Fortune and Glory

by David McIntee

  Since Herihor had managed to take on the powers and duties of the pharaoh himself, at least some of the time, and over half of the empire, there is a likelihood that he may have kept many burial treasures for his own interment. The possibility that he was entombed with not just his own funeral goods, but also those of others, makes his tomb a potential hoard the likes of which the world has never seen outside of movies and comic books.

  WHERE IS IT NOW?

  The mummies Herihor relocated which have since been discovered have not been accompanied by their grave goods – even when those tombs have been proven not to have been broken into by looters. There are three possible reasons for this:

  1) Their treasures were looted from their original tombs before reburial. In which case why would Herihor, or anyone else, rebury them with an intent of hiding them from looters? In any case, this is what John Romer believes was done at the Wadi el-Ghabri site. In which case there is no treasure to be found.

  2) There was only a limited amount of treasure available for a big funeral at the time, and the priesthood simply used the same items each time, ceremonially burying them with the deceased before retrieving them for use in the next royal funeral. In this instance, it was probably buried with someone else.

  3) Herihor and his priesthood kept it for themselves, in which case it may have ended up buried with him.

  THE OPPOSITION IN YOUR WAY

  In fiction, especially movies, people seeking to uncover the treasures of the pharaohs are most likely to have to face reanimated or reincarnated ancient wizards and mummies, flesh-eating scarab beetles, homicidal jackals, cursed tombs and so on. Thankfully most of these are unlikely to be encountered in the real world, with the obvious exception of the cursed tombs part.

  In this rational age, few people (hopefully) believe that supernatural death will come on swift wings to those who disturb tombs, especially when we know that that most famous of curses – laid upon Tutankhamen’s tomb – was made up in 1926 by a rival journalist to the official newsman attached to Carter’s expedition (and not by a sorcerous priest thousands of years ago). However, there are some dangers likely to be found in Egyptian tombs.

  Firstly, the original builders did like to put in the occasional deep pit, and stone slabs set to fall. Such things can still be dangerous, as it’s all too easy to fall into a pit without seeing it when blundering about in the pitch-dark tunnel leading to a tomb. The mechanisms for booby traps would have rotted or been seized up with sand, but this also means that roof supports and the like may also have rotted, and thus will be more likely to come down upon you like a ton of the proverbials.

  Tombs have also been shown to be havens for a particular type of fungal bacterium. On a more obvious note, cool dark places like tombs are ideal havens for cold-blooded reptiles such as snakes, which can fit in through the tiniest gaps. There is good reason why Indiana Jones found a lot of cobras in the Well of Souls. You’re more likely to encounter asps and vipers, but cobras are also possible. If you’re near the Nile, crocodiles are also a danger. Your biggest fauna problem, though, will be insects such as mosquitoes, and the occasional deathstalker scorpion.

  Egypt is also home to some sectarian tension, and tourist buses have been known to be attacked by Islamic extremists (most famously at the Temple of Hathor some years ago). The Egyptian tourist police are somewhat under-funded and sometimes short of good equipment, but their hearts are in the right place.

  Terrorism is more of an issue in the south and east, but one human opponent is nationwide: the Antiquities Department of the government. You will not be allowed to just bring finds out of the country, especially if they are as historically significant as this would be.

  KING SOLOMON’S MINES

  WHAT IS IT?

  A misnomer. Well, yes, the mines are supposed to be the source of the fabulous wealth ascribed to King Solomon in the Old Testament, however the Bible describes that wealth being brought to him by the Queen of Sheba, so, technically, they should really be called The Queen of Sheba’s Mines.

  The basic idea is that they are gold and gemstone mines from which this wealth was originally dug. They’d have to be mines, plural, because gold and gemstones form in different ways and under different pressures.

  Such mines couldn’t exist without a workforce and support network, however, so they must be accompanied by a settlement also. Traditionally, therefore, explorers and fortune hunters have been looking for a set of mine tunnels full of gold and gemstone veins next door to some kind of lost city, in an area under the influence of King Solomon and/or the Queen of Sheba. What could be simpler?

  HOW MUCH IS IT WORTH TO YOU?

