The Lost City of Solomon and Sheba

by Robin Brown-Lowe

  Then there is the reference to ‘iron’ that the natives crave as much as the salt and tender meat. This surely indicates that the natives have no iron of their own, or are dealing with superior ironsmiths; that is, that they are Stone Age people.

  Reading between Cosmas’s lines also reveals a rough clue to the date of these expeditions. Although they are undertaken to a schedule – every two years – they do not appear to be dealing with settled communities. The proto-Karanga would have lived in settlements of sorts from the time of their arrival. Cosmas’s description more closely suggests contact with the tough little San hunter-bowmen of the Stone and early Iron Age who lived nomadic lives, surviving mostly in primitive bush bivouacs. The Boers have many a salutary tale to tell of how fierce the Hottentots and bushmen could be; indeed, in the early days in the Cape they hunted them as vermin. You certainly needed caution to approach them.

  The expeditions were apparently dedicated to the acquisition of gold. There is no mention in Cosmas’s account of ivory, precious stones, slaves or even almug trees. Most significantly the gold came in ingots and this detail really does suggest that Aksum’s expeditions took place long before any form of deep mining and gold processing had been implemented. Remember also Dr Sauer’s description of how gold ingots of an ounce in weight, along with ancient Egyptian beads, could be garnered from the floors of zimbabwes simply by washing them. On the down side, the land of Sasov rings no bells with anyone so there is no way of positively identifying the country described in the Ethiopian account. But we do have some more clues.

  Other than the badlands of Ethiopia, no significant source of gold exists in Arabia or northeast Africa and it is unlikely that the Ethiopians would have taken two years to come and go from their own up-country gold fields. Mashonaland is indubitably the nearest large goldfield. If we assume that expeditions mounted every two years equated to expeditions lasting two years then Mashonaland is about the right distance away whether you choose to do the journey on foot, by sea, or a combination of both. It took David Livingstone years to travel across half of Africa on foot and by boat.

  Perhaps most intriguingly, Cosmas’s account goes some way, as no other account ever has, to eliminating the only other prime candidate for the actual builders of the Zimbabwe culture being entirely alien, in this case Indians. Because throughout the ages India has always produced gold, and Indians have an observable passion for the precious metal, there has always been a potent school of thought that India was the gold-producing nation that sustained the dreams of avarice of Solomon, Sheba and Hiram – especially as the Phoenicians are known to have sailed as far as India.

  The subject has been widely broadcast in a documentary by Anthony Irving, that he called Behind the African Mask. His thesis is based on the work of the Slovak-American historian, Dr Cyril Hromik, who in addition to exploring the Indian connection has compiled an impressive set of statistics on the extent of the Zimbabwe culture. Some 18,000 zimbabwes or stone ruins have now been plotted in southern-central Africa. One conurbation covers 36 square kilometres. There are 100 kilometres of ancient canals, terracing covering 5,000 square kilometres, 2,000 stone pits and 2,000 known ancient mines. It is the largest collection of ancient ruins in Africa outside Egypt. And it is Dr Hromik’s passionate conviction that he has the physical evidence to prove that this was all built by Indians who came here for the gold, beginning so far back in historical times that any trade with Solomon is of comparatively recent origin. Moreover, this was not a creative partnership between Indians and the Bantu (the Bantu were not in southern Africa then), but initiated by ancient Indians who sailed here in catamarans, the earliest form of ocean-going boat.

  All manner of ethnographic and physical evidence has been collected by the industrious Dr Hromik to support this radical idea, and is somewhat impressive, especially when supported by the pictures in Anthony Irving’s film. Dr Hromik starts with a good number of linguistic connections. In southern India 2,000 years ago, for example, the word that Buddhist monks used for gold was shona. The same root word for the precious metal exists in a number of other Indian languages. Perhaps more intriguing is his observation that in Indian Dravidian weddings the bride, called bali, was ritually mutilated by having a joint of her finger removed. Some Khosa tribes in South Africa used to employ a marriage priest known as Mama Bali to carry out the same operation. The word ‘Bantu’ is echoed in the Tamil language as ‘brother’ or ‘kinsman’ and there are Indian words for cotton-cloth and medicine very like Bantu words. ‘Manica’, as in Manicaland where some of the most impressive zimbabwes are located, is an Indian word meaning ‘precious stones’. Without questioning any of the above we should not forget (as Dr Hromik has the grace to remind his audience in Irving’s documentary) that India has 400 languages, including 94 forms of Hindi.

