Note 1 — Chapter VII · THE GEOGRAPHY AND ETHNOLOGY OF THE MASHONALAND RUINS

From an Egyptian source also certain knowledge may be gained, though the Egyptians themselves would appear never to have carried their commerce outside the Straits of Bab-el-Mandeb, but to have met at the port of Adule, at the south of the Red Sea, Arabian merchants who did so. Now in the reign of Queen Hatasou, of the eighteenth dynasty, in the seventeenth century B.C., the land of Punt was conquered by an Egyptian expedition, and on the monuments of Deir-el-Bahari the conquered people of Punt are depicted as sending tribute, which included ebony, ostrich feathers, leopard skins, giraffes, lions, living leopards, cynocephalous apes, elephants’ tusks, and ingots of gold, all products of South-eastern Africa. When compared with the Biblical account of King Solomon’s expedition about seven centuries later, the productions of both show a very remarkable analogy. Gold was the most important of the objects brought, gold in ingots such as the mould would produce which we found at Zimbabwe, and the gold of Arabia in antiquity was proverbial. During the height of the prosperity of Rome gold was sent thither by the Arabians, as we have seen from Aristeas. Horace bears testimony to this in his line, ‘Thesauris Arabum et divitis Indiæ.’ Agatharcides, in B.C. 120, speaks in glowing terms of the wealth of the Sabæans; allusions to it are common in the Bible, and the connection between Phœnicia and Arabia is borne testimony to by Ezekiel in his denunciation of Tyre: ‘Arabia and all the princes of Kedar, they occupied with thee in lambs, and rams, and goats: in these were they thy merchants. The merchants of Sheba and Raamah, they were thy merchants: they occupied in thy fairs with chief of all spices, and with all precious stones, and gold.’1 Probably community of origin, the inherent commercial instinct common to the Semitic races, brought about this intimate relationship between Phœnicia and Sabæa. Another testimony to the wealth of gold in Arabia is given us by the Assyrian inscriptions, on which Tiglath Pileser II., B.C. 733, is mentioned as receiving tribute from that country in gold, silver, and much incense; and Sargon in his annals also mentions the tribute of Shamsi, Queen of Arabia, as paid in gold and spices. There was little, if any, gold to be found in Arabia itself; on this point all travellers who have penetrated this country are agreed. Here, near the east coast of Africa, far nearer to Arabia than India and China and other places, which they were accustomed to visit, not only is there evidence of the extensive production of gold, but also evidence of a cult known to Arabia and Phœnicia alike, temples built on accurate mathematical principles, containing kindred objects of art, methods of producing gold known to have been employed in the ancient world, and evidence of a vast population devoted to the mining of gold.