Even by African standards Ethiopia has been a rumbling volcano of humanity since the dawn of recorded time. Politics and religion have produced repeated magma flows of displaced people, mostly in a southerly direction. Before I studied its history I had always assumed that these troubles were of recent origin, but this is not the case and if we are looking for a source of refugees, Ethiopia, more than anywhere else in Africa, has to be a prime choice. Evidently, although admittedly almost secretly, the Bents felt the same.
During the last century, Ethiopia, once known as Abyssinia, has experienced all the typical African traumas of hunger, disease, a particularly evil brand of colonialism, a communist coup, almost ceaseless drought and starvation, inept government and self-serving politicians. It was the first African country to be used as a test ground for modern war machines, the place where Mussolini practised aerial warfare and the effects of poison gas. But go back a few thousand years to the times that we have been researching, and the excesses above seem just a natural part of the national tradition.
The earliest Arabian geographers like Ibn Hawkal saw Ethiopia as ‘an immense country with indefinite borders and solitudes’, protected by its desert and mountains. In the Periplus of the Red Sea it is recognised as a source of obsidian and ivory (but not yet gold) and Pliny reports that it exported African exotica, like rhino horn, hippopotamus hides, tortoiseshell, monkeys and slaves; but again no gold. There were gold mines in ancient Ethiopia but they do not appear to have been prolific enough to impinge on the record. A Greek explorer 500 years after Pliny opined that the gold displayed in the rich trappings of the monarchy was earned from a profitable trade with the interior. It may well have been Zimbabwe gold in transit.
As the historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto (who draws an immediate comparison between Ethiopia and Zimbabwe) writes in Civilisations, Ethiopia’s isolation produced a singular culture: ‘Even at the time of her most intense contacts with the Romans, her clergy had to be appointed from Alexandria [hence the wide use of Greek], at a crucial time of Monophysite heresy, which erred in underestimating the humanity of Christ and making him uncompromisingly divine. When Monophysite worthies from the Roman Empire fled orthodox persecution in the second and fifth centuries, Ethiopia received some of the most celebrated of them, and the future of the Ethiopian church as a splinter group of the Christian world became inescapable.’
Solomon, as the father of the nation, featured large for more than a thousand years. He was recognised by the Agawa Dynasty, and by the people from whom they sprang, the Awga who spoke a Cushitic language. The Amhara, speakers of the Ge’ez dialect (another exclusive cultural feature of the area) regarded the Agawa as foreign intruders. There were also rivals for the mantle of Solomon among the worshippers of Sheba and the refugee communities who espoused ‘the new Israel’, which will become pivotal to our story. In terms of the likely movement of people south it is also worth keeping an eye on the believed dates of some of these upheavals, especially in relation to seminal dates at Zimbabwe.
Solomon seemingly had material influence on the people of Ethiopia a thousand years before Christ and this influence could have provoked migrations south. Whether, indeed, his fabled union with Sheba founded an Ethiopian dynasty is a matter for speculation; it is the strength and durability of the tale that should interest us. In the same way as the description ‘King Solomon’s Mines’ could simply describe the source of his gold rather than a place he actually owned and where Sheba built him a temple, the Ethiopian legends could be describing the ancient influence of Solomon and Sheba on what was then a very primitive Ethiopia. Almost all legends are apocryphal anyway.
A later Ethiopian king, Azana, left boastful and detailed descriptions on stone stelae of the mayhem he caused: the precise numbers of his victims, the brutalities he inflicted (and occasionally his munificence) and the punitive exile of the vanquished to distant parts of the country. One little war was launched against enemies attacking and destroying Ethiopian trade caravans which, true or false, is at least evidence of trade routes north and south and the value the Ethiopians put on them.
In the early centuries of the Christian millennium, the Ethiopian kings converted to Christianity, resulting in yet more major movements of the faithful which are still reflected in Ethiopian society today. ‘To become Christian in the fourth century was to become part of the growing common culture of the Near East,’ writes Armesto, ‘to share the religion of many Greek and Indian traders in the Indian Ocean.’ To this we should add ‘old Moors’, who were observably at least as active. But this was followed by the rise of Islam and by the ninth century, about the time when even the Shona school is happy to acknowledge the arrival of northern cattle-herders, Ethiopia was a beleaguered empire surrounded by enemies other than to the south.
