The Lost City of Solomon and Sheba (31 page)

The poignant thesis of the film was that here was a cheerful, happy, independent race who lived with nature, valued it and had determined to stay that way. The truth of the matter was that if you put out enough trade goods and hung around long enough you would make contact in the end. There are no tribes hiding from man in the Matto Grosso today, although Adrian and his associates did live to see the creation of a huge Indian sanctuary now protecting some of those who took the bait.

There are certainly no tribes hiding from man in Mashonaland, presumably because those ancient Moorish traders described by Cosmas learned the same lesson. The proto-Karanga or the San (if, indeed, they were the people who picked up the Arab barter goods) needed salt and iron for weapons. Swapping such valuable commodities for useless gold ingots would have been irresistible.

Cosmas's description of the initiation of the trade process via barter is fortunately quite detailed and for me, a reporter, detail has always proved the most reliable guide to the authenticity of an account. For example, barter, rather than trade via a currency, seems to have been the favoured exchange of the Zimbabwe culture throughout the long centuries of its tenure. Certainly no evidence of a mutually acceptable currency, with the possible exception of some cowrie shells, has ever come to light.

There are several other details in the Cosmas translation, which can be read for clues. The Ethiopian (or traders in partnership with Ethiopians) expeditions were not random explorations of territory where the natives were still ‘wild', but dedicated sorties every two years to barter with people the traders knew had gold. They must have been there before to know that there was gold on offer and they must have known the kind of goods the natives would swap it for.

The use of oxen feels like a system worked out from experience. Beef would have been a very succulent food to a Boskop people used only to tough game meat. As we shall see in a moment, it is also thought that the first Karanga migrants to Mashonaland did not possess cattle so they too would have liked tender meat. The ergonomics of a system whereby you use oxen to pack in your heavy trade goods like iron and bags of salt, butcher the oxen to enhance the display and only have to carry home bags of gold nuggets, is sophisticated. The traders even established a rough rate of exchange – one, two or three ingots for meat, salt or iron, says Cosmas.

The reference to a hedge of thorns could be another pointer. They are used protectively all over east and south-central Africa. The cattle-dependent people who live on the fringes of the Tsavo East National Park in Kenya build thorn
bomas
for their cattle, strong enough to be lion-proof. These hedges are invariably made of an acacia with a long white thorn that I have seen used for drying beef to ‘biltong'. ‘Butcher-bird' shrikes hang grasshoppers on these aptly named ‘wait-a-minute' thorns until they are ripe for eating.

Then there is the reference to ‘iron' that the natives crave as much as the salt and tender meat. This surely indicates that the natives have no iron of their own, or are dealing with superior ironsmiths; that is, that they are Stone Age people.

Reading between Cosmas's lines also reveals a rough clue to the date of these expeditions. Although they are undertaken to a schedule – every two years – they do not appear to be dealing with settled communities. The proto-Karanga would have lived in settlements of sorts from the time of their arrival. Cosmas's description more closely suggests contact with the tough little San hunter-bowmen of the Stone and early Iron Age who lived nomadic lives, surviving mostly in primitive bush bivouacs. The Boers have many a salutary tale to tell of how fierce the Hottentots and bushmen could be; indeed, in the early days in the Cape they hunted them as vermin. You certainly needed caution to approach them.

The expeditions were apparently dedicated to the acquisition of gold. There is no mention in Cosmas's account of ivory, precious stones, slaves or even almug trees. Most significantly the gold came in ingots and this detail really does suggest that Aksum's expeditions took place long before any form of deep mining and gold processing had been implemented. Remember also Dr Sauer's description of how gold ingots of an ounce in weight, along with ancient Egyptian beads, could be garnered from the floors of
zimbabwes
simply by washing them. On the down side, the land of Sasov rings no bells with anyone so there is no way of positively identifying the country described in the Ethiopian account. But we do have some more clues.

Other than the badlands of Ethiopia, no significant source of gold exists in Arabia or north-east Africa and it is unlikely that the Ethiopians would have taken two years to come and go from their own up-country gold fields. Mashonaland is indubitably the nearest large goldfield. If we assume that expeditions mounted every two years equated to expeditions lasting two years then Mashonaland is about the right distance away whether you choose to do the journey on foot, by sea, or a combination of both. It took David Livingstone years to travel across half of Africa on foot and by boat.

