History, not just this history, will be rewritten using the new tools of genetic mutations. Nothing even remotely as powerful has previously come to the aid of archaeologists, in particular origin theorists. Dramatic, sometimes shocking, home truths about who we all are and where we come from are just over the horizon. One such by Bryan Sykes, Professor of Human Genetics at the University of Oxford, using genetic fingerprints from mitochondrial DNA, claims that everyone of native European descent, wherever they live in the world, can trace their ancestry back to one of seven women.
But the most exciting aspect of this new science is that it can with great accuracy make quantum leaps back in time. Back before human time in fact, and the genetic scientists have already cast new light on the seminal debate of the origins of our species, and whether Homo sapiens, the so-called ‘thinking apes’ of modern Europe, are the descendants of Neanderthal or Cro-Magnon ape-men. The informed opinion, now virtually a consensus, is that we all began in Africa and, intriguingly for this story, that cultural awareness, particularly cave-art, began in Ethiopia at sites like Omo-Kibbish that are well over 100,000 years old. Personally I cannot wait for the revelations about the San People that must come in the near future from refinements of the techniques of genetic dating.
At the beginning of this book I declared my brief to be that of an investigation of the origins of the Zimbabwe culture, not of the temple-cities like Great Zimbabwe, and I feel I have shown beyond reasonable doubt that the temple-cities are the more recent, eclectic window-dressing of a much older society. If now, however, we throw off the time constraints suggesting that this was a culture which came and went in a single millennium, the lid is lifted on a period of history that has never been properly considered in the Zimbabwe context other than by very old, much-derided Romantics. With genetic fingerprinting still in its infancy it is still, admittedly, only possible to peep into this Pandora’s box.
Is there anything in the myths and legends, the Bible’s layered apocryphal tales, the oral traditions and peculiar practices of singular tribes like the Lemba, to add flesh to these vague shadows of truly ancient priests whose genetic fingerprints have travelled down Africa? Could the Lemba be the descendants of one of the Lost Tribes of Israel? There is a considerable amount of documentation from various sources of the expulsion of ten tribes from Israel by the Assyrian King, Shalmaneser V, after his conquest of their country in 722–721 BC. But no one knows what happened to them, although the few ancient accounts we have indicate that they were driven south.
The Apocrypha, a set of Hebrew books (or parts of books) included the Septuagint translation of the Old Testament (into Greek), reputedly made by seventy Jewish scholars in Alexandria around 200 BC. Remarkably the Septuagint turns out to be a very accurate record. As a result of comparisons made with the Dead Sea Scrolls that include a fragmented copy of Isaiah, we know that the old Jewish scholar-scribes applied rigorous checks to their copies. They would total up the number of letters, then find the middle letter of the book. If the copy was not the same as the original they would start again. For example, a comparison of Isaiah 53 from the Dead Sea Scrolls with a later (Massoretic) text shows only seventeen differing letters, and ten of these are mere differences of spelling like, say, ‘Honour’ as opposed to its US form, ‘Honor’.
Nowadays the word ‘apocryphal’ is used to warn of texts that need to be taken with a pinch of salt. But is the original Apocrypha a rather more reliable record than we thought? Does it offer any clues to a refugee tribe, or remnants of that tribe, which worked its way down to south-central Africa and there made a seminal contribution to the creation of a unique culture which would go on to build monumental temple-cities, one of which, Great Zimbabwe, is, dimensionably, a mirror image of Marib, the temple of the Queen of Sheba, in the deserts of modern Yemen?
All the ancient translations aver that the Assyrians did drive out ten of the twelve Hebrew tribes which, under Joshua, had taken possession of Canaan, the ‘Promised Land’, after the death of Moses. By then, after the death of Solomon, the Jewish kingdom had split in two. Two tribes set up the kingdom of Judah in the south and the remaining ten ruled Israel. These ten tribes of Israel then vanish from the face of the earth. They remain arguably the greatest missing persons (or mass murder) mystery of history and the search for them has never stopped; indeed, it goes on at this very moment via the Internet. The Apocrypha (IV Ezra) says the lost tribes were forced into arid lands beyond the ‘Mountains of Darkness’, uninhabited by human beings. The Zeng, remember, were even in much more recent times regarded by Arabians as subhuman. A later, more detailed, account describes them as vanishing into a country of great mountains and rivers where they were trapped behind a river, the Sambatyon, with magical properties. It defied anyone crossing it during the week but calmed down on the Sabbath, a most effective trap for Israelites immobilised by their holy day of rest!
Be that as it may, I think we have finally reached the end of the road. I strongly suspect that it is a road that can now only be retraced by the genetic scientists and they alone may some day give the answer to a question that I would never have dreamed of asking when I began this enquiry: did the Shona plateau become the promised land of a lost tribe of Israel?
Whatever the truth, these Semitic refugees did not build the Zimbabwe culture alone; indeed, by the time the great zimbabwes were built they would, as Frederick Courtney Selous first suggested, have been indistinguishable from the local people, just as now they are but genetic traces.
This is Zimbabwe’s matchless heritage. I pray that before too long Zimbabweans may be in a position to rejoin the commonwealth of nations, spearhead the research into their exotic past, and promote lucrative access to the ancient architectural treasures they alone possess.