The Lost City of Solomon and Sheba E-Book

Robin Brown-Lowe

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 439

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2003

Beschreibung

In the heart of south-central Africa there are remains of monuments, ruined cities, temples, forts, irrigation terraces reminiscent of the classic civilizations of the Egyptians and Phoenicians. Yet despite having first been investigated by the Royal Geographical Society a century ago the Zimbabwe (stone courts) culture remains all but unknown to the world at large. This book reveals how the truth about the Zimbabwe culture has been radically influenced, indeed suppressed, throughout history by white and black political interests, struggling to redefine Zimbabwe's identity.

Leseprobe

First published in 2003 by Sutton Publishing

The History PressThe Mill, Brimscombe PortStroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QGwww.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2013

All rights reserved© Robin Brown-Lowe, 2003, 2013

The right of Robin Brown-Lowe, to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

EPUB ISBN 978 0 7524 9490 6

Original typesetting by The History Press

For Heather . . .and recalling a seminal weekend in the Great Karoowith Pauline and John Pank, Lin Mehmel andJohn Rudd when the light suddenly dawned.

Contents

Foreword

Introduction

One

To Ophir Direct

Two

The Conquest of Ophir

Three

Dreams of Avarice

Four

Ophir Revealed

Five

The Gold of Ophir

Six

Treasure Hunters

Seven

The Debunkers

Eight

Ophir Spinning

Nine

The Road to Ophir

Ten

First Footsteps

Eleven

Ophir Writ Large

Postscript

Bibliography

The King Solomon’s mines I have dreamed of have been discovered and are putting out their gold once more. . . .

H. Rider Haggard, Ditchingham, 15 July 1905

. . . and they came to Ophir, and fetched from thence gold, four hundred and twenty talents, and brought it to King Solomon.

I Kings 9:28

. . . Then shalt thou lay up gold as dust, and the gold of Ophir as the stones of the brooks.

Job 22:24

Far land of Ophir, mined for goldBy lordly Solomon of old,Who, sailing northward to Perim,Took all the gold away with him

Hilaire Belloc, The Modern Traveller

Foreword

In 1909 when my father took up his duties as Consul-General and British Minister at Addis Ababa’s British Legation, he brought with him a number of books on the country, its inhabitants and its history. Only with some background knowledge could he have hoped to deal with this singular people who believed that their emperors were descended directly from Solomon and Sheba. It is to these books that I owe much of what I learned about the early history of Abyssinia (now Ethiopia) where I was born and brought up.

Today, Ethiopians of traditional faith still believe that the Queen of Sheba visited Solomon, King of the Israelites, in Jerusalem, was seduced by him and bore him a son named Menelik, who founded the Abyssinian royal line. Many also believe that Menelik visited his father, Solomon, and on his departure contrived to substitute a copy of the Ark of the Covenant that his father had given him for the original, which he eventually brought back to Aksum.

Robin Brown-Lowe’s fascinating quest for The Lost City of Solomon and Sheba explores this legend and investigates how refugees from ancient Abyssinia may have gone south to establish stone monuments bearing certain features of buildings they had left; and to mine for gold as they had done previously in their homeland. He also studies the Falashas, sometimes called the ‘Black Jews’ of Ethiopia, and examines their connection with other ancient religious cults found elsewhere in the Middle East.

Robin Brown-Lowe’s vivid account has reminded me of a journey I made, on foot, with mules, through northern Ethiopia, over forty years ago. I passed Gondar and Dabat, where I sold two of my mules and bought three others. Here I encountered a Protestant mission to the Falashas. The Falashas, who now claimed to be Jews, held pre-Talmudic beliefs different from orthodox Judaism. An industrious people, skilled iron-workers, they had been disliked by the Ethiopians who believed they possessed supernatural powers and could turn themselves into hyenas or wolves. As so-called Abyssinian Jews, the Falashas were superficially indistinguishable from their Christian neighbours, among whom, I was told, they lived amicably.

Wilfred ThesigerSurrey, 2002

Introduction

It is a matter of fact that in the very heart of Africa there is a ‘lost’ civilisation whose people built some 20,000 stone temples, forts, and an irrigation system covering hundreds of square miles. It has been estimated that as much stone was used here as went into the building of the Egyptian Pyramids. A century after this ruined empire was first scientifically investigated by the Royal Geographical Society, however, it remains all but unknown to the general public even though the country in which it is located is lately much in the news. Its origins are also still the subject of intense speculation, even though they could hardly be more exotic – with the suggestion that this realm is the work of the legendary Solomon and Sheba.

My interest in the place began half a century ago as an English boy aged nine, when my family trekked overland to south central Africa, lured by my father’s promise that we would start a new life among the gold mines of King Solomon and visit the temple of his lover, the Queen of Sheba. These wonders were to be found, my father assured me, in an African kingdom, Mashonaland, then part of the British Empire as a result of its occupation by the richest man in Africa, Cecil John Rhodes.

Reaching King Solomon’s mines would involve a long and dangerous drive to the south of the Mountains of the Moon where my favourite author, H. Rider Haggard, had located the mines in his book of the same name. We had already covered more than half of Africa by then and my intrepid father relished the challenge. As refugees from the austerity of postwar Britain we were – well, he was – more than ready to risk our lives if at the end of it all was a land of milk and honey populated by the benign descendants of the most advanced race in southern Africa.

