The Lost City of Solomon and Sheba (11 page)

What are ochres?

Yield had more important questions to answer, however, and his intro was a quote from Descartes: ‘
Cogito ergo sum
' (I think, therefore I am).

Yes, but what are ochres?

Implacably, Yield went on: ‘It is the ability to think and to translate these complex thoughts into actions that distinguishes modern humans, like homo erectus, or from the hominids like Australopithecus, which came even earlier, and from other species in the animal kingdom.'

Was this the San again?

‘One of the keys to complex, abstract thought is the use of symbols, including geometric shapes. An international team of researchers led by South African archaeologists have discovered abstract representations engraved on pieces of red ochre in the Middle Stone Age layers at Blombos Cave, near Stillbaai on the southern Cape coast.'

Yes it was!

The discovery was apparently about to be reported in the prestigious American journal,
Science
, and the scientists led by Professor Christopher Henshilwood of the South African Museum in Cape Town, and professor at Bergen University in Norway and the State University of New York, Stony Brook, had evidence that modern human behaviour emerged in Africa at least
35,000 years
before the start of the Upper Paleolithic era in Eurasia. The San had a history of coherent, creative social groupings far, far older than I had ever suspected, and infinitely older than Solomon and Sheba.

Ochre is chunks of hardened red-ochre-coloured clay and it is thought to have been used for things like hide-tanning and pigments, but no other ochre pieces or artefacts older than about 40,000 years have provided evidence for abstract or depictable images which would indicate modern human behaviour. Among archaeologists, modern human behaviour means the thoughts and actions underwritten by minds equivalent to those of Homo sapiens today. Such cognitive abilities have, until now, been confined to depictable images found at Eurasia's Upper Paleolithic sites and date back some 35,000 years.

Two pieces of engraved ochre have now been found in the Blombos Cave, another seven are potentially engraved and there are some 8,000 other pieces, many bearing signs of use from Middle Stone age layers. That they were worked by members of a settled community is confirmed by the discovery of a number of bowl-shaped hearths. On one piece of ochre, both the flat surfaces and one edge are modified by scraping and sanding. ‘The edge has two ground facets and the larger of these bears a small cross-hatched engraved design,' says Henshilwood. The cross-hatching consists of two sets of six and eight lines partly intercepted by a long line. The engravings on the second slab consist of rows of cross-hatching, bounded top and bottom by parallel lines, and divided through the middle by a third parallel line which divides the lozenge shapes into triangles. ‘The preparation by grinding of the engraved surface, situation of the engraving on this prepared face, engraving technique, and final design are similar for both pieces, indicating a deliberate sequence of choices,' Henshilwood concluded.

Both pieces were found within layers of bifacial flaked stone points which occur only below the so-called Howeison's Poort horizons, which date to between 65,000 and 70,000 years ago. This truly ancient date for thinking, decision-taking, artistic people who could only be the ancestors of the San has subsequently been confirmed by two different luminescence-based dating methods. The engraved slabs are therefore about 77,000 years old!

‘The Blombos Cave engravings are intentional images,' Henshilwood insists, and then lays down an idea which could be pivotal to our story, bearing in mind that Great Zimbabwe, indeed most of the hundreds of
zimbabwes
, are covered with ‘intentional images' of a creative nature, many of them engravings. ‘The Blombos Cave motifs . . . may have been constructed with symbolic intent, the meaning of which is now unknown. These finds demonstrate that ochre use in the Middle Stone Age was not exclusively utilitarian and, arguably, the transmission and sharing of the meaning of the engravings relied on fully syntactical language.'

If this is true of motifs made at the dawn of human time in a cave in the tip of Africa, then it surely must be true of the motifs so generously engraved on thousands of shaped Zimbabwe stones on which cross-hatching also features large. Moreover, these stones of ‘symbolic intent' are set in a natural art gallery of thousands of San, or their students', paintings and engravings. Suddenly, the disreputable thought becomes feasible that thousands of years ago – well before the time of Solomon and Sheba and even the earliest Egyptian dynasties – this Zimbabwe countryside was home to a considerable population of modern (in the archaeological sense) artistic people settled enough to find time to decorate their dwellings and deify certain sites.

