The Lost City of Solomon and Sheba

 

 

First published in 2003 by Sutton Publishing

The History Press
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This ebook edition first published in 2013

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© Robin Brown-Lowe, 2003, 2013

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EPUB ISBN
978 0 7524 9490 6

Original typesetting by The History Press

 

 

 

The King Solomon's mines I have dreamed of have been discovered and are putting out their gold once more. . . .

H. Rider Haggard, Ditchingham, 15 July 1905

. . . and they came to Ophir, and fetched from thence gold, four hundred and twenty talents, and brought it to King Solomon.

I Kings 9:28

. . . Then shalt thou lay up gold as dust, and the gold of Ophir as the stones of the brooks.

Job 22:24

Far land of Ophir, mined for gold
By lordly Solomon of old,
Who, sailing northward to Perim,
Took all the gold away with him

Hilaire Belloc,
The Modern Traveller

I
n 1909 when my father took up his duties as Consul-General and British Minister at Addis Ababa's British Legation, he brought with him a number of books on the country, its inhabitants and its history. Only with some background knowledge could he have hoped to deal with this singular people who believed that their emperors were descended directly from Solomon and Sheba. It is to these books that I owe much of what I learned about the early history of Abyssinia (now Ethiopia) where I was born and brought up.

Today, Ethiopians of traditional faith still believe that the Queen of Sheba visited Solomon, King of the Israelites, in Jerusalem, was seduced by him and bore him a son named Menelik, who founded the Abyssinian royal line. Many also believe that Menelik visited his father, Solomon, and on his departure contrived to substitute a copy of the Ark of the Covenant that his father had given him for the original, which he eventually brought back to Aksum.

Robin Brown-Lowe's fascinating quest for
The Lost City of Solomon and Sheba
explores this legend and investigates how refugees from ancient Abyssinia may have gone south to establish stone monuments bearing certain features of buildings they had left; and to mine for gold as they had done previously in their homeland. He also studies the Falashas, sometimes called the ‘Black Jews' of Ethiopia, and examines their connection with other ancient religious cults found elsewhere in the Middle East.

Robin Brown-Lowe's vivid account has reminded me of a journey I made, on foot, with mules, through northern Ethiopia, over forty years ago. I passed Gondar and Dabat, where I sold two of my mules and bought three others. Here I encountered a Protestant mission to the Falashas. The Falashas, who now claimed to be Jews, held pre-Talmudic beliefs different from orthodox Judaism. An industrious people, skilled iron-workers, they had been disliked by the Ethiopians who believed they possessed supernatural powers and could turn themselves into hyenas or wolves. As so-called Abyssinian Jews, the Falashas were superficially indistinguishable from their Christian neighbours, among whom, I was told, they lived amicably.

Wilfred Thesiger
Surrey, 2002

I
t is a matter of fact that in the very heart of Africa there is a ‘lost' civilisation whose people built some 20,000 stone temples, forts, and an irrigation system covering hundreds of square miles. It has been estimated that as much stone was used here as went into the building of the Egyptian Pyramids. A century after this ruined empire was first scientifically investigated by the Royal Geographical Society, however, it remains all but unknown to the general public even though the country in which it is located is lately much in the news. Its origins are also still the subject of intense speculation, even though they could hardly be more exotic – with the suggestion that this realm is the work of the legendary Solomon and Sheba.

My interest in the place began half a century ago as an English boy aged nine, when my family trekked overland to south central Africa, lured by my father's promise that we would start a new life among the gold mines of King Solomon and visit the temple of his lover, the Queen of Sheba. These wonders were to be found, my father assured me, in an African kingdom, Mashonaland, then part of the British Empire as a result of its occupation by the richest man in Africa, Cecil John Rhodes.

Reaching King Solomon's mines would involve a long and dangerous drive to the south of the Mountains of the Moon where my favourite author, H. Rider Haggard, had located the mines in his book of the same name. We had already covered more than half of Africa by then and my intrepid father relished the challenge. As refugees from the austerity of postwar Britain we were – well, he was – more than ready to risk our lives if at the end of it all was a land of milk and honey populated by the benign descendants of the most advanced race in southern Africa.

