The Lost City of Solomon and Sheba

by Robin Brown-Lowe

Like where to go for gold?

  Which brings us back to Ethiopia. Their ancient Christian church believes to this day that the union of Solomon and Sheba produced Menelik I, father of the Ethiopian Solomonic Dynasty whose last earthly representative was Ras Tafri or the Emperor, Haile Selassie. The worldwide Rastafarian cult still worships Ras Tafari, not least because his famous ancestor, Menelik, is also credited with rescuing the Ark of the Covenant from apostate Jerusalem. However, before getting lost in this labyrinth of religions and myths, we should review the evidence which could support the idea that Solomon’s Phoenicians might have sailed down Africa, beached their ships somewhere and marched inland in search of the source of the alluvial gold being offered for sale at the coast.

  It should perhaps be noted here that the best way of getting to India from the Red Sea ports in ships, which could only properly run before the wind, was to sail south before the northeast monsoon between November and May, land to reprovision and take on water, then ride the southwest monsoon across the Indian Ocean between May and November. The initial run south would need to be at least as far as the equator, but these ancient mariners would more likely have gone further south to more verdant coastlines where water and better food supplies would have been more readily available.

  The Phoenicians confirmed that they had made such voyages when, in the 1920s, a French scholar, Ernest Renan, led an expedition to investigate the site of ancient Byblos. Renan was particularly interested in the linguistic history of Byblos, which is also the Greek word for papyrus, leading to ‘biblion’ or book, and in turn, to bible.

  Renan found several stelae – granite slabs – covered with Egyptian hieroglyphics, and a bas relief of a goddess he believed to be Hathor, with a hawk’s head. More extensive excavations latr produced a series of semi-intact royal tombs that yielded gold, silver and jewellery, and an elaborate sarcophagus, confirming that this was the last resting place of Ahiram (Hiram), King of Byblos and Solomon’s business partner. Theodore Bent’s suspicion that Great Zimbabwe was the product of Phoenician ancient influence was enhanced, you will recall, by a comparison he made between the lost city’s conical tower and a tower pictured on a coin from Byblos. The inscribed tablets recorded that the Phoenicians were the descendants of two groups, the early Canaanites, who inhabited the coast of Lebanon, and the Sea People, who invaded Lebanon about 1200 BC. Thus this new nation had an established maritime tradition which they enhanced by the development of ships with hulls fit to sail the open seas.

  Along the coast of Lebanon they established a loose federation of city-states built on islands or rocky promontories that provided natural harbours for ship-building and trade. Byblos, Tyre, Sidon and Arqad became fabulously wealthy as the Phoenicians expanded their sphere of trade. In time it would encompass all of Europe and, almost certainly, much of Africa. The wrecks of two wooden ships believed to be Phoenician have been found on the Indian Ocean coast, one of which is thought to have circumnavigated the Cape.

  At home the Phoenicians were literate, fine craftsmen who evolved an alphabet of twenty-two consonants, which is the foundation of the English alphabet and is the core of Hebrew, Arabic and Syriac script. They raised glass-making to a fine art and made delicate terracotta pots and votive statues. They worshipped Baal and a powerful mother-goddess, Astarte, both as earth-mother and heavenly mother. Cult statues of Astarte in many different forms, including clay and stone figurines, were left as votive offerings in shrines and sanctuaries as prayers for good harvest, for children, and for protection and tranquillity in the home. The figurines found at the lowest levels at Great Zimbabwe and at David Randall-MacIver’s altar site near Umtali more closely resemble some of the Phoenician anthropomorphic votive offerings than any other artefact in the historical record.

  The Phoenician gods were incorporated in varying degrees by their neighbours, and Baal and Astarte eventually took on the look of Greek gods. The Babylonian King, Nebuchadnezzar, sacked Tyre in 573 BC and in 332 BC Alexander the Great took over this and the remains of Phoenician culture, embodying it into the Hellenistic culture. But had hardy seeds from these ancient religions already been sown abroad by ‘ancient Moors’? The early Greeks, as we shall see in a moment, were seminally influential in ancient Ethiopia. The ancient Egyptians also knew of Ethiopia as the fabulously wealthy ‘Land of Punt’.

