Free The Lost City of Solomon and Sheba by Robin Brown-Lowe Page A

the Karanga were, at least originally, innocently ignorant of the international value of gold even if it does open the door to a currently politically unacceptable suggestion that ancient mining, certainly deep mining, was imported and directed by a foreign trading cartel using local, and not necessarily Bantu, labour. In the same way, perhaps, as these traders were ignorant of the economics and skills of cattle-raising.
    The fact remains that it is pointless seeking information about ancient gold production from the Shona. It occurs, therefore, that the riddle might only be solved from the customer’s end. More simply, thousands of tons of Shona gold went somewhere. Who at the time of Solomon, or before, had demonstrated a conspicuous consumption of gold? Solomon and Sheba both only ruled very small kingdoms in the North African hegemony.
    My first lead came from an unexpected (and surely coincidental) source. Rhodes’ bird, the stone statue he worshipped and used so successfully to raise money for the occupation of ‘Ophir’, thereafter Rhodesia, wears a pendant necklace. At least two of the other birds have them too. No explanation has ever been given for this singular piece of decoration. I have long doubted the prevailing notion that no cryptograms or meaningful inscriptions have ever been found at Great Zimbabwe; I simply cannot conceive of a piece of art that is totally absent of meaning and there is a great deal of art in the various
zimbabwes
. I prefer the idea that we have simply not learned to read the cryptograms that are there, particularly the meaning of the extensive and varied decorative additions to the Zimbabwe birds.
    So over the last three years I have spent what might be termed ‘quality’ time with Rhodes’ bird at his house, Groote Schuur, in Cape Town, which is now the official residence of the State President. I had always assumed that his original bird, along with half a dozen others which had ended up in South African museums, had been returned to Zimbabwe in the 1980s. When I called the Curator of Groote Schuur, Alta Kriel, to make arrangements for the necklace to be professionally photographed, however, she told me this fascinating story – Rhodes’ bird had not gone home. There
are
copies at Groote Schuur, but the black stone bird which sits on Rhodes’ wardrobe in a corner of his bedroom is the original, thanks to the wife of former President Vorster. Apparently Mrs Vorster took an unusual interest in the house, which was not shared by other State Presidents; Nelson Mandela is said to have moved out of the old place, concerned at the damage his lively grandchildren might do. But Mrs Vorster recognised that they were treasures and when South Africa was minded to send the Zimbabwe birds home she had Rhodes’ will re-examined by lawyers. As she had suspected, Rhodes had stipulated that his private collection should not be broken up or disseminated, so this seminal bird, although indubitably stolen for Rhodes by the hunter-prospector Willie Posselt, still sits in his bedroom, unknown to the general public, to this day. In African terms this is quite the equal of the saga of the Elgin Marbles.
    But to return to the necklace that Rhodes’ bird – and others collected by Theodore Bent at Great Zimbabwe – wears. . . .
    In the course of my research into the ‘ancient Moors’ who for as long as records exist have dominated the trade between the Middle East and East Africa, I came across an intriguing name for the most ancient Egyptian word for gold, a name used several thousand years before the birth of Christ and a millennium before Solomon and Sheba.
    That word is
nub
.
Nub
was produced from mines in the deserts of ancient Egypt but they were small in number and never prolific. Seemingly when the demand for gold exceeded the Egyptians’ own supply, they took over the kingdom of Nubia – the ‘kingdom of gold’ – to the