The most startling comparison of all is, of course, the temple of Awwam, buried in the desert at the ancient Sabaean capital of Marib in Yemen. It is a great stone ellipse, of a size, shape, system of curved walls, and orientation practically indistinguishable from Great Zimbabwe’s Elliptical Building or temple. Great Zimbabwe has two rows of chevron patterns round a fourth part of the main wall. A pattern in the stone on the Marib wall is identically positioned. Inscribed walls at both sites are well built, while the reverse faces are rough. The two temples are both the product of gold-rich societies.
The Periplus of the Red Sea records that much of the East African coast, including the district of Azania (modern Tanzania), was, by the first century AD, ruled by Sabaeans through local governors. Gold-hungry Sabaeans, working their way down the east coast, must have surmised from the evidence of alluvial ingots and gold dust offered for sale at the coast that there was an eldorado in the hinterland, and I cannot believe that they would not have gone looking for it. Everyone else did. Again, it adds weight to the idea that Sheba, keen to establish good relations with Solomon (to whatever level we feel inclined to interpret the word), and who arrived on his doorstep with 6 tons of gold, surely would have said something about where it came from.
The critics who deride such Romantic ideas have always based their case on the absence of artefacts of proven Phoenician origin at Great Zimbabwe or any material evidence that it was an Egyptian or Arabian trading outpost, provided you turn a blind eye to the fact that the Zimbabwe birds appear to be icons to Hathor. There is also unequivocal evidence from later times indicating that Great Zimbabwe had a trading area, with workshops used by aliens. In the period under discussion – Zimbabwe’s earliest beginnings – the ivory and gold traders would have been little more than mobile caravans on very occasional visits: every three years the Bible says of Hiram and Solomon. These old Moor traders remained like this until David Livingstone’s time; indeed, a great deal of his exploration was based on information from Arab traders, particularly slave-traders he came across deep in the African hinterland. One such gave him a map that allowed him to make his famous journey, ‘discovering’ the mighty Congo river.
Every effort would have been made by these journeymen to travel as light as possible. Valuable possessions – such as weapons, a drinking cup or a knife – would have been cared for as a matter of life or death. The only excess baggage would have trade goods, mainly cloth and beads. Even the Shona school acknowledges that the grand zimbabwes spilled ancient beads. One, says William Flinders Petrie, is of the most ancient times. Mr Robinson’s snap-ended glass beads could be also, as could those found at Mapungubwe. Cloth, of course, would have rotted. But this is just not good enough to convince the archaeologists, even though Sauer’s bead was washed from the floor of a zimbabwe. Comparable artefacts of known antiquity must be found with it for it to have any value as a dating tool.
So what about Adam Renders? By this rule no artefacts mean no Adam Renders! This is patently nonsense because we have at least two written references, not only to the fact that this skilled alien existed, but that he took to wife two daughters of the chief of Great Zimbabwe and must therefore have had considerable local influence.
Adam Renders is one of the reasons I have grown ever more convinced that anecdotal evidence, of which there is a great deal, must be carefully reconsidered in this more liberal age of historical investigation. We should certainly be reviewing the judgements that have been made of Great Zimbabwe’s hawk-headed stone birds, towers of phallic shape, inscribed stelae, and monumental stone circles, all of which at least echo Phoenician and Ethiopian artefacts of proven date.
To return to our hypothetical migrants from the troubled north that found refuge in Ethiopia, were processes still in train which could have impelled them to move on into the unknown wildernesses to the south? By all accounts both Saba at the lower end of the Red Sea and Ethiopia opposite were torn apart by religious and political conflicts for all of the 1,000 years under investigation. The Sabaeans converted from heathenism to Christianity. Then in the fifth century they were conquered and became officially Jews, part of the hegemony of Judaism. At the end of that century the Christian Ethiopians invaded Saba to rescue Sabaean Christians from the notorious persecutions of King Du Nawas.
