The Lost City of Solomon and Sheba

by Robin Brown-Lowe

  Hereafter, the monuments were known as the ‘Zimbabwe ruins’, which is how they were referred to throughout my time in Rhodesia. Rather than an exotic antique connecting at least two cultures and linking Great Zimbabwe to ancient golden ages, it was henceforth simply the neglected evidence of a decayed black kingdom. And it is hard to convey how quickly public interest worldwide fell away in the wake of the Caton-Thompson report.

  The concrete arc of the Mazoe Dam which the colonialists built over a river I now know to be the conduit for a vast treasure in gold was then at least as big a tourist attraction as these native ruins and certainly better publicised. No school party from Churchill High School, where I was a founder pupil, ever bussed down to Fort Victoria to see the largest stone temple-city south of the Valley of the Kings. So far as I know, no black school parties went there either. This is the real tragedy of the lost city. Not a day has passed since I have been involved with this project without some intelligent person admitting that they have never heard of the place. Perhaps one in a thousand, and this includes people with some knowledge of Africa, have even an inkling that Great Zimbabwe is the largest stone monument south of the Pyramids or that there are several thousand zimbabwes. An extraordinary international cultural attraction that Zimbabwe can patently ill-afford to lose has vanished almost as effectively as Atlantis.

  But how do you lose the Incas or the Aztecs? Time has shown, I believe, that these early archaeologists, blinkered by scientific disciplines which have been relaxed a great deal since their time, failed to recognise that there are two seminal issues to be addressed here, not just the dates of the grand zimbabwes. To define the Zimbabwe culture we also need to know: (1) The origins and make-up of the original Bantu settlers; and (2) The elements that evolved into the Zimbabwe culture. These questions address the most intransigent of the riddles: how and from where did the natives acquire the know-how, the design skills, the decorative patterns, the architectural mathematics, measuring and levelling instruments and the business acumen to pay for the movement of tens of millions of tonnes of well-shaped tiles of granite? Moreover, if any one of these was alien in origin then the prevailing theory of authorship has to be rewritten and Great Zimbabwe and the Zimbabwe culture has to be accorded a very much more exotic history than it has been credited with for the last half-century.

  On the information we have at the moment there is actually no justification for rejecting the idea that these were King Solomon’s mines, and even the most sceptical of the archaeologists has never questioned that Great Zimbabwe was a temple of sorts. They have also largely sidestepped the question: a temple to whom? That said, I am not intending to lose our way in the Romantic mists of Carl Mauch’s erotic theories. The pioneer archaeologists, especially Ms Caton-Thompson, have at least given us an idea of where to look for the founders of the Zimbabwe culture.

  Mauch’s idea that the actual Queen of Sheba built a temple at Great Zimbabwe can, I think, now safely be set aside. If Sheba’s biblical trip to Africa is, however, apocryphal like so many other Bible stories, it is not yet safe to dismiss the possibility that the first itinerant traders here could have worshipped Sabaean gods and, when the gold trade was at its most lucrative, directed the building of a temple. They at least would have known how. The pivotal question now is not whether there was alien influence, but how much and how early did it come into play. Admittedly this has to be speculation, but there is no way forward (or more importantly, backward) if you deny, as the Shona school largely continues to do, the impact of material alien influence. The dramatic waning of interest by the international scientific community (and the tourist trade) which has caused Great Zimbabwe to remain all but ‘lost’ for the last century is in my opinion a direct result of this door being wrongly closed.

  After Gertrude Caton-Thompson appeared to swing it shut, the lost city could only attract the attentions of poorly funded local enthusiasts either directly or peripherally connected to a body called the Rhodesian Historical Monuments Commission. Its brief was about the preservation and – where damage was hazardous – also the restoration of the zimbabwes. Few of these zealous enthusiasts were academically trained; indeed, one of the most active, K.S. Robinson, who would become Inspector of Monuments the year I arrived, was self-taught. Largely unsung and perhaps with the exception of some of the ‘restoration’, they all did an excellent job. Dr Roger Summers, who after training in the archaeology school of the University of London was Secretary, later Chairman, of the Historical Monuments Commission from 1950 to 1967 and from his post at the National Museum, Bulawayo, gave energetic leadership to this disparate crew. And in the end their work was distinctive and unique because of a sensational American invention – a technique for dating carbon based on its residual radioactivity. More of that in a moment.