Today, half a century later, there is still nothing from that wonderful journey that I remember more vividly than my father delivering on his promise and taking us to see Sheba’s palace in a ruined city built with the treasure from King Solomon’s nearby mines. The city housing the temple and a massive phallic conical tower, where he posed me and my little brother for the official photograph, nestled in an odd jungle of exceptionally dense vegetation rising from savannah grassland against a background of bare stone hills – kopjes. Monkey ropes, for which I was always on the lookout in the hope that Tarzan might come attached to one, hung from huge trees, some of which grew out of the granite walls. The undergrowth was dominated by bushes sporting terrible thorns, long white barbs with black tips which I later learned were actually called ‘wait-a-minute’ (wag ‘n bietjie) thorns.

We had set out that morning from the nearest town, Fort Victoria. Even though this was dry, high summer, everywhere a strong wind blew from the south-east and a thin rain – guti – misted our wind-screen. We passed a number of broken stone walls no more impressive than those which divide fields in England, then suddenly the whole view ahead filled with a massive curving flank of stone walling, a monolith sprung whole from the surrounding grass and trees.

My mother, Edith, was nervous of Africa after our traumatic overland journey and would have turned back there and then had not I, totally enthused for the first time in what was already quite an adventurous life, clambered down from our Willy’s shooting-brake. Thus my father, Leonard, and I gingerly entered the misty passages of the temple on our own.

Eventually, discretion got the better of even his considerable nerve because while the walls were high and solid, soaring over my head to heights which made it impossible to see their tops, the passage we had entered was peculiarly narrow, hardly wide enough even for a man and a boy to walk side by side. Moreover, it curved away like the scaly, glistening body of a monstrous snake so that there was no way of telling who, or what, lay ahead. Ten minutes of this, and the stones underfoot growing slippery, my father turned back announcing that we needed to get ‘get help with this place’.

Even though we had penetrated no more than a hundred yards we quickly got slightly lost retracing our steps. One of the abiding enigmas of the temple is the extraordinary quality of the masonry. Early explorers described them as bricks. In fact they are almost perfectly sculptured granite blocks of such similar shape and size they require no mortar. One section of grand wall looks very like another and, in the deepening guti mist the labyrinth had taken us in. At an unfamiliar junction I was told to wait while Leonard explored the way ahead.

While he was gone, the walls began to talk!

I can hear them to this day, whispering and moaning. I called my father back and drew his attention to the ‘voices’. He made a nervous joke about Solomon calling for Sheba, but raised no further objection to our beating a hasty retreat.

Intriguingly, those voices have turned out not to be that much of a fantasy. An intense enquiry into the origins of these ruins has been going on for more than a hundred years and one aspect of the research has revealed that the walls do indeed make eerie sounds, and for good reason. In the more massive structures cunning spaces were constructed by the ancient masons to allow the prevailing winds to pass through the walls. There is also a cave with very peculiar sound characteristics in the ruined acropolis overlooking the temple. It so amplifies any sound made inside it, be it a blast of wind or the human voice, it can be heard in the temple half a mile away. As extensive ‘religious’ artefacts have also been found in this cave it is now the consensus of opinion that it was used by Monomatapa and Rozvi priests acting as spirit mediums to their gods.

After our adventure in the temple maze we stuck to the high ground. Hundreds of well-made steps led upwards between narrow flanking walls of smooth natural granite until, after many pauses for rest, we arrived within the spectacular acropolis. Here, surrounded by mountainous piles of ancient worked stones the like of which we had seen nowhere else in Africa, Edith laid out on a large flat rock our lunch of avocado sandwiches and Mazoe orange squash. My father gleefully identified the stone from the guide book as a ‘sacrificial’ altar stone but my mother, after inspecting its surface (for dried blood?), insisted it would do very well.

The hilltop sported a crest of cut stones – stelae – rising from the walls above a sheer cliff, and inexplicable little round towers like pepper pots on the fortress buttresses of an enclosure to the west. In the valley the huge doughnut of the temple some 800 feet long was clearly visible.

Whereupon it began to disappear!

At first it just wobbled when the stones found they could take up no more of the midday heat. These mirages then became so dense and plastic, whole sections of wall, especially the tops of the higher walls and towers, broke down to shifting battlements. By the time we had finished our sandwiches the stone city in the valley below was a shifting miasma of grey, drizzled with blacks and greens. Lost!

My mother checked that we were all wearing our hats and began to ask nervous questions of Leonard as to how long he thought it would take us to return to the rest huts in Fort Victoria. I was spellbound, and protested at this early departure, pointing out that I had yet to see a single one of King Solomon’s mines! But Edith observed that they would probably be too dangerous given the way the whole place had been ‘let go’ and we were on our way by mid-afternoon.

Over the next twenty years, until Rhodesia’s white regime decided I had dangerously over-liberal views and forced me to become a political refugee, I went back to the ruins several times. Ever more sanitised, they remained a popular picnic stop on the way to South Africa where, each year, we drove on our summer holidays.

Archaeologists, mainly from Britain, worked away behind the scenes, exorcising the ghosts of Solomon and Sheba and relabelling the ruins with scientifically correct names. The acropolis became the Western Enclosure on the Hill, the temple the Elliptical Building and the various ruins in the valley were cleansed of the names of pioneers, like Baden-Powell of scouting fame, and became numbered Enclosures. Doubts were cast on the popular theory of a Phoenician origin. Admittedly, the general public still preferred to climb to ‘the acropolis’ and enjoy a barbecue with a view of ‘the temple’.

