The Lost City of Solomon and Sheba (10 page)

Hiram's expedition certainly returned home and shared with Solomon an enormous hoard of gold. Had anything like it been seen before it would not have featured so large in the Bible. And if 43 tons is a dubious return from gold-rich Mashonaland it is even more questionable from the two other gold-producing countries, Ethiopia and Somalia, where Hiram's ships might have called. Then there is the problem of transporting gold in these quantities. This little band of Phoenicians and Jews could certainly not, on their own, have trekked up to Mashonaland and carried back 43 tons of gold through tsetse-fly and malaria-infested bush which, centuries later, almost brought Rhodes' expedition to its knees. Unless there had been some kind of gold market, collecting point or trading post with access to porters.

Was the easily defended acropolis hill community which preceded the grand
zimbabwes
a very early gold market or trading post? Did the Phoenicians, or possibly even earlier Moorish traders, set it up? An intriguing fact to support this idea will emerge shortly; Great Zimbabwe in medieval times certainly had buildings from which foreigners sold imported goods.

The Phoenicians were after all the old world adepts at trading with primitive people. We know they went to markets in south-west England to buy Cornwall's tin, and some believe their unique ships took them as far afield as South America. As for porterage, Ezekiel 27:12 specifically mentions that the Phoenicians were slave-traders. In the earliest days of slave-trading, this human cargo was usually previously employed in the transportation of heavy goods, like ivory, to the coast.

That Solomon enjoyed close relations with the Phoenician King is confirmed frequently in the Old Testament, suggesting that in the beginning the two countries were operating almost as one. They had, initially, similar polytheistic religions and shared gods like Baal, Astoreth and Moloch, all of whom were worshipped amid sacred stones, pillars, towers and high places. Later, of course, the Hebrews came to worship just one god.

Apart from the joint expedition to Punt, the Bible is littered with references to the intimate early trading relationship which, given the size of his kingdom, brought Solomon disproportionately great riches, and a legend to match; II Chronicles 2:13 says that King Hiram's father was a Phoenician, his mother a daughter of the Jewish tribe of Dan. In the same book Hiram is reported as supplying Solomon with materials for his famous temple and ornaments to decorate it. I Kings 5 and Ezra 3:7 describe the Phoenician trade with Hebrews, the latter supplying wheat, honey wine and oil for various Phoenician luxuries like gold and the famous cedar trees (which Mauch thought he had found at Great Zimbabwe).

It is also recorded that Solomon married a Phoenician princess, that the daughter of the King of Tyre and High Priest of Astoreth married Ahab, King of Israel, and that Athaliah, daughter of Jezebel, a Phoenician princess, married Ahaziah, King of Judah, and so on.

I think we can accept with reasonable confidence that these two little nation states had strong blood ties and mutual trading interests, more than sufficient to support the biblical stories that they were partners in the expedition to Ophir that returned with tons and tons of gold. Moreover, this intimate Jewish partnership with the far-ranging Phoenicians will acquire considerable significance as this story reaches its climax. I am further convinced, even though he grew to be more and more enigmatic, that Theodore Bent regarded the Phoenicians and the Hebrews as one, specially in matters of trade and influence in south-central Africa. If that is the case, he was uncannily prescient.

Sadly, however, there is a seminal problem with all these Romantic theories that has in the past always stopped them dead in their tracks. A thousand or so years before the birth of Christ the expert opinion is that there were no resident natives in Zimbabwe. Or rather I should say, no ‘Bantu' here. For the Zimbabwe culture to be an all-Bantu construct in line with the current ‘definitive' origin theory, everything we have been talking about needs to have happened about 1,500 years later.

Contemporary Bantu are understandably implacable in their insistence that these unique stone works were raised by their ancestors, and them alone. But are they right? There are indications from almost every quarter that other influences were at work here, influences which increase in number the further back you go. Could this impasse, which has been holding the truth at bay for a century, be broken if, as I have suggested, the originators of the Zimbabwe gold trade and the authors of the Zimbabwe monuments are regarded, at least for the sake of argument, as different? It is surely obvious that the former must date from earlier times; indeed, the only question is how much earlier?

