The Lost City of Solomon and Sheba (27 page)

More than a century after the first Royal Geographical Society expedition sought to resolve the origins of the lost city, none of the seminal riddles have been answered and the Zimbabwe culture has instead been parked in a politically correct cul-de-sac.

The official record is now one of listless guesses. The geometrical conical tower, for example, is relegated to a ‘symbolic Karanga grain bin'. The mysterious soapstone columns ‘may well have served as reminders or tallies of the individual dead'. The unique Great Zimbabwe birds are dismissed as ‘stiff, crude diagrams; conventional statements of a generalised avian theme'. I have even seen a suggestion that the very early pottery figurines were toys.

Is it any wonder that this lost marvel of the southern hemisphere becomes less well known with every passing day? Rather more dangerous is that politically correct but observably questionable interpretations of events have now become the official record taught to children. You will recall my quoting from a recent (1998) primer by Harvard University's Dean, Mark Bessire, which borrows Garlake's title,
Great Zimbabwe
. It concluded with the following timeline:

c.
AD
1000, Ancestors of the Shona arrive on the Zimbabwe plateau.

c.
1250–1300, Mapungubwe becomes important trading centre.

c.
1270–90, First major building projects at Great Zimbabwe.

c.
1300–1450, Great Zimbabwe reaches the height of its power.

Can you spot what has happened here? This children's primer should say that the first major building could have started in
AD
671 which is the mean Carbon-14 date of that piece of
ubande
wood under one of Great Zimbabwe's most massive walls. However, it has been corrected by almost exactly the 500 years Peter Garlake said was the lifespan of the tree even though nobody knows its real age. Time has made gospel of a dubious guess.

So from here on I propose to abandon the argument – it is going to run a while yet – as to exactly when the grand
zimbabwes
were constructed and concentrate instead on the ancestors of the people who built the first stone buildings and on the people who started formal trade in the precious metal that paid for them. Who were the first blacks to enter these lands from across the Zambesi, what skills did they bring with them, and were they gold traders? Or were there other people with them with special skills and did they deal their gold through others? So far as I am aware no one has backtracked to any of these original settlers with a view to establishing what knowledge they could have brought with them.

Then one morning at Groote Schuur, Alta Kriel, the ever-helpful curator, put on her white gloves and pulled down from the shelves of Rhodes' study a pristine first edition of a book called
The Sacred Cities of Ethiopia
– by Theodore Bent! This is such a rare book (the author was dead of malaria by the time it went into circulation) and of so little general interest I could not escape the feeling that the last hands to turn its pages might have been those of Rhodes himself. Indeed, the only reference I had ever even seen to the book was in the Royal Geographical Society's obituary to Bent:

In the winter of 1892 Mr and Mrs Bent set out for Africa, this time to investigate the extensive ruins in the north of Abyssinia. This journey threw much new light on the early connections between the people of Abyssinia and those of south-west Arabia, whence both the writing and the language of the old Abyssinians must have been derived.

It is described in Mr Bent's volume,
The Sacred City of the Ethiopians
. In the winter of 1893–4, Southern Arabia, the mother country of both the peoples whose antiquities had been examined in the two preceding years, was visited and a considerable addition made to our knowledge of the little-known Hadramut country.

This was revisited during the succeeding winter, while that of 1895–6 was devoted to exploration of the African coast of the Red Sea. The last fatal journey is said to have resulted in the discovery of fresh archaeological matter in Sokotra and Southern Arabia, in the latter of which some new ground was broken.

This makes no mention of Great Zimbabwe, so what new ground is being referred to? Within minutes of opening Rhodes' copy of
The Sacred Cities of Ethiopia
, however, that became obvious. Theodore and Agnes Bent had never stopped tracking the people he had termed the ‘authors' of the Zimbabwe culture; indeed, Bent had given his life to that very Grail.

E
ven by African standards Ethiopia has been a rumbling volcano of humanity since the dawn of recorded time. Politics and religion have produced repeated magma flows of displaced people, mostly in a southerly direction. Before I studied its history I had always assumed that these troubles were of recent origin, but this is not the case and if we are looking for a source of refugees, Ethiopia, more than anywhere else in Africa, has to be a prime choice. Evidently, although admittedly almost secretly, the Bents felt the same.