The Rhodesian Tourist Board continued to display its famous poster of a ghostly Sheba emerging from her temple with its spectacular conical tower. Today, of course, even the poster has been judged politically incorrect and has gone the same way as its ghostly queen, even though few of the ‘riddles’ it advertises have been solved. In those days, and now, what little tourism there was paid for the basic preservation of the ruins, and the relegation of Solomon and Sheba to romantic myth did material damage to Great Zimbabwe’s image as an international tourist attraction. It is income that cash-strapped modern Zimbabwe can ill-afford to lose.

To return to that naïve ten-year-old, however, here we were driving away, perhaps never to see again the greatest mystery southern Africa had to offer. Little did I know then that this act of deprivation would plant the seed of a fifty-year obsession with the origins of the city and its thousands of associated works. Many years later, when I checked the details of our day’s outing with my father, he reminded me that I had been preoccupied by its origins even then and had subjected him to a barrage of questions, not least about its age.

‘I told you that nobody could say for sure,’ he recalled, ‘which was what we thought at the time. A lot of overseas boffins had looked at the place but opinion was completely split.’

‘What about the local black people?’

There was not much point in talking to them either, apparently. The first scientific expedition to come here from Britain at the turn of the century had interviewed all the local Africans and established that they knew nothing about the ancient ruins. Nor did they build stone houses themselves and they certainly did not mine gold. And there the matter rested for most of the first half of the twentieth century.

My father, otherwise a compassionate man, was of a generation of Rhodesians who preferred to leave a great many important questions unanswered – in particular the morality of white supremacist rule and its justifications. By our very presence we were ‘raising civilised standards’. African culture was decadent, evidence the ruins of Zimbabwe. It well suited the proponents of such views to find that the black people living in mud huts above Great Zimbabwe knew nothing of an earlier culture. So for all my early years in Rhodesia I shared the popular view that there had to be some kind of ancient classical explanation for this culture skilled in the building of stone monuments and the deep-mining of gold. Even our schoolteachers avoided rocking this comfortable boat.

Eventually, this placebo even became entrenched in white law. When the Rhodesian regime had its back to the wall in the face of African demands for equality and political power, Ian Smith’s government banned the Historical Monuments Commission from promoting an African origin for Great Zimbabwe. The Minister of Internal Affairs declared officially (and ordered the preparation of a new guidebook to reflect his views) that there was no irrefutable evidence of the origins of the ruins ‘at the present time’. Academically he was right – there were at least three learned books refuting an exclusive Shona authorship competing with the three archaeological treatises supporting one. Truth, however, had very little to do with this ban because by then Great Zimbabwe had become a political pawn. It has remained so to the present day; indeed, all that has changed is the skin colour of the protagonists.

Today’s Great Zimbabwe guidebooks (this quotation was taken from the Internet) offer an origin theory along these lines: ‘Controversy regarding the ruins’ origins has persisted for years and is even now not completely dispelled. It has taken years of careful archaeological study to arrive at the answers to these questions. They are now known and they are unequivocal, the original structures were built by indigenous African people, the ancestors of modern Zimbabweans.’ Perhaps – but Africa is a big place, with one of its coastlines on the Mediterranean. It is here, says one school of thought (branded the ‘Romantics’), that we should look for Africans skilled in monumental stone-building.

Who, indeed, were the ancestors of modern Zimbabweans and who were their ancestors? To imply, as these guidebooks do, that the Zimbabwe culture sprang unaided, uninfluenced and exclusively from Shona soil is to distort both the archaeological evidence and the volumes of comparative and ethnographic information produced by the opponents of a Shona genesis.

There is, for example, little hard evidence that a sufficiently large Bantu population to build several mighty zimbabwes, temples, stone forts and irrigation terracing had migrated this far south by the time the Carbon-14 datings say the stone-building began in earnest. I am not, however, disputing the key claim of the Shona school that the ancestors of the modern Shona, a people known as the Karanga, largely assembled these stones. Certainly when the grand zimbabwes were raised and improved no other large workforce existed here. But this book will seriously question the modern myth that no other influences and no other nationalities were involved in ancient times.

It took many years for it to be recognised that Great Zimbabwe is actually the largest stone city in Africa south of the Pyramids – indeed, this astonishing statistic is, in my experience, largely unknown to the general public. Yet there is no precedent for monument-sized stone-building this far south in Africa when the Great Zimbabwe complex is believed to have been started, and little or no stone-building has gone on here since the Zimbabwe culture proper ended some 500 years ago.

Today’s rural Karanga mostly live in thatched mud huts just as their ancestors did when the first European explorers came to the ruins. Moreover, the granite walls were by then already ancient ruins in process of being broken up by aged trees such as the baobab and spirostachys africana which take hundreds of years to reach maturity.

Where did the ancient Karanga, born and raised as cattle-herders on this central African savannah, acquire a sophisticated knowledge of architectural geometry, the mathematics of load and stress-bearing structures, and the measuring devices to service the architects, not to mention the function of drains and foundations, the graded battering of rising cones, and the beautiful arts and crafts which went on inside these walls? I shall also be examining a similar set of unanswered questions for the widespread deep gold-mining and crafting industry which paid for it all.