In his respected treatise
Africa: its People and their Cultural History
(New York, McGraw-Hill), Professor G.P. Murdock says that the Bantu only reached the north-east African coast from the interior between
AD
575 and 879. This broad band is generally accepted. Others have pointed out that since the Bantu in southern Africa came down from the north as part of a general movement of expansion it is unlikely that they could have reached Mashonaland and further south in any large numbers before the sixth to the ninth centuries
AD
.

However, radio-carbon dating would soon make of all this guesswork a political time bomb that has been ticking ever since.

From well-conducted excavations on a site in the acropolis, the monument where the stone birds were found on the high kopje overlooking Great Zimbabwe, Messrs Robinson and Summers took charcoal from the hearths of early inhabitants, which gave them a carbon dating from the fourth century
AD
– several hundred years before expert opinion says there were Bantu here. Rare for archaeologists of that time who were newly armed with the miraculous tool of radio-carbon dating, Summers and Robinson did not suggest that this was the earliest period of occupation. In any case the dating method was only accurate to within plus or minus 150 years. Ergo, their Great Zimbabwe acropolis site could have been established by or before the start of the Christian millennium. It is also accepted nowadays that ancient communities can remain unchanged for hundreds or even thousands of years. The first Portuguese missionary to actually live with the Karanga 500 years ago, for example, left an account of a rural Shona society all but identical to the one I found there in 1947. So if there were people living on the Zimbabwe acropolis in what appeared to be settled communities, who were they? Packed into this question, however, there is so much political dynamite no one appears to have dared to answer it.

Dr Peter Garlake, whose book
Great Zimbabwe
(Thames & Hudson, London, 1973) remains the bible of the Shona school, goes no further than to propose that ‘early iron age groups must once have lived or camped in the vicinity . . . infiltrating country previously occupied only by late Stone Age hunters . . . able to coexist in some areas without competition or conflict for many centuries'. Dr Garlake does not specify that by ‘early iron age groups' he means Bantu, whereas his ‘late Stone Age hunters' were people of a different race – itinerant bushmen (San People). Admittedly he does support, albeit unwittingly, that the San People once occupied the Zimbabwe countryside alone but he begs the question: for how long? If, however, we accept my proposal that people who collected and traded gold were the true originators of the Zimbabwe culture then this is not a question that may be begged; indeed, it is the fundamental question.

Nowadays, archaeologists admit that they can rarely, if ever, pick up on and employ their skills other than to reasonably well-established ancient sites. There simply is no sufficient build-up of evidence from anything but settlements of some antiquity. Layers of traceable materials at the so-called lowest levels of the Zimbabwe acropolis site are therefore a good indication that there was an old settlement or the regular gathering of Stone Age people here.

Recent research has also indicated that pastoralists did not quickly take over from hunter-gatherers because theirs was the easier life. The opposite is true. When pastoralists first infiltrated the bush areas of hunter-gatherers, keeping their cattle alive and properly grazed was much the harder work. The reason that the pastoralists, like the Bantu, eventually won out is that cattle grazing drives out the hunter-gatherer and then expands exponentially as the cattle multiply. Eventually, as exemplified by today's Kalahari bushmen, the hunter-gatherers end up scratching a living from neo-desert land that won't support livestock or agriculture.

You can see the process still at work and seriously threatening wildlife in modern Tanzania. The local Bantu, the Masai, have lived as a cattle-dependent society for thousands of years and have only been stopped from covering the entire country with their livestock by wildlife protection laws. A Masai man genuinely believes that he has been put on earth to protect the world's cattle (which made for some very interesting defences against charges of cattle-theft in colonial times). Not surprisingly, full-time hunter-gatherers in Tanzania have become extinct.

The point is that this process takes a lot of time. Did it take the amount of time we require for San People to have met Solomon's priests and Phoenician gold traders, the ‘ancient Moors' who are the shadows in the background of every ancient record of trade in southern Africa?