Yet in spite of all this human abuse Ethiopia remains hauntingly lovely and intensely religious. It lays claim to one of the oldest forms of Christianity on the planet. Admittedly, for more than a thousand years this has often been a God in hiding and most of His churches are extraordinary underground bunkers – stone temples of monumental proportions at least as impressive and similar in construction if not always in style to Great Zimbabwe’s mortar-free walls. These alone would have been enough to attract Theodore Bent and his photographer wife to Ethiopia if indeed the quest for the authors of the Zimbabwe culture had remained their Holy Grail.
At the beginning of the twentieth century very little was known of these Ethiopian monuments. Visiting them and the wild mountain territory which had offered some protection from the forces of Islam was extremely dangerous. But this was a very determined couple when it came to treading the road to Ophir. They also had a reputation to rebuild. By 1905, the disciplines of the new archaeology were firmly in place, and the Bents’ pioneering book on the Zimbabawe culture, The Ruined Cities of Mashonaland, had been derided as Romantic and unscientific by the young Turk from Oxford, David Randall-MacIver.
The Bents were termed ‘antiquarians’ by this scientific establishment. The fact that they were very widely travelled and extremely knowledgeable, and that their book and its conclusions displayed considerable scholarship, counted for nothing. This in spite of the fact that thanks to Rhodes and the Royal Geographical Society the Bents had been the first western scholars to visit Great Zimbabwe solely for the purpose of science, and as a result had made the most intriguing finds.
But literally everything they unearthed was rejected as inadmissible to the origin debate because their methods had not followed the new rules of archaeology. When, for example, they dared to suggest that Zimbabwe’s unique conical tower was probably a religious symbol because it so closely resembled other towers known to be symbols of phallic worship, it was rejected as speculative. Time has shown the Zimbabwe tower to be the most interesting geometrically. Today, such draconian rules on speculation have been considerably relaxed, perhaps because pictorial images can so readily be produced in support of speculative observations. The evidence of one’s own eyes must have some value. There is even some new evidence to give force to Bent’s theory about the Zimbabwe tower being a religious artefact. Recent excavation of a ‘workers town’ adjoining the Gîza Pyramids has revealed that mini-pyramids – stone towers – apparently of religious significance, complemented most of these workers’ compounds.
A similar case might now be made for the validity of the Bents’ comparison of the Zimbabwe tower with the tower on a coin of known Phoenician origin. This features a religious tower sited at Byblos remarkably similar in shape to the Zimbabwe tower. Close examination of this coin, which for some reason the Bents do not mention, reveals that it is located behind a wall bearing a hatched pattern like the one round the top of the Elliptical Building’s outer wall, and inside an open-roofed stone-walled monument. The raised-stud pattern round the rim of the coin is also identical to a distinctive pattern on one of the Zimbabwe birds. But this, along with all the other intriguing artefacts in the Bents’ Pandora’s box of finds was emphatically rejected. For the coin to be admissible as an indication of the date of the Zimbabwe tower it would have had to be found in the tower’s foundations when Ms Caton-Thompson dug there, and of course it was not.
Contributors to the Zimbabwe story have been plagued for a century by political rectitude of one kind or another and by these arcane disciplines, but none so mercilessly as Theodore Bent who was in fact a serious scholar. For him the rigid application of the new rules for archaeological finds amounted not just to the death of his reputation as an investigative historian, but also to his actual death. After his book was dismissed as Romantic speculation he went to Ethiopia to find physical evidence to support his theories and was there bitten by the malaria-infected mosquito that killed him.
