The Lost City of Solomon and Sheba Read online

  First published in 2003 by Sutton Publishing

  The History Press

  The Mill, Brimscombe Port

  Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

  www.thehistorypress.co.uk

  This ebook edition first published in 2013

  All rights reserved

  © Robin Brown-Lowe, 2003, 2013

  The right of Robin Brown-Lowe, to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  EPUB ISBN 978 0 7524 9490 6

  Original typesetting by The History Press

  For Heather …

  and recalling a seminal weekend in the Great Karoo

  with Pauline and John Pank, Lin Mehmel and

  John Rudd when the light suddenly dawned.

  Contents

  Foreword

  Introduction

  One

  To Ophir Direct

  Two

  The Conquest of Ophir

  Three

  Dreams of Avarice

  Four

  Ophir Revealed

  Five

  The Gold of Ophir

  Six

  Treasure Hunters

  Seven

  The Debunkers

  Eight

  Ophir Spinning

  Nine

  The Road to Ophir

  Ten

  First Footsteps

  Eleven

  Ophir Writ Large

  Postscript

  Bibliography

  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

  Foreword

  In 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

  Introduction

  It 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 southeast 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.

  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 rig
ht – 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.