This makes no mention of Great Zimbabwe, so what new ground is being referred to? Within minutes of opening Rhodes’ copy of The Sacred Cities of Ethiopia, however, that became obvious. Theodore and Agnes Bent had never stopped tracking the people he had termed the ‘authors’ of the Zimbabwe culture; indeed, Bent had given his life to that very Grail.
NINE
The Road to Ophir
Even by African standards Ethiopia has been a rumbling volcano of humanity since the dawn of recorded time. Politics and religion have produced repeated magma flows of displaced people, mostly in a southerly direction. Before I studied its history I had always assumed that these troubles were of recent origin, but this is not the case and if we are looking for a source of refugees, Ethiopia, more than anywhere else in Africa, has to be a prime choice. Evidently, although admittedly almost secretly, the Bents felt the same.
During the last century, Ethiopia, once known as Abyssinia, has experienced all the typical African traumas of hunger, disease, a particularly evil brand of colonialism, a communist coup, almost ceaseless drought and starvation, inept government and self-serving politicians. It was the first African country to be used as a test ground for modern war machines, the place where Mussolini practised aerial warfare and the effects of poison gas. But go back a few thousand years to the times that we have been researching, and the excesses above seem just a natural part of the national tradition.
The earliest Arabian geographers like Ibn Hawkal saw Ethiopia as ‘an immense country with indefinite borders and solitudes’, protected by its desert and mountains. In the Periplus of the Red Sea it is recognised as a source of obsidian and ivory (but not yet gold) and Pliny reports that it exported African exotica, like rhino horn, hippopotamus hides, tortoiseshell, monkeys and slaves; but again no gold. There were gold mines in ancient Ethiopia but they do not appear to have been prolific enough to impinge on the record. A Greek explorer 500 years after Pliny opined that the gold displayed in the rich trappings of the monarchy was earned from a profitable trade with the interior. It may well have been Zimbabwe gold in transit.
As the historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto (who draws an immediate comparison between Ethiopia and Zimbabwe) writes in Civilisations, Ethiopia’s isolation produced a singular culture: ‘Even at the time of her most intense contacts with the Romans, her clergy had to be appointed from Alexandria [hence the wide use of Greek], at a crucial time of Monophysite heresy, which erred in underestimating the humanity of Christ and making him uncompromisingly divine. When Monophysite worthies from the Roman Empire fled orthodox persecution in the second and fifth centuries, Ethiopia received some of the most celebrated of them, and the future of the Ethiopian church as a splinter group of the Christian world became inescapable.’
Solomon, as the father of the nation, featured large for more than a thousand years. He was recognised by the Agawa Dynasty, and by the people from whom they sprang, the Awga who spoke a Cushitic language. The Amhara, speakers of the Ge’ez dialect (another exclusive cultural feature of the area) regarded the Agawa as foreign intruders. There were also rivals for the mantle of Solomon among the worshippers of Sheba and the refugee communities who espoused ‘the new Israel’, which will become pivotal to our story. In terms of the likely movement of people south it is also worth keeping an eye on the believed dates of some of these upheavals, especially in relation to seminal dates at Zimbabwe.
Solomon seemingly had material influence on the people of Ethiopia a thousand years before Christ and this influence could have provoked migrations south. Whether, indeed, his fabled union with Sheba founded an Ethiopian dynasty is a matter for speculation; it is the strength and durability of the tale that should interest us. In the same way as the description ‘King Solomon’s Mines’ could simply describe the source of his gold rather than a place he actually owned and where Sheba built him a temple, the Ethiopian legends could be describing the ancient influence of Solomon and Sheba on what was then a very primitive Ethiopia. Almost all legends are apocryphal anyway.
A later Ethiopian king, Azana, left boastful and detailed descriptions on stone stelae of the mayhem he caused: the precise numbers of his victims, the brutalities he inflicted (and occasionally his munificence) and the punitive exile of the vanquished to distant parts of the country. One little war was launched against enemies attacking and destroying Ethiopian trade caravans which, true or false, is at least evidence of trade routes north and south and the value the Ethiopians put on them.