Perhaps most intriguingly, Cosmas's account goes some way, as no other account ever has, to eliminating the only other prime candidate for the actual builders of the Zimbabwe culture being entirely alien, in this case Indians. Because throughout the ages India has always produced gold, and Indians have an observable passion for the precious metal, there has always been a potent school of thought that India was the gold-producing nation that sustained the dreams of avarice of Solomon, Sheba and Hiram – especially as the Phoenicians are known to have sailed as far as India.

The subject has been widely broadcast in a documentary by Anthony Irving, that he called
Behind the African Mask
. His thesis is based on the work of the Slovak-American historian, Dr Cyril Hromik, who in addition to exploring the Indian connection has compiled an impressive set of statistics on the extent of the Zimbabwe culture. Some 18,000
zimbabwes
or stone ruins have now been plotted in southern-central Africa. One conurbation covers 36 square kilometres. There are 100 kilometres of ancient canals, terracing covering 5,000 square kilometres, 2,000 stone pits and 2,000 known ancient mines. It is the largest collection of ancient ruins in Africa outside Egypt. And it is Dr Hromik's passionate conviction that he has the physical evidence to prove that this was all built by Indians who came here for the gold, beginning so far back in historical times that any trade with Solomon is of comparatively recent origin. Moreover, this was not a creative partnership between Indians and the Bantu (the Bantu were not in southern Africa then), but initiated by ancient Indians who sailed here in catamarans, the earliest form of ocean-going boat.

All manner of ethnographic and physical evidence has been collected by the industrious Dr Hromik to support this radical idea, and is somewhat impressive, especially when supported by the pictures in Anthony Irving's film. Dr Hromik starts with a good number of linguistic connections. In southern India 2,000 years ago, for example, the word that Buddhist monks used for gold was
shona
. The same root word for the precious metal exists in a number of other Indian languages. Perhaps more intriguing is his observation that in Indian Dravidian weddings the bride, called
bali
, was ritually mutilated by having a joint of her finger removed. Some Khosa tribes in South Africa used to employ a marriage priest known as Mama Bali to carry out the same operation. The word ‘Bantu' is echoed in the Tamil language as ‘brother' or ‘kinsman' and there are Indian words for cotton-cloth and medicine very like Bantu words. ‘Manica', as in Manicaland where some of the most impressive
zimbabwes
are located, is an Indian word meaning ‘precious stones'. Without questioning any of the above we should not forget (as Dr Hromik has the grace to remind his audience in Irving's documentary) that India has 400 languages, including 94 forms of Hindi.

More focused is the work done by Oxford and Princeton University which shows a connection between the blood groups of the Quena (bushmen) and Bantu people and Indians, which does not show in West Africans.

Very old Indian maps show the Cape province separated from the African continent, and label it ‘Diab', an Indian word for ‘two waters'. The boats which plied these two waters were, according to Dr Hromik, the ancient marine-going ‘catamarans', a word which in India means ‘tied logs'.

But Dr Hromik is at his best when he turns to the religions, monuments and icons of India, going back 6,000 years to when gold mining and processing started in India and introduced a love of the precious metal which has been sustained since. Indians still dress themselves and their temples in as much gold as they can afford to lay their hands on. Some 450 tons of it are used cosmetically every year. In the old days it was crushed with stone rollers in rock mortars, which can still be found today. Mine props have been found that carbon-date back to the time of Christ. Two hundred and fifty years before the birth of Christ the Indian King, Ashoka, is recorded on a rock stela as having issued instructions to his missionaries to go out into the world, spread the Buddhist religion – and find gold. In the gold-bearing districts of India, stone-workers to this day cut symmetrical tiles of granite, as in Mashonaland, and build them into temples and village houses.