At the end of the sixth century, just about the time when the Great Zimbabwe Carbon-14 datings suggest we should start looking for an architect with a knowledge of the mathematics of monumental stone structures, the Persians overthrew the Christian Ethiopian government and made possible Islam’s bloody proselytism of the whole region. One can only guess at the waves of refugees this created. Fernandez-Armesto observes: ‘By the ninth century AD [when Nilotic people were settling in numbers in Mashonaland], pressure caused by infiltration of nomadic peoples from the north seems to have driven families to resettle southwards. We read of shadowy and diabolic female rulers … images of unnatural and scandalous chaos of implicitly demonic origin.’ These religious wars would certainly have created many refugees; indeed, we know they did because a group of Judaised Arabs ended up in a remote part of Ethiopia where they are known today as the Falashas. These ‘black Jews’ have an important part to play in our story.
Edward Ullendorf in his respected book The Ethiopians (Oxford University Press) describes the Falasha cult as a mixture of Judaism, paganism and some Christian elements. They know the Pentateuch but not the Talmud. They worship the Sabbath as a deity and practise circumcision and clitoridectomy. ‘Like their Christian fellow Ethiopians, the Falashas are stubborn adherents to formalised Hebraic-Jewish beliefs, practices and customs, which were transplanted from South Arabia into the Horn of Africa.’ The Falashas also claim to be derived from King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba!
My migration theory is becoming somewhat less hypothetical. It is time to take a breath and rejoin Mr and Mrs Theodore Bent who, in 1904, stepped ashore in Ethiopia. From the beginning it was a considerably more difficult exploration than their trip to Mashonaland. Ethiopian factions were, as ever, at each others’ throats in several regions. Many of the monuments they wanted to inspect were controlled by misogynist monks. Theodore thought he had lost his intrepid wife on one occasion when he went alone to a male-only monastery. Monks coming up behind him found Mrs Bent waiting on the trail, decided even that was too close, and escorted her roughly down the mountain without leaving word of her removal.
Then, as now, a visit to Ethiopia is to step back in time. The scenery, especially in the mountain regions where the natural monoliths of the Great Rift are jagged teeth across an eternal skyline, is stupendous. Fast-flowing rivers plunge into great lakes through arid canyons which, lower down, fade into a shifting haze of semi-and absolute desert. It is a bird-watchers’ paradise with twenty-eight endemic species, including magnificent birds of prey as tough and as merciless as the mountain people. This step back in time is actual rather than whimsical. The Ethiopians never took to the Gregorian calendar, and have their own that runs about seven years and eight months behind ours, with leap-year days creating what amounts to a thirteenth month each year. They also have their own clock, with two twelve-hour cycles beginning at 6 a.m. and 6 p.m., and their own indigenous script, the Ge’ez alphabet.
Even so, the Bents noticed ‘striking points of comparison’ with Mashonaland as soon as they entered the mountains and mixed with the people in the villages. Here were wooden head pillows all but identical to those found in ancient Egypt and at Great Zimbabwe, game-boards with many holes, millet beer, iron being smelted using clay blow pipes found all over the Shona ruins, inscribed standing stones, and much more. ‘They cannot all be accidental but point either to a common origin or a common influence,’ Theodore states.
As they travel on Bent reviews Ethiopia’s more contemporary history, reminding us that Greek influence spread and established itself here after the conquests of Alexander the Great, hence the joint use of Greek on inscribed stones. One of these, copied by the Greek monk
, Cosmas, refers to a conquest of Abyssinia (Ethiopia) by Ptolemy Indicoplenstes when Sabaeans were still worshipping Baal-Ava.
The Bents manage to reach the ancient village of Yeha (old Ava) near Adoua, where they saw echoes of the hundreds of miles of Inyanga stonework: ‘An enormous extent of terraced mountains. Hundreds of thousands of acres must have been cultivated but is now all ruined.’ Here also they come across their first stelae – two stone monoliths bearing what Bent describes as Himyaritic (Sabaean) inscriptions. Eventually they arrive at their destination, the ancient city of Aksum, and are greeted by a sight to gladden their hearts – a line of stone columns which they are told were once topped with statues, just as the important Zimbabwe stelae are topped with bird statues. ‘Here there are for miles traces of buildings with large stone foundations at the edge of the plain’, Bent observes. There are also ‘a mass of Himyaritic inscriptions which absolutely prove that the Ethiopians descend from an ancient Arabian colony which gradually lost its identity and merged with the negroid races around it’.
