No one, of course, is prepared to say exactly where the kingdom of Punt was; the consensus of opinion is that it was Yemen, in the south of Arabia. But suppose it to be there, or suppose it to be on the coast of Africa, opposite Arabia, or even suppose it to be Zimbabwe itself, the question is the same: where did they get the large supply of gold from, which they poured into Egypt and the then known world? In Mashonaland we seem to have a direct answer to this question. It would seem to be evident that a prehistoric race built the ruins in this country, a race like the mythical Pelasgi who inhabited the shores of Greece and Asia Minor, a race like the mythical inhabitants of Great Britain and France who built Stonehenge and Carnac, a race which continued in possession down to the earliest dawnings of history, which provided gold for the merchants of Phœnicia and Arabia, and which eventually became influenced by and perhaps absorbed in the more powerful and wealthier organisations of the Semite. CHAPTER VII THE GEOGRAPHY AND ETHNOLOGY OF THE MASHONALAND RUINS The ancient geography of the east coast of Africa is a subject fraught with difficulties on all sides. To begin with, our authorities are not only meagre, but they are men who had no practical knowledge of the subject, and who knew next to nothing of the vast extent of commercial operations which were going on outside the limits of the Red Sea. The written accounts come to us from either an Alexandrian or Roman source, whereas the practical knowledge possessed by the Arabs themselves of these outer waters is lost to us for ever. It was probably the monopolising policy of the Semitic nations which induced them to conceal from other countries the whereabouts of their commercial relations, which on the one hand extended outside the pillars of Hercules to the Canaries and Great Britain, and on the other hand outside the Straits of Bab-el-Mandeb to India, China, and the east coast of Africa. Of these two directions the voyage to Great Britain was undoubtedly the most adventurous, the navigation of the Indian Ocean with a knowledge of the monsoons, which the Arabian who lived on it must have had from time immemorial, presenting far less difficulty. Hippalus has the credit of introducing the monsoons to Western civilisation, but surely a seafaring race like the Arabians, who lived on the spot, must have known all about them long before his day; and just as they were reticent on the subject of their voyages, so were they reticent on the subject of the localities from which their merchandise came. The knowledge given us by Marinus of Tyre, by the anonymous author of the ‘Periplus of the Red Sea,’ by Ptolemy, by Pliny, and others, was obviously not the knowledge possessed by the traders of the world, for they do not even attempt to elucidate the question of where the precious commodities came from which they enumerate.