  That would depend on what deposits still remain in the mines. The Bible doesn’t specify a regular amount, but Biblical scholars on average tell us that Solomon was given 450 talents of gold every three years. Different ancient cultures defined the measure of a ‘talent’ differently, but the ancient Israelites of Old Testament times had adopted the Babylonian talent, which was 67lb, or just over 30kg.

  If there remained even one shipment’s worth of gold at source, that would be 30,150lb – 15 tons – of gold. In today’s values, that’s a good half a billion dollars worth.

  There’d be the value of any gemstones to add to that, plus assorted other trade goods, so it’s not inconceivable to imagine one shipment’s worth remaining in the mines to go way beyond that half a billion.

  THE STORY

  According to the Biblical Book of Kings, Solomon was famed both for his wisdom and devotion to the God of the Israelites, building the legendary first temple to house the Ark of the Covenant and other sacred goods. He also had 700 wives and 300 concubines, which seems a bit tiring.

  According to 1 Kings 10, the Queen of Sheba came to test him on his devotion ‘with hard questions’. Aside from the exam paper, she brought ‘camels that bore spices, and very much gold, and precious stones’. Solomon answered all her doubts and questions perfectly, and she was thoroughly impressed with his temple and his theological rulership, saying, ‘It was a true report that I heard in mine own land of thy acts and of thy wisdom. Howbeit I believed not the words, until I came, and mine eyes had seen it: and, behold, the half was not told me: thy wisdom and prosperity exceedeth the fame which I heard. Happy are thy men, happy are these thy servants, which stand continually before thee, and that hear thy wisdom. Blessed be the LORD thy God, which delighted in thee, to set thee on the throne of Israel.’

  At this point, she rewards Solomon with, according to Kings, ‘one hundred and twenty talents of gold, and of spices very great store, and precious stones: there came no more such abundance of spices … And the navy also of Hiram, that brought gold from Ophir, brought in from Ophir great plenty of almug trees, and precious stones.’

  Solomon turned the wood from the almug trees into pillars in his temple, and also into musical instruments such as harps. He then rewarded her with ‘all her desire’, which is probably as salacious as it sounds, and she went home satisfied. We’re then given Solomon’s annual income: ‘six hundred threescore and six talents of gold’, and that ‘once in three years came the navy of Tarshish, bringing gold, and silver, ivory, and apes, and peacocks.’

  PREVIOUS SEARCHES IN FACT AND FICTION

  People have been searching for the source of Solomon and Sheba’s wealth for a very long time. Mainly they sought Tarshish and Ophir, which were sometimes thought to be lost cities, and sometimes thought to be lost names for known cities.

  In the 1st century AD, the Roman-Jewish historian Josephus wrote that Solomon’s wealth had most likely come from India. Other European and Islamic writers in the first millennium thought that it came from Arabia, or that Solomon never existed.

  There also came to be something of a split between those writers who believed that both Ophir and Tarshish were cities, and those who thought that Tarshish was the word for a type of ship, capable of longer journeys than the shallow-hulled boats that plied the Arabian and Red sea
s. The Bible mentions two navies belonging to Solomon: the navy of Tarshish, and the navy of Hiram, but nobody ever seemed to think the latter was a place.

  Today, say ‘King Solomon’s Mines’ and most people think of Africa. In 1488, a Portuguese explorer, Pêro da Covilhã, arrived in Sofala, Mozambique. Sofala had been a trading centre for gold for 500 years by this point, and was frequented by Somalis, Arabs and Persians. By 1502, Portuguese ships were visiting, having made an alliance with the local Sultan, Isuf.

  Portuguese chronicler Thomé Lopes had come along, and learned from the Arab and Somali populace that the local tribes retained folktales of ships being sent to Solomon every three years bearing cargoes of gold. The Portuguese of the time were most familiar with the Bible in its Greek translation – in Greek Ophir is called Sophir – and, knowing that Sofala was at the centre of a gold trade anyway, decided that the names must simply be variations of the same word. So they started looking for where the gold was coming from, not just with an eye to getting a piece of the action, but to confirming that they’d found Ophir.

