The Lost City of Solomon and Sheba

by Robin Brown-Lowe

  Are these the first faint footprints of a Nilotic diaspora spreading right down Africa, accompanied, or certainly serviced, by Arab traders? The archaeologists can help somewhat. Dr Garlake says that in about the ninth or tenth century (at about the time Masoudi was describing a Zeng presence) new immigrants entered southwestern Matabeleland to create what is known as the Leopard Rock culture: ‘Their pottery shows such a marked typological break with early Iron Age wares that, in this instance, there can be little doubt that these people were immigrants who had no direct cultural relationships with the previous inhabitants … they were a pastoral people for whom cattle, for the first time in south-central Africa, played important cultural and economic roles.’ Garlake goes on to acknowledge the ‘rather risky’ supposition that these people came from Botswana; that is, they were the early Sotho Bantu. They are possibly the ancestors of the people who built Mapungubwe, the gold-rich, artistic settlement south of the Limpopo which predates Great Zimbabwe. They may indeed have founded the dynasty which went on to build Great Zimbabwe. Garlake prefers the idea that two groups developed ‘in the same direction at much the same time’. The word ‘Zang’ may also simply have been a generic term (like ‘Kaffir’ was a century ago) for central African black tribes about whom little was known.

  The pottery record tends to support the idea of a two-pronged Bantu migration that already had trading contacts with foreigners. One style of ceramics prevails in Iron Age sites along the whole of the Zambian watershed. Another type is found in Malawi and Zimbabwe – the route of the Great North Road. The people who made the Malawi/Zimbabwe pots could not have come down through Katanga and across the inhabited Zambian watershed without their ceramics being influenced by the Zambian style. This pottery evidence dates from very old communities. Ceramic sherds of the Malawi/Zimbabwe style at Great Zimbabwe were associated with Robinson’s burnt posts that carbon-dated to AD 320 ± 150. Moreover, every one of these early Iron Age sites in the south contains evidence of trade with foreigners, mainly glass beads and pierced cowrie shells.

  It is, however, from a Stone Age cave in the Zambian watershed that we have, so far as I am aware, the earliest apparent evidence of contact between the ancient black inhabitants of central Africa and ancient Moors. My discovery of it was a piece of extraordinary luck. Lodged as a bookmark in an expensive volume on the life of Rhodes, in a Cape Town bookshop, I found a battered paper on the northern Rhodesian Stone Age by Dr J. Desmond Clark, who in the 1950s worked at the Rhodes–Livingstone Museum. Two diagrams caught my eye.

  One is from a cave in the Mpika district north of the Zambesi and is a typical bushman painting of the type found all over southern Africa. (These artists have been named the Nachikufu culture and the earth floors of their caves have revealed many kinds of Stone Age implements.) Another cave from the same site displayed, in faded red pigment, a very strange drawing. The pigmentation appears to be the same as the bushman painting and implements for grinding pigments were among the Stone Age implements found. ‘There is,’ observes Dr Desmond Clark, ‘a sudden change to entirely stylised drawing – circles, ladders, strokes, capital Us and Is, crescents, tectiform designs and combinations of lines, dots and circles.’ The second drawing is alien and – he was told by expert Orientalists he consulted – represented: ‘a debased form of some kind of Arabic writing, drawn by illiterate or semi-literate persons, in imitation of some ornamental piece of decoration or writing. As yet it is impossible to date this art style but it has been tentatively suggested that [it] may be a debased version of the Cufic word for Allah… . In addition to the paintings there are engravings in the same style. They are known from one rock-shelter, but more usually are found on flat, exposed rock surfaces near the banks of streams or rivers… . A significant fact is that the distribution of the schematic art style appears to coincide with the known areas of Arab penetration of the sub-continent. Similar paintings occur in Tanganyika superimposed on the naturalistic art group.’

  Subsequent excavations by Desmond Clark revealed that these Stone Age deposits were overlaid by a Bantu occupation layer. Moreover, the Stone Age deposits here contained artefacts resembling those from the Tanganyika plateau and stone tools found in late Stone Age middens on the shores of Lake Tanganyika. Clark’s work provides an important missing link in the genesis of alien influence in south-central Africa, and if there were old Moors trading, possibly semi-resident on the Zambesi in the Stone Age, then this is much earlier than most experts had previously conceded. It also has a dramatic bearing on the race of those traders, as we will discover shortly.