Bent was not to know that these ‘traces of buildings with large stone foundations’ were just the tip of an iceberg. Across the country in the century following Bent’s visit, the world would slowly gain access to the stone monoliths of Lalibela. There are eleven of these extraordinary ‘buried’ churches. According to the legend, King Lalibela was instructed by God to build his veritable maze of temples, some cut 50 feet into the rock, connected by tunnels, secret passageways, stairs and little wooden bridges. The temples are separated from the surrounding rock by deep trenches. Some of them represent huge crosses. King Lalibela was also instructed to build a ‘River Jordan’ and a ‘Mount of Olives’. Two local geographical features were duly landscaped. The extraordinary eleventh-century Beit Giorgis was built by the King after a fully armoured Saint George appeared and censored Lalibela for not dedicating a church to him.
This is about the time when the very grand zimbabwes were being planned and started in Mashonaland.
Why these Ethiopian Christian temples were so carefully concealed, or more accurately, designed for concealment, has been much debated, the general assumption being that it was to protect them from Islamic incursions. All are decorated to a greater or lesser degree: Medhane Alem (Saviour of the World) resembles a Greek temple, others are more primitive. Beit Golgotha (House of Cavalry) features fine figurative reliefs. Beit Mariam (House of the Virgin Mary) has massive pillars and beautifully sculptured arches. Inside this structure is a distinctive stela which the priests keep covered with a cloth, believing it to be inscribed with the past and the future of the world. Human beings, they warn, are too weak to accept its truths. A similar protective custody is maintained by the monks at Aksum’s Mariam-Tsion (St Mary of Zion) church where the Ark of the Covenant is said to be hidden away. Its ‘fearsome light’ kills mere mortals, especially women, so they are kept out of the church altogether.
All the way into Aksum, the Bents are literally tripping over tall stelae, some plain spikes of stone like those which originally crowned the Zimbabwe hill ruins, some inscribed like the soapstone stelae the Bents found and gave to Rhodes. Three-quarters of a mile outside the city they come across a 20 foot high column still standing. Others lay on the ground around it. The standing stone has Greek and Sabaean inscriptions. It is King ‘Aizane’s’ (as Bent calls him) death-threat of 1,300 years ago to the Arabs. Evidently the warning against its removal has worked.
Since Bent’s time hundreds of stelae have been found around Aksum. Many of them are similar to the columns raised at Great Zimbabwe. The largest, broken into four pieces, is more than 100 feet long and weighs more than 500 tons. They continue to baffle scholars.
The Bents follow a line of stelae into the ancient city which they are told were once crowned with statues, ‘one of gold, one of silver and three of brass’. Here Theodore Bent is also introduced to the translations which the monk, Cosmas, made from inscriptions on an Adulitan stela. So far as I am aware the following description has never been published since it appeared in Bent’s obscure book. He wrote: ‘It described how every two years the King of Aksum sends an expedition to a place called Sasov very rich in gold mines. The traders stop at a certain point, make a hedge of thorns piled together, and establish themselves there. Then they kill their oxen and expose pieces on the thorns, also salt and iron. Then the natives approach bringing ingots of gold called “tanchara” and each one gives gold for the pieces of meat, the salt, the iron – one, two or three ingots.’
This fascinatingly detailed account of the technique employed by the earliest ‘ancient Moors’ to barter for gold with the primitive Africans of the south literally stunned me. Not so much because it fits the alien influence thesis so well but because I had this uncanny, surely impossible, feeling that I had seen it happening somewhere!
TEN
First Footsteps
The traders stop at a certain point, make a hedge of thorns piled together, and establish themselves there. Then they kill their oxen and expose pieces on the thorns, also salt and iron. Then the natives approach bringing ingots of gold called ‘tanchara’ and each one gives gold for the pieces of meat, the salt, the iron – one, two or three ingots.
