Great Zimbabwe, Mashonaland, Rhodesia: An account of two years' examination work in 1902-4 on behalf of the government of RhodesiaHall, R. N. (Richard Nicklin)
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Great Zimbabwe, Mashonaland, Rhodesia: An account of two years' examination work in 1902-4 on behalf of the government of Rhodesia
Hall, R. N. (Richard Nicklin)
Great Zimbabwe (Extinct city); Zimbabwe -- Antiquities
In _The Gold of Ophir, whence Brought and by Whom_,[2] where several
chapters are devoted to this subject, I inferred, on plausible grounds,
that the Havilah of Scripture—“the whole land of Havilah where there is
gold”—was the mineralised region between the Zambesi and the Limpopo,
and that the ancient gold-workings of this region were first opened
and the associated monuments erected by the South Arabian Himyarites,
followed in the time of Solomon by the Jews and Phœnicians. I further
endeavoured to show that all these Semitic treasure-seekers reached
Havilah (the port of which was Tharshish, probably the present
Sofala) through Madagascar, where they had settlements and maintained
protracted commercial and social intercourse with the Malagasy natives;
and lastly, that the produce of the mines was by them sent down to
the coast and shipped at Tharshish for Ophir, the great Himyaritic
emporium on the south coast of Arabia, whence it was distributed over
the eastern world. It followed that the scriptural “gold of Ophir” did
not mean the gold mined at Ophir, which was not, as hitherto supposed,
an auriferous land, but a gold mart.[3] The expression meant the gold
imported by the Jews and Phœnicians from Havilah (Rhodesia), _viâ_
Tharshish, Ophir, and Ezion-geber in Idumæa, at the head of the Red Sea.
It is needless here to recapitulate in detail the arguments that I have
advanced in support of this general thesis. But I should like to point
out that if one or two of them have been invalidated by my critics,
several have been greatly strengthened by the fresh evidence that has
accumulated since the appearance of _The Gold of Ophir_.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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