  The weight of all this information from several sources, albeit mostly anecdotal, indicates that from time immemorial there was an established sea route down the Red Sea to the gateway to black Africa, Ethiopia. Moreover, modern Moors still ply the route in wooden dhows that closely resemble the sailing ships of yore. So it is inarguable that cultures who knew how to build in stone could, indeed did, make extended journeys south in search of gold, precious stones and other valuable trade goods, including all the items listed in the tribute the Queen of Sheba took to Solomon. The Phoenicians even left written records – stelae again – of journeys to exploit the riches of the lower Arabian peninsula, where mining colonies became so settled they had their own temples for hawk-headed gods.

  The Egyptians were also on their way down Africa. Directly south of Egypt was the Negro kingdom of Nubia. Among other ties these Nubians worshipped Gods also found in Egypt, the most powerful of whom was Horus, representing the sun in the guise of a hawk. There is nothing to have prevented these early, cultured Nubians (Group A Nubians as they are called) influencing, through trade and conquest, societies to the south. Moreover, there is good archaeological evidence to indicate that Egyptian colonists, now backed by a mighty dynastic empire on the lower Nile, took over Nubia.

  As the Egyptian tribes coalesced, their colonies became stronger, in particular the kingdom of Hierakapolis on the Upper Nile. The old gods metamorphosed into the winged deities we have already met. Hathor even took on special colonial duties as the god-protector of natural resources brought back to Egypt from far-off places. His enforcer was the hawk-god Eye of Ra.

  The bead which Dr Sauer found at the Dholo Dholo zimbabwe was dated by Flinders Petrie to the later part of this era of Egyptian colonial expansion.

  The archaeologists also tell us that the Nubian A group were farmers who practised irrigation and maintained large herds of animals. They had a governing elite who apparently monopolised foreign trade, exchanging Nubian goods like valuable jewel stones, incense, copper and gold for Egyptian crafted items, metals and grain. They were also the middlemen for the produce, like ivory, of the less developed cultures to the south.

  This is not just speculation. A ‘royal’ cemetery of the Nubian A group has been carefully excavated at Qustul. The tombs of the elite are of a size equal to or greater than the contemporaneous ‘royal’ tombs of Hierakopolis. The goods in them are also richer and feature iconography, which suggest that these are the remains of a king in his own right, not an Egyptian subject. These Nubian kings wore a tall white ‘crown’, symbolising Horus the hawk.

  One of the comparisons which has been made with these Nubian royal tombs is the so-called Treasury of Atreus, a Mycenaean tomb of the fabulously wealthy tribe which ruled the shores of the Greek mainland 1,300 years before Christ. The tomb yielded surprising contents. Alongside the royal dead and masks of gold and silver there was a considerable amount of equipment, as in the Nubian royal burials. This included jewellery, weapons, and beaten gold and silver drinking vessels, one representing a bull with forward-facing horns like those of Nubian cattle and exactly like the horns on soapstone bowls found at Great Zimbabwe. Moreover, the tomb was a tower, or ‘beehive tomb’ comprising concentric layers of precisely cut stone.

  What happened to the Nubian A group is unclear, but they certainly sustain the idea of a southern movement with the knowledge required to build monumental stone structures or, if you prefer, the first stepping stone of cultural diffusion south out of Egypt.

  There are written records of King Aha-Menes, King of the 1st Egyptian Dynasty established at Memphis, planning an invasion of Lower Nubia, and at about this ti
me all the royal tombs in Qustal cemetery were looted and burned. The current consensus is that in the face of aggressive Egyptian expansion, the cultured Nubian A group were driven south into Upper Nubia, which was then the territory of a group called the Pre-Kerma culture (developed in the region of the town of Kerma) some 2,500 years before Christ. Little is known of this Pre-Kerma culture other than it was Negroid African, that it was settled, and that its domestic dwellings were mostly circular – rondavels – as they are today in much of rural Zimbabwe. These settlements each had ‘pits’, lined with clay, which were used as silos and grain stores.

  One of the remaining riddles at Great Zimbabwe, at the foot of the hill on which stands the fortress (or citadel), are two immense pits, and similar pits have been found at other zimbabwes. The current view is that from these pits came the ‘daga’ for the hut floors and walls, but the idea seems dubious, if only from the point of view of flooding.