  In 1531, Portuguese Captain Vincente Pagada had learned that ‘among the gold mines of the inland plains, between the Limpopo and Zambezi rivers, there is a fortress built of stones of a marvellous size, and there appears to be no mortar joining them’. Putting two, in the form of gold mines, and two, in the form of a stone-built fortress, together, Pagada came up with five: this was the palace of the Queen of Sheba, and source of King Solomon’s gold.

  This tale got repeated over the years, becoming tied up with the tale of the mythical African Christian king, Prester John, but becoming best known through being mentioned by Milton in Paradise Lost.

  The idea seeped out into wider adventures, and the name of Ophir was altered only slightly by Edgar Rice Burroughs for his Tarzan stories, when he wrote Opar into The Return Of Tarzan in 1913, in which the city is actually a lost colony of Atlantis.

  Despite this familiarity, fewer people were interested in actually looking for the place than you’d think. This is partly because it was overgrown and in an otherwise inhospitable area, and partly, perhaps, because people didn’t feel the need, since they assumed that this mystery had been solved. Also, treasure-seekers tended to focus on trying to locate where Solomon’s treasure had gone, rather than on where it had come from. European interest in Africa had also come to concentrate on other things, such as slavery, ore, diamonds and colonial lands.

  Pagada’s stone fortress, therefore, went largely ignored until around 1852, when a German boy named Karl Mauch was given a largely blank map of Africa, and access to the writings of Pagada. These inspired him to become an explorer set on finding King Solomon’s Mines. In fact he was pretty much the first person to think of it in those terms, though he didn’t really use the phrase in his journals.

  Mauch took 11 years to teach himself botany, geology, entomology, English, Arabic, Latin, and French. He worked out, walking 6 miles a day to prepare himself for an African expedition, and, in 1863, he sought sponsorship from August Petermann, the publisher of Germany’s Geographical Magazine. Petermann refused, but promised to publish any reports Mauch sent in if he ever reached Africa. This he did in 1865, having worked his passage as a ship’s deckhand from London to Durban.

  Mauch may have prepared for 11 years, but his packing was lacking; he started walking with only a compass, penknife, writing gear, blanket, and pistol. He never carried enough food, and turned out to be totally rubbish at hunting. Multiple instances of heatstroke, exhaustion, and starvation later, the readers of Geographical Magazine had a whip-round and donated enough cash to keep him going for a further eight years. He also had the good fortune to run into Henry Hartley, a famous (at the time) English big-game hunter, who needed some help with a wounded elephant. Newly funded, and now with some teaching on how to catch dinner, Mauch made his first actual discovery in 1867.

  In the Tati region of the border between what’s now Botswana and Zimbabwe, he found some curious quartz pits, with old traces of gold in them, and realized they had been used for smelting gold. The very next day, he found a gold field, which the Geographical Magazine was happy to trumpet as ‘Solomon’s Ophir’ in its report on the find. Mauch knew from Pagada’s writings that there must be a fortress city nearby if this was really Ophir, and sourced local stories of just such a construction, matching Pagada’s description, in the hill country between the Zambezi and Limpopo.

  This phase of his search lasted another three years (despite his goal being only 40 miles inland from Sofala), during which time he was abducted and robbed by Matabele tribesmen, and fell victim to starvation again despite having learned how to get elephant meat, which you’d think would last a while.

  On 5 September 1871, Mauch walked into the stone fortress we now call Great Zimbabwe. The ancient citadel fit Pagada’s description perfectly, and he immediately jumped to the conclusion that the city could never have been built by black people for two reasons: he was a white guy living in the height of 19th century imperialism (which was busily whitewashing history at the best of times), or, the tribes living in the area openly admitted that the place had nothing to do with them, and that they had no idea who had built it.

  Mauch decided that the Phoenicians had built the city, and the local tribes had no objection to this idea. He decided from his impression of the architectural style that it must have been built to replicate the design of Solomon’s Temple, and constructed with imported iron tools. He found pieces of wooden beams that he was sure were Lebanese cedar, because it looked like the cedarwood in his pencil.

  The locals also called Sofala ‘Sophir’, so Mauch was satisfied that he had found Ophir. The Geographical Magazine agreed, publishing to a very limited audience. Mauch returned home to Germany, afflicted with liver disease from his near-starvations.

