The Lost City of Solomon and Sheba

by Robin Brown-Lowe

  Sir John Willoughby happily admitted that he was not an archaeologist and his searches had been conducted as ‘thoroughly and rapidly as possible and without that caution which the expectation of an expert’s report demands’. It also has to be said that treasure-hunting did not, in those days, attract the opprobrium it does today.

  Assuming that he declared everything he found, which admittedly would make him unique in this company, his work did not enrich him, although a lot of his finds are very interesting. Like Bent, he dug up soapstone bowl fragments, pieces of china, porcelain beads, a soapstone game board, thirteenth-century painted glass (confirmed by the British Museum), a soapstone miniature bird, a three-pronged spear and an iron hammer 8 feet below the surface, portions of ancient crucibles showing gold and gold in flux, many phalli, and a copper-green enamelled, patterned bodkin. His finds add to the evidence of long-term alien influence at Great Zimbabwe and that this most splendid of zimbabwes had special religious significance.

  But Rhodes, single-minded as ever, continued to promote Great Zimbabwe as gold-rich Ophir. ‘You will find,’ he wrote to a backer, ‘that Zimbabwe is an old Phoenician residence and everything points to Sofala being the place from which Hiram fetched his gold.’ Behind the bravura, however, Shona gold was proving very disappointing and Rhodes was facing a financial disaster. Only the reefs around Great Zimbabwe had apparently not been worked. Could it be that the treasure house had been emptied thousands of years ago by Solomon, Hiram and their successors, leaving the place to decay into ruins? Had the golden bird flown, taking all its eggs with it?

  The truth was that the British South Africa Company was financially on its last legs a year after the occupation, and the accounts laid before the shareholders at their first meeting in 1891 were frightening. With all but no income, ‘general expenses’ already exceeded £402,000, nearly half the total capital of the company.

  Much the most poignant description of how desperate things were in the new Rhodesia is to be found in the last chapter of Theodore Bent’s book as he attempts to leave the country. He had gone again to Beira, the port on the east coast to which the Rhodesians had been allowed access under the agreement recognising the coastal strip as Portuguese territory, and on the strength of which Rhodes had commissioned two of his most loyal cronies, Heany and Johnson, to open a road.

  Bent reveals:

  Ours is the only wheeled vehicle which has traversed [the road] in its entirety since the single pioneer coach went up to Umtali, after infinite difficulty and weeks of disaster, with such sorry tales of fever, fly and swamp, that no vehicles have since ventured to repeat the experiment.

  Dozens of wagons lie rotting in the veldt … everywhere lie the bleached bones of the oxen which dragged them … fully £2,000 worth of wagons we calculated, ghostlike as after a battle. Then there are Scotch carts of more or less the same value, and a handsome Cape cart, which Mr Rhodes had to abandon on his way up to Mashonaland, containing in the box seat a bottle labelled ‘Anti-fly mixture’, a parody of the situation.

  At a Portuguese settlement on the banks of the Pungwe river, Bent saw:

  Two handsome coaches, made expressly in New Hampshire, in America … they are richly painted with arabesques and pictures on the panels; ‘Pungwe route to Mashonaland’ is written thereon in gold. The comfortable cushions inside are being moth-eaten and the approaching rains will complete the ruin of these handsome but ill-fated vehicles. Meanwhile, the Portuguese stand and laugh at the discomfiture of their British rivals in their thirst for gold.

  What Rhodes desperately needed was some good news from King Solomon’s mines but by now that too was in very short supply. ‘The Directors are extremely anxious about gold news,’ Macquire wrote to Rhodes in July 1891; ‘any tangible news would have an excellent effect.’

  What they got was the opposite and from a very eminent source. Lord Randolph Churchill had treated himself to a luxurious three-month safari in Mashonaland in 1891, subsidised by articles published in the Daily Graphic. Lord Randolph praised the settlers for their energy but poured doom and gloom on their prospects – ‘It occurs to me that there must be upon this great continent some awful curse, some withering blight, and that to delude and to mock at the explorer, the gold-hunter, the merchant, the speculator, and even at ministers and monarchs, is its dark fortune and its desperate fate.’ In private letters Lord Randolph’s prognosis was even more specific and damning – ‘The B.S.A. Co. funds have all been expended and no gold has been found.’