Ethiopia is ideally placed if you are looking for stepping stones from ancient Egypt to Great Zimbabwe. The shortest crossing point on the Red Sea, Bab el Mandeb, separates Ethiopia from Yemen, the Sabaean kingdom of ancient times. Directly north of Ethiopia is the old Negro kingdom of Nubia, which adjoined Egypt and shared a cultural heritage with Egypt. To the south-east is Somalia, peopled by fierce warrior tribes who fit the descriptions of the savage Zindj and whose Indian Ocean coast hooks back to face the Hadramat region of Arabia. To the west, Uganda, and the territory which later became Rwanda, was ruled for most of the past by the tall, elitist Tutsi, a people who look like the Somalis and the Ethiopian highlanders and who once kept a slave-tribe, the Hutu. Due south is Kenya, and south-east of Kenya, Tanganyika (now joined with Zanzibar island as Tanzania), both dominated in olden times by tall war-like nomads, the ancestors of the modern Turkhana and Masai.
Unlike any of these African neighbours (with the notable exception of the old Nubians) Ethiopia has a long, classical and religious tradition which produced a monolithic stone-building culture. For the Europeans of the old world, Ethiopia was always an alluring and mysterious ‘lost civilisation’ in the heart of Africa, a cultural oasis of an ancient Christian sect led by ‘Prester John’. The rumour was that this was the last resting place of the Ark of the Covenant and it could be said that our story begins with Prester John because it was a search for him by the intrepid Portuguese mariner, Batholomew Diaz, which would produce in time the first eye-witness accounts of our lost city deep in the African hinterland.
I join the road here, too. If, as I suspect, the proto-Karanga followed a path down Africa that a millennium later became roughly the route of the Great North Road, then that was the road my family would take south from Tanganyika in 1947. But, with Mr and Mrs Bent, we need to step back a pace or two before we can join that long walk of the Karanga migration.
There were two ways to find your way to Great Zimbabwe in ancient times. You could sail south aboard one of the new Phoenician ships, then walk inland, or you could trek down Africa. It is possible, indeed likely, that both methods were used at different times. How strong is the case for the first alien influence at Great Zimbabwe having been imported by explorer-merchants from ships? The earliest indications that a voyage rather than a march might have fuelled the evolution of the Zimbabwe culture are those famous biblical references. The King James version of the Bible gives chapter and verse on King Solomon’s shopping lists to his Phoenician mariner-merchants. Top of that list is gold: ‘Now the weight of the gold that came to Solomon in one year was six hundred and three score and six talents of gold. . . . Beside [that which] chapmen and merchants bought. And all the kings of Arabia and the governors of the country bought gold and silver to Solomon . . . and King Solomon made two hundred targets [of] beaten gold; six hundred [shekels] of beaten gold went to one target.’ There are fifteen references in II Chronicles 9 alone. The most specific records that every three years ‘the servants also of Hurram, and the servants of Solomon, which brought gold from Ophir, brought almug trees and precious stones’.
There has been considerable speculation about the three years it took Hiram’s fleet to bring Solomon his gold from Ophir. One theory promotes a voyage to India, another that the Phoenician fleet took a year travelling to an east African port, a year trekking inland trading for gold and gathering, perhaps growing, sufficient food for the long return journey. Sea journeys of several years were not uncommon in those days and these maritime traders could easily have taken a year visiting the various settlements in the interior where gold, ivory and perhaps hardwoods were traded.
We know a good deal more about Solomon and Sheba than they did in Theodore Bent’s day and this new information is quite revealing if we are indeed looking for a king whose fortune depended on colonial, or at least colonial trading, connections. Solomon’s name means ‘sun’ (although in no account I have read to date has this association been mentioned). Many Zimbabwe artefacts, including the birds and the stelae, carry sun-symbol discs. The early sun-gods of Solomon’s homeland were hawk-headed and these self-same gods had responsibility for the protection of ancient mines. It surely does not go beyond the bounds of reasonable speculation to suggest that these birds (whose inscribed symbols have thus far not been translated), who were found guarding Great Zimbabwe’s most sacred stone keep, are icons of a sun-god. To my mind the only question is: a sun-god to which cult?
