The Lost City of Solomon and Sheba Read Online Free PDF Page B

circular or zigzag plan of the walls would also indicate.
    All the walls without exception, are built without mortar, of hewn granite, more or less about the size of our bricks. Best preserved of all is the outer wall of an erection of rounded forms, situated in the plain, and about 150 yards in diameter. It is at a distance of about 600 yards from the mountain, and was probably connected with it by means of great outworks, as appears to be indicated by the mounds of rubbish remaining.
    Inside, everything excepting a tower nearly 30 feet in height, and in perfect preservation, is fallen to ruins, but this at least can be made out; that the narrow passageways are disposed in the form of a labyrinth.
    The tower consists of similar blocks of hewn granite, and is cylindrical to a height of 10 feet, then upwards to the top conical in form. At the foot its diameter is 15 feet, at the top 8 feet.
    It stands between the outer wall and another close to and parallel with it. This entrance has, up to the height of a man, four double layers of quite black stone, alternating with double tiers of granite. The outer walls show an attempt at ornamenting the granite – it represents a double line of zigzags between horizontal bands. The ornament is 20 feet from the ground, and is employed upon a third part of the south wall on each side of the tower and only on the inside.
    Remembering Merensky’s notes, Mauch then looked for ‘inscriptions’, finding none, a problem which has bothered origin theorists ever since. He did, however, unearth a soapstone beam protruding from a wall, a soapstone dish lying underneath a large walled-up boulder close to the Eastern Enclosure and, near the Elliptical Building, an iron object which ‘was a complete mystery to me, but it proves most clearly that a civilised nation must once have lived here’. He sketched this object – it is an iron ‘gong’ of which several others would be found at Great Zimbabwe. Mauch’s critics have, of course, derided this ‘civilised nation’ conclusion but others have shown that the gongs were most likely imported objects, perhaps trade goods. Others very like them have been found in various parts of Africa.
    For Mauch, his most exciting find came on his last day when he revealed the collapsed wooden lintels of the doorways of the Elliptical Building, noting that the wood had not been eaten by insects, was reddish in colour and slightly scented. It was similar to the cedar wood of his pencil. Mauch instantly embroidered a whole theory of Solomon and Sheba around this wood, for which he has been much ridiculed; indeed, it can be said that it was what Mauch made of this wood that has resulted in all his theories about the ruins being scorned as romantic nonsense. Nonetheless, discoveries since have made many of Mauch’s observations worth reviewing.
    â€˜It can be taken as fact that the wood which we obtained actually is cedar-wood and from this that it cannot come from anywhere else but the Lebanon,’ Mauch affirmed. ‘Furthermore only the Phoenicians could have brought it here; further Solomon used a lot of cedar-wood for the building of the temple and his palaces; further, including here the visit of the Queen of Sheba and, considering Zimbabwe or Zimbaoe, or Simbaoe written in Arabic (of Hebrew I understand nothing), one gets as a result that the great woman who built the
rondeau
could have been none other than the Queen of Sheba.’
    Obviously these connections are very tenuous. As Mauch’s critics have pointed out, for Solomon to have brought cedar-wood to Zimbabwe would have been Biblical coals to Newcastle. Mauch’s theory also suffered another mauling when it was demonstrated that an indigenous Zimbabwe tree
spirostachys africana
has all the properties he describes.
    Back in the 1880s, however, Mauch’s reports set many imaginations alight, not least that of Cecil John Rhodes. What Rhodes wanted