During the last century, Ethiopia, once known as Abyssinia, has experienced all the typical African traumas of hunger, disease, a particularly evil brand of colonialism, a communist coup, almost ceaseless drought and starvation, inept government and self-serving politicians. It was the first African country to be used as a test ground for modern war machines, the place where Mussolini practised aerial warfare and the effects of poison gas. But go back a few thousand years to the times that we have been researching, and the excesses above seem just a natural part of the national tradition.

The earliest Arabian geographers like Ibn Hawkal saw Ethiopia as ‘an immense country with indefinite borders and solitudes', protected by its desert and mountains. In the
Periplus of the Red Sea
it is recognised as a source of obsidian and ivory (but not yet gold) and Pliny reports that it exported African exotica, like rhino horn, hippopotamus hides, tortoiseshell, monkeys and slaves; but again no gold. There were gold mines in ancient Ethiopia but they do not appear to have been prolific enough to impinge on the record. A Greek explorer 500 years after Pliny opined that the gold displayed in the rich trappings of the monarchy was earned from a profitable trade with the interior. It may well have been Zimbabwe gold in transit.

As the historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto (who draws an immediate comparison between Ethiopia and Zimbabwe) writes in
Civilisations
, Ethiopia's isolation produced a singular culture: ‘Even at the time of her most intense contacts with the Romans, her clergy had to be appointed from Alexandria [hence the wide use of Greek], at a crucial time of Monophysite heresy, which erred in underestimating the humanity of Christ and making him uncompromisingly divine. When Monophysite worthies from the Roman Empire fled orthodox persecution in the second and fifth centuries, Ethiopia received some of the most celebrated of them, and the future of the Ethiopian church as a splinter group of the Christian world became inescapable.'

Solomon, as the father of the nation, featured large for more than a thousand years. He was recognised by the Agawa Dynasty, and by the people from whom they sprang, the Awga who spoke a Cushitic language. The Amhara, speakers of the Ge'ez dialect (another exclusive cultural feature of the area) regarded the Agawa as foreign intruders. There were also rivals for the mantle of Solomon among the worshippers of Sheba and the refugee communities who espoused ‘the new Israel', which will become pivotal to our story. In terms of the likely movement of people south it is also worth keeping an eye on the believed dates of some of these upheavals, especially in relation to seminal dates at Zimbabwe.

Solomon seemingly had material influence on the people of Ethiopia a thousand years before Christ and this influence could have provoked migrations south. Whether, indeed, his fabled union with Sheba founded an Ethiopian dynasty is a matter for speculation; it is the strength and durability of the tale that should interest us. In the same way as the description ‘King Solomon's Mines' could simply describe the source of his gold rather than a place he actually owned and where Sheba built him a temple, the Ethiopian legends could be describing the ancient influence of Solomon and Sheba on what was then a very primitive Ethiopia. Almost all legends are apocryphal anyway.

A later Ethiopian king, Azana, left boastful and detailed descriptions on stone stelae of the mayhem he caused: the precise numbers of his victims, the brutalities he inflicted (and occasionally his munificence) and the punitive exile of the vanquished to distant parts of the country. One little war was launched against enemies attacking and destroying Ethiopian trade caravans which, true or false, is at least evidence of trade routes north and south and the value the Ethiopians put on them.

In the early centuries of the Christian millennium, the Ethiopian kings converted to Christianity, resulting in yet more major movements of the faithful which are still reflected in Ethiopian society today. ‘To become Christian in the fourth century was to become part of the growing common culture of the Near East,' writes Armesto, ‘to share the religion of many Greek and Indian traders in the Indian Ocean.' To this we should add ‘old Moors', who were observably at least as active. But this was followed by the rise of Islam and by the ninth century, about the time when even the Shona school is happy to acknowledge the arrival of northern cattle-herders, Ethiopia was a beleaguered empire surrounded by enemies other than to the south.

Yet in spite of all this human abuse Ethiopia remains hauntingly lovely and intensely religious. It lays claim to one of the oldest forms of Christianity on the planet. Admittedly, for more than a thousand years this has often been a God in hiding and most of His churches are extraordinary underground bunkers – stone temples of monumental proportions at least as impressive and similar in construction if not always in style to Great Zimbabwe's mortar-free walls. These alone would have been enough to attract Theodore Bent and his photographer wife to Ethiopia if indeed the quest for the authors of the Zimbabwe culture had remained their Holy Grail.

