The Lost City of Solomon and Sheba (19 page)

The most impressive set of ruins after Great Zimbabwe is Khami in Matabeleland and again it is a city of substance covering an area of some two square miles. There are eleven distinct sets of ruins set across a long kopje in a spectacular landscape of kopjes and open valleys overlooking the Khami river. Two wide gullies lead into the remains guarded at several points by ruined forts which must have rendered the main ruins impregnable. The gullies have been paved with ‘cement'. Neal found five pavements at one place, one on top of the other. Khami is extensively decorated, some herringbone patterns having been constructed of tooled blocks of a darker stone, diorite; elsewhere there are check patterns. Many of the walls are more than 100 feet in length, have stairways, and in one case a square door. Wild vines and fig trees were found in almost every ruin. Neal and Johnson used a small dry-crushing machine on a huge midden at Khami and from the washed spoils recovered over 40 oz of gold in beads, tacks, wire, small portions of gold bangles and pellets.

Head east from Khami in the direction of Great Zimbabwe on a line directly to Sofala Bay and you pass within a few miles of at least ten citadels, like that of Umnukwana overlooking the Bubi river. The ruins command the top of a 90-foot kopje and are regarded as the capital of a district containing some fifty minor and dependent ruins. Umnukwana itself covers an area of 300 by 60 feet with a massive main wall 300 feet long, 13 feet thick and 17 feet 6 inches high when Johnston and Neal surveyed it. There are a number of enclosures, one them 170 by 60 feet, served by rounded entrances.

Here the treasure hunters found a grave containing remains dressed with fine gold bangles, large beads weighing 2 dwt and a single bead of 1 oz 14 dwt, also smelted gold, a copper ingot, a pair of double iron ‘bells', a boss or rosette of beaten gold with a presentation of the sun image, and a large soapstone bowl. Nearby is the Check ruins, regarded as the most beautiful of the
zimbabwes
, also on a kopje but invisible from the surrounding countryside. It gets its name from the fact that it is completely covered inside and out with decorations of the check or chessboard pattern. Neal reported that ‘pannings of the soil from inclosures [sic] gave good returns of fine gold'.

North again brings one to the massive spread of the Thabas Imamba (or Momba) ruins, set on the highest point of the Imamba range. The walls enclose an area of over 200 feet by 80 feet. Thabas Imamba has the most exotic history of any of the
zimbabwes
, for as oral records suggest, this was the capital of the Mombo clan, whose last king was ‘skinned alive' here by invading Amaswazies.

West of here are four citadels, the Mundie ruins, of which the third is 160 feet in diameter with 14-foot-high walls. The space between the first and second structures had been cemented and from these enclosures 208 oz of pure gold ornaments were discovered. A grave contained human remains dressed with 72 oz of gold. In fact, Mundie was quite literally littered with gold, including 230 oz of gold in cakes. Neal observed: ‘Gold was found scattered around the floors quite promiscuously in the two ruins. This was in all stages of manufacture. There were many gold-wire bangles pulled together out of shape as if torn or snatched by violent hands, and scattered beads and charred remains of unburied people evidencing a fight and a defeat of the ancient occupiers.'

And so it goes on, mile upon mile of ruins until the treasure hunters, tired of local names, start to name them after themselves. There is the Baden Powell ruin in the Sabi valley, the Selkirk, Gatling Hill, Mullen's, World View, Stone Door, and Yellow Jacket, until even these run out and Hall simply lists ‘eighteen unnamed ruins in the Salisbury area', or ‘Ancient Aqueduct Area and numerous unnamed ruins'. And this was the list after just a few years of white occupancy!

The most recent surveys, especially those from the air, would indicate that
zimbabwes
great and small could number 20,000. There are, as well, a few mythical lost cities, the most famous of which is the White City, alleged to contain stone figures, including a woman in a mourning position and a reclining man. Solomon and Sheba no doubt. They have vanished into legend. An American traveller, G. Farini, claimed in a book published in 1886 to have found a lost city in the Kalahari desert in the extreme north of the Cape Province. This was taken so seriously that several expeditions and aerial surveys were made in the 1950s and '60s but no city was ever found.

