The Lost City of Solomon and Sheba Read Online Free PDF

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