  But if Rhodes was good at anything it was manipulating the assets of his various companies. The London board urged him to return home and ‘smash Randolph with the public’ and this he did, displaying Bent’s new finds and continuing to stress that Great Zimbabwe was gold-rich Ophir. At the same time he ‘stoked up enthusiasm’ at board meetings of his rich companies in South Africa. These ‘curious financial methods’ often involved Rhodes ‘wearing one hat, coming to the rescue of Rhodes in another of his hats’. Essentially, until his death of heart disease in March 1902, he kept his dream alive by ensuring that the financial wolves never quite got through Rhodesia’s door, even though the exercise probably contributed to his death. In the last weeks he avoided going to his Cape Town club, for example, for fear that his condition would become generally known and depress share prices in his companies, particularly the rocky British South Africa Company.

  On the ground in Mashonaland, Rhodes had taken control of gold affairs, reducing the 50 per cent company premium which had been restricting capital investment in gold mining, and licensing the treasure hunters to ensure the company got a percentage of these spoils. Great Zimbabwe was, however, excluded from any of the licences. Initially, an American, F.R. Burnham, who had fought bravely against the Matabele, was granted the rights to dig in the newly discovered Dholo Dholo ruins, fifty miles east of Bulawayo. Burnham lifted everyone’s spirits when he recovered 641 oz of ‘gold inlaid work and gold ornaments’, some of which were given to Rhodes.

  Two mining prospectors, W.G. Neal and G. Johnson, were at the same time desecrating native graves at a small unnamed ruin fifty miles to the south, stripping the bodies of gold necklaces, bangles and bracelets and other gold items ‘strewn around’, in all weighing 208 oz, which they sold for £3,000, a fortune at the time. Rhodes also later acquired this treasure and decided it was time he took control of these lucrative operations. The treasure-hunting company he licensed through the Charter Company was called Rhodesian Ancient Ruins Ltd, and it was operated by these same two lucky diggers, Neal and Johnson. Their licence was confined to the right to explore and work for treasure in several ruins in Matabeleland with a first option on other ruins. The British South Africa Company received 20 per cent of all their finds and Rhodes had a first right of purchase on everything. He is said to have accumulated over 200 oz of necklaces and beads. Other artefacts went to the BSAC’s offices in London, but the bulk of these have just disappeared. One would have to be very naïve not to conclude that much more than this ‘disappeared’ in other ways and into other pockets in the course of a decade of open looting. As previously mentioned, however, Great Zimbabwe was fortunately not included in any of these activities, at Rhodes’ ‘express desire’.

  Neal and Johnson dug through five Matabeleland ruins in the next six months, including a return trip to Dholo Dholo where they found their best cache of 700 oz of gold beads and wire bracelets. In the following year this industrious pair forked through some fifty other ruins but their luck, as with gold finds elsewhere in the country, had run out. They found a little bit of worked gold, or gold dust, everywhere they looked, but the average from each ruin was less than 10 oz.

  If we consider that an estimate of 21,000,000 oz of ancient mined gold (worth in those days some £75,000,000) against a couple of thousand ounces still on or in the ground in 1895, this is surely incontrovertible evidence of a Zimbabwe culture engaged for centuries with alien gold traders. More simply, most of Zimbabwe’s gold was exporte
d from the country long before Rhodes or even the Matabele got there.

  In 1900 the Rhodesian Ancient Ruins company was wound up and Neal gave all the information he had carefully compiled to a writer, Richard Nicklin Hall, who produced from it The Ancient Ruins of Rhodesia, a strange book which made Hall’s name in the field of popular history. It also made Hall the new self-appointed expert on the authorship of Great Zimbabwe. Hall revealed to the general public for the first time that Great Zimbabwe was not a lone, lost city (albeit the most impressive one south of the Pyramids), but the likely capital of an empire encompassing hundreds of zimbabwes across the whole of south-central Africa, including at least half a dozen ‘grand’ zimbabwes.

