However, radiocarbon dating would soon make of all this guesswork a political time bomb that has been ticking ever since.
From well-conducted excavations on a site in the acropolis, the monument where the stone birds were found on the high kopje overlooking Great Zimbabwe, Messrs Robinson and Summers took charcoal from the hearths of early inhabitants, which gave them a carbon dating from the fourth century AD – several hundred years before expert opinion says there were Bantu here. Rare for archaeologists of that time who were newly armed with the miraculous tool of radiocarbon dating, Summers and Robinson did not suggest that this was the earliest period of occupation. In any case the dating method was only accurate to within plus or minus 150 years. Ergo, their Great Zimbabwe acropolis site could have been established by or before the start of the Christian millennium. It is also accepted nowadays that ancient communities can remain unchanged for hundreds or even thousands of years. The first Portuguese missionary to actually live with the Karanga 500 years ago, for example, left an account of a rural Shona society all but identical to the one I found there in 1947. So if there were people living on the Zimbabwe acropolis in what appeared to be settled communities, who were they? Packed into this question, however, there is so much political dynamite no one appears to have dared to answer it.
Dr Peter Garlake, whose book Great Zimbabwe (Thames & Hudson, London, 1973) remains the bible of the Shona school, goes no further than to propose that ‘early iron age groups must once have lived or camped in the vicinity … infiltrating country previously occupied only by late Stone Age hunters … able to coexist in some areas without competition or conflict for many centuries’. Dr Garlake does not specify that by ‘early iron age groups’ he means Bantu, whereas his ‘late Stone Age hunters’ were people of a different race – itinerant bushmen (San People). Admittedly he does support, albeit unwittingly, that the San People once occupied the Zimbabwe countryside alone but he begs the question: for how long? If, however, we accept my proposal that people who collected and traded gold were the true originators of the Zimbabwe culture then this is not a question that may be begged; indeed, it is the fundamental question.
Nowadays, archaeologists admit that they can rarely, if ever, pick up on and employ their skills other than to reasonably well-established ancient sites. There simply is no sufficient build-up of evidence from anything but settlements of some antiquity. Layers of traceable materials at the so-called lowest levels of the Zimbabwe acropolis site are therefore a good indication that there was an old settlement or the regular gathering of Stone Age people here.
Recent research has also indicated that pastoralists did not quickly take over from hunter-gatherers because theirs was the easier life. The opposite is true. When pastoralists first infiltrated the bush areas of hunter-gatherers, keeping their cattle alive and properly grazed was much the harder work. The reason that the pastoralists, like the Bantu, eventually won out is that cattle grazing drives out the hunter-gatherer and then expands exponentially as the cattle multiply. Eventually, as exemplified by today’s Kalahari bushmen, the hunter-gatherers end up scratching a living from neo-desert land that won’t support livestock or agriculture.
You can see the process still at work and seriously threatening wildlife in modern Tanzania. The local Bantu, the Masai, have lived as a cattle-dependent society for thousands of years and have only been stopped from covering the entire country with their livestock by wildlife protection laws. A Masai man genuinely believes that he has been put on earth to protect the world’s cattle (which made for some very interesting defences against charges of cattle-theft in colonial times). Not surprisingly, full-time hunter-gatherers in Tanzania have become extinct.
The point is that this process takes a lot of time. Did it take the amount of time we require for San People to have met Solomon’s priests and Phoenician gold traders, the ‘ancient Moors’ who are the shadows in the background of every ancient record of trade in southern Africa?
It is time to take a proper look at those ‘late Stone Age hunters’ cum gold traders, the mysterious San People, but that is no easy task because if Great Zimbabwe is the lost city of Africa, the San are most certainly the lost tribe. Their origins will be traced later. Here, for a moment, let us think that which has previously been unthinkable – that the San People were the original gold traders of south-central Africa and created the first settlement, albeit transitory, at Great Zimbabwe. Did they then, over a period of about a thousand years, slowly intermingle with the early Bantu immigrants until (as happened everywhere in south-central Africa) the exponential expansion of the cattle culture across gold-rich ground made them the dominant Karanga race that in medieval times would crown its achievements, like the Kings of Egypt and Israel, with spectacular monumental buildings?
