The Lost City of Solomon and Sheba (2 page)

The hilltop sported a crest of cut stones – stelae – rising from the walls above a sheer cliff, and inexplicable little round towers like pepper pots on the fortress buttresses of an enclosure to the west. In the valley the huge doughnut of the temple some 800 feet long was clearly visible.

Whereupon it began to disappear!

At first it just wobbled when the stones found they could take up no more of the midday heat. These mirages then became so dense and plastic, whole sections of wall, especially the tops of the higher walls and towers, broke down to shifting battlements. By the time we had finished our sandwiches the stone city in the valley below was a shifting miasma of grey, drizzled with blacks and greens. Lost!

My mother checked that we were all wearing our hats and began to ask nervous questions of Leonard as to how long he thought it would take us to return to the rest huts in Fort Victoria. I was spellbound, and protested at this early departure, pointing out that I had yet to see a single one of King Solomon's mines! But Edith observed that they would probably be too dangerous given the way the whole place had been ‘let go' and we were on our way by mid-afternoon.

Over the next twenty years, until Rhodesia's white regime decided I had dangerously over-liberal views and forced me to become a political refugee, I went back to the ruins several times. Ever more sanitised, they remained a popular picnic stop on the way to South Africa where, each year, we drove on our summer holidays.

Archaeologists, mainly from Britain, worked away behind the scenes, exorcising the ghosts of Solomon and Sheba and relabelling the ruins with scientifically correct names. The acropolis became the Western Enclosure on the Hill, the temple the Elliptical Building and the various ruins in the valley were cleansed of the names of pioneers, like Baden-Powell of scouting fame, and became numbered Enclosures. Doubts were cast on the popular theory of a Phoenician origin. Admittedly, the general public still preferred to climb to ‘the acropolis' and enjoy a barbecue with a view of ‘the temple'.

The Rhodesian Tourist Board continued to display its famous poster of a ghostly Sheba emerging from her temple with its spectacular conical tower. Today, of course, even the poster has been judged politically incorrect and has gone the same way as its ghostly queen, even though few of the ‘riddles' it advertises have been solved. In those days, and now, what little tourism there was paid for the basic preservation of the ruins, and the relegation of Solomon and Sheba to romantic myth did material damage to Great Zimbabwe's image as an international tourist attraction. It is income that cash-strapped modern Zimbabwe can ill-afford to lose.

To return to that naïve ten-year-old, however, here we were driving away, perhaps never to see again the greatest mystery southern Africa had to offer. Little did I know then that this act of deprivation would plant the seed of a fifty-year obsession with the origins of the city and its thousands of associated works. Many years later, when I checked the details of our day's outing with my father, he reminded me that I had been preoccupied by its origins even then and had subjected him to a barrage of questions, not least about its age.

‘I told you that nobody could say for sure,' he recalled, ‘which was what we thought at the time. A lot of overseas boffins had looked at the place but opinion was completely split.'

‘What about the local black people?'

There was not much point in talking to them either, apparently. The first scientific expedition to come here from Britain at the turn of the century had interviewed all the local Africans and established that they knew nothing about the ancient ruins. Nor did they build stone houses themselves and they certainly did not mine gold. And there the matter rested for most of the first half of the twentieth century.

My father, otherwise a compassionate man, was of a generation of Rhodesians who preferred to leave a great many important questions unanswered – in particular the morality of white supremacist rule and its justifications. By our very presence we were ‘raising civilised standards'. African culture was decadent, evidence the ruins of Zimbabwe. It well suited the proponents of such views to find that the black people living in mud huts above Great Zimbabwe knew nothing of an earlier culture. So for all my early years in Rhodesia I shared the popular view that there had to be some kind of ancient classical explanation for this culture skilled in the building of stone monuments and the deep-mining of gold. Even our schoolteachers avoided rocking this comfortable boat.

