Photograph by Sanuj Goswami
ReviewsThe Lost City of Solomon and Sheba - by Robin Brown-LoweA review by Grey Wolf of the historical investigative work 'The Lost City of Solomon and Sheba' byRobin Brown-Lowe, looking at the zimbabwes (stone ruins) of modern Zimbabwe, South Africa andMozambique, and especially at Great Zimbabwe, and the lost gold-mining industryWhen Cecil Rhodes pushed his expansionist British South Africa Company into what soon becameknown as Rhodesia, and is today modern Zimbabwe, he did so primarily for one reason - the allure ofgold. But what the prospectors found was that all the mines had already been largely worked out, thatfew undiscovered veins remained, and that whilst a lot of gold residue could be found in the site ofruined workings, this type of scavenging off history was to be the most profitable, and the shortestlivedway of making money. What they also found was that the local inhabitants neither knewanything about gold mining, nor about the numerous stone ruins all around them, and that gold to themwas no more precious than shells, or copper. To all intents and purposes it appeared that somebodylong, long in the past had mined out all of the gold, and only a tiny shadow of that age remained in themodern Zimbabwe.From this it was an easy to step for Victorian romanticists to suppose that they had quite literally foundKing Solomon's mines, and that the largest of all these stone ruins, the city of Great Zimbabwecontained within it the temple that the Queen of Sheba is mentioned in the Bible as commanding built.The name of Ophir stirred that mix of history and mythology that the romantic historian thrives on,though it is in no way clear from ancient writings whether Ophir was where the gold was mined, orsimply where it was sold to the ancient traders, including those of Solomon and the Phoenician Hiramof Tyre.Soon enough of course there was a backlash against this romanticism, from those who saw themselvesas fundamentally evidence-based, refusing to accept ancient texts as being anything more than hearsay,and demanding evidence in the workings to date them, evidence which was by and large notforthcoming, certainly not in the early decades of the twentieth century. There were no writteninscriptions at all in any of the zimbabwes, the tens of thousands of stone ruins dotting this area ofAfrica, and what evidence there was was often confusing.Most striking of all the finds at Great Zimbabwe had been the figures of carved stone birds, embeddedinto plinths, but the evidence did not argue conclusively as to whether these were based on their nearsymboliccousins, the ancient Egyptian Horus bird, or were a local representation that was onlysimiliar in effect because birds on a column are birds on a column.Datable evidence was thought to be the holy grail, but when it was found it was too sparse and toovague to be of help. The discovery of medieval venetian beads, or chinese trading beads, proves onlythat the buildings were operational in a contemporary period; it would be like finding a Victorian coinin London. All you can deduce is that however old the place is, and whatever its origins, it wasoperational at the time that these trade goods were in use.Radio carbon dating when it was discovered was not much more help. A timber used in the foundationof part of Great Zimbabwe dated somewhere between 700 AD and 1200 AD. By this time the reactionagainst the romanticist ancient view had become so extreme that a purely native origin for the workswas being put forward, a theory that said that the Bantu developed them themselves, and as there werefew Bantu before the medieval period, scholars saw fit to accept the later dating, and even to argue thatthe wood was already old when used, and thus push the date even further forward.
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In MemoriamMAUREENMumLlyn Clywedog
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Special Cellar PacksBe ready for th
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Question 4Which other authors do yo
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Photograph by Sanuj Goswami
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that the king says would serve well
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1st January 1844New Year and still
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5th May 1845The 5th of May has no p
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against Japan. Quite how far they a
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23rd August 1849One is not certain
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