The Lost City of Solomon and Sheba (12 page)

Might this answer the riddle of Great Zimbabwe's lost gold? Did it contribute to war-chests now lost in the depths of time via earlier ancient links with the only other traditional stone-city builders south of the Pyramids? Theodore Bent grew ever more convinced of a Great Zimbabwe history along these lines as his team unearthed a wealth of ancient artefacts. Such Romantic possibilities were actively contemplated.

In the middle of all this exciting activity, however, Bent, makes an odd discovery which he does not regard as particularly significant but which for me started a whole new line of enquiry. The largest of the soapstone pillars in the hill fortress measures 11 feet 6 inches. The base of the pillar was found in situ, acting as the centre to a group of monoliths. ‘The rest had been broken off and appropriated by a Kaffir to decorate a wall,' says Bent. It is hard to understand, given his love of classical cross-referencing, that Bent fails to appreciate that throughout the golden age of the Greeks and the Romans, walls were decorated with coloured scraps of broken stone and tile. Mosaic proved, in fact, to be the most durable of the decorative arts of these times. It would seem that even when the Zimbabwe culture had began to decay the people here were still sufficiently concerned with the aesthetics of their monument (and of aesthetics per se) to want to decorate it. Could it be that the art of Great Zimbabwe is the key to many of the enigmas?

Bent does acknowledge that other pieces he is finding are beautifully decorated
objets d'art
. The tallest pillar has patterns round it, as on the wall below the altar, orientating it to the setting sun. The rosette pattern is present on many of these pillars.

He provides evidence of old-world religious veneration of large stones like these Great Zimbabwe columns. Dr Gustav Kremer of the Akademie der Wissenschaft, Vienna, has written a famous account of the ancient cults and of their worship of stones, as have El Masoudi, Marinus of Tyre and Herodotus. There is also this account from Euthymius Zygabemus: ‘This stone was the head of Aphrodite, which the Ishmaelites formerly worshipped, and it is called Bakka Ismak . . . they have certain stone statues erected in the centre of their houses, round which they danced till they fell from giddiness; but when the Saracens were converted to Christianity they were obliged to anathematise this stone which formerly they worshipped.' Bent himself suggests that the famous Kaaba stone at Mecca resembles a black schistose block he has found at Great Zimbabwe. Taken together it all adds up to an exceedingly old worship at Great Zimbabwe apparently dating back to the most primitive ages of mankind.

His team of diggers have now worked down to considerable depths on the shady side of the hill temple and these excavations begin to turn up what for me, apart from the Zimbabwe birds, are the most interesting artefacts found at Great Zimbabwe: fragments of decorated and plain soapstone bowls. Soapstone is a soft, mostly emerald green, talc schist which can be easily carved and highly polished. Bent is artistically impressed with these bowls:

The work displayed in executing these bowls, the careful rounding of the edges, the exact execution of the circle, the fine pointed tool-marks, and the subjects they chose to depict, point to the race having been far advanced in artistic skill – a skill arrived at doubtless by commercial intercourse with the more civilised races of mankind.

Seven of these bowls were of exactly the same size – 19.2 inches in diameter. The most elaborate of the fragments is a bowl which has depicted round its outer edge a hunting scene; it is very well worked and bears in several points a remarkable similarity to objects of art produced by the Phoenicians. There is here, as we have in all Phoenician patterns, the straight procession of animals, to break the continuity of which a little man is introduced shooting a zebra with one hand and holding in the other an animal on a leash.

To fill up a vacant space, a bird is introduced flying, all of which points are characteristic of Phoenician work. Then the Phoenician workmen always had a great power of adaptability, taking their lessons in art from immediate surroundings, which is noticeable all over the world, whether in Greece, Egypt, Africa, or Italy.

There are three zebras, two hippopotami, and the sportsman in the centre is obviously a Hottentot. The fragments of a large bowl, which has a procession of bulls round it, is also Phoenician in character.

This lovely artwork is, however, quickly set aside when the diggers unearth more fragments depicting, Bent believes, a religious procession, a hand holding a pot or censer containing an offering, and an arm of another figure with the portion of the back of the head with the hair drawn off it in folds. But it is a third fragment which, as Bent puts it, is the most tantalising of all. It is from a huge bowl – estimated at more than 2 feet across – and it appears to have writing round it. Mrs Bent carefully photographs this fragment and they compare it with letters from the proto-Arabian alphabet. There is certainly a striking similarity to letters which are found in the earliest Sabaean inscriptions. Bent asserts: ‘It is an attempt at writing.' But it has never been translated and it is the only item resembling a cryptogram ever found at Great Zimbabwe.