Eventually, this placebo even became entrenched in white law. When the Rhodesian regime had its back to the wall in the face of African demands for equality and political power, Ian Smith's government banned the Historical Monuments Commission from promoting an African origin for Great Zimbabwe. The Minister of Internal Affairs declared officially (and ordered the preparation of a new guidebook to reflect his views) that there was no
irrefutable
evidence of the origins of the ruins ‘at the present time'. Academically he was right – there were at least three learned books refuting an exclusive Shona authorship competing with the three archaeological treatises supporting one. Truth, however, had very little to do with this ban because by then Great Zimbabwe had become a political pawn. It has remained so to the present day; indeed, all that has changed is the skin colour of the protagonists.

Today's Great Zimbabwe guidebooks (this quotation was taken from the Internet) offer an origin theory along these lines: ‘Controversy regarding the ruins' origins has persisted for years and is even now not completely dispelled. It has taken years of careful archaeological study to arrive at the answers to these questions. They are now known and they are unequivocal, the original structures were built by indigenous African people, the ancestors of modern Zimbabweans.' Perhaps – but Africa is a big place, with one of its coastlines on the Mediterranean. It is here, says one school of thought (branded the ‘Romantics'), that we should look for Africans skilled in monumental stone-building.

Who, indeed, were the ancestors of modern Zimbabweans and who were their ancestors? To imply, as these guidebooks do, that the Zimbabwe culture sprang unaided, uninfluenced and exclusively from Shona soil is to distort both the archaeological evidence and the volumes of comparative and ethnographic information produced by the opponents of a Shona genesis.

There is, for example, little hard evidence that a sufficiently large Bantu population to build several mighty
zimbabwes
, temples, stone forts and irrigation terracing had migrated this far south by the time the Carbon-14 datings say the stone-building began in earnest. I am not, however, disputing the key claim of the Shona school that the ancestors of the modern Shona, a people known as the Karanga, largely assembled these stones. Certainly when the grand
zimbabwes
were raised and improved no other large workforce existed here. But this book will seriously question the modern myth that no other influences and no other nationalities were involved in ancient times.

It took many years for it to be recognised that Great Zimbabwe is actually the largest stone city in Africa south of the Pyramids – indeed, this astonishing statistic is, in my experience, largely unknown to the general public. Yet there is no precedent for monument-sized stone-building this far south in Africa when the Great Zimbabwe complex is believed to have been started, and little or no stone-building has gone on here since the Zimbabwe culture proper ended some 500 years ago.

Today's rural Karanga mostly live in thatched mud huts just as their ancestors did when the first European explorers came to the ruins. Moreover, the granite walls were by then already
ancient
ruins in process of being broken up by aged trees such as the baobab and
spirostachys africana
which take hundreds of years to reach maturity.

Where did the ancient Karanga, born and raised as cattle-herders on this central African savannah, acquire a sophisticated knowledge of architectural geometry, the mathematics of load and stress-bearing structures, and the measuring devices to service the architects, not to mention the function of drains and foundations, the graded battering of rising cones, and the beautiful arts and crafts which went on inside these walls? I shall also be examining a similar set of unanswered questions for the widespread deep gold-mining and crafting industry which paid for it all.

Finally – the greatest riddle of them all – having evolved all these skills, why has not a whisper of it been passed down to the descendants of these architects, skilled masons, sculptors and miners? Even the name of their magnificent temple-city is utterly lost. ‘Zimbabwe' translates to nothing more than ‘stone building'.

All this defies credibility, yet you must believe in it as an act of faith if you are to be a card-carrying member of the Shona school, just as in Mr Smith's time you had to believe in a classical Semite origin and an émigré architectural elite to stay on message.

I find both these assaults on the truth offensive, even if in the context of the region's recent history they are understandable. None of the rulers of the land on which Great Zimbabwe stands, past and present, have dared properly to investigate its enigmatic origins for fear of the impact it would have on their political claims. We have been saddled with two racially tainted Zimbabwe myths and the truth of this marvellous place has become even more lost in the process. This is a genuine tragedy because even a quick glance at the evidence suggests that the Zimbabwe culture was the product of a number of complex multi-racial associations or partnerships, with Great Zimbabwe arguably the most important ancient monument to cultural partnership on the planet.