Ancient temples, of course, are India's pride and joy but Dr Hromik draws us away from the magnificent structures to a variety of lesser-known shrines with distinct echoes in Africa. He visits Indian temples hand-carved into the bedrock, as in Ethiopia. On some sites upwards of 200,000 tons of stones have been sculptured by the monks to create a monolithic temple complex. In the mountains are more simple places of worship: ‘Sky' cells without roofs for prayer, rings of rocks with great religious significance, lingams (rounded rocks very like miniature Zimbabwe towers), dolmans (three-cornered shrines containing round religious stones), Yoni stones representing Shiva's female aspect which have holes bored through the middle and are very like the round stone ‘drums' and ‘spinning whorls' the Bents found at Great Zimbabwe, and game boards using stone pieces like the Bents discovered both at Great Zimbabwe and in Ethiopia. Recent research into San agriculture has recorded that they actually weighted their digging sticks with stones shaped just like this.

Dr Hromik makes much of the alignment of significant rocks, paths, arches in caves, and other geographical features that he suggests were used to predict the solstices and act as celestial clocks. The alignment of these features and of some of the
zimbabwes
imply to him that they were Indian holy places, as all Indian temples have an alignment which is religiously meaningful. But so many complex measurements on so many different locations are a little speculative for my taste. The one thing that you can virtually guarantee in the granite kopje country of southern Africa is that rocks of interesting shape will line up with a hill behind which the sun will obligingly rise or set. Theodore Bent's cartographer, R.M.W. Swan, speculated about this to his cost. Dr Hromik also traces stone-walled paths in Africa leading to stone circles where he has, more convincingly, found anachronistic round stones echoing significant religious markers in many primitive Indian temples.

For me this all rather peters out somewhat when Dr Hromik, like so many historians, antiquarians and archaeologists before him, tries to fit all this fascinating collection into a single homogeneous theory. His theory requires a very substantial
Indian
labour force to cut and raise all that stone. Why have they left so few incontrovertible signs of their extended presence? Indians revere monuments, especially religious monuments, and their country boasts some of the most magnificent in the world. The
zimbabwes
, even the grand
zimbabwes
, are very plain by comparison and show few of the features, not least the very intricate wall carving, of Indian monuments. So far as I am aware no statues or definable icons of the ubiquitous Indian deities, like Shiva, have been found. Given that the grandest of the African monuments, Great Zimbabwe, does feature very clear-cut icons – the Zimbabwe birds – this absence is surely strange.

Dr Hromik says the Indians lost interest in southern African gold when it became more difficult to produce using the techniques available at the time. They abandoned the trade to the Arabs now firmly settling on the east coast. Why was this, if it was still a viable trade for Arabs, and India's appetite for gold has remained consistent? Dr Hromik's general thesis that there could have been an ancient Indian trading presence in southern Africa from very ancient times is an acceptable one. If, as he says, it was linked with the San then he may have made an invaluable contribution to the enigma of the bodies in the Mapungubwe graves and even to the idea, so far unresolved, that the great southern
zimbabwes
and the Zimbabwe culture as a whole owes more to various San–alien partnerships than has previously been acknowledged. Moreover, Dr Hromik is not alone in suspecting a significant Indian contribution to the evolution of the gold trade in southern Africa that was after all the springboard for the Zimbabwe culture.

The Scottish academic Professor Gayre devoted a good part of his book,
The Origin of the Zimbabwean Civilisation
(Galaxie Press, 1972), to proving how the monsoon wind systems would have carried ancient ships from the Middle East to India from November to May, then reversed to allow return trips, resulting in landfalls in the region of Madagascar, from May to November. Theoretically these ancient mariners could have done the round trip in a year but that would have allowed little time for trade so they probably took longer. Professor Gayre suggests that for the navies of Tyre, Israel and Saba the route was first southwards on the north-east monsoon, taking in Punt until they reached Madagascar for refitting and provisioning ahead of the long journey across the Indian ocean. They may even have had to spend a season there growing a food crop. The following year they would take the south-west monsoon to India, a voyage of three months, followed by a trading period. In the third year they crossed back across the Indian Ocean on the north-east monsoon, refitted and provisioned again and caught the next south-west monsoon home through the Gulf of Aqaba. These winds are predictably regular and this neatly fits the biblical accounts of three-year gold-collecting voyages for Solomon.