No one has seriously suggested that Solomon had great ambitions outside his own borders but there are a number of stories confirming his skill as a diplomat and an adept of trading partnerships. Soon after Solomon became king he made an important political marriage – thus securing future diplomatic relations – to the daughter of an Egyptian pharaoh. Her dowry is said to have included 1,000 musical instruments! But more relevant to this story, 80,000 Egyptian builders. Solomon has remained famous throughout history for his opulent palace and temple. The scriptures say he sent 10,000 workers a month to Lebanon to fell and transport over land and sea the tall cedars of Lebanon. It is this legend which so excited Carl Mauch when he found at Great Zimbabwe a wooden beam he thought was the same wood as the cedar of his pencil.
Stories as old as this must, however, be interpreted with caution. What we can reasonably conclude from the Scriptures is that Solomon was in the market for quality hardwood and that he possessed a skilled labour force that could build monumental stone temples and palaces. It is also not commonly acknowledged that Phoenician craftsmen were the architects of Solomon’s palace and temple. The temple consisted of three large rooms of richly carved cedar, cyprus and marble with a huge bronze altar and bronze columns 40 feet high.
Solomon’s abiding reputation for wisdom comes from the alleged conversation he had with God when, invited to name his heart’s desires, instead of choosing riches and power, he said ‘Give thy servant therefore an understanding heart to judge Thy people, that I may discern between good and evil.’ Pleased with this request, God apparently also endowed him with more material gains. Although Israel was at this time a pocket-kingdom of some 30,000 square miles sandwiched between Assyria and Egypt, Solomon’s much-vaunted wisdom and his ability to run the treasury attracted considerable interest, including that of his neighbour, the Queen of Sheba. By then he had already concluded a number of lucrative trading partnerships with neighbouring kings, most notably with the Phoenician King, Hiram of Tyre.
Solomon commissioned Hiram’s large fleet, or was a major investor in the expedition which sailed from Esyon-Geber or Eilat on the Red Sea to unknown Ophir. But did they really sail off ‘into the blue’ as the legend suggests? I find it hard to believe that the notoriously secretive Phoenicians would put in so huge an investment without some strong expectation of riches at the end of it.
Sheba may also have shared with Solomon some of the trade secrets of her successful entrepot kingdom when she made her fabled visit and, if one is to momentarily join the Romantic school, produced the royal house of the Ethiopians. Certainly the young Queen was attracted by Solomon’s wisdom, affluence and good looks. He was reportedly dark-haired, tanned, lean and with a gracious smile and a lively spirit. He wore elegant tunics dyed royal purple, golden collars and chains and a golden circlet inset with sea-green stones.
Sheba was duly impressed with Solomon’s palace which boasted ‘40,000 horse stalls and 1,400 chariots’, which sounds excessive but the archaeologists have in fact since unearthed some 450 horse stalls and 150 sheds for chariots at Megiddo alone. There were vineyards, gardens, pools, singers, and musicians with exotic instruments. Solomon received the young Sheba seated on an ivory throne with gold armrests and golden embroidery. She was understandably seduced, but there is considerable documentation to support the idea that Solomon won Sheba’s respect, love and an intimate partnership as much by intense, extended conversations on all manner of topics, as by his wealth. Sheba was, after all, a very wealthy young woman in her own right and it is unlikely that these two would not have talked about how it was to be made.
On this one trip she brought Solomon a tribute of ‘a hundred and twenty talents of gold [about 6 tons!], and spices in great abundance and precious stones’. One of the ancient Jewish encyclopaedias, the Kebra Negast, suggests that this really was a meeting of kindred spirits. Apparently the pair roamed Jerusalem together as she questioned Solomon and watched him at his work: ‘The Queen used to go to Solomon and return continually, and hearken unto his wisdom, and keep it in her heart. And Solomon used to go and visit her, and answer all the questions which she put to him . . . and he informed her concerning every matter that she wished to enquire about.’
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 north-east monsoon between November and May, land to reprovision and take on water, then ride the south-west 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 time 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 south-west 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 mount 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.’
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!