In the early centuries of the Christian millennium, the Ethiopian kings converted to Christianity, resulting in yet more major movements of the faithful which are still reflected in Ethiopian society today. ‘To become Christian in the fourth century was to become part of the growing common culture of the Near East,’ writes Armesto, ‘to share the religion of many Greek and Indian traders in the Indian Ocean.’ To this we should add ‘old Moors’, who were observably at least as active. But this was followed by the rise of Islam and by the ninth century, about the time when even the Shona school is happy to acknowledge the arrival of northern cattle-herders, Ethiopia was a beleaguered empire surrounded by enemies other than to the south.
Yet in spite of all this human abuse Ethiopia remains hauntingly lovely and intensely religious. It lays claim to one of the oldest forms of Christianity on the planet. Admittedly, for more than a thousand years this has often been a God in hiding and most of His churches are extraordinary underground bunkers – stone temples of monumental proportions at least as impressive and similar in construction if not always in style to Great Zimbabwe’s mortar-free walls. These alone would have been enough to attract Theodore Bent and his photographer wife to Ethiopia if indeed the quest for the authors of the Zimbabwe culture had remained their Holy Grail.
At the beginning of the twentieth century very little was known of these Ethiopian monuments. Visiting them and the wild mountain territory which had offered some protection from the forces of Islam was extremely dangerous. But this was a very determined couple when it came to treading the road to Ophir. They also had a reputation to rebuild. By 1905, the disciplines of the new archaeology were firmly in place, and the Bents’ pioneering book on the Zimbabawe culture, The Ruined Cities of Mashonaland, had been derided as Romantic and unscientific by the young Turk from Oxford, David Randall-MacIver.
The Bents were termed ‘antiquarians’ by this scientific establishment. The fact that they were very widely travelled and extremely knowledgeable, and that their book and its conclusions displayed considerable scholarship, counted for nothing. This in spite of the fact that thanks to Rhodes and the Royal Geographical Society the Bents had been the first western scholars to visit Great Zimbabwe solely for the purpose of science, and as a result had made the most intriguing finds.
But literally everything they unearthed was rejected as inadmissible to the origin debate because their methods had not followed the new rules of archaeology. When, for example, they dared to suggest that Zimbabwe’s unique conical tower was probably a religious symbol because it so closely resembled other towers known to be symbols of phallic worship, it was rejected as speculative. Time has shown the Zimbabwe tower to be the most interesting geometrically. Today, such draconian rules on speculation have been considerably relaxed, perhaps because pictorial images can so readily be produced in support of speculative observations. The evidence of one’s own eyes must have some value. There is even some new evidence to give force to Bent’s theory about the Zimbabwe tower being a religious artefact. Recent excavation of a ‘workers town’ adjoining the Gîza Pyramids has revealed that mini-pyramids – stone towers – apparently of religious significance, complemented most of these workers’ compounds.
A similar case might now be made for the validity of the Bents’ comparison of the Zimbabwe tower with the tower on a coin of known Phoenician origin. This features a religious tower sited at Byblos remarkably similar in shape to the Zimbabwe tower. Close examination of this coin, which for som
e reason the Bents do not mention, reveals that it is located behind a wall bearing a hatched pattern like the one round the top of the Elliptical Building’s outer wall, and inside an open-roofed stone-walled monument. The raised-stud pattern round the rim of the coin is also identical to a distinctive pattern on one of the Zimbabwe birds. But this, along with all the other intriguing artefacts in the Bents’ Pandora’s box of finds was emphatically rejected. For the coin to be admissible as an indication of the date of the Zimbabwe tower it would have had to be found in the tower’s foundations when Ms Caton-Thompson dug there, and of course it was not.
Contributors to the Zimbabwe story have been plagued for a century by political rectitude of one kind or another and by these arcane disciplines, but none so mercilessly as Theodore Bent who was in fact a serious scholar. For him the rigid application of the new rules for archaeological finds amounted not just to the death of his reputation as an investigative historian, but also to his actual death. After his book was dismissed as Romantic speculation he went to Ethiopia to find physical evidence to support his theories and was there bitten by the malaria-infected mosquito that killed him.