The dig continues to be very rewarding. They retrieve an object similar to a drum, some 2 feet wide. Again of soapstone it is decorated on the sides and top with rings of knobs, four on the side and four on the top, with a hole in the middle. One theory is that it was a quern or grinding stone, but soapstone is too soft for such a purpose. It remains one of the most prized treasures found at the lost city and the most enigmatic; indeed, it has inspired an entire theory of Indian authorship for the ancient ruins of southern Africa. It remains at Groote Schuur in Cape Town where for some years, I am told, it was used as a doorstop.

Bent is particularly pleased with it because, though larger, it was all but identical to an artefact in the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge. The Fitzwilliam stone is of white marble 6 inches in diameter with similarly disposed knobs in rows. This studded drum, attributed confidently to the Phoenicians, was found during excavations at Paphos, in Cyprus. Herodian (Book 5) also describes a sacred cone in the great Phoenician temple of the sun at Emesa, in Syria, which was adorned with knobs or protuberances.

Bent obviously believes he is accumulating strong evidence for his theory of a sun-worshipping Semite origin for the authors of the lost city – at the time I think I would have too – and is literally cock-a-hoop when he finds not one but eight of Herr Mauch's much-vaunted Zimbabwe birds. I cannot escape the feeling that this whole story hinges on a correct interpretation of the Zimbabwe birds and the enigmatic past from whence they flew. Are the ancestors of this flock the raptor-spirits, particularly eagles, to be found in some African cults? Or are they simple effigies of Egypt's feathered gods, like the hawk, Horus, protector of foreign miners? They were Rhodes' obsession as well, metaphors of a golden lost city he had yet to see. Through their influence on him they changed the course of history in this part of Africa; indeed, the shadows from their wings may be changing it still.

Apart from Carl Mauch, who is not a reliable witness, Theodore Bent was the first westerner with any archaeological expertise to examine these remarkable birds in situ. In all he found six large and two small ones. We already know that Posselt appropriated one for Rhodes who installed it in pride of place in his house in Cape Town. Bent also found a number of pedestals – stelae – still standing in the temple with their tops broken off which probably originally supported more birds. The tallest bird column stood 5 feet 4 inches high, the smallest 6 inches shorter. Each is essentially modelled on the same bird, but they are differently worked. The birds are exquisitely decorated and it is this decoration which makes them so fascinating for me.

One has wings tipped with the lost city's prevailing dentelle pattern. They all have the veiled rosette-eyes. There are a variety of patterns down the backs, some indicating feathers, others beaded knobs. Yet another has what looks like a necklace with a brooch in front. Two of the birds are distinctive and different to the others. They have fan-shaped tails and straight legs and they are perched on zones or cesti. Another, with nothing beneath its talons, has two circles carved below it and two on the wings. There are two raised ovoids thought to represent the sun, and chevron patterns.

The birds launch Bent on a frenzy of cross-referencing:

I have little doubt in stating that they are closely akin to the Assyrian Astarte or Venus, and represent the female element in creation. Similar birds were sacred to Astarte amongst the Phoenicians and are often represented as being perched on their shrines.

Ancient Egypt, he reminds us, is littered with sacred bird sculptures:

Horapollo tells that the vulture was emblematic of ‘Urania, a year, a mother' while Aelian goes so far as to suppose that all vultures are female, to account for their character as emblems of maternity.

The cesti and the circles point obviously to this, and these birds in connection with phallic worship are interesting as emblems, signifying incubation.

Lucian, who in his work ‘De Syria Dea' describes a temple at Hierapolis, near the Euphrates, which as we have seen, has much in common with these temples at Zimbabwe . . . mentions a curious pediment, of no distinctive shape, called by the Assyrians ‘the symbol', on the top of which is perched a bird.

Among Dr Schliemann's discoveries at Mycene, there are also images surmounted by birds.

All of this is very convincingly supported with drawings, photographs and invitations to his readership to see these comparable artefacts in northern museums:

A bird on a pedestal carved from ‘rude stone fragments found in the Soudan [Sudan]' on display at the Ashmolean Museum.