  If you combine the Pre-Kerma culture with the refugee Group A Nubians – an amalgam which the archaeological record says happened – you have an uncanny model for one interpretation of the origins of the Zimbabwe culture: a Negroid (Kerma) people living in round huts who were transformed by an influx of refugees of their own, or a similar, race (Nubian A) who had superior knowledge of gold production, trade with northern cultures, expert architects and stone-builders, and a religion dominated by a hawk-god. This model would also illuminate one of the most intransigent of the Great Zimbabwe enigmas – the absence of any inscriptions or other forms of writing. The Group A Nubians, while cultured, also lacked literacy and certainly never developed it once they were subsumed into the Pre-Kerma hegemony.

  Could the ever-expanding Egyptian Empire have turned this Nubian mixture – or dissatisfied elements of it – into a migrant population? Most cattle-dependent African tribes have nomadic inclinations anyway. If refugee nomads did flee Nubia to escape colonial oppression from Egypt their next stops south would have had to be either Uganda to the southwest or Ethiopia to the southeast. Could this explain the very distinctive features of the mountain people of both regions?

  Until the middle of the nineteenth century Uganda was ruled by a people who are black, have woolly hair, but are otherwise not typically Negroid; indeed, a lot of them are so tall – 7 feet is not uncommon – they are typical of no other race on earth. They also have thin, aquiline facial features. They are elitist by nature and they kept a local tribe, the Hutu, who are entirely African in appearance and of normal stature, virtually as their slaves. The traditions of the Hutu, not denied by the Tutsi, say the Tutsi immigrated here from the north. (This tradition was used by the Hutu in Rwanda, where they are now in the majority, to justify the genocide of more than a million Tutsi in the late 1990s.)

  The Tutsi are by tradition cattle-herders and they live in compounds of round huts. The cattle they raise are semi-wild and have distinctive forward-pointing horns that are featured on bas-reliefs all over ancient Egypt and in even older Mycenaean tombs. There are also horns of this style carved on a Zimbabwe bird and on soapstone bowls. The native people in this area of north-central Africa who most resemble the Tutsi are the highland cattle-herders of Ethiopia. This comparison was drawn to my attention by Dr Henry Atkinson, who was on holiday in Cape Town when I was working there. Henry lives an interesting life in the remote outback of Ethiopia, searching out and reopening ancient gold mines. Until I spoke to him I was not aware that there were ancient gold workings in Ethiopia.

  Ethiopia, adjoining Arabia, was an even more volatile melting pot than Nubia. If human waves did diffuse south away from imperial pressures in the north then their contact with the complex cultural mix that was Ethiopia would have been seminal and we should be able to find evidence of their presence. That, I am sure, is why Theodore Bent went there. I do not think there is an explicit case to be made for a single uninterrupted exodus flowing down Africa like a trickle of army ants. If, however, a diaspora over centuries is considered, each migration soaking up new knowledge and experience before fresh conflicts provoked further movement into the relative safety of the southern wilderness, the concept becomes more credible. There is even a good model for just such a migration in the Matabele. After General Msilikaze fell out with the Zulu king, Chaka, the general’s impis fought their way north until they had crossed the Limpopo and could safely settle in Karanga country. Once settled they learned something of the gold trade from alien entrepreneurs and, later, compliments of Rhodes, of the effectiveness of the Martini-Henry rifle.

  We know that Lobengula actively considered moving on when another pressure group – the British South Africa Company – disturbed his comfortable conquest of the Shona. Had the chief set up a new Matabele kingdom on the Zambesi it would – in terms of its skills, economics, dress, armaments and in the case of its ruler, a taste for champagne – have been very different culturally to the impi who fled Zululand just a century previously. Was this how it happened in the black kingdoms bordering the ancient civilisations of the Phoenicians, the Egyptians, and the Sabaeans?

  There is good evidence that the Queen of Sheba’s Sabaeans cast acquisitive eyes on Ethiopia and, as mentioned, a large part of the populace still regard Sheba as the mother of the nation, her union with Solomon having produced the first emperor of Ethiopia, Menelik I. Visit the old capital, Aksum, today and you will be shown Sheba’s swimming pool, a rock-hewn reservoir where villagers gather water and small children splash and play. The Queen is known locally as Makeda and is said to have made Aksum the centre of her empire, and built a 52-room palace complete with Romanesque plumbing, whose unremarkable ruins lie on the outskirts of town. Across the way, they say, is Sheba’s actual grave. The archaeologists dispute all this, claiming some eight centuries separate the Aksum culture from that of Solomon and Sheba, but a majority of Ethiopians do not regard it as a myth and the religion which has grown up around it continues to thrive.