Ethiopia is ideally placed if you are looking for stepping stones from ancient Egypt to Great Zimbabwe. The shortest crossing point on the Red Sea, Bab el Mandeb, separates Ethiopia from Yemen, the Sabaean kingdom of ancient times. Directly north of Ethiopia is the old Negro kingdom of Nubia, which adjoined Egypt and shared a cultural heritage with Egypt. To the southeast is Somalia, peopled by fierce warrior tribes who fit the descriptions of the savage Zindj and whose Indian Ocean coast hooks back to face the Hadramat region of Arabia. To the west, Uganda, and the territory which later became Rwanda, was ruled for most of the past by the tall, elitist Tutsi, a people who look like the Somalis and the Ethiopian highlanders and who once kept a slave-tribe, the Hutu. Due south is Kenya, and southeast of Kenya, Tanganyika (now joined with Zanzibar island as Tanzania), both dominated in olden times by tall warlike nomads, the ancestors of the modern Turkhana and Masai.
Unlike any of these African neighbours (with the notable exception of the old Nubians) Ethiopia has a long, classical and religious tradition which produced a monolithic stone-building culture. For the Europeans of the old world, Ethiopia was always an alluring and mysterious ‘lost civilisation’ in the heart of Africa, a cultural oasis of an ancient Christian sect led by ‘Prester John’. The rumour was that this was the last resting place of the Ark of the Covenant and it could be said that our story begins with Prester John because it was a search for him by the intrepid Portuguese mariner, Batholomew Diaz, which would produce in time the first eyewitness accounts of our lost city deep in the African hinterland.
I join the road here, too. If, as I suspect, the proto-Karanga followed a path down Africa that a millennium later became roughly the route of the Great North Road, then that was the road my family would take south from Tanganyika in 1947. But, with Mr and Mrs Bent, we need to step back a pace or two before we can join that long walk of the Karanga migration.
There were two ways to find your way to Great Zimbabwe in ancient times. You could sail south aboard one of the new Phoenician ships, then walk inland, or you could trek down Africa. It is possible, indeed likely, that both methods were used at different times. How strong is the case for the first alien influence at Great Zimbabwe having been imported by explorer-merchants from ships? The earliest indications that a voyage rather than a march might have fuelled the evolution of the Zimbabwe culture are those famous biblical references. The King James version of the Bible gives chapter and verse on King Solomon’s shopping lists to his Phoenician mariner-merchants. Top of that list is gold: ‘Now the weight of the gold that came to Solomon in one year was six hundred and three score and six talents of gold… . Beside [that which] chapmen and merchants bought. And all the kings of Arabia and the governors of the country bought gold and silver to Solomon … and King Solomon made two hundred targets [of] beaten gold; six hundred [shekels] of beaten gold went to one target.’ There are fifteen references in II Chronicles 9 alone. The most specific records that every three years ‘the servants also of Hurram, and the servants of Solomon, which brought gold from Ophir, brought almug trees and precious stones’.
There has been considerable speculation about the three years it took Hiram’s fleet to bring Solomon his gold from Ophir. One theory promotes a voyage to India, another that the Phoenician fleet took a year travelling to an east African port, a year trekking inland trading for gold and gathering, perhaps growing, sufficient food for the long return journey. Sea journeys of several years were not uncommon in those days and these maritime traders could easily have taken a year visiting the various settlements in the interior where gold, ivory and perhaps hardwoods were traded.
We know a good deal more about Solomon and Sheba than they did in Theodore Bent’s day and this new information is quite revealing if we are indeed looking for a king whose fortune depended on colonial, or at least colonial trading, connections. Solomon’s name means ‘sun’ (although in no account I have read to date has this association been mentioned). Many Zimbabwe artefacts, including the birds and the stelae, carry sun-symbol discs. The early sun-gods of Solomon’s homeland were hawk-headed and these self-same gods had responsibility for the protection of ancient mines. It surely does not go beyond the bounds of reasonable speculation to suggest that these birds (whose inscribed symbols have thus far not been translated), who were found guarding Great Zimbabwe’s most sacred stone keep, are icons of a sun-god. To my mind the only question is: a sun-god to which cult?