At the beginning of the twentieth century very little was known of these Ethiopian monuments. Visiting them and the wild mountain territory which had offered some protection from the forces of Islam was extremely dangerous. But this was a very determined couple when it came to treading the road to Ophir. They also had a reputation to rebuild. By 1905, the disciplines of the new archaeology were firmly in place, and the Bents' pioneering book on the Zimbabawe culture,
The Ruined Cities of Mashonaland
, had been derided as Romantic and unscientific by the young Turk from Oxford, David Randall-MacIver.

The Bents were termed ‘antiquarians' by this scientific establishment. The fact that they were very widely travelled and extremely knowledgeable, and that their book and its conclusions displayed considerable scholarship, counted for nothing. This in spite of the fact that thanks to Rhodes and the Royal Geographical Society the Bents had been the first western scholars to visit Great Zimbabwe solely for the purpose of science, and as a result had made the most intriguing finds.

But literally everything they unearthed was rejected as inadmissible to the origin debate because their methods had not followed the new rules of archaeology. When, for example, they dared to suggest that Zimbabwe's unique conical tower was probably a religious symbol because it so closely resembled other towers known to be symbols of phallic worship, it was rejected as speculative. Time has shown the Zimbabwe tower to be the most interesting geometrically. Today, such draconian rules on speculation have been considerably relaxed, perhaps because pictorial images can so readily be produced in support of speculative observations. The evidence of one's own eyes must have some value. There is even some new evidence to give force to Bent's theory about the Zimbabwe tower being a religious artefact. Recent excavation of a ‘workers town' adjoining the Gîza Pyramids has revealed that mini-pyramids – stone towers – apparently of religious significance, complemented most of these workers' compounds.

A similar case might now be made for the validity of the Bents' comparison of the Zimbabwe tower with the tower on a coin of known Phoenician origin. This features a religious tower sited at Byblos remarkably similar in shape to the Zimbabwe tower. Close examination of this coin, which for some reason the Bents do not mention, reveals that it is located behind a wall bearing a hatched pattern like the one round the top of the Elliptical Building's outer wall, and inside an open-roofed stone-walled monument. The raised-stud pattern round the rim of the coin is also identical to a distinctive pattern on one of the Zimbabwe birds. But this, along with all the other intriguing artefacts in the Bents' Pandora's box of finds was emphatically rejected. For the coin to be admissible as an indication of the date of the Zimbabwe tower it would have had to be found in the tower's foundations when Ms Caton-Thompson dug there, and of course it was not.

Contributors to the Zimbabwe story have been plagued for a century by political rectitude of one kind or another and by these arcane disciplines, but none so mercilessly as Theodore Bent who was in fact a serious scholar. For him the rigid application of the new rules for archaeological finds amounted not just to the death of his reputation as an investigative historian, but also to his actual death. After his book was dismissed as Romantic speculation he went to Ethiopia to find physical evidence to support his theories and was there bitten by the malaria-infected mosquito that killed him.

Ethiopia is ideally placed if you are looking for stepping stones from ancient Egypt to Great Zimbabwe. The shortest crossing point on the Red Sea, Bab el Mandeb, separates Ethiopia from Yemen, the Sabaean kingdom of ancient times. Directly north of Ethiopia is the old Negro kingdom of Nubia, which adjoined Egypt and shared a cultural heritage with Egypt. To the south-east is Somalia, peopled by fierce warrior tribes who fit the descriptions of the savage Zindj and whose Indian Ocean coast hooks back to face the Hadramat region of Arabia. To the west, Uganda, and the territory which later became Rwanda, was ruled for most of the past by the tall, elitist Tutsi, a people who look like the Somalis and the Ethiopian highlanders and who once kept a slave-tribe, the Hutu. Due south is Kenya, and south-east of Kenya, Tanganyika (now joined with Zanzibar island as Tanzania), both dominated in olden times by tall war-like nomads, the ancestors of the modern Turkhana and Masai.