  The story wasn’t over, however, as an English writer, H. Rider Haggard, had heard the tale from Hartley, and used Mauch’s adventures as the source material for his novel King Solomon’s Mines, which cast Mauch as the young man searching for his lost father, and Hartley as the much better-remembered fictional hunter, Allan Quatermain.

  Unfortunately, Mauch hadn’t actually found the Biblical Ophir. At the turn of the 20th century, archaeology underwent a reboot of sorts, changing from being the search for physical remnants of Biblical myths to being the scientific search for evidence of what had happened in the past. So, in 1905, an archaeologist named Randall MacIver confirmed that the city dated to around the 14th century, and had been built by Africans.

  In 1929, an all-woman dig led by Gertrude Caton Thompson confirmed that it had been built by the Shona tribe around 1150, and was a cattle-raising and gold trading centre until being abandoned around 1450 – which would have been within living memory when the Portuguese showed up.

  Sadly, it never occurred to Mauch that the reason the local people had no idea about the building of the city was because they themselves were newbies to the area, preceding him by only 40 years. Since the place had been abandoned for centuries, it’s no surprise that they knew nothing about it. Mauch didn’t live to see his discovery debunked, however. He had expected a university tenure when he returned to Germany, but it never materialized. Instead he ended up in a dead-end job, living in a one-room bed-sit hotel. In 1875, either asleep or drunk, he rolled out of the hotel window and died on the cobbles below, aged just 37.

  This meant that the search was still on, but, thanks to Haggard’s phenomenally successful novel, everybody now thought of this goal as King Solomon’s Mines.

  Individuals and expeditions searched Africa for years afterwards, in the hope of finding another similar lost city, with attached mines. However, the first discoveries of historical evidence linked to Solomon came not in Africa, but in Israel, in 1993.

  It’s not really surprising that this should be the case, since it’s where he was king of, but this discovery had nothing to do with his mines; rather it was a statue of his father, the legendary King Davi
d, from the right period. Shortly thereafter, however, in neighbouring Jordan, copper mines from Solomon’s era were also uncovered.

  CRACKING THE WHIP

  If you’re the kind of treasure hunter who teaches archaeology by day but wants to be a cross between a motorcycle rebel and cowboy while off duty, you may be tempted to consider taking along a bullwhip. After all, the media over the past 30 years or so has made it an iconic piece of treasurehunting equipment.

  Is it really so practical as to be worth packing for your expedition? Well, it depends what you expect to do with it, and what you expect to use it for. Are you going to use it as a weapon, to disarm or deface your enemies, or are you thinking more of using it as an aid to gymnastic dealing with obstacles and terrain? Or perhaps you want to reel in your date for the evening?

  The bullwhip definitely has some use as a weapon. It takes some training and getting used to, but it absolutely will wrap itself around a wrist or forearm and allow you to pull a weapon or tool out of an enemy’s hand. The other way to use a bullwhip as a weapon, of course, is to use it in such a way that the tail at the end will cut into the skin. This can be extremely dangerous, easily blinding or cutting the faces of others. That said, if your opponent has a gun, you are not going to kill them with a whip before they can shoot you.

  The other main purpose for which you may want to use a bullwhip is to climb, or to swing across rivers or chasms where there is no bridge, by a convenient log or branch. Again, the whip will wrap around such an object if used correctly, and the friction will enable a grip. However, getting that grip to stay is a different matter. A grip that lasts just long enough to jerk on an arm may take the gun out of an enemy hand, but is less likely to last long enough for you to climb up the length of the whip, or to swing across a gap.

  Basically, the best way to ensure that a whip will hold on to that branch long enough to cross an obstacle is to tie a knot in it, around the branch or object to which you’re securing it. The material of a proper bullwhip is certainly strong enough to support an active person’s bodyweight and shouldn’t break. The problem is that in order to tie a knot around the supporting object, you’d have to have already climbed up or been otherwise suspended or supported, which is somewhat paradoxical. For this type of purpose, really you’d be better off bringing along a coil of strong modern rope and a small grappling hook, ideally with folding arms.