  More focused is the work done by Oxford and Princeton University which shows a connection between the blood groups of the Quena (bushmen) and Bantu people and Indians, which does not show in West Africans.

  Very old Indian maps show the Cape province separated from the African continent, and label it ‘Diab’, an Indian word for ‘two waters’. The boats which plied these two waters were, according to Dr Hromik, the ancient marine-going ‘catamarans’, a word which in India means ‘tied logs’.

  But Dr Hromik is at his best when he turns to the religions, monuments and icons of India, going back 6,000 years to when gold mining and processing started in India and introduced a love of the precious metal which has been sustained since. Indians still dress themselves and their temples in as much gold as they can afford to lay their hands on. Some 450 tons of it are used cosmetically every year. In the old days it was crushed with stone rollers in rock mortars, which can still be found today. Mine props have been found that carbon-date back to the time of Christ. Two hundred and fifty years before the birth of Christ the Indian King, Ashoka, is recorded on a rock stela as having issued instructions to his missionaries to go out into the world, spread the Buddhist religion – and find gold. In the gold-bearing districts of India, stone-workers to this day cut symmetrical tiles of granite, as in Mashonaland, and build them into temples and village houses.

  Ancient temples, of course, are India’s pride and joy but Dr Hromik draws us away from the magnificent structures to a variety of lesser-known shrines with distinct echoes in Africa. He visits Indian temples hand-carved into the bedrock, as in Ethiopia. On some sites upwards of 200,000 tons of stones have been sculptured by the monks to create a monolithic temple complex. In the mountains are more simple places of worship: ‘Sky’ cells without roofs for prayer, rings of rocks with great religious significance, lingams (rounded rocks very like miniature Zimbabwe towers), dolmans (three-cornered shrines containing round religious stones), Yoni stones representing Shiva’s female aspect which have holes bored through the middle and are very like the round stone ‘drums’ and ‘spinning whorls’ the Bents found at Great Zimbabwe, and game boards using stone pieces like the Bents discovered both at Great Zimbabwe and in Ethiopia. Recent research into San agriculture has recorded that they actually weighted their digging sticks with stones shaped just like this.

  Dr Hromik makes much of the alignment of significant rocks, paths, arches in caves, and other geographical features that he suggests were used to predict the solstices and act as celestial clocks. The alignment of these features and of some of the zimbabwes imply to him that they were Indian holy places, as all Indian temples have an alignment which is religiously meaningful. But so many complex measurements on so many different locations are a little speculative for my taste. The one thing that you can virtually guarantee in the granite kopje country of southern Africa is that rocks of interesting shape will line up with a hill behind which the sun will obligingly rise or set. Theodore Bent’s cartographer, R.M.W. Swan, speculated about this to his cost. Dr Hromik also traces stone-walled paths in Africa leading to stone circles where he has, more convincingly, found anachronistic round stones echoing sign
ificant religious markers in many primitive Indian temples.

  For me this all rather peters out somewhat when Dr Hromik, like so many historians, antiquarians and archaeologists before him, tries to fit all this fascinating collection into a single homogeneous theory. His theory requires a very substantial Indian labour force to cut and raise all that stone. Why have they left so few incontrovertible signs of their extended presence? Indians revere monuments, especially religious monuments, and their country boasts some of the most magnificent in the world. The zimbabwes, even the grand zimbabwes, are very plain by comparison and show few of the features, not least the very intricate wall carving, of Indian monuments. So far as I am aware no statues or definable icons of the ubiquitous Indian deities, like Shiva, have been found. Given that the grandest of the African monuments, Great Zimbabwe, does feature very clear-cut icons – the Zimbabwe birds – this absence is surely strange.