And these were a people whom we know from the earliest Western encounters collected and traded gold.

T
heodore and Agnes Bent spend their first two weeks cutting their way in to the temple through thick, stinging jungle. Everywhere walls had collapsed. Passages were overlain with human and animal detritus. No maintenance had observably taken place for centuries. Ancient trees grow through walls, including a well-established pair of
muchechete
trees flanking the conical tower which Carl Mauch had excitedly labelled ‘cedars', and from which he extrapolated his theory of Sheba's temple and the ancient Ophir of Solomon.

The Bents make an early, disappointed, note of an absence of ancient tombs or grave sites but put a positive spin on it by suggesting that the ‘ancient inhabitants who formed but a garrison in this country' might have taken their dead for ceremonial burial at sacred sites elsewhere. On the Bahrein islands in the Persian Gulf they have seen acres of mounds containing thousands of tombs and no vestige of a town. This custom, Theodore Bent says, still prevails among the Mohammedans of Persia. He also makes an early observation here which has been uncontested since:

The circular ruins repeat themselves, always, if possible, occupying a slightly raised ground for about a mile along a low ridge acting, doubtless, as the double purpose of temples and fortresses for separate communities, the inhabitants dwelling in beehive huts of mud around.

Today's improved view of this is:

A family homestead at the capital [Great Zimbabwe] consisted of several
daga
houses. Among the elite these dwellings were linked by low stone walls to form a homestead. Each homestead, in turn, was linked to other homesteads by similar walls. These shared walls provided privacy, surfaces for decoration, and protection against bad weather and wild animals.

Down the years everyone has been concerned by the obvious paradox here. Why live in mud huts if you know how to build exquisitely in stone, of which there is an abundance locally? Bent notes that all the native villages on the Zimbabwe hill are built, understandably, on the sunniest spots. Over the years – possibly thousands of years – many feet of human spoil had been laid down, making excavation with an unskilled labour force difficult and time-consuming. He seeks out a dig-site in the shade where the locals had not seen fit to build huts. Even though it is difficult to persuade his ‘shivering Kaffirs' to work here his choice of the shaded side of the hill fortress immediately produces exciting results. (‘Kaffir' was more a generic than a disparaging term in his day; ‘Blacks' would have been more insulting.)

The kopje on which the fortress, or the acropolis, is built is a natural defensive position protected on one side by giant granite boulders and on the south by a 90 foot precipice. On the only accessible side is a massive wall, in places 13 feet thick and 30 feet high, decorated with small round towers and monoliths. The fortress is served by a flight of steps through a narrow slit in the granite boulders. Every angle is protected from attack, so much so that Bent speculates that the occupants were in constant dread of attack and lived like a garrison in the heart of enemy territory.

Just below the summit Bent comes upon an odd little plateau approached by narrow passages and steps and a curious passage through the wall covered with huge beams of granite to support the weight of stone above. Steps on one side are made of the ‘strong cement' (powdered granite) he has found elsewhere and one wall is decorated with the ubiquitous chevron pattern. This platform is spectacularly adorned with huge monoliths and decorated pillars of soapstone, one of which is more than 11 feet tall.

The team clears the dense jungle below this platform and soon comes across an altar. Contemporary accounts seem to share Bent's view of the religious significance of the site. Behind the altar a labyrinthine confusion of stone structures is revealed which completely baffles everyone. They follow a narrow gully 4 feet wide descending between two boulders and protected, for no apparent reason, by six buttresses which narrow to a zigzag passage 10 inches wide. Thick walls shut off separate chambers. ‘In all directions everything is tortuous; every inch of ground is protected with buttresses and traverses. As in the large circular building below, all the entrances are rounded off.'

Bent speculates that this is the oldest of the ruins – later work has proved him right – and that it was built at a time when defence was the main object. ‘When they were able to do so with safety, they next constructed the circular temple below and as time went on they erected the more carelessly put-together buildings around.'