  Hall’s book explores in some detail almost 200 zimbabwes from which we will consider just a few here, mainly for the extraordinary variety of artefacts which came to light in them. Other grand zimbabwes will be described by qualified archaeologists later on. Hall’s favourite ruin was the acropolis which overlooked the temple, and his clear, succinct descriptions of these sites is a testimonial to the detail of his record-keeping:

  The hill fortress is of labyrinthine character. The kopje on which it is erected is itself of great natural strength, being about 500 feet high, and having on the south side a precipice of smooth rock of 70 to 90 feet.

  On the only accessible side there is a wall of massive thickness, being 13 feet high on the summit with a batter of 1 foot in 6 feet, and in height 30 feet in parts, with a flat causeway to the top, decorated on the outer edge by a succession of little round towers 3 feet in diameter, alternating with tall monoliths.

  The approach to the fortress is protected at every turn with traverses and ambuscades. A flight of steps leads up from the bottom of the precipice and runs up an exceedingly narrow slit between the boulders. In front of the steps is a section of wall in dentelle pattern. At the summit of the hill are large boulders 50 feet high, with a little plateau approached by narrow passages and steps on either side.

  The plateau was adorned with huge monoliths and decorated with pillars of soapstone, the patterns on which were chiefly of a geometric character, one being 11 feet 6 inches in height. The large semicircular area below this plateau contained an altar covered with cement. The labyrinthine character of these buildings baffles description.

  Below in the valley he found some of the most spectacular monoliths, or stelae:

  There are several large monoliths in the southeast wall of the elliptical Temple, some of which have fallen down. Evidence exists that they were equidistant. One of the largest standing was measured by Sir John Willoughby and found to be 14 feet 3 inches above the accumulated soil and 12 feet 3 inches above the top of the old cement floor. The foundation in which it once stood still remains in good condition.

  The most impressive set of ruins after Great Zimbabwe is Khami in Matabeleland and again it is a city of substance covering an area of some two square miles. There are eleven distinct sets of ruins set across a long kopje in a spectacular landscape of kopjes and open valleys overlooking the Khami river. Two wide gullies lead into the remains guarded at several points by ruined forts which must have rendered the main ruins impregnable. The gullies have been paved with ‘cement’. Neal found five pavements at one place, one on top of the other. Khami is extensively decorated, some herringbone patterns having been constructed of tooled blocks of a darker stone, diorite; elsewhere there are check patterns. Many of the walls are more than 100 feet in length, have stairways, and in one case a square door. Wild vines and fig trees were found in almost every ruin. Neal and Johnson used a small dry-crushing machine on a huge midden at Khami and from the washed spoils recovered over 40 oz of gold in beads, tacks, wire, small portions of gold bangles and pellets.

  Head east from Khami in the direction of Great Zimbabwe on a line directly to Sofala Bay and you pass within a few miles of at least ten citadels, like that of Umnukwana overlooking the Bubi river. The ruins command the top of a 90-foot kopje and are regarded as the capital of a district containing some fifty minor and dependent ruins. Umnukwana itself covers an area of 300 by 60 feet with a massive main wall 300 feet long, 13 feet thick and 17 feet 6 inches high when Johnston and Neal surveyed it. There are a number of enclosures, one them 170 by 60 feet, served by rounded entrances.

  Here the treasure hunters found a grave containing remains dressed with fine gold bangles, large beads weighing 2 dwt and a single bead of 1 oz 14 dwt, also smelted gold, a copper ingot, a pair of double iron ‘bells’, a boss or rosette of beaten gold with a presentation of the sun image, and a large soapstone bowl. Nearby is the Check ruins, regarded as the most beautiful of the zimbabwes, also on a kopje but invisible from the surrounding countryside. It gets its name from the fact that it is completely covered inside and out with decorations of the check or chessboard pattern. Neal reported that ‘pannings of the soil from inclosures [sic] gave good returns of fine gold’.