Here again, however, that very awkward question of population numbers creeps into the equation. There certainly weren’t any Bantu here a thousand years before Christ; were there viable populations of San? Consideration of the Sans’ role in the early cultural development of southern Africa has been inhibited until fairly recently by the ‘bushman’ stereotype. Just as the Australian rediscovered their Aborigines about twenty-five years ago, the South Africans are now rediscovering the San, not least because the San, like the Aborigines, are demanding that large parts of their country – for some San all of the country! – be restored to them. The wave of interest in the San People that has swept through South Africa in the last few years is not, however, a significant movement in support of San territorial claims, but concern that the race should not become extinct before a claim of any kind can be filed and tested.
Already emerging are some quite extraordinary statistics based on hard evidence that these lost people of the far south were just the tip of an iceberg. There were San communities in Tanzania, Zambia, Zaire, Malawi, Mozambique, Angola, Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Swaziland and South Africa. And while these communities may have been small and transitory (although there is no strong proof either way of that) they were the only communities of modern humans. Moreover, it appears they were around for an immensely long time, a time that makes the territorial claims of ‘modern’ Bantu immigrants appear rather dubious.
Unlike the builders of the Great Zimbabwe monuments, the San People left a wealth of pictorial evidence of their presence in the form of glorious, highly creative and meaningful pictures and engravings, or, if you like, pictograms. The San painted extensively in the area of Great Zimbabwe and all the other grand monuments; indeed, their art is a cultural treasure to equal the monuments. In 1996 a survey was undertaken of all the rock art records in the countries above which produced a total of 14,118, of which South Africa contributed some 10,000. The latter was obviously the product of better record-keeping. The husband and wife academic team of Professor H.J. Deacon and Dr Jeanette Deacon in their book Human Beginnings in South Africa (David Philips, Cape Town) have judged that figure to be a gross underestimate of the actual number of sites:
We know from recent surveys that when these records are checked in the field, even for small areas, the numbers can be quadrupled at least and there are many areas in all the southern African countries that have never been surveyed at all. Peter Garlake believes that in Zimbabwe alone there are at least 30,000 sites, and there must be many more in South Africa.
Another observation from this erudite book should be added:
Although most of the rock painting and rock engravings were done by the San, not all South African rock art was the work of hunter-gatherers. There are many sites mostly in the north and east of the country, with paintings in a distinctive ‘finger painting’ or ‘late white style’, as well as engravings that depict subjects different from those in the San art.
The Deacons believe that these were done by Bantu (Khosa, Zulu, Venda, Shona, Sotho and Tswana agriculturists) and their ancestors, ‘within the last 2,000 years’. That certainly takes us back to the time of Graeco-Roman Egypt when gold lust was at its heigh
t. It suggests again that the San and the Bantu overlapped and may have cohabited, not just coexisted. Sadly, even the learned Deacons are not able to say how far back into the pre-Christian millennium of the Phoenicians, Solomon and Sheba these creative ‘ancestors’ of the lost people of Africa learned to trade gold.
And that is where I had got to in Cape Town last year when a copy of the Cape Argus was dropped on my stoep. MAN’S EARLIEST IDEAS ARE WRITTEN ON OCHRE, was the headline of an article by the Argus science correspondent, John Yield.
What are ochres?
Yield had more important questions to answer, however, and his intro was a quote from Descartes: ‘Cogito ergo sum’ (I think, therefore I am).
Yes, but what are ochres?
Implacably, Yield went on: ‘It is the ability to think and to translate these complex thoughts into actions that distinguishes modern humans, like homo erectus, or from the hominids like Australopithecus, which came even earlier, and from other species in the animal kingdom.’