  The significant elements of our ‘Time Line’ of alien influence now read like this:

  950 bc Solomon makes an alliance with the Phoenician Hiram of Tyre and they share the wealth of foreign expeditions, returning with distinctly African goods, particularly gold.

  611 bc Neku II circumnavigates Africa.

  470 bc Phoenicians sail to the Azores and Madeira. Himilco, to the British Isles.

  110 bc Eudoxos of Cysicus is sent by Cleopatra to India. Blown off course returning home he lands on the east coast of Africa where he finds a wrecked Phoenician ship from Gades mounting a distinctive horse-head prow.

  24 bc Aelius Gallus, Roman Prefect of Egypt, invades Yemen with an army of 10,000 Roman infantry seeking to take over the Sabaean colonial trade. Illness among the troops forces a retreat.

  ad 35 The Greek Periplus records that the Sabaean King Kharabit controls East Africa to ‘an indefinite extent’.

  ad 100 (or earlier) Ancient Moors leave their trade markers (or Stone Age artists copy Arab markers) north of the Zambesi in south-central Africa.

  ad 150 Ptolemy’s map of the world records accurate details of East Africa, including the correct positions of Mashonaland and Mozambique, which are shown south of ‘The Mountains of the Moon’.

  ad 700–1000 The Bantu migrate into Mashonaland.

  ad 943 Masoudi reports that the Muslims of Oman sailed on the Zang Sea as far south as Madagascar and ‘Sufalah’ where they meet the ‘Wak Wak’.

  ad 1140 Idris enlarges on these Wak Wak of Sufalah, describing them as horrible aboriginals whose speech resembles whistling. Hottentots (‘Chinese’ Hottentots) were later reported as using the name Quae Quae. The San are today mostly known by the generic ‘Khoi Khoi’.

  ad 1220 Yakut records in his geographia that Sofala is the furthest south city in the country of ‘Zang’.

  ad 1250 Marco Polo reports (by hearsay, but from Arab sources) that goods are brought by ships to the African side of the Red Sea, then shipped by camel on a thirty-day overland journey to the Nile, then on to Cairo and Alexandria. He also describes the Negroid features of the Zeng. He is cognisant of the powerful current (the Agulhas) between Madagascar and Mozambique, warning that in places it runs so fast that sailing vessels would make no headway even with favourable winds. He must have been told this by Moorish mariners with whom he voyaged to India.

  ad 1487 Captain Bartolomeu Dias de Novaes finds the African coast north of Walvis Bay, then rounds the Cape and sails north to Bushman’s River. Vasco da Gama follows him, also rounding the Cape. He encounters large groups of San and has to shoot one to get safely back to his ship.

  ad 1502 Portuguese explorers visit Sofala and, from old Moors, hear of a ‘wonderful rich mine’. They decide this is King Solomon’s mines.

  ad 1505 The start of Portuguese colonialism with the annexation of Sofala leading, by 1609, to many descriptions of the hinterland. Trade is in the hands of ancient Moors; there are 300 mosques in Sofala. A detailed report by the reliable Dominican missionary, Joao dos Santos, who lived and worked among the Karanga, produces the first detailed testimony of an ancient trade: ‘The people of these lands, and especially some old Moors who have preserved a tradition of their ancestors, say these houses were in olden times the trading depots of the Queen of Saba and that from these depots they used to bring to her much gold, following the rivers of Cuama [Zambesi] down to the Ethiopian co
ast up to the Red Sea. They entered the Red Sea and sailed to the shores which touch Egypt and there they used to off load all this gold which was brought by land to the Queen of Sheba.’

  ‘MODERN’ TIMES

  1800s

  Adventurous western treasure seekers like the American, Adam Renders, find spectacular ruins in the hinterland. They certainly trade and intermarry with the natives.

  The first eyewitness account of Great Zimbabwe is that of Carl Mauch who ‘finds’ the lost city. Land-grabbers, some like Cecil Rhodes, whose appetites aspire to whole continents, turn their eyes north.