No one has seriously suggested that Solomon had great ambitions outside his own borders but there are a number of stories confirming his skill as a diplomat and an adept of trading partnerships. Soon after Solomon became king he made an important political marriage – thus securing future diplomatic relations – to the daughter of an Egyptian pharaoh. Her dowry is said to have included 1,000 musical instruments! But more relevant to this story, 80,000 Egyptian builders. Solomon has remained famous throughout history for his opulent palace and temple. The scriptures say he sent 10,000 workers a month to Lebanon to fell and transport over land and sea the tall cedars of Lebanon. It is this legend which so excited Carl Mauch when he found at Great Zimbabwe a wooden beam he thought was the same wood as the cedar of his pencil.
Stories as old as this must, however, be interpreted with caution. What we can reasonably conclude from the Scriptures is that Solomon was in the market for quality hardwood and that he possessed a skilled labour force that could build monumental stone temples and palaces. It is also not commonly acknowledged that Phoenician craftsmen were the architects of Solomon’s palace and temple. The temple consisted of three large rooms of richly carved cedar, cyprus and marble with a huge bronze altar and bronze columns 40 feet high.
Solomon’s abiding reputation for wisdom comes from the alleged conversation he had with God when, invited to name his heart’s desires, instead of choosing riches and power, he said ‘Give thy servant therefore an understanding heart to judge Thy people, that I may discern between good and evil.’ Pleased with this request, God apparently also endowed him with more material gains. Although Israel was at this time a pocket-kingdom of some 30,000 square miles sandwiched between Assyria and Egypt, Solomon’s much-vaunted wisdom and his ability to run the treasury attracted considerable interest, including that of his neighbour, the Queen of Sheba. By then he had already concluded a number of lucrative trading partnerships with neighbouring kings, most notably with the Phoenician King, Hiram of Tyre.
Solomon commissioned Hiram’s large fleet, or was a major investor in the expedition which sailed from Esyon-Geber or Eilat on the Red Sea to unknown Ophir. But did they really sail off ‘into the blue’ as the legend suggests? I find it hard to believe that the notoriously secretive Phoenicians would put in so huge an investment without some strong expectation of riches at the end of it.
Sheba may also have shared with Solomon some
of the trade secrets of her successful entrepot kingdom when she made her fabled visit and, if one is to momentarily join the Romantic school, produced the royal house of the Ethiopians. Certainly the young Queen was attracted by Solomon’s wisdom, affluence and good looks. He was reportedly dark-haired, tanned, lean and with a gracious smile and a lively spirit. He wore elegant tunics dyed royal purple, golden collars and chains and a golden circlet inset with sea-green stones.
Sheba was duly impressed with Solomon’s palace which boasted ‘40,000 horse stalls and 1,400 chariots’, which sounds excessive but the archaeologists have in fact since unearthed some 450 horse stalls and 150 sheds for chariots at Megiddo alone. There were vineyards, gardens, pools, singers, and musicians with exotic instruments. Solomon received the young Sheba seated on an ivory throne with gold armrests and golden embroidery. She was understandably seduced, but there is considerable documentation to support the idea that Solomon won Sheba’s respect, love and an intimate partnership as much by intense, extended conversations on all manner of topics, as by his wealth. Sheba was, after all, a very wealthy young woman in her own right and it is unlikely that these two would not have talked about how it was to be made.
On this one trip she brought Solomon a tribute of ‘a hundred and twenty talents of gold [about 6 tons!], and spices in great abundance and precious stones’. One of the ancient Jewish encyclopaedias, the Kebra Negast, suggests that this really was a meeting of kindred spirits. Apparently the pair roamed Jerusalem together as she questioned Solomon and watched him at his work: ‘The Queen used to go to Solomon and return continually, and hearken unto his wisdom, and keep it in her heart. And Solomon used to go and visit her, and answer all the questions which she put to him … and he informed her concerning every matter that she wished to enquire about.’
The Lost City of Solomon and Sheba Page 21