Was this the San again?
‘One of the keys to complex, abstract thought is the use of symbols, including geometric shapes. An international team of researchers led by South African archaeologists have discovered abstract representations engraved on pieces of red ochre in the Middle Stone Age layers at Blombos Cave, near Stillbaai on the southern Cape coast.’
Yes it was!
The discovery was apparently about to be reported in the prestigious American journal, Science, and the scientists led by Professor Christopher Henshilwood of the South African Museum in Cape Town, and professor at Bergen University in Norway and the State University of New York, Stony Brook, had evidence that modern human behaviour emerged in Africa at least 35,000 years before the start of the Upper Paleolithic era in Eurasia. The San had a history of coherent, creative social groupings far, far older than I had ever suspected, and infinitely older than Solomon and Sheba.
Ochre is chunks of hardened red-ochre-coloured clay and it is thought to have been used for things like hide-tanning and pigments, but no other ochre pieces or artefacts older than about 40,000 years have provided evidence for abstract or depictable images which would indicate modern human behaviour. Among archaeologists, modern human behaviour means the thoughts and actions underwritten by minds equivalent to those of Homo sapiens today. Such cognitive abilities have, until now, been confined to depictable images found at Eurasia’s Upper Paleolithic sites and date back some 35,000 years.
Two pieces of engraved ochre have now been found in the Blombos Cave, another seven are potentially engraved and there are some 8,000 other pieces, many bearing signs of use from Middle Stone age layers. That they were worked by members of a settled community is confirmed by the discovery of a number of bowl-shaped hearths. On one piece of ochre, both the flat surfaces and one edge are modified by scraping and sanding. ‘The edge has two ground facets and the larger of these bears a small cross-hatched engraved design,’ says Henshilwood. The cross-hatching consists of two sets of six and eight lines partly intercepted by a long line. The engravings on the second slab consist of rows of cross-hatching, bounded top and bottom by parallel lines, and divided through the middle by a third parallel line which divides the lozenge shapes into triangles. ‘The preparation by grinding of the engraved surface, situation of the engraving on this prepared face, engraving technique, and final design are similar for both pieces, indicating a deliberate sequence of choices,’ Henshilwood concluded.
Both pieces were found within layers of bifacial flaked stone points which occur only below the so-called Howeison’s Poort horizons, which date to between 65,000 and 70,000 years ago. This truly ancient date for thinking, decision-taking, artistic people who could only be the ancestors of the San has subsequently been confirmed by two different luminescence-based dating methods. The engraved slabs are therefore about 77,000 years old!
‘The Blombos Cave engravings are intentional images,’ Henshilwood insists, and then lays down an idea which could be pivotal to our story, bearing in mind that Great Zimbabwe, indeed most of the hundreds of zimbabwes, are covered with ‘intentional images’ of a creative nature, many of them engravings. ‘The Blombos Cave motifs … may have been constructed with symbolic intent, the meaning of which is now unknown. These finds demonstrate that ochre use in the Middle Stone Age was not exclusively utilitarian and, arguably, the transmission and sharing of the meaning of the engravings relied on fully syntactical language.’
If this is true of motifs made at the dawn of human time in a cave in the tip of Africa, then it surely must be true of the motifs so generously engraved on thousands of shaped Zimbabwe stones on which cross-hatching also features large. Moreover, these stones of ‘symbolic intent’ are set in a natural art gallery of thousands of San, or their students’, paintings and engravings. Suddenly, the disreputable thought becomes feasible that thousands of years ago – well before the time of Solomon and Sheba and even the earliest Egyptian dynasties – this Zimbabwe countryside was home to a considerable population of modern (in the archaeological sense) artistic people settled enough to find time to decorate their dwellings and deify certain sites.
And these were a people whom we know from the earliest Western encounters collected and traded gold.