Apart from these ghosts virtually all the larger ruins gave up some gold. A number provided much more exotic treasure trove. There were old barrels of flintlock muskets, portions of a brass trumpet, two cannon which to this day command the front steps of Groote Schuur, a gold medallion embossed on one side with two birds fighting over a heart, silver twisted wire bangles, two huge lumps of lead weighing 60 lb, a large elephant tusk, bar silver, and what was described as ‘a Jesuit priest's hoard', of which more later.

One or two very enigmatic curios also turned up. In a cave ten miles from Great Zimbabwe, Mr Edward Muller found a wooden platter or dish, 38 inches in circumference, showing a number of zodiacal and other astronomical signs – Gemini, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius, a sun image, Orion and Taurus. The face of the bowl displays a crocodile, which was believed to indicate the northern circumpolar constellation. Rhodes acquired this gem and it is still in his bedroom at Groote Schuur, where it keeps company with the Posselt bird, also featuring a crocodile. The crocodile would indicate that this is Karanga work – but where did the local artist get his knowledge of northern zodiacal symbols other than from educated aliens?

Hall and Neal's
Ruined Cities of Mashonaland
, controversial as it has remained ever since, deeply impressed the one man it needed to impress, Cecil John Rhodes, so much so it earned Hall the appointment by the British South Africa Company of Curator of Great Zimbabwe. Hall's appointment was immediately condemned by British scientists, who wrote him off as a ‘journalist'. In fact, he was well educated in England, qualified as a solicitor and, after coming to Rhodesia, was a local correspondent for several British journals, and editor of the
Matabeleland Times
, later the
Bulawayo Chronicle
, the first newspaper I ever worked for. In 1909 he travelled for five months down the Sabi and Lundi rivers collecting ethnological information. Hall eventually became a Fellow of several European and South African scientific societies and in addition to his books had numerous papers published in the journals of learned societies.

Hall's ‘clearances' at Great Zimbabwe have been condemned as ‘ruining Great Zimbabwe for archaeology'. What has been forgotten or ignored is that Hall's terms of reference from the BSAC required him to prioritise the ‘preservation of the building' – or perhaps more accurately, the preservation of what had become Rhodes' private ancient ruin. Ignoring ever-louder howls of protest from foreign archaeologists he indulged in clearances which involved not just a wealth of trees, creepers and undergrowth, but fallen stones round the walls, the spoil from the Bent and Willoughby digs, and at least 3, 5 and in places up to 12 feet of what the archaeologists called ‘stratified archaeological deposits'; that is, the layered history of the Zimbabwe culture, in particular the more recent stages of it.

Hall was utterly unrepentant. His job as he saw it was to preserve the
ancient
ruin, make it safe and improve access to it and if that involved removing the ‘filth and decadence of the Kaffir occupation', so be it. This was bad enough but Hall did not stop there. Once he had cleaned and opened up the lost city he set about looking for evidence of what he called ‘the ancients'. His predecessor, Bent, had already searched for and failed to find worthwhile grave sites. By the time Hall got to work, treasure hunters and white miners had located some 500
zimbabwes
but they too found remarkably few graves. This was not for want of diligent desecration: everyone knew grave sites were the best places to find gold.

The total number of graves found by the time Hall went to press was just forty, one per ten
zimbabwes
, which everyone agreed was peculiar. Even Theodore Bent, who only ever knew of twenty-three
zimbabwes
, was mystified by this, suggesting that perhaps the alien authors of the Zimbabwe culture had removed their dead for burial at sacred sites in their homelands as was the practice in places like Bahrein.

Bent had gone on to suggest that ‘the ancients were but a garrison in the country' but Richard Hall, now aware that he was in charge of the largest stone city south of the Pyramids, quickly rejected that view. The ancient gold mines, Hall pointed out, must have been worked by huge gangs of ‘slaves', as was the custom in all the ancient countries of the world. A similarly large workforce would have been engaged in quarrying and transporting the millions of tons of rock for the buildings. A great deal of food would have had to be planted, processed and transported by and for a large indigenous workforce. ‘Such a vast slave population,' Hall decided, ‘presupposes a vast population of the alien ancients to protect the town and the many and scattered gold mining districts.'