It is time to take a proper look at those ‘late Stone Age hunters' cum gold traders, the mysterious San People, but that is no easy task because if Great Zimbabwe is the lost city of Africa, the San are most certainly the lost tribe. Their origins will be traced later. Here, for a moment, let us think that which has previously been unthinkable – that the San People were the
original
gold traders of south-central Africa and created the first settlement, albeit transitory, at Great Zimbabwe. Did they then, over a period of about a thousand years, slowly intermingle with the early Bantu immigrants until (as happened everywhere in south-central Africa) the exponential expansion of the cattle culture across gold-rich ground made them the dominant Karanga race that in medieval times would crown its achievements, like the Kings of Egypt and Israel, with spectacular monumental buildings?

Here again, however, that very awkward question of population numbers creeps into the equation. There certainly weren't any Bantu here a thousand years before Christ; were there viable populations of San? Consideration of the Sans' role in the early cultural development of southern Africa has been inhibited until fairly recently by the ‘bushman' stereotype. Just as the Australian rediscovered their Aborigines about twenty-five years ago, the South Africans are now rediscovering the San, not least because the San, like the Aborigines, are demanding that large parts of their country – for some San
all
of the country! – be restored to them. The wave of interest in the San People that has swept through South Africa in the last few years is not, however, a significant movement in support of San territorial claims, but concern that the race should not become extinct before a claim of any kind can be filed and tested.

Already emerging are some quite extraordinary statistics based on hard evidence that these lost people of the far south were just the tip of an iceberg. There were San communities in Tanzania, Zambia, Zaire, Malawi, Mozambique, Angola, Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Swaziland and South Africa. And while these communities may have been small and transitory (although there is no strong proof either way of that) they were the
only
communities of modern humans. Moreover, it appears they were around for an immensely long time, a time that makes the territorial claims of ‘modern' Bantu immigrants appear rather dubious.

Unlike the builders of the Great Zimbabwe monuments, the San People left a wealth of pictorial evidence of their presence in the form of glorious, highly creative and meaningful pictures and engravings, or, if you like, pictograms. The San painted extensively in the area of Great Zimbabwe and all the other grand monuments; indeed, their art is a cultural treasure to equal the monuments. In 1996 a survey was undertaken of all the rock art records in the countries above which produced a total of 14,118, of which South Africa contributed some 10,000. The latter was obviously the product of better record-keeping. The husband and wife academic team of Professor H.J. Deacon and Dr Jeanette Deacon in their book
Human Beginnings in South Africa
(David Philips, Cape Town) have judged that figure to be a gross underestimate of the actual number of sites:

We know from recent surveys that when these records are checked in the field, even for small areas, the numbers can be quadrupled at least and there are many areas in all the southern African countries that have never been surveyed at all. Peter Garlake believes that in Zimbabwe alone there are at least 30,000 sites, and there must be many more in South Africa.

Another observation from this erudite book should be added:

Although most of the rock painting and rock engravings were done by the San, not all South African rock art was the work of hunter-gatherers. There are many sites mostly in the north and east of the country, with paintings in a distinctive ‘finger painting' or ‘late white style', as well as engravings that depict subjects different from those in the San art.

The Deacons believe that these were done by Bantu (Khosa, Zulu, Venda, Shona, Sotho and Tswana agriculturists) and their ancestors, ‘within the last 2,000 years'. That certainly takes us back to the time of Graeco-Roman Egypt when gold lust was at its height. It suggests again that the San and the Bantu overlapped and may have cohabited, not just coexisted. Sadly, even the learned Deacons are not able to say how far back into the pre-Christian millennium of the Phoenicians, Solomon and Sheba these creative ‘ancestors' of the lost people of Africa learned to trade gold.

And that is where I had got to in Cape Town last year when a copy of the
Cape Argus
was dropped on my stoep.
MAN'S EARLIEST IDEAS ARE WRITTEN ON OCHRE
, was the headline of an article by the
Argus
science correspondent, John Yield.