  Dr Hromik says the Indians lost interest in southern African gold when it became more difficult to produce using the techniques available at the time. They abandoned the trade to the Arabs now firmly settling on the east coast. Why was this, if it was still a viable trade for Arabs, and India’s appetite for gold has remained consistent? Dr Hromik’s general thesis that there could have been an ancient Indian trading presence in southern Africa from very ancient times is an acceptable one. If, as he says, it was linked with the San then he may have made an invaluable contribution to the enigma of the bodies in the Mapungubwe graves and even to the idea, so far unresolved, that the great southern zimbabwes and the Zimbabwe culture as a whole owes more to various San–alien partnerships than has previously been acknowledged. Moreover, Dr Hromik is not alone in suspecting a significant Indian contribution to the evolution of the gold trade in southern Africa that was after all the springboard for the Zimbabwe culture.

  The Scottish academic Professor Gayre devoted a good part of his book, The Origin of the Zimbabwean Civilisation (Galaxie Press, 1972), to proving how the monsoon wind systems would have carried ancient ships from the Middle East to India from November to May, then reversed to allow return trips, resulting in landfalls in the region of Madagascar, from May to November. Theoretically these ancient mariners could have done the round trip in a year but that would have allowed little time for trade so they probably took longer. Professor Gayre suggests that for the navies of Tyre, Israel and Saba the route was first southwards on the northeast monsoon, taking in Punt until they reached Madagascar for refitting and provisioning ahead of the long journey across the Indian ocean. They may even have had to spend a season there growing a food crop. The following year they would take the southwest monsoon to India, a voyage of three months, followed by a trading period. In the third year they crossed back across the Indian Ocean on the northeast monsoon, refitted and provisioned again and caught the next southwest monsoon home through the Gulf of Aqaba. These winds are predictably regular and this neatly fits the biblical accounts of three-year gold-collecting voyages for Solomon.

  There would also have been time for the traders to acquire gold in Africa during the refit periods. Says Professor Gayre: ‘The location of Ophir as a place in India becomes almost a certainty, but only as the entrepot – the trading port – where African gold was traded for the other items that appear on Solomon’s exotic shopping list, like peacocks and spices… . Since India was always an importer of gold not an exporter, it means that these passages had to include a gold-rich country. The only one of consequence along these sailing routes was Mozambique with its hinterland of Rhodesia.’

  Gayre’s sailing plan has always struck me as an ingenious but a somewhat expedient explanation of those enigmatic three-year voyages by Solomon’s fleet, although it has to be said that other scholars have noted how secretive the Phoenicians were. ‘They gave no thought to proclaiming discoveries,’ comments Constance Irwin in her book on the Phoenicians (W.H. Allen, 1964), ‘being less concerned with their public image than private profits. Theirs was in fact a conspiracy of silence. Although they disseminated culture along with the more profitable items of trade, they never shared information regarding trade routes, markets or winds and currents. The routes were their roads to riches, and as such were shielded from prying potential competitors.’

  So the Greek monk, Cosmas’s, account that Theodore Bent unearthed, remains for me the only description of early African trading expeditions with sufficient detail to be plausible. But again, if we read a little deeper between its lines there are a number of indications that both Ophir the entrepot, and Havilah, the source of the gold, were in Africa, not India. Dr Hromik’s excellent descriptions of the age and nature of the Indian gold industry have also convinced me that Cosmas’s translation describes African trading expeditions. If, as he insists, the Indian gold industry has a 6,000-year history of supplying the Indian ruling classes and its affluent religions with a precious metal which demonstrated status, it is hardly likely that this elite would have allowed what amounted to Arab pirates to land and bribe the peasants into trading ingots of the national gold supply for scraps of meat, iron and salt. Nor indeed do Indian peasants fit Cosmas’s description of wild natives gullible enough to trade in this way.

  But Dr Hromik’s observations do make it more likely that ancient trading forays did go south from Ethiopia and find gold, and this eldorado would not have remained a secret forever. In any event a southern exodus of settler-migrants was inevitable, as people sought peace and religious freedom away from the interminable conflicts in the states around the horn of Africa.