(Cosmas)
Probably the best ethnographic documentary maker of my generation, Adrian Cowell, spent years making a film in the Brazilian Matto Grosso entitled The Tribe That Hides from Man.
The Tribe was a remarkable film with an extraordinary ring of authenticity, largely because Adrian spent five years in appalling conditions failing to find the tribe. He and Chris Menges walked for days, weeks, months and finally years, through the dark green forest, following in the footsteps of two Brazilian conservationists who were determined to make contact with the tribe and move it to safety before it came into conflict with new white settler-farmers from the slums of Rio. These conflicts resulted, almost inevitably, in the death of the naïve Indians. If they attacked with their lethal blowpipes the settlers destroying the forests on which their entire livelihoods depended, they were shot. If they tried to integrate with the settlers they caught diseases to which they had no natural resistance. They also had little resistance to the flashy goods of settler-traders, especially alcohol, and they had no understanding whatsoever of prostitution.
Thinking back on those miles of film I realised that I had seen re-enacted the process of contacting aboriginal people as described by the Greek monk, Cosmas, in the translations quoted by Theodore Bent. In Indian clearings in the Amazon delta, Menges filmed the Villas Boas brothers hanging out food, bright new pots and tools to entice the Indians. They arrayed their lures, moved out of the clearing, then climbed into their hammocks and waited. Even in the cases of successful contacts, several of these baiting sessions were required and the waiting could be interminable. In this case the lures vanished without trace. Nobody ever saw an Indian, just fleeting shadows of human forms in the thick foliage. It was tremendously dangerous work because the little darts fired with great accuracy by invisible blowpipes really were lethal.
The poignant thesis of the film was that here was a cheerful, happy, independent race who lived with nature, valued it and had determined to stay that way. The truth of the matter was that if you put out enough trade goods and hung around long enough you would make contact in the end. There are no tribes hiding from man in the Matto Grosso today, although Adrian and his associates did live to see the creation of a huge Indian sanctuary now protecting some of those who took the bait.
There are certainly no tribes hiding from man in Mashonaland, presumably because those ancient Moorish traders described by Cosmas learned the same lesson. The proto-Karanga or the San (if, indeed, they were the people who picked up the Arab barter goods) needed salt and iron for weapons. Swapping such valuable commodities for useless gold ingots would have been irresistible.
Cosmas’s description of the initiation of the trade process via barter is fortunately quite detailed and for me, a reporter, detail has
always proved the most reliable guide to the authenticity of an account. For example, barter, rather than trade via a currency, seems to have been the favoured exchange of the Zimbabwe culture throughout the long centuries of its tenure. Certainly no evidence of a mutually acceptable currency, with the possible exception of some cowrie shells, has ever come to light.
There are several other details in the Cosmas translation, which can be read for clues. The Ethiopian (or traders in partnership with Ethiopians) expeditions were not random explorations of territory where the natives were still ‘wild’, but dedicated sorties every two years to barter with people the traders knew had gold. They must have been there before to know that there was gold on offer and they must have known the kind of goods the natives would swap it for.
The use of oxen feels like a system worked out from experience. Beef would have been a very succulent food to a Boskop people used only to tough game meat. As we shall see in a moment, it is also thought that the first Karanga migrants to Mashonaland did not possess cattle so they too would have liked tender meat. The ergonomics of a system whereby you use oxen to pack in your heavy trade goods like iron and bags of salt, butcher the oxen to enhance the display and only have to carry home bags of gold nuggets, is sophisticated. The traders even established a rough rate of exchange – one, two or three ingots for meat, salt or iron, says Cosmas.
The reference to a hedge of thorns could be another pointer. They are used protectively all over east and south-central Africa. The cattle-dependent people who live on the fringes of the Tsavo East National Park in Kenya build thorn bomas for their cattle, strong enough to be lion-proof. These hedges are invariably made of an acacia with a long white thorn that I have seen used for drying beef to ‘biltong’. ‘Butcher-bird’ shrikes hang grasshoppers on these aptly named ‘wait-a-minute’ thorns until they are ripe for eating.
The Lost City of Solomon and Sheba Page 23