Today, half a century later, there is still nothing from that wonderful journey that I remember more vividly than my father delivering on his promise and taking us to see Sheba's palace in a ruined city built with the treasure from King Solomon's nearby mines. The city housing the temple and a massive phallic conical tower, where he posed me and my little brother for the official photograph, nestled in an odd jungle of exceptionally dense vegetation rising from savannah grassland against a background of bare stone hills –
kopjes
. Monkey ropes, for which I was always on the lookout in the hope that Tarzan might come attached to one, hung from huge trees, some of which grew out of the granite walls. The undergrowth was dominated by bushes sporting terrible thorns, long white barbs with black tips which I later learned were actually called ‘wait-a-minute' (
wag ‘n bietjie
) thorns.

We had set out that morning from the nearest town, Fort Victoria. Even though this was dry, high summer, everywhere a strong wind blew from the south-east and a thin rain –
guti
– misted our wind-screen. We passed a number of broken stone walls no more impressive than those which divide fields in England, then suddenly the whole view ahead filled with a massive curving flank of stone walling, a monolith sprung whole from the surrounding grass and trees.

My mother, Edith, was nervous of Africa after our traumatic overland journey and would have turned back there and then had not I, totally enthused for the first time in what was already quite an adventurous life, clambered down from our Willy's shooting-brake. Thus my father, Leonard, and I gingerly entered the misty passages of the temple on our own.

Eventually, discretion got the better of even his considerable nerve because while the walls were high and solid, soaring over my head to heights which made it impossible to see their tops, the passage we had entered was peculiarly narrow, hardly wide enough even for a man and a boy to walk side by side. Moreover, it curved away like the scaly, glistening body of a monstrous snake so that there was no way of telling who, or what, lay ahead. Ten minutes of this, and the stones underfoot growing slippery, my father turned back announcing that we needed to get ‘get help with this place'.

Even though we had penetrated no more than a hundred yards we quickly got slightly lost retracing our steps. One of the abiding enigmas of the temple is the extraordinary quality of the masonry. Early explorers described them as bricks. In fact they are almost perfectly sculptured granite blocks of such similar shape and size they require no mortar. One section of grand wall looks very like another and, in the deepening guti mist the labyrinth had taken us in. At an unfamiliar junction I was told to wait while Leonard explored the way ahead.

While he was gone, the walls began to talk!

I can hear them to this day, whispering and moaning. I called my father back and drew his attention to the ‘voices'. He made a nervous joke about Solomon calling for Sheba, but raised no further objection to our beating a hasty retreat.

Intriguingly, those voices have turned out not to be that much of a fantasy. An intense enquiry into the origins of these ruins has been going on for more than a hundred years and one aspect of the research has revealed that the walls do indeed make eerie sounds, and for good reason. In the more massive structures cunning spaces were constructed by the ancient masons to allow the prevailing winds to pass through the walls. There is also a cave with very peculiar sound characteristics in the ruined acropolis overlooking the temple. It so amplifies any sound made inside it, be it a blast of wind or the human voice, it can be heard in the temple half a mile away. As extensive ‘religious' artefacts have also been found in this cave it is now the consensus of opinion that it was used by Monomatapa and Rozvi priests acting as spirit mediums to their gods.

After our adventure in the temple maze we stuck to the high ground. Hundreds of well-made steps led upwards between narrow flanking walls of smooth natural granite until, after many pauses for rest, we arrived within the spectacular acropolis. Here, surrounded by mountainous piles of ancient worked stones the like of which we had seen nowhere else in Africa, Edith laid out on a large flat rock our lunch of avocado sandwiches and Mazoe orange squash. My father gleefully identified the stone from the guide book as a ‘sacrificial' altar stone but my mother, after inspecting its surface (for dried blood?), insisted it would do very well.