The hill fortress enclosure has been used as a pen for Chief Mugabe's cattle but once cleared Bent is rewarded with spectacular soapstone birds and pillars, fragments of soapstone bowls and ‘phalli'. Nothing like them has been found elsewhere in southern Africa. These phalli, mostly of soapstone, have been inserted into the stones of the altar and scattered all around it. They are carved ‘with an anatomical accuracy which unmistakably conveys their meaning'. This does not deter Mrs Bent from taking sufficiently explicit photographs for her husband to make the observation that circumcision was practised by this ancient race and he draws attention to Herodotus's description of the origin of this practice: ‘Its origin both amongst the Ethiopians and Egyptians may be traced to the most remote antiquity [Herodotus 2.37.104].'

They unearth no less than thirty-eight miniature phalli, one highly decorated with what appears to be a winged sun, ‘or perchance the winged Egyptian vulture'. Bent compares it, printing accurate illustrations, with a small marble column of Phoenician origin in the Louvre, which has a winged symbol on the shaft and is crowned with an ornamentation of four petalled flowers.

MM Perrot and Chipiez, experts on the Phoenicians, are again called in to confirm that this is ‘A sort of trade mark by which we can recognise as Phoenician all such objects as bear it, whether they come from Etruria or Sardinia, from Africa or Syria . . . we may say it is signed.' Bent takes a closer look at his Great Zimbabwe altar artefact and finds it is also crowned with a rosette of seven petals. These rosettes or flower patterns are also seemingly very distinctive as they were commonly used by the Phoenicians to indicate the sun. Phoenician stelae at the British Museum carry the rosette, often in conjunction with the half moon. Moreover, Bent's team find rosettes carved on the decorated pillars. The eyes of the soapstone birds appear also to be carved in the form of rosettes.

It is back to Herodotus for the significance of all this: ‘The Arabians of all the gods only worshipped Dionysus . . . that is to say they worshipped the two deities, which in the mind of the father of history, represented in themselves all that was known of the mysteries of creation, pointing to the very earliest period of the Arabian cult, prior to the more refined religious development of the Sabaeo-Himyaritic dynasty, when sun-worship, venerated for the great luminary which regenerated all animal and vegetable life, superseded the grosser forms of nature worship, to be itself somewhat superseded or rather incorporated in a worship of all the heavenly luminaries which developed as knowledge of astronomy was acquired [Herodotus 3–8].'

Theodore Bent is evidently inclining towards the idea of a Semitic process of religious evolution at Great Zimbabwe, helped no doubt by his cartographer, Swan's, belief that the altars and other astronomical pointers are inclined towards northern stars.

The several Semite tribes are, we believe, descended from Shem, Noah's eldest son. They include the Phoenicians, the various Aramaean tribes (including Hebrews) and a considerable portion of the population of Ethiopia. They began to leave Arabia as early as 2500
BC
in successive waves of migrations that took them to Mesopotamia, the Mediterranean coast, and the Nile delta. In Mesopotamia the Semitic people were in contact with the Sumerian civilisation and eventually dominated it. In Phoenicia they developed the most sophisticated and adventurous of maritime trades and are regarded as the first great seafaring nation.

The Hebrews went through Sinai into the Nile delta, settling eventually with other Semitic inhabitants in Palestine, and became the leaders of a new nation and a very potent religion, Judaism. In fact the three great monotheistic religions, Christianity, Islam and Judaism, all of them militantly evangelical, were born within the Semite hegemony. It is the Jews, however, who have maintained an unbroken tradition of commercial acumen.

Competition between the complex monotheistic religions which evolved within the Semitic sphere, in particular between Christianity and Islam, increasingly led to conflicts – and refugees. The most extended and bloody of these ancient conflicts were the Crusades and at the time when they raged between Islam and Christianity, Great Zimbabwe was probably at its most affluent. So was a king, ‘Prester John', in a mysterious Afro-Christian kingdom to the far north. Hence the hope of European kings and popes who launched the Crusades that a flank attack on Islam might be mounted if contact could be made with Prester John.