  Mashonaland, the homeland of a race called the Karanga, part of a black diaspora from the north, c. 700–800, becomes Rhodesia where, c. 1947, I become an alien settler as part of a post-Second World War white diaspora.

  An acrimonious debate between the Romantic school and the Shona school fuelled by the conclusions of (alien) archaeologists rages for the first quarter of the twentieth century, neither side giving ground till this day.

  The earliest scientifically authenticated artefact is an Egyptian bead found by Dr Hans Sauer among gold ingots.

  Some time earlier the Zimbabwe chief of the time, Mugabe, is photographed by the wife of the leader of the Royal Geographical Society’s expedition to Great Zimbabwe, Mrs Bent, wearing what her husband identifies as a necklace of Venetian origin.

  Returning us to the present, I have become convinced that this necklace is one of the great undetected clues to several unresolved enigmas in the origin debate. It is certainly the most important photograph Mrs Bent ever took, even though the Bents were interested in the facial features of these Shona, not their alien accoutrements.

  The picture casts grave doubts on the critical comments made of Chief Mugabe. He was disparaged as a minor rural chief and maligned for knowing nothing about his ancestors and/or the authors and craftsmen who raised the stone monoliths and in whose shadow he raised cattle from a makeshift village of pole-and-daga huts. Indeed, he was accused of fuelling Romantic arguments by recounting legends of a ‘white’ origin. I would suggest that Chief Mugabe is exactly what he appears to be, an authoritative-looking African elder statesman, obviously familiar with traders from the outside world; indeed, he is rather magnificently adorned with their trade goods, as are his indunas.

  How much of all the evidence, I wonder, have we failed to take at its obvious ‘face value’? Chief Mugabe’s photograph is not the only instance where answers to some of Great Zimbabwe’s intractable riddles may have been staring everyone in the face for the last century. The researcher who spent more time than any other puzzling over the origins of the grand zimbabwes, Dr Roger Summers, was, throughout the latter part of his term as Director of the Historical Monuments Commission, troubled by similar thoughts about certain singular features of the walls of Great Zimbabwe. Could it be, he pondered, that the evidence of alien influence was literally written in these stones?

  ELEVEN

  Ophir Writ Large

  Roger Summers was not immediately rewarded with an answer. Only after gazing hard at the huge walls of Great Zimbabwe for a good many years did he realise that something was inexplicably ‘wrong’ with them: ‘The Zimbabwe ruins are very complex and contain a great variety of details which are very hard to explain by a complete acceptance of MacIver’s hypothesis,’ was his opening gambit in a dangerous game.

  Summers was trained at the University of London’s Institute of Archaeology. He worked on the ancient ruins of the Zimbabwe culture from his post at the National Museum, Bulawayo, from 1947 until 1970, and served as Chairman of the Rhodesian Historical Monuments Commission for five years. His qualifications are impeccable. In his book, Ancient Ruins and Vanished Civilisations of Southern Africa (T.V. Bulpin, Cape Town, 1971), he lays down his ‘rules of logic’ for archaeological research: (1) All available factual evidence must be taken into account; (2) Evidence must be weighed critically, but personal prejudice must be avoided; (3) Simple explanations and proximate causes are always preferable to complicated or remote ones.

  Professor Summers is no Romantic. In the main his beliefs fall within the framework of those of the Shona school and Summers is at one with ‘most recent commentators, [who] after careful re-examination of the evidence have accepted the view that Great Zimbabwe is a local phenomenon built by native peoples’.

  So what is so ‘very hard to explain’ about the walls? What did others miss? Summers’ carefully chosen words were expressed at a time (1971) when the authorship of the ruins was a very hot topic politically. From personal experience of how dangerous any utterances about the origin of Great Zimbabwe could be, I am surprised to find Summers stepping into this ring at all. But step he did, and I am thankful for his courage, because the ‘wrongness’ writ large in these walls offers the best indication yet of those responsible for the lost city’s distinctive architecture. Summers believed he had found what amounted to a ‘third force’, a craftsman clan within Zimbabwe society which was either alien or alien-taught.