I see my task, therefore, as a process of unravelling perhaps 3,000 years of apocryphal legend, myth, science good and bad, passions that have blinded good men to the truth, disinformation by evil men, and downright propaganda.

R
umours were rife a century and a half ago that the unexplored hinterland of Africa hid a fabulous eldorado, a place that had provided the Queen of Sheba with the gold to seduce Solomon. The tale has been immortalised as fiction by that most exotic of African adventure writters, H. Rider Haggard, in his novel
King Solomon's Mines
. Actually, Rider Haggard had intimate personal experience of the territory we are about to explore. When in 1886 a small army of intrepid treasure hunters went in search of Solomon's mines this master of derring-do would be up there with the best of them. The rest of the best included Indian fighters from the American frontier wars and Baden-Powell who would go on to found the Boy Scout movement.

It is, I think, the most intriguing aspect of this story that the facts are always stranger than the fiction. For example, it is a fact that King Solomon must have acquired the gold he accumulated in vast quantities from somewhere, and it is also fact that the Queen of Sheba was a major gold dealer. Time and the explorations of people like H. Rider Haggard have revealed that the closest country to both of them where huge quantities of gold had been mined was Mashonaland.

It is agreed by all the schools of thought that this gold, sold through foreign traders, paid for the construction of at least five grand cities with massive walls of stone, one of which, a temple-city, is the largest stone structure south of the Pyramids. Aerial surveys carried out in recent times suggest lesser towns and villages of stone number more than 15,000, not counting a mountain ‘kingdom' which incorporates one of the largest stone-terraced irrigation systems on our planet. 1

But the history of this lost Zimbabwe culture – even that part of its history of which we can be sure – is a good deal stranger than the fiction which has been based upon it.

The first classical mention we have of King Solomon's eldorado is a guarded reference in the Bible to a place called ‘Ophir', somewhere in Africa. Ophir's exact location is never defined. It would have been surprising if it had been because Ophir, according to the Bible, was the source of the gold which Phoenician mariners, hired by Solomon through Hiram of Tyre, brought home from three-year trips round Africa in their new deep-hulled ships. These ships allowed the Phoenicians to navigate oceans of variable tides, winds and currents. They made extraordinary voyages as far afield as England and India. They went to Africa – Phoenician wrecks have been found on the African coasts – but the location of Ophir remained a well-kept secret, probably because it was the Phoenicians' most valuable piece of information regarding trade.

Advance some thousands of years to the rough frontiers of pioneer South Africa where the Dutch have established a garden in the Cape of Good Hope to victual the ships passing round it in the service of the East India trade. In a few years they will push out from these protected gardens into coastal mountains sparsely populated by a strange Asian-looking race of miniature aboriginals, the Khoi. They move these ‘Chinese Hottentots' on, plant vineyards, build villages, every one with a church. They read their Bibles every day and believe every word they read, not least of the riches of Solomon and of his seduction by the voluptuous Sheba. It is an interest focused by the possibility that Solomon and Sheba's fabulous fortunes have been mined in their new wilderness homeland. But where?

A century on and these Europeans have become a deeply religious farming community, the Boers. But Britain takes over the now-thriving Cape Colony and the Boers make another break for freedom, this time trekking in their ox wagons in search of ‘free' land deep in the hinterland. In Africa by now, ‘free' land means land not within the ‘sphere of influence' of other Europeans. Well-watered arable land is the Boers' prime objective and this they find alongside the Vaal and the Orange rivers, but the Bible is still their guidebook and Ophir has yet to be discovered. They set up the Boer states of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State and in a few years will discover beds of diamonds and reefs of gold beyond even the dreams of Solomon and Sheba. But the Transvaal cannot be Ophir either because these deposits are found under virgin land. Even so, the Boers sense they are getting warm.