He was determined to find cemeteries, at least those of the ‘Proconsuls or overlords . . . the chief stewards and taskmasters, or priests', which he expected would provide rich rewards of gold as ‘the minimum amount of gold found with the remains of each ancient so far discovered has not been less than one and a half ounces.' He also anticipated no difficulties separating modern (Mombo–Monomatapa) burials from those of his ancients. On the basis of the few graves he had opened he asserted that the ancients were buried on their sides at full length whereas the moderns were interred haphazardly, often sitting upright. ‘Ancients' were always buried under the original cemented floors or under the first or second floors above the original cemented floors. Medieval and modern people were buried near the surface and many feet above the ancients.

The presence of a considerable amount of solid gold ornaments decorated with old Zimbabwe patterns was an unfailing feature of an ancient burial, said Hall. Those of the Mombo–Monomatapa period had ornaments of iron and copper, sometimes banded with gold. The most recent burials only had copper, iron, brass and glass bead ornamentation. Hall further claimed that the pottery which he found invariably buried with the dead differed in design, glaze, ornamentation and material and that it deteriorated with each successive period until it became identical with the ‘coarse articles' made by the natives of his day.

Graves that had been found and opened revealed, Hall remarked, evidence of a turbulent and violent history. At the Umnukwana ruin, seven ‘undoubted ancients' were found who had not been buried. Surrounded by their weapons, they were lying under the soil just outside the entrance, evidently in the positions in which they had been slain. Broken bangles of solid gold and torn bangles of gold wire were found on the same site. Hall condemned what he called ‘vandalism galore', which had caused considerable damage to the ruins as a result of a false belief among treasure hunters that the ancients buried their dead in the walls.

After five years of excavations, his own and those of Neal, Hall felt qualified to offer a detailed description of the ancient burial practices of the Zimbabwe culture:

On the death of an ancient a grave was sunk through the cemented floor, apparently under his own dwelling, and the grave was made apparently without any reference to the points of the compass. As all original floors have a layer of ashes underlying them, the ashes in the grave were removed and replaced by some sort of red earth in which the body was laid always on one side or the other.

His gold ornaments were buried on his person, and his cakes of gold still remained in the pouch on his waist, while, as in ancient Egyptian and present-day Kaffir burials, earthenware pots probably once containing grain, were placed beside him.

These pots of the ancients were of the finest clay, beautifully glazed, very thin, and engraved in the best style with the oldest Zimbabwe patterns.

His head either rested on a pillow of water-grooved stone as at Chum Ruins, or on a wooden pillow very similar to those seen in Egyptian museums and in ancient paintings of Egyptian tombs, resembling in shape and patterns the best of pillows used by the Kaffirs of today.

The wooden pillow was frequently covered with beaten gold fastened on by solid gold tacks weighing 3 dwt each, or were beautifully worked on both sides in gold wire with patterns of the oldest chevron decoration.

By his side if he were a great man, was laid his rod of office with the beaten gold head embossed with the Phallic sun image, and with solid gold ferrule six to eighteen inches long and weighing 1½ oz.

In these same Chum ruins, Neal found a ‘giant'. One shin bone was over 2 feet in length. Hall speculated about the ‘Tombs of the Giants' created by the builders of the ancient stone monuments known as nauraghes on Sardinia which Theodore Bent had also compared with Zimbabwe stone structures.

Hall, it should be noted, quickly donned the mantle of antiquarian and was also in the process of formulating his own rules of archaeology for Great Zimbabwe. These have subsequently been much maligned, in my view unfairly. The ‘science' of archaeology as we know it was still being invented when Hall worked at Great Zimbabwe and Hall implemented an early system of ‘stratification' – layers of human activity – based on that suggested by Flinders Petrie in the same decade from his digs in Palestine. It may be that Hall interpreted his stratification to support his Romantic theories – most archaeologists do to a degree – but it also demonstrates that he was aware of and sought to practise scientific method. Hall was the first to spot ‘a great waste of the precious metal [gold] which was so noticeable on every hand', and to extrapolate from this a material difference in the attitude to gold of modern Africans and the aliens he was now convinced had run the gold industry.