Finally – the greatest riddle of them all – having evolved all these skills, why has not a whisper of it been passed down to the descendants of these architects, skilled masons, sculptors and miners? Even the name of their magnificent temple-city is utterly lost. ‘Zimbabwe’ translates to nothing more than ‘stone building’.

All this defies credibility, yet you must believe in it as an act of faith if you are to be a card-carrying member of the Shona school, just as in Mr Smith’s time you had to believe in a classical Semite origin and an émigré architectural elite to stay on message.

I find both these assaults on the truth offensive, even if in the context of the region’s recent history they are understandable. None of the rulers of the land on which Great Zimbabwe stands, past and present, have dared properly to investigate its enigmatic origins for fear of the impact it would have on their political claims. We have been saddled with two racially tainted Zimbabwe myths and the truth of this marvellous place has become even more lost in the process. This is a genuine tragedy because even a quick glance at the evidence suggests that the Zimbabwe culture was the product of a number of complex multi-racial associations or partnerships, with Great Zimbabwe arguably the most important ancient monument to cultural partnership on the planet.

I see my task, therefore, as a process of unravelling perhaps 3,000 years of apocryphal legend, myth, science good and bad, passions that have blinded good men to the truth, disinformation by evil men, and downright propaganda.

ONE

To Ophir Direct

Rumours were rife a century and a half ago that the unexplored hinterland of Africa hid a fabulous eldorado, a place that had provided the Queen of Sheba with the gold to seduce Solomon. The tale has been immortalised as fiction by that most exotic of African adventure writters, H. Rider Haggard, in his novel King Solomon’s Mines. Actually, Rider Haggard had intimate personal experience of the territory we are about to explore. When in 1886 a small army of intrepid treasure hunters went in search of Solomon’s mines this master of derring-do would be up there with the best of them. The rest of the best included Indian fighters from the American frontier wars and Baden-Powell who would go on to found the Boy Scout movement.

It is, I think, the most intriguing aspect of this story that the facts are always stranger than the fiction. For example, it is a fact that King Solomon must have acquired the gold he accumulated in vast quantities from somewhere, and it is also fact that the Queen of Sheba was a major gold dealer. Time and the explorations of people like H. Rider Haggard have revealed that the closest country to both of them where huge quantities of gold had been mined was Mashonaland.

It is agreed by all the schools of thought that this gold, sold through foreign traders, paid for the construction of at least five grand cities with massive walls of stone, one of which, a temple-city, is the largest stone structure south of the Pyramids. Aerial surveys carried out in recent times suggest lesser towns and villages of stone number more than 15,000, not counting a mountain ‘kingdom’ which incorporates one of the largest stone-terraced irrigation systems on our planet. 1

But the history of this lost Zimbabwe culture – even that part of its history of which we can be sure – is a good deal stranger than the fiction which has been based upon it.

The first classical mention we have of King Solomon’s eldorado is a guarded reference in the Bible to a place called ‘Ophir’, somewhere in Africa. Ophir’s exact location is never defined. It would have been surprising if it had been because Ophir, according to the Bible, was the source of the gold which Phoenician mariners, hired by Solomon through Hiram of Tyre, brought home from three-year trips round Africa in their new deep-hulled ships. These ships allowed the Phoenicians to navigate oceans of variable tides, winds and currents. They made extraordinary voyages as far afield as England and India. They went to Africa – Phoenician wrecks have been found on the African coasts – but the location of Ophir remained a well-kept secret, probably because it was the Phoenicians’ most valuable piece of information regarding trade.

Advance some thousands of years to the rough frontiers of pioneer South Africa where the Dutch have established a garden in the Cape of Good Hope to victual the ships passing round it in the service of the East India trade. In a few years they will push out from these protected gardens into coastal mountains sparsely populated by a strange Asian-looking race of miniature aboriginals, the Khoi. They move these ‘Chinese Hottentots’ on, plant vineyards, build villages, every one with a church. They read their Bibles every day and believe every word they read, not least of the riches of Solomon and of his seduction by the voluptuous Sheba. It is an interest focused by the possibility that Solomon and Sheba’s fabulous fortunes have been mined in their new wilderness homeland. But where?

A century on and these Europeans have become a deeply religious farming community, the Boers. But Britain takes over the now-thriving Cape Colony and the Boers make another break for freedom, this time trekking in their ox wagons in search of ‘free’ land deep in the hinterland. In Africa by now, ‘free’ land means land not within the ‘sphere of influence’ of other Europeans. Well-watered arable land is the Boers’ prime objective and this they find alongside the Vaal and the Orange rivers, but the Bible is still their guidebook and Ophir has yet to be discovered. They set up the Boer states of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State and in a few years will discover beds of diamonds and reefs of gold beyond even the dreams of Solomon and Sheba. But the Transvaal cannot be Ophir either because these deposits are found under virgin land. Even so, the Boers sense they are getting warm.

The first real clue that such a place as Ophir – gold mining in the context of an ancient culture – might actually exist reaches them and soon thereafter, the British, through an unlikely source – the German pastor of the so-called Berlin Mission in the Soutspanberg, a mountain area in the Transvaal. Here resided in rather ambivalent circumstances a pioneering missionary, the Revd Alex Merensky (1837–1918) who, like other missionaries of his time, in particular the better known Robert Moffat and his son-in-law David Livingstone, shared the promotion of the Gospel with the advancement of imperialism.