FOUR
Ophir Revealed
Theodore and Agnes Bent spend their first two weeks cutting their way in to the temple through thick, stinging jungle. Everywhere walls had collapsed. Passages were overlain with human and animal detritus. No maintenance had observably taken place for centuries. Ancient trees grow through walls, including a well-established pair of muchechete trees flanking the conical tower which Carl Mauch had excitedly labelled ‘cedars’, and from which he extrapolated his theory of Sheba’s temple and the ancient Ophir of Solomon.
The Bents make an early, disappointed, note of an absence of ancient tombs or grave sites but put a positive spin on it by suggesting that the ‘ancient inhabitants who formed but a garrison in this country’ might have taken their dead for ceremonial burial at sacred sites elsewhere. On the Bahrein islands in the Persian Gulf they have seen acres of mounds containing thousands of tombs and no vestige of a town. This custom, Theodore Bent says, still prevails among the Mohammedans of Persia. He also makes an early observation here which has been uncontested since:
The circular ruins repeat themselves, always, if possible, occupying a slightly raised ground for about a mile along a low ridge acting, doubtless, as the double purpose of temples and fortresses for separate communities, the inhabitants dwelling in beehive huts of mud around.
Today’s improved view of this is:
A family homestead at the capital [Great Zimbabwe] consisted of several daga houses. Among the elite these dwellings were linked by low stone walls to form a homestead. Each homestead, in turn, was linked to other homesteads by similar walls. These shared walls provided privacy, surfaces for decoration, and protection against bad weather and wild animals.
Down the years everyone has been concerned by the obvious paradox here. Why live in mud huts if you know how to build exquisitely in stone, of which there is an abundance locally? Bent notes that all the native villages on the Zimbabwe hill are built, understandably, on the sunniest spots. Over the years – possibly thousands of years – many feet of human spoil had been laid down, making excavation with an unskilled labour force difficult and time-consuming. He seeks out a dig-site in the shade where the locals had not seen fit to build huts. Even though it is difficult to persuade his ‘shivering Kaffirs’ to work here his choice of the shaded side of the hill fortress immediately produces exciting results. (‘Kaffir’ was more a generic than a disparaging term in his day; ‘Blacks’ would have been more insulting.)
The kopje on which the fortress, or the acropolis, is built is a natural defensive position protected on one side by giant granite boulders and on the south by a 90 foot precipice. On the only accessible side is a massive wall, in places 13 feet thick and 30 feet high, decorated with s
mall round towers and monoliths. The fortress is served by a flight of steps through a narrow slit in the granite boulders. Every angle is protected from attack, so much so that Bent speculates that the occupants were in constant dread of attack and lived like a garrison in the heart of enemy territory.
Just below the summit Bent comes upon an odd little plateau approached by narrow passages and steps and a curious passage through the wall covered with huge beams of granite to support the weight of stone above. Steps on one side are made of the ‘strong cement’ (powdered granite) he has found elsewhere and one wall is decorated with the ubiquitous chevron pattern. This platform is spectacularly adorned with huge monoliths and decorated pillars of soapstone, one of which is more than 11 feet tall.
The team clears the dense jungle below this platform and soon comes across an altar. Contemporary accounts seem to share Bent’s view of the religious significance of the site. Behind the altar a labyrinthine confusion of stone structures is revealed which completely baffles everyone. They follow a narrow gully 4 feet wide descending between two boulders and protected, for no apparent reason, by six buttresses which narrow to a zigzag passage 10 inches wide. Thick walls shut off separate chambers. ‘In all directions everything is tortuous; every inch of ground is protected with buttresses and traverses. As in the large circular building below, all the entrances are rounded off.’
Bent speculates that this is the oldest of the ruins – later work has proved him right – and that it was built at a time when defence was the main object. ‘When they were able to do so with safety, they next constructed the circular temple below and as time went on they erected the more carelessly put-together buildings around.’
The Lost City of Solomon and Sheba Page 8