  There is no doubting that Ethiopia has been a powder keg of religious and political conflict since the dawn of recorded time. There are, for example, more than eighty languages spoken, while the religious spectrum encompasses ancient Christianity, a segregated neo-Jewish community, Islam in all its shapes and forms, Protestants, Roman Catholics and followers of local animist sects. Ethiopia has been a religious battleground for Christians and Muslims for longer than anyone can remember, fuel enough for countless refugee migrations.

  It was this clash with Islam that first excited European interest in Ethiopia. In 1145 when the Second Crusade was being prepared, a fantastic rumour swept through western Europe that a priest-king named Prester John was ruling a Christian kingdom of the Nestorian faith ‘behind the lines’, so to speak, of the Muslim ‘horde’ of Persians and Medes. It was said that Prester John desired to join forces against Islam with western Christendom and had been triumphant in a number of battles. His advance had been stopped at the Tigris river in Mesopotamia for want of boats. Prester John himself was said to descend from the Magi – the wise men who followed the star to Bethlehem.

  Then in 1170 a letter purporting to come from Prester John himself, addressed to the Byzantine Emperor Comenus, was circulated to Pope Alexander III and the Holy Roman Emperor Barbarossa. Calling himself ‘King of Kings’ over the ‘Three Indias’ the letter described the fabulous wealth of this realm and gave a bizarre list of its fauna, including elephants, panthers and several species unknown to man before lapsing into a fantasy of ‘horned men, one-eyed giants, men with eyes back and front, cyclops’ and other freaks. The Byzantines, not unnaturally, decided the letter was a hoax and the only follow-up was an attempt by the pope to make contact with Prester John. He sent a message with his personal physician but the man was never heard of again.

  Even so, the legend of Prester John proved durable because it was known from travellers’ tales, among them Marco Polo, that there were definitely elements of ancient Christianity lost among the Islamic and Mongol hordes of the East. If the Nestorians had been prepared to moun
t flank attacks in support of any one of the six bloody Crusades between 1095 and 1229 the Templars might have prevailed a lot sooner.

  The shifting allegiances of the followers of Islam and of the Nestorian Christian god divided parts of Asia and the Middle East for centuries. There were once Christians in Mecca. The most definite evidence we have that ancient Christianity prevailed in Ethiopia as far back as the fourth century BC (it may have been first established much earlier), is one of those inscribed stone stelae erected by King Azana (sometimes spelt Ezana), inscribed in Greek, Ge’ez and Sabaean. It reads: ‘I conquered the Arab people. If you remove this stone from its proper place I will kill your families as punishment.’ It is particularly significant that this warning should have been addressed to Sabaeans. Saba was Sheba’s kingdom, the closest part of Arabia to Ethiopia. King Azana’s warning to the Sabaeans indicated that there had been centuries of conflict and this, coupled with religious differences, could well have provoked refugee movements south.

  That the Sabaeans had the wealth to sustain wars of acquisition is not in question. There are Assyrian inscriptions on stelae in which King Tiglath Pileser II (733 BC) records tribute from Saba of gold, silver and incense. Eratosthenes (276–194 BC) refers to the Sabaean capital as ‘Mariab’ and calls it one of the four great nations of the area, a view supported by Agatharchides (120 BC) who applauds the wealth of Saba. By then the Sabaeans must have been getting their large imports of gold from countries outside Arabia and North Africa. Mashonaland is much the closest source.

  Almost anywhere you look in the histories, among the artefacts, and at the ruined buildings of Saba, one finds uncanny links with Great Zimbabwe. Writing for the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Sir T.H. Holdich points out: ‘In the Wadi Sher which leads northwards from the head of the Haramat into the central districts, there exists the remains of at least one great Himyaritic [Sabaean] town, with traces of megalithic buildings and rock exhibiting Himyaritic inscriptions… . Large unhewn stones of the dolmen type [are to be found] similar to those found in Mashonaland.’