  North again brings one to the massive spread of the Thabas Imamba (or Momba) ruins, set on the highest point of the Imamba range. The walls enclose an area of over 200 feet by 80 feet. Thabas Imamba has the most exotic history of any of the zimbabwes, for as oral records suggest, this was the capital of the Mombo clan, whose last king was ‘skinned alive’ here by invading Amaswazies.

  West of here are four citadels, the Mundie ruins, of which the third is 160 feet in diameter with 14-foot-high walls. The space between the first and second structures had been cemented and from these enclosures 208 oz of pure gold ornaments were discovered. A grave contained human remains dressed with 72 oz of gold. In fact, Mundie was quite literally littered with gold, including 230 oz of gold in cakes. Neal observed: ‘Gold was found scattered around the floors quite promiscuously in the two ruins. This was in all stages of manufacture. There were many gold-wire bangles pulled together out of shape as if torn or snatched by violent hands, and scattered beads and charred remains of unburied people evidencing a fight and a defeat of the ancient occupiers.’

  And so it goes on, mile upon mile of ruins until the treasure hunters, tired of local names, start to name them after themselves. There is the Baden Powell ruin in the Sabi valley, the Selkirk, Gatling Hill, Mullen’s, World View, Stone Door, and Yellow Jacket, until even these run out and Hall simply lists ‘eighteen unnamed ruins in the Salisbury area’, or ‘Ancient Aqueduct Area and numerous unnamed ruins’. And this was the list after just a few years of white occupancy!

  The most recent surveys, especially those from the air, would indicate that zimbabwes great and small could number 20,000. There are, as well, a few mythical lost cities, the most famous of which is the White City, alleged to contain stone figures, including a woman in a mourning position and a reclining man. Solomon and Sheba no doubt. They have vanished into legend. An American traveller, G. Farini, claimed in a book published in 1886 to have found a lost city in the Kalahari desert in the extreme north of the Cape Province. This was taken so seriously that several expeditions and aerial surveys were made in the 1950s and ’60s but no city was ever found.

  Apart from these ghosts virtually all the larger ruins gave up some gold. A number provided much more exotic treasure trove. There were old barrels of flintlock muskets, portions of a brass trumpet, two cannon which to this day command the front steps of Groote Schuur, a gold medallion embossed on one side with two birds fighting over a heart, silver twisted wire bangles, two huge lumps of lead weighing 60 lb, a large elephant tusk, bar silver, and what was described as ‘a Jesuit priest’s hoard’, of which more later.

  One or two very enigmatic curios also turned up. In a cave ten miles from Great Zimbabwe, Mr Edward Muller found a wooden platter or dish, 38 inches in circumference, showing a number of zodiacal and other astronomical signs – Gemini, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius, a sun image, Orion and Taurus. The face of the bowl displays a crocodile, which was believed to indicate the northern circumpolar constellation. Rhodes acquired this gem and it is still in his bedroom at Groo
te Schuur, where it keeps company with the Posselt bird, also featuring a crocodile. The crocodile would indicate that this is Karanga work – but where did the local artist get his knowledge of northern zodiacal symbols other than from educated aliens?

  Hall and Neal’s Ruined Cities of Mashonaland, controversial as it has remained ever since, deeply impressed the one man it needed to impress, Cecil John Rhodes, so much so it earned Hall the appointment by the British South Africa Company of Curator of Great Zimbabwe. Hall’s appointment was immediately condemned by British scientists, who wrote him off as a ‘journalist’. In fact, he was well educated in England, qualified as a solicitor and, after coming to Rhodesia, was a local correspondent for several British journals, and editor of the Matabeleland Times, later the Bulawayo Chronicle, the first newspaper I ever worked for. In 1909 he travelled for five months down the Sabi and Lundi rivers collecting ethnological information. Hall eventually became a Fellow of several European and South African scientific societies and in addition to his books had numerous papers published in the journals of learned societies.