  Summers wrote what I regard as the best general primer on the zimbabwes, Ancient Ruins and Vanished Civilisations of Southern Africa, that sadly, like all others with the exception of Hall’s, is long out of print. Robinson did a particularly useful stratification of part of the Western Enclosure on Zimbabwe hill. Hall had already removed 5 feet of deposits in 1903. Much of the remainder had been shovelled out by the Public Works Department in 1915, fearing wall damage.

  Robinson started to dig at an undisturbed point where the remains of a ‘modern’ circular hut protruded and in the fabric of which he unearthed sherds of pots with well-defined necks and graphited interiors. Beneath this were 8 feet of daga flooring, the floors and disintegrated superstructures of successive huts which appeared once to have been of better construction than the ‘modern’ remains. Several hundred beads were found and a carbonised wooden pole which gave a Carbon-14 dating of AD 1440, ± 150 years or so. Archaeologists were delighted that this date supported the guesses of their learned predecessors, although they recognised that they were dating huts, not the grand zimbabwes. At levels below this Robinson found more burned pole-impressed daga flooring and another carbonised pole which gave a dating of AD 1075, ± 150 years.

  Randall-MacIver, you will recall, avowed that the Zimbabwe culture could not possibly be older than the eleventh century. Robinson soon realised that several layers of daga floors lay below his eleventh-century pole. Three more trenches were dug which indicated that daga flooring had once covered the whole enclosure. In what he thought was a midden between base-rock boulders, Robinson found the remains of a further 77 vessels, 29 of which were the same as in the level above. He retrieved 42 beads similar to those found elsewhere, plus a handful of beautiful beads of translucent greyish-green glass with snapped ends. These were definitely alien.

  The find which excited the most interest was a number of pottery figurines in this lowest level: animals, phalli, long-horned cattle and humans, plus the remains of thirty-four pottery vessels decorated with stamped impressions, which could be attributed to a well-known Iron Age tradition. If these pottery figures are religious artefacts of a kind – and the consensus opinion is that they are – then they are pointers to an embryonic ‘culture’ in the making at Great Zimbabwe from much earlier times than had previously been contemplated. This was apparently confirmed by another carbonised wood sample found below the midden on natural earth. It carbon-dated to AD 320, ± 150 years, which takes us back to the early Christian era, a thousand years earlier than any of the early archaeologists had dared suggest. The crucial element here is, however, that it seemingly dates the remains of a settlement. It was, moreover, a settlement of quality huts (rather than nomadic bivouacs), whose occupants knew how to fashion ornamented ceramics and icons for their religious practices.

  Settlements of that complexity certainly do not arise overnight. We have no way of knowing when the very first walls rose round this settlement or indeed when it was first occupied but it is not unreasonable at least to wonder if its roots were not established well before the start of the Christian millennium. And when did people first stop and trade here? No one has seriously asked that question since Carl Mauch; indeed, it may
well be a question – the key question – which is beyond the skills of archaeology to answer, because these founders left all but nothing for the archaeologist to work with.

  Robinson’s dig provided for the first time a complete stratigraphic map of a Great Zimbabwe settlement from its Iron Age beginnings through to the golden age of mighty stone monuments. In spite of the new and paradoxical carbon datings, however, these local workers chose in the main to follow the party line of their academic predecessors at eminent British universities.

  In 1973, the Historical Monuments Commission’s Chief Inspector of Monuments from 1964 to 1970, Peter Garlake, wrote a much-admired ‘definitive’ treatise entitled Great Zimbabwe (Thames & Hudson) which assessed Robinson’s findings, asserting unequivocally that the Rhodesian research supported the conclusions of Caton-Thompson and Randall-MacIver. From the moment I opened the pages of Garlake’s book I experienced a sense of unease, triggered in particular by this sentence where he comes to the defence of his fellow-archaeologist, David Randall-MacIver: ‘Randall-MacIver’s approach had been faultless, his excavations careful, and his assessment of the basic culture of the occupants of Great Zimbabwe unassailable.’ That is very debatable. Randall-MacIver’s approach had been hurried, and even Garlake goes on to admit that his dating evidence came from the stratification of a trench from which Hall had earlier removed several layers of deposits. Does this constitute careful excavation and unassailable assessment?

