The Gold of Ophir, Whence Brought and by Whom? (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: II CHAPTER II Bent's 'ancient Rhodesia'?Its Monuments And Gold Workings But with the decadence of Portuguese power in South Africa all this was forgotten, and the very existence of the mines and monuments had faded from the memory of man until they were re-discovered by Adam Renders in 1868, and in 1871 again visited, and for the first time since De Barros, described by Dr. Carl Mauch and Thomas Baines.7 But for the first thorough survey, at least, of the chief central group of buildings, ' Great Zimbabwe, ' near Victoria, we are indebted to the distinguished archaeologist, the late Theodore Bent, whose classical work, ' The Ruined Cities of Mashonaland' (London, 1892), was certainly the best and most comprehensive book of reference on the whole subject till the appearance of Messrs. Hall and Neal's sumptuous volume. Like so many of his predecessors, and, we may now add, successors, Bent was strongly inclined to ascribe the ruins to the South Arabians, and so strongly impressedwas he by their great age that he was prepared to assign them even to a pre-Sabaean epoch. ' The cumulative evidence is greatly in favour of the gold-diggers being of Arabian origin, before the Sabaeo-Himyariticperiod, in all probability' (p. 186). But it is unnecessary, and indeed impossible, to go so far back; nor would Bent have written thus had he known, as we now know, that the South Arabian rock inscriptions partly interpreted by Mordtmann, Glaser, and others, carry the Sabaean and Minaean records back thousands of years before the new era, that is into late Neolithic times. Elsewhere he speaks more cautiously, and in fact retracts somewhat from the pre-eminence of Rhodesia as the chief gold- yielding land of antiquity: ' Here, near the east coast of Africa, far nearer to Arabia than India...