Phoenician coins which have birds on pedestals as their focal object.

The curious zodiac of Denderah, where a bird is perched on a pillar and with the crown of Upper Egypt on its head ‘which has recently been found on an archaeological dig in Egypt'.

‘It is just possible', Bent avows, ‘that the birds at Zimbabwe had some solstitial meaning, but as their exact position on the temple walls is lost, it is impossible to speak on this point with anything like certainty.' He adds: ‘The very earliest Arabian tribes at the time of the Himyaritic supremacy, used the vulture as a totem.' The Zimbabwe birds do look quite like vultures. At this moment one senses that in Bent's mind the case for origin is all but proven.

Other interesting finds attesting to a cosmopolitan lifestyle at the lost city are mentioned almost as an afterthought:

In the vicinity of the temple we also came across some minor objects very near the surface, which did not do more than establish the worldwide commerce carried on at Great Zimbabwe at a much more recent date, and still by the Arabians – namely a few fragments of Celadon pottery from China, of Persian ware, an undoubted specimen of Arabian glass, and beads of doubtful provenance, though one of them may be considered as Egyptian of the Ptolemaic period.

One bowl is, however, so exquisitely decorated that he is obliged to concede that it is worthy of a good period of classic Greek ware.

The pattern round it is evidently stamped on, being done with such absolute accuracy. It is geometric, as all the patterns on the pottery are. It is not hand-made pottery, for on the back of it are distinct signs of a wheel. Then there are some black fragments with an excellent glaze and bevel, also fragments of pottery lids, and a pottery stopper, pointing to the fact that the old inhabitants of Zimbabwe had reached an advanced state of proficiency in ceramic art. All that the pottery proves to us is that the ancient inhabitants of Zimbabwe had reached a high state of excellence in the manufacture of it, corresponding to a state of ceramic art known only to the rest of the world in classic time.

He is less impressed by a considerable quantity of iron weapons and implements, including a spearhead which had been gold-plated. ‘I am inclined to set aside the iron implements as pertaining to a more recent occupation, though at the same time there is no actual reason for not assigning them a remoter antiquity.'

There is a reason for his interest wandering from these significant artefacts – he has found a gold foundry. Just below the temple under the fortress the dig reveals a smelting furnace flecked with gold, ‘made of very hard cement of powdered granite'. The team is under no illusions about the importance of this discovery and, widening the excavation, they soon find evidence to confirm that it is indeed a metal-smelting furnace for the manufacture of gold from gold-bearing quartz. The furnace has a proper chimney, also of powdered-granite cement. Says Bent: ‘Hard by, in a chasm between two boulders, lay all the rejected casings from which the gold-bearing quartz had been extracted by exposure to heat prior to the crushing, proving beyond a doubt that these ruins, although not immediately on a gold reef, formed the capital of a gold-producing people who had chosen this hill fortress with its granite boulders for their capital owing to its strategic advantages.'

Bent also found numerous clay crucibles, nearly all of them containing small specks of gold adhered to the glaze produced by the heat of smelting. In the same area he unearthed a number of water-worn stones also with gold stuck to them which he concluded were burnishers. Then there was a soapstone object with a hole in, which he decided was a hammer for beating gold into sheets.

Great Zimbabwe sits on the edge of an elevated plateau averaging 3,000 to 5,000 feet above sea level. The plateau, known as the Zimbabwe batholith, is largely Archaen granite some 3,000 million years old. The granite forms the bottom layer of the plateau, known as the Basement, and through this huge outcrops – kopjes – were raised up and later eroded.

Robert Swan is the best geologist in the party and describes the kopjes as ‘suggesting the idea of huge bubbles on the surface of a molten mass'. In their explorations of Mashonaland prior to tackling the lost city, the team noted patches of stratified rock of quartzites and schists, crystalline limestone and magnesium. These belts of stratified rock are generally two or three miles wide and in them occur the gold-bearing quartz reefs. One such belt was found near Fort Victoria. Swan made a close examination of the quartzite rock they had found near the furnace, established that it contained only minute traces of gold, and decided it had probably been rejected as unworthy of processing. He took time off from cartography to visit the nearby quartz belt and to search for old workings and gold reefs but was again disappointed, finding a single poor reef and no evidence that this particular area had been mined. This was all somewhat puzzling because Mr and Mrs Bent were continuing to turn up fascinating artefacts associated with the crafting of gold.