The scramble for the whole of Africa – essentially a scramble for the natural resources of the dark continent – was well advanced by this time. There was a flush of British pink across the far north (Egypt), the north-east and central areas (Kenya and, soon, Uganda and the Sudan) and across all of the south as far north as the Boer republics. The French sphere of influence extended across most of north-west Africa, although there were solid smudges of British pink here as well (Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast and Nigeria). The Belgians controlled Conrad’s heart of darkness (the Congo). The Portuguese had substantial domains on the east and west coasts (Angola and Portuguese East Africa). The Germans under Bismarck had interests on both the east and west coasts (South West Africa and Tanganyika) and there was still an east coast outpost of Arabs on Zanzibar island. But the south-central median of Africa – the place where all held the eldorado of Ophir to be – was ruled by a despotic regiment of refugee Zulus, the Matabele, who now stood in the way of any further exploration of the hinterland from the south.

The European powers all realised that if they could join up their territories or spheres of influence by taking over the middle ground, they would control the continent and its resources – which might include Ophir. Efforts to keep each other out often verged on the ridiculous. The British, for example, would build a railway, dubbed ‘the Lunatic Line’ all the way from the East African coast to the central great lakes and declare a protectorate over Uganda, because they thought the French had their sights set on the headwaters of the Nile in those same great lakes. Control the flow of the Nile and you control Nile-dependent British Egypt, it was argued.

Feeling out the ground for the ‘Great Powers’ were their missionaries, the harbingers, as I believe they have been rightly described, of imperialism. The British had Robert Moffat studying the Ndebele language at his Kuruman Mission. He would soon become a constant, trusted visitor to the court of the Matabele chiefs, Msilikaze and his son Lobengula. Msilikaze is said to have worshipped Moffat as an individual but never came close to being converted to Christianity. Livingstone monitored the Matabele eastern flank from Bechuanaland, where he too failed to convert almost anybody, and would later move hopefully on to a position of influence on the Zambesi river north of Lobengula’s fiefdom.

The missionaries, of course, spent a great deal of time with their Bibles. Ophir for them was gospel. It was just a matter of finding it. Merensky had set up his Berlin Mission on land controlled by the British-hating Boers in the mountains just south of the land of the Matabele; indeed, he overlooked the road, known as the Missionary Road, and the Limpopo river crossing everyone had to take into Matabeleland. The Portuguese, whose colonisation of the east spanned more than five centuries, were also probing the hinterland, which in the light of their long tenure they regarded as a legitimate sphere of influence. The British, noting that the Portuguese had made little progress from the east coast in all that time, saw no immediate threat from them in the race for Ophir. Not so from the Germans, and particularly the Boers, who were known to be working together.

British fears were well founded. Boer agents – tough, bush-wise hunters – had reported that there was gold to be found deep in the hinterland behind the potent and disciplined Matabele military screen. Moreover, the land here did indeed fit the definitions of both Ophir and Shangri-La. Ancient abandoned mines with shafts too narrow for an adult European were found, and the overgrown piles of quartz beside them revealed that they had been worked for gold. These ancient workings were on the edges of a cool plateau offering verdant, well-watered arable and grazing land too high for the tsetse-fly and, most important, thinly populated by a quiescent Matabele slave-tribe, the Shona.

There was also, paradoxically, another lure. Neither the Matabele nor the Shona appeared to have any real knowledge of the value of their gold. Nor were there any legends or even myths of the ancient gold-miners.

Yet for almost a decade before the turn of the nineteenth century the balance of other political concerns in an increasingly volatile Europe confined these European powers to their existing spheres of influence. Confrontation in Africa could provoke the unmentionable but inevitable war in Europe between the aspirant Germans and the established British. For the time being, limited and probably expensive territorial gains in Africa were worth neither the risk nor the cost, even if there was, perhaps, a pot of gold at the end of it all.

This all changed when one Englishman, Cecil John Rhodes, decided he had become rich enough to implement his personal dream of a British Africa from the Cape to Cairo, and the German chancellor, Bismarck, turned ‘Kolonialmensch’. But even the arrival of these two extraordinary egos would not of itself have opened up the road to Ophir had not a fateful meeting taken place in 1871 at the Soutspanberg Berlin Mission between Pastor Merensky and an itinerant German ‘geologist’, Carl Mauch.

This was the same year that Rhodes came to Africa to begin making what in its time would be the largest individual fortune the world had ever known. Mauch was also there to make his fortune from Africa’s mineral wealth but until he met Merensky had had little luck. It is also patently obvious that both he and Merensky were furthering their national interests or, more simply, were willing agents of German imperialism.

Rhodes from the beginning was a political and financial voice to be reckoned with. Within a decade he would become a member of the Cape parliament and then its Prime Minister. At no time did he make any secret of his national interests, believing that if Great Britain did not occupy the hinterland by fair means or foul, the Germans would beat them to it.