  Down the years several attempts have been made to date-categorise the different wall types. Today there are four agreed ‘stages’, varying from irregular blocks piled in chaotic style with no evidence of courses, to equal-sized blocks with the blocks coursed in horizontal layers that form a very regular pattern. The first are believed to date back to the Iron Age at about the start of the Christian millennium and the last, of which Great Zimbabwe is the best example, to medieval times.

  The start of this ‘best-built’ stage, especially in the case of the Great Outer Wall of the Elliptical Building, exhibit, as Summers puts it, ‘new and vastly improved techniques’.

  He identifies six distinct improved techniques in the Great Wall:

  1. Foundation trench with levelled floor, implying some form of levelling instrument.

  2. Laying of first course as an even pavement over the whole of the foundation trench.

  3. Careful trimming of foundation stones and very strict selection of all stones for thickness.

  4. Levelling of all courses (see 1. above).

  5. Thick walls with inward-sloped faces, the slope (batter) being even, implying the use of a plumb line.

  6. Construction of wall patterns.

  ‘At least two and probably three [of the improved techniques],’ Summers adds, ‘never appear again in any ancient ruin.’ I have emphasised this statement because I believe it is as close as we can ever get to material evidence, writ in stone, of alien architectural influence in the Zimbabwe culture. Indeed, I would personally go a step further and propose that this, the moment when stone enclosures became works of art, might also be the moment when the Karanga moved from being a hardworking aboriginal society to becoming a culture.

  What brought this about? ‘One may postulate the appearance of a genius among local architects, but it may involve less of a strain on credibility if one suggests the arrival of someone who was conversant with building techniques elsewhere, since the level and the plumb line have been known as building instruments for many centuries.’ Summers thinks this knowledgeable mason arrived and made his contribution some time between 1450 and 1600, the most favoured dates for the best period of Zimbabwe building. But what if this ‘best period’ started several centuries earlier? We still have that contentious carbon dating of AD 670 for the ubande drain supports under one of Great Zimbabwe’s most massive walls.

  It emerges that Summers is plagued by similar thoughts. An earlier date for the building of the temple (Elliptical Building) would, he admits, ‘open all sorts of exciting possibilities such as MacIver could not have foreseen,’ and ‘it is not entirely stretching possibility to suggest that some Portuguese stonemason may have reached Zimbabwe and entered the service of the great chief living there… . Equally probable, although rather less plausible, is that some travelling Arab craftsman may have been responsible.’ Given the fact that we have now traced alien influence, most likely by ancient Moors, all the way back to the central African Stone A
ge we are entitled at least to consider that Arab craftsmen, or Arab-taught craftsmen, were influential in the raising of zimbabwes long before their work became so distinctive. Professor Summers was able to see evidence of it in the massive walls of Great Zimbabwe, before there were Bantu here perhaps?

  Politically, Summers is now treading on very thin ice and, I presume in recognition of this, he follows the example of respected peers and leaves the country. In 1971 we find him not in Bulawayo but at the South African Museum, working on his book with a Cape Town publisher. It was a wise move, however, because Summers was actually harbouring a theory much more destructive to the Shona idyll of a home-grown Zimbabwe culture than anything he had expressed thus far. He had become convinced that the alien mason was neither Portuguese nor Arab, but a member of a subculture of artistic black craftsmen. On the face of it this should have put him right back in favour, but he had also decided that this subculture was not Shona and might possibly be alien. Remember, we are here reviewing the findings of a quiet, studious academic whose work reflects his great love of Africa and its people. What could he possibly have found that was causing him to wander so far off the safe, beaten track?

  The Summers paradox, if we may call it that, starts with his observations that the mighty walls depend on level foundations, implying some form of levelling instrument. The walls, moreover, have inward-facing slopes, the slope (batter) being even, implying the use of a plumb line. But – and this is the paradox – Summers also observed that the use of other instruments vital to the sophisticated mason’s trade, particularly the square, were nowhere in evidence. Virtually nothing is square at Great Zimbabwe and there is literally no squaring of walls and corridors as are found in classic Arab and Portuguese architecture. The opposite is in fact true. Zimbabwe is a place of sensuous curves, even the doorways. It is, I think, the true appeal of the place. The architecture is, if you like, whimsical.