the enigmas, which, as a result, left the issue of authorship somewhat more of a puzzle than it had been before.

  Her final report included this apparently definitive comment on the key issue of authorship of the Zimbabwe culture and its buildings: ‘If by indigenous we mean an origin born of the country on which they stand, then the ruins are in my opinion, indigenous in the full sense of the term.’ The Shona school claimed this with glee, reading it as proof positive that the Zimbabwe culture was entirely of their making.

  Take a close look at her phraseology, however, and you find that it might not mean that. Is Gertrude Caton-Thompson in fact covertly questioning an ‘indigenous’ Bantu origin? Personally I am convinced that she chose to be ambivalent. ‘Born of the country on which they stand’, is an odd phrase by any definition, but is obviously carefully chosen. Caton-Thompson was well aware of the history of the region and of the long-term influence of aliens like ‘ancient Moors’ who by medieval times could have been permanently resident, not to say integrated. Born of the country on which they stand, in fact.

  Moreover, Caton-Thompson uses this peculiar phrase to answer the key question she has been sent in to resolve when she could very easily have made a simple, unequivocal answer such as: these monuments are the spontaneous, unassisted work of the Karanga cattle-herders who lived here. I think there is significance in her avoiding this plain answer if only because I can see no other rationale for her conditional answer. Was she really trying to suggest: we have no idea of the composition or the antecedents of the elite who created the Zimbabwe culture but whoever they were, they, not invading aliens, built these extraordinary buildings. Given that the rest of her report so closely reflected David Randall-MacIver’s, was she in fact carefully choosing her own words to echo his evasive answer to this point: ‘As to which particular tribe of Negroes erected the buildings I make no suggestion’? In the light of all this ambivalence I find it very surprising that Gertrude Caton-Thompson and her meticulous, encyclopaedic report, at least so far as academic opinion was concerned, closed the case.