Such dreams by a single, destitute, individual may seem extraordinary by today’s standards but as early as 1872 when his fortune had yet to be made, Rhodes made a will in which he left his imagined estate to the British Secretary of State for the Colonies ‘for the extension of the British Empire’. A second will in 1877 provided for ‘a secret society, the true aim and object whereof shall be the extension of British rule throughout the world . . . and especially the occupation by British settlers of the entire Continent of Africa, the Holy Land, the valley of the Euphrates, the Islands of Cyprus and Candia, the whole of South America, the island of the Pacific not heretofore possessed by Great Britain, the whole of the Malay Archipelago, the seaboard of China and Japan, the ultimate recovery of the United States of America as an integral part of the British Empire, the consolidation of the whole empire, and finally the foundation of so great a power as to hereafter render wars impossible and promote the best interests of humanity.’

The only man even vaguely in his class of imperialist was Bismarck, who took Rhodes seriously and had his Afrika agents keep a careful eye on him.

Rhodes finally found his fortune in the rich diamond mines of the Transvaal at Kimberley. The German imperialist, Ernst von Weber, came there in 1873 and wrote an article urging the colonisation by Germany of the west coast north of the Cape Colony which had a ‘superfluity of mineral treasures and could support a population 50 times as large as that of Great Britain’.

In 1874, Bismarck shook Great Britain off the fence and caused all Rhodes’ worst dreams to come true when he declared South West Africa a protectorate of Germany. And it did not stop there. Almost the whole of Germany’s colonial empire was laid out between 1884 and 1885 and Rhodes and the British became convinced that Germany’s next move would be to join forces with the Boers, block the road to the north, then move on Ophir themselves. Rhodes was by then convinced that he knew where Ophir was and he wanted it to be ‘Rhodesia’ (literally) not some German mining colony.

But again we must step back a few years and try to overhear the conversation which took place at the Berlin Mission between Merensky and Mauch. By 1871 Mauch had been inside Matabele territory twice, ostensibly as a member of a hunting party mounted by the legendary elephant hunter, Henry Hartley. Also by this time the Boers had launched a series of diplomatic forays to the Matabele court at Bulawayo, culminating in a dubious mutual defence ‘treaty’ in 1847 between the Boer leader, Hendrick Potgeiter, and Matabele indunas which was subsequently ratified by Potgeiter’s son, Piet, in 1852.

It is, I think, too much of a coincidence that the Potgeiter family were the political bosses of the Soutspanberg, which commanded the road leading to the best crossing point of the Limpopo river into Matabeleland, and that Pastor Merensky, citizen of the country most opposed to Britain, chose this site for his mission station.

In those early days the only whites Msilikaze would admit were a few favoured missionaries and hunters who rewarded him with part of their bag. The most famous of these were Thomas Baines, who was also a skilled artist, Frederick Courtenay Selous and Henry Hartley, all from Britain; the brothers Posselt from the Boer Republics; and the German, Carl Mauch, who had useful geological skills other than with a rifle, even though hunting was his great passion.

The years from 1865 to 1870 were the golden age of elephant hunting north of the Limpopo river; in fact elephants were all but wiped out on higher ground where an absence of the tsetse-fly allowed pursuit on horseback. Some hunters, like Selous, who also collected ‘specimens’ for the British Museum of Natural History, took after their prey on foot. Others like Hartley turned their attention to clandestine hunts for another lucrative natural resource – and here Carl Mauch came into his own.

Hartley had first found gold in quartz seams when he hunted in Matabele territory in 1865. Local informants also showed him what they described as old gold workings which had fallen into disuse a decade earlier when the ‘Disturbers’ (Msilikaze’s original refugee Zulu impi) had overrun the country. Back in the Transvaal, Hartley approached the young geologist, Mauch, and invited him to join his hunting expedition planned for the winter of 1867, an invitation which Mauch accepted with alacrity even though he must have known that there were few elephants left and, if he was caught digging for gold, Lobengula might well have him put to death. Lobengula, in fact, had a favoured clifftop for just this purpose.

The group trekked deep into Shona country with little success. As they returned, however, Hartley wounded an elephant and in the course of pursuing it through the bush, he and Mauch stumbled upon several excavations which turned out to be ancient mine shafts. Mauch took out his hammer, examined several specimens and found them to contain gold. Along the Umsweswe and Sebakwe rivers more old diggings were found and Mauch abandoned hunting in favour of prospecting to establish the extent of this ancient eldorado. To keep these activities secret he put it about that, guided by honey birds, he was searching for wild honey to supplement the party’s diet.

At the end of that summer on their way out of Matabeleland, Mauch came upon another promising reef in the southern Tati area and the party hurried home to plan an expedition to exploit these more accessible Tati lodes. Negotiations were opened with Lobengula who had that year succeeded his father, Msilikaze, and in December news of the gold ‘broke’ in the Transvaal Argus, soon to be followed by wildly exaggerated claims in the British press, one of which was entitled ‘To Ophir Direct’. But Mauch kept to himself information, indeed an introduction, to an even more exotic secret.

We know that he visited his fellow-national, Pastor Merensky, at the Berlin Mission on his way through the Soutspanberg. It was either on this visit or on another trip a year later, Merensky told Mauch that the ancient gold mines were the work of a lost civilisation and, according to Merensky’s native sources, they had left behind a monumental temple-city ruined and overgrown in the Shona jungle. Merensky also revealed that he had already passed on this story to an earlier adventurer, an American sailor, Adam Renders, of whom nothing had been heard since. If Mauch could find Adam Renders, or any evidence of his passage, he might also find the lost city. Merensky knew his Bible. He wanted his fellow countryman to be the first to discover King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba’s lost city of Ophir.