  My heart sank further when I read the book’s introduction by the eminent British archaeologist, Sir Mortimer Wheeler: ‘I welcome this book as a comprehensive and probably final account of Great Zimbabwe as we can now recover it from the depredations of half a century of largely (though not entirely) untutored curiosity.’ Oh dear. Not another final account to keep the untutored curious at bay and the lost city safe for archaeology. Not only that, but the definitive book which, I have to say, it has remained to this day.

  But Garlake’s book is doubly fascinating. It contains many new revelations, not only because archaeology, post-1949, has been revolutionised by the Carbon-14 dating technique, but also because it is the first true piece of propaganda reflecting the new political relevance of Great Zimbabwe in a country about to dissolve into internal racial war. For the moment, however, we need to go back to that epoch-making by-product of an earlier war, atomic fusion, and consider how much credence can be placed on this Carbon-14 method of dating.

  Ordinary wood, or charcoal, contains a known portion of radioactive carbon (Carbon-14). The radioactivity decays at a known rate from the time the wood ceases to live so its age can be calculated by measuring the amount of extant radioactivity. The technique has a margin of error, a ‘standard deviation’ averaging ± 100 years. There is also the problem that the level fluctuates. We now know that there were fluctuations after AD 1100, and between AD 1400 and 1800 they were quite violent.

  Robinson went on to find another paradoxical piece of ancient wood, this time actually under a massive wall in the Elliptical Building at Great Zimbabwe – the lintels of a drain in fact. This unquestionably had to be an item of building material from the golden age of the monuments – the wall would probably not have still been there without it. Or if we stay loyal to Caton-Thompson and Randall-MacIver, it had to be of the fourteenth century or later.

  Robinson’s timber was local ubande (Spirostachys africanus), probably the same as Mauch took for cedar and caused him to speculate about cedars of Lebanon, and Solomon and Sheba. The younger of the two timber samples dated AD 700 ± 95, the older AD 590 ± 120. That makes it possibly as old as AD 470, and that is all but a thousand years earlier than the scientific guesses. Let us also not forget that this is a relic from the great days of monument-raising, not a burned hut pole from the Zimbabwe culture’s founding time.

  More dramatically, the lintels are earlier than some expert opinion believed the Bantu entered the country. The implications of this particular point electrified everyone, not least Peter Garlake, who immediately engaged in damage control on behalf of the archaeological establishment. He proposed: ‘These dates (for the ubande) were earlier than both MacIver and Caton-Thompson’s estimates of the building’s age but they did not in fact date the building. They only showed that the wall must have been constructed at some indefinite time after the fifth century. Spirostachys is a tree which lives for up to 500 years so if the samples were taken from the heart of the tree then the radiocarbon dates could be that much earlier than the dates the poles were cut.’

  Garlake also suggests that the poles could have been reused from earlier buildings. This is pure supposition. He has no way of knowing whether the wood was old or new, or recycled, and by the rules of his trade, adjusting findings speculatively is disallowed. Garlake would further have us believe that skilled ancient carpenters went hunting for the oldest ubande in living memory. My information and experience is that very few live anything like 500 years, especially in an area where good wood would have been in great demand for buildings and as a cooking fuel. Is it at all reasonable to suggest that masons about to build Great Zimbabwe’s most spectacular wall would have chosen a truly ancient tree or recycled a piece of old timber?

  At no time does Peter Garlake even contemplate that the dating could be correct and there were carpenters/masons here long before anyone previously suspected, craftsmen experienced in the construction of massive dry-stone walls, on level foundations, properly battered and with efficient drains. These drains would, of course, have needed to be calculated for flow and structural stress before the stonework commenced. The walls above the drain rise 10 metres.