  Each new piece of information entering the origin debate is now beginning to render untenable the Shona school’s seminal belief that the Zimbabwe culture was built without alien influence.

  Regrettably Cosmas’s translation, while otherwise very explicit, does not provide a location for the place where ingots of gold could be traded for tender meat and iron tools. It seems likely, however, that he would not have bothered to record the expeditions if they were no more than trading outings to other parts of Ethiopia. But can we at least give the southern ethnic gold producers a name and could it be the aforementioned ‘Zeng’ (sometimes referred to as Zang or Zindj)? Were they a black diaspora?

  There is unfortunately a ‘Dark Age’ shadow across south-central Africa at the start of the Christian millennium, a veil as impenetrable as that over Britain after the departure of the Romans. Even the Shona school, which claims to be able to define a continuity of African evolution through kingdoms, with names like Karanga B, Mwene Mutapa, and Rodzvi (of which more in a moment), admits a 200-year gap in the record.

  Professor A.H. Keane, Vice-President of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain, researched the ancient records of the enigmatic Zeng and quotes from several accounts of them controlling the African east coast from the Somal horn to dominions as far south as Sofala: ‘From them the seaboard itself took the name Zanguebar [Zanzibar], the Balid-ez-Zeng or “Land of the Zeng”.’ The Periplus of the Red Sea, a seaman’s guide to these waters, c. AD 110, warns mariners that Zeng lands extend down the east coast as far as a land called Azania. When in 1964 Julius Nyerere made Tanganyika and Zanzibar island independent of colonial control he called the new state Tanzania.

  Tanzania, or if we go back to its earlier name Azania, bordered several countries which must have been involved in any southern migration: Zambia, Congo, Burundi and Rwanda are to the west; Mozambique and Malawi to the south; Uganda and Kenya to the north. Kenya shares a boundary with Ethiopia and Tanzania. Zambia, to the north of Mashonaland, is Tanzania’s neighbour.

  Any southern diaspora from Arabia/Ethiopia would most likely have called at Zanzibar island. When I came to Africa in 1947, docking at the port of Mombasa, the adjoining island of Zanzibar was still ruled by Arabs, and their ocean-going dhows, which appeared to have sailed straight out of history, still plied these harbours. We followed the traditional route south, first inland to Tanganyika and then down the still-unpaved Great North Road to northern R
hodesia and finally southern Rhodesia, settling in Mashonaland. It is patently a much older road than ever I imagined, and almost certainly, as we shall see, the route of the Bantu migration to Mashonaland. I retraced part of the journey for this book two years ago. There are still dhows coming down the coast to Zanzibar and, a further indication of how slow change can be in Africa, the Great North Road is in worse shape now than it was half a century ago.

  Professor Keane’s research revealed that Claudius Ptolemy, writing in the second century ad, supports the Greek Periplus and describes dark-skinned people as far south as Mozambique. His account has been used to support the claim that there were Bantu in the Great Zimbabwe region much earlier than some would put them there. Others have suggested that the Zeng were a mix of Negroes and Arabians whose dominion was confined to coastal lands. These people came to be called Swahilis and the Shona school has decided that these are the people who traded and transported the gold of the hinterland. Writing in the tenth century the Arab traveller, Masoudi, gives the most detailed description of the Zeng living near Sofala. They were ruled by an elected king called Waqlimi, the name meaning ‘the Son of the Supreme Lord’ and they worshipped a God by the name of Moklandjalou.

  And did this black diaspora keep on the move? A Zimbabwe ethnologist, James Mullan, points out that Waqlimi is phonetically surprisingly close to the Sesotho term Morwa wa ka Limi. The Sotho, who today live in Botswana, Basutoland and elsewhere, call their god mulimi. The coastal blacks encountered by later explorers called themselves by a name which has been phonetically recorded as ‘Wak Waks’. It is at least probable that the people Masoudi describes as worshipping Waqlimi were Waks; their god-king being Wak-limi. Travelling further south to the Zulu nation, the word for god is Mkulunkulu, which is not a million miles removed from the Zeng god Moklandjalou, bearing in mind that Masoudi reported everything phonetically.