Rhodes, meanwhile, had been spending time at Oxford University getting a degree, and he read all of the newspaper accounts – especially ‘To Ophir Direct’ – with undisguised excitement. In Africa, however, there were more pressing affairs, not least the takeover bid which would make or break him. Rhodes had determined to buy out the entire Kimberley diamond field. Just one powerful entrepreneur, Barney Barnato, still stood in his way. By 1888 Rhodes had in effect ‘cornered’ the world’s diamond market but there was still a fight over the terms of the trust deed for the new company, De Beers Consolidated Mines. Barnato had insisted on a company limited to diamond mining, but that was far too confining for Rhodes who had announced to friends that he wanted to use the De Beers company as his instrument for ‘winning the north’. There was a final all-night meeting at the end of which an exhausted Barney Barnato conceded defeat with the comment: ‘Some people have a fancy for one thing and some for another. You have a fancy for making an empire. Well I suppose I must give it to you.’ As a result the mighty De Beers conglomerate has the right not only to mine diamonds and other minerals, but to conduct banking operations, build railways, annex and govern territory – and even raise an army. All this, as we shall see in a moment, can be traced back to the outcome of the conversation Carl Mauch had with Pastor Merensky.

In this interval the Boers had added to everyone’s fears of an Afrikaner–German axis across middle Africa by first allowing the establishment of two ‘freebooter’ pocket republics, Stellaland and Goshen, and then annexing them into their South African republic. The British responded by declaring their ‘protection’ over the southern approaches to Matabeleland and installing a British commissioner there. When the Boer annexation took place under the eyes of this commissioner, 4,000 British troops marched north into what would in future be known as the Bechuanaland Protectorate and eliminated Goshen and Stellaland. For the moment the threat of further anti-British territorial gains which would block the road to Ophir was over.

That still left the Boers with unrestricted access to the north and the Boers were as ever restless, their young men agitating for the right to open up more land for farming. To the east all the political activity had also reignited Portuguese interest in the land of the Mashonas. Basing their case on century-old precedents and treaties they claimed to have with Shona and Manica chiefs they reinstated the Shona hinterland as their sphere of influence.

Frederick Courtenay Selous, the hunter-politician who will feature large in our story, sought to secure the Shona eldorado for himself by recognising the Portuguese claims and obtaining a gold-mining concession from them.

The British denied all such claims but they did acknowledge that a race between three European powers – Britain, Germany and Portugal, as well as the Boers – was under way and they began to call on their agents, missionaries like Moffat and Livingstone, hunter-explorers like Selous and businessmen like Rhodes, for information about this alleged Ophir. Was it worth the expense and perhaps the risk of war? Carl Mauch’s description of the place which had been published years before in an obscure German journal were dusted off and re-examined. His conclusions of origin had been derided as amateur romanticism by antiquarians of the time (archaeology was still a science in its infancy) but leaving aside Mauch’s exotic claim that he had actually discovered the Queen of Sheba’s summer palace, what else had he revealed?

Merensky had warned Mauch that the journey would be both difficult and dangerous. He confessed that he had already tried to reach the ‘ancient Ophir of Solomon’ himself but had not pushed on to any ruins because of a notorious tribe called ‘Makwapa’ who robbed and murdered whites for their valuable possessions. Merensky later recorded: ‘A guide of the Banyai tribe told us much about this mysterious spot (the temple-ruins), and thus we gathered that the Banyai revere these ancient buildings; that no living creature may there be put to death, no tree destroyed, since everything is considered sacred. He told us that a populous black tribe, acquainted with the use of firearms, had formerly dwelt there, but about fifty years before had gone northwards. We heard many details regarding the form and structure of these ancient piles, and the inscriptions they bore, but I cannot answer for their truth.’

Mauch, however, was tougher, younger and more intrepid. He also had established credentials with the Matabele as a hunter. Nonetheless, as his journal reveals, it would take him four months, from May until the end of August 1871, to reach ‘the most valuable and important and hitherto most mysterious part of Africa . . . the old Monomotapa or Ophir’. Deep in Shona country he also found Adam Renders, of whom he was somewhat contemptuous because Renders had ‘gone native’, taking two wives, the daughters of a Shona chief. This might have offended Mauch’s morality but it proved diplomatically useful because after much prevarication on the part of suspicious local people, Mauch was taken by Renders to ‘quite large ruins which could never have been built by blacks’.

Mauch hung on in Mashonaland for nine months, his relations with the natives progressing from bad to worse until in the end he was only allowed to visit the ruins three times. His plight is reported in a note he sent to a hunter friend, George Phillips, in October. Mauch had not even dared to sign the note for fear of revealing where he was to the Matabele, but he identified himself to Phillips by reminding his friend of an incident they had had with lions. Mauch confirmed that he was living with a man named Renders, was in a bad way, having been robbed of everything except his papers and a gun, and needed help. He reminded Phillips not to bring any Matabele. Phillips went to his rescue and also met Renders.