  Why is this avenue of possibility not pursued? Presumably because the dating conflicts with the accepted archaeology and plays into the hands of the Romantics. Instead, Garlake focuses on the extensive pottery finds and decides they demonstrate ‘a gradual internal evolutionary process within a single tradition’, ending at Great Zimbabwe with ‘luxurious glazed ceramics’. There is, he admits, ‘a single abrupt change’ around AD 1000. Garlake also concedes that one of the designs – guilloche – is foreign and ‘a pattern probably too complex to have been developed independently by a people with apparently no tradition of arabesque design’. He gets round this by suggesting that the pattern could have been copied from an imported article with guilloche decoration. Imported by whom, and when?

  A similar strange defence is mounted to explain Chief Mugabe’s ignorance of ancestors who slowly evolved a great culture: ‘The invasion [of Zimbabwe hill] of an unimportant Karanga chief finally disrupted a continuous historical tradition that can be traced back through the Rodzwi, the Tora, Mwene Mutapa and Mbire to the foundations of Great Zimbabwe. Mugabe’s incomprehension of the history, significance or purposes of the buildings allowed him to turn them into cattle kraals and use many of the stones to build the rough walls that block and divide several enclosures.’ Garlake adds this rider, giving the first hint that other – political – currents are running beneath the surface here: ‘The same ignorance eventually fortified white questioners in their mistaken beliefs that the indigenous people had nothing to do with the building of Great Zimbabwe.’ For a man of liberal tendencies who is doing his best to support the Shona school of origin this is a most patronising description of a Karanga chief.

  One cannot propose a case for a continuous cultural evolution by Mugabe’s ancestors, then reject the chief’s testimony because he does not fit into this scheme of things or have any recollection of it. Chief Mugabe would have worshipped his ancestors as much as most Shona do and his ancestors would have been revered in oral tradition. The right conclusion here is surely that Mugabe’s people had no oral traditions of elite ancestors. Why? Perhaps the only reasonable answer is because they had gone elsewhere or ‘died out’ too long ago even for Chief Mugabe’s ancestors to have remembered them.

  Garlake is maligning the ‘white questioners’ as well. I know of no ‘white questioner’ (with the possible exception of Richard Hall) who has sa
id that the indigenous people had nothing to do with the building of Great Zimbabwe. Who gathered up those millions of tons of stone; indeed, who raised them? It is the level and the nature of indigenous involvement in the conception and the sophistication of the construction that has been questioned.

  To resist, as Garlake does, the very idea of alien influence seems to me to create an artificial barrier to discovery. In fact the only ‘gradual internal evolutionary process’ at Great Zimbabwe for which we have incontrovertible evidence in the form of artefacts is trade with aliens. Remember that the point of all this is that Garlake’s Great Zimbabwe, endorsed by Sir Mortimer Wheeler, is still widely regarded as the defining text on the Zimbabwe culture. Nothing remotely as comprehensive has been published in the thirty years since it appeared. It still has pride of place in Zimbabwe academic establishments.

  Imagine my surprise, therefore, when I found proof that Garlake was also laundering his evidence to support his case. He quotes Rhodes’ scout, Frederick Courtenay Selous, in support of his theory of an entirely indigenous origin: ‘Selous was a man who had spent many years travelling throughout Mashonaland and who, because of an unparalleled knowledge of the country and the people, had been employed to guide the B.S.A. Co’s occupation forces into the country. He consistently said he knew no reasons of organisation, skill, technology or opportunity, why the Karanga should not have built Great Zimbabwe.’ Does this not give the impression that Selous, who was probably the most expert observer we have, supported the indigenous Bantu theory of origin?

  I had done quite a lot of work on Selous by the time I read Great Zimbabwe, being fortunate enough to have access to a first edition of his wonderful Travels and Adventures in South Central Africa through the Travellers Club in London. I was, however, at that time studying Garlake from a first edition found in Cape Town. Where might I find another first edition of Selous’s book? It occurred to me that Rhodes was certain to have acquired a first edition of his scout’s famous journal and a quick call to Groote Schuur produced not just a confirmation but another invitation to work in Rhodes’ library.