Phillips’ report confirms that Renders was an American and he had been living near the lost city for three years. It should be noted in passing that if there is to be credit for the ‘discovery’ of the ruins, which would become known as Great Zimbabwe, it should go to Adam Renders, especially as nothing is heard of him ever again. Renders was living with Mauch, Phillips stated, on a stone hill a few miles south-west of the lost city. It was a pretty place: a waterfall coming down from the ridges above which fell into a pan by their hut, to re-emerge as a gushing fountain several hundred feet below. The river had eroded a cave nearby and Mauch told Phillips that he and Renders regularly had to hide there with their Shona hosts to avoid Matabele raiding parties.

It is from George Phillips’ account of this rescue mission that we get our first hint that Great Zimbabwe might be just one of many lost city complexes. When Mauch takes Phillips to see ‘Ophir’, Phillips comments on a zigzag pattern on the walls similar to a ruined wall he had seen while hunting in the western mountains. He had also heard of decorated walls in the south close to the Tati gold workings in Matabeleland.

Phillips re-provisioned Mauch, who was then able to make two more visits to Great Zimbabwe. Mauch wrote the first detailed descriptions and drew remarkably accurate plans and sketches. It was no easy task. Apart from the hostility of the locals the entire complex was overgrown with giant stinging plants. Massive ancient trees grew through some of the larger walls. Not a single building was in a state of repair or occupied. ‘It was a very sombre environment’, Mauch wrote. ‘Masses of rubble, parts of walls, dense thickets and big trees.’ But he hacked his way through them and was rewarded with a sight no European had seen before, a massive stone wall of immaculate construction with a decorated top. It left him in no doubt that he had finally discovered the ‘rondavel’ of the Queen of Sheba.

That was, of course, an enormous conclusion to jump to but it should be remembered that in those days the Bible was gospel, not a book of apocryphal stories. The consensus of opinion of the time, expert and romantic, was that Ophir was in Africa. It was perfectly reasonable, having already found the gold mines on which the existence of Ophir hinged, for Mauch to conclude that he had now found the temple Sheba is said by the Bible to have built at Ophir, especially as nothing of this magnitude had ever been found in ‘darkest’ Africa before. Even more so because the local people living in its shadow laid no claim to the ruin and told Mauch ‘the walls were built at a time when the stones were still very soft, otherwise it would have been impossible for the whites who built the walls to form them into a square shape’. Mauch also interviewed an elderly African who described religious ceremonies, including sacrifice, which had been conducted in the ruins by his father.

Mauch now packed his meagre belongings and hurried south, compiling from his diaries two articles which would eventually be published in German in the Geographischen Mittheilungen in 1874.

Mauch wrote:

The ruins may be divided into two parts. The one upon a rocky granite eminence of 400 feet in height, the other upon a somewhat elevated terrace. The two are separated by a gentle valley, their distance apart being about 300 yards. The rocky bluff consists of an elongated mass of granite, rounded in form, upon which stands a second block, and upon this again fragments small, but still many tons in weight, with fissures, chasms and cavities.

The western side of the mountain is covered from top to bottom by the ruins. As they are for the most part fallen in and covered with rubbish, it is at present impossible to determine the purpose the buildings were intended to serve; the most probable is that it was a fortress in those times, and thus the many passages – now, however, walled up – and the circular or zigzag plan of the walls would also indicate.

All the walls without exception, are built without mortar, of hewn granite, more or less about the size of our bricks. Best preserved of all is the outer wall of an erection of rounded forms, situated in the plain, and about 150 yards in diameter. It is at a distance of about 600 yards from the mountain, and was probably connected with it by means of great outworks, as appears to be indicated by the mounds of rubbish remaining.

Inside, everything excepting a tower nearly 30 feet in height, and in perfect preservation, is fallen to ruins, but this at least can be made out; that the narrow passageways are disposed in the form of a labyrinth.

The tower consists of similar blocks of hewn granite, and is cylindrical to a height of 10 feet, then upwards to the top conical in form. At the foot its diameter is 15 feet, at the top 8 feet.

It stands between the outer wall and another close to and parallel with it. This entrance has, up to the height of a man, four double layers of quite black stone, alternating with double tiers of granite. The outer walls show an attempt at ornamenting the granite – it represents a double line of zigzags between horizontal bands. The ornament is 20 feet from the ground, and is employed upon a third part of the south wall on each side of the tower and only on the inside.

Remembering Merensky’s notes, Mauch then looked for ‘inscriptions’, finding none, a problem which has bothered origin theorists ever since. He did, however, unearth a soapstone beam protruding from a wall, a soapstone dish lying underneath a large walled-up boulder close to the Eastern Enclosure and, near the Elliptical Building, an iron object which ‘was a complete mystery to me, but it proves most clearly that a civilised nation must once have lived here’. He sketched this object – it is an iron ‘gong’ of which several others would be found at Great Zimbabwe. Mauch’s critics have, of course, derided this ‘civilised nation’ conclusion but others have shown that the gongs were most likely imported objects, perhaps trade goods. Others very like them have been found in various parts of Africa.

For Mauch, his most exciting find came on his last day when he revealed the collapsed wooden lintels of the doorways of the Elliptical Building, noting that the wood had not been eaten by insects, was reddish in colour and slightly scented. It was similar to the cedar wood of his pencil. Mauch instantly embroidered a whole theory of Solomon and Sheba around this wood, for which he has been much ridiculed; indeed, it can be said that it was what Mauch made of this wood that has resulted in all his theories about the ruins being scorned as romantic nonsense. Nonetheless, discoveries since have made many of Mauch’s observations worth reviewing.