In Search of King Solomon's Mines
An inky hand-drawn map was hanging on the back wall of Ali Baba’s tourist emporium, lost in the maze of Jerusalem’s Old City. Little more than a sketch, and smudged by a clumsy hand, the map showed a river and mountains, a desert, a cave, and what looked like a trail between them. At the end of the trail was an oversized ‘X’. ‘Is it a treasure map?’ Ali Baba, an old pot-bellied dog of a man, glanced up from his newspaper. The sketch, he said, showed the way to the fabled gold mines of ‘Suleiman’: King Solomon’s mines.
After an hour of negotiation, I slid a thick wad of Israeli shekels across the counter and left with the map. Anyone else may have scoffed at the object, or laughed at my gullibility. After all, Jerusalem’s Old City is cluttered with Holy Land bric-a-brac (I’ve been offered ‘splinters’ from the Cross there before, and even what a salesman claimed were Christ’s thumb bones). I knew from the start that Ali Baba’s map was suspect merchandise, for it had no place names or co-ordinates. But to me it symbolised a family obsession.
In the 1920s my grandfather, Sirdar Ikbal Ali Shah, an Afghan traveller and scholar, searched for King Solomon’s mines in southern Arabia. He felt certain that Solomon had acquired his gold in what is now Yemen; but he had to cut his expedition short after being accused of spying. Thirty years later, my father carried on the search, scouring the Red Sea coast of Sudan. He found no gold either, but did come across a great labyrinth of what seemed to be ancient mine shafts. There was no carbon on the tunnel walls, a point which confused him, as burning torches would have been needed to illuminate the galleries. When he raised the matter with his Sudanese guide, the man replied that the answer was obvious: the mines were worked, he said, by Solomon’s army of jinns. As supernatural beings, they had no need for light.
Shortly before his death five years ago, my father cautioned me not to bother searching for Solomon’s mines – declaring it to be a waste of time and money. I had never given much thought to continuing the family tradition, but Ali Baba’s map changed all that.
I spent almost two years doing research, turning to texts such as the Septuagint, the oldest known version of the Old Testament. It describes the magnificent temple that Solomon constructed in Jerusalem, near to where the Dome of the Rock now stands. The building’s interior was overlaid with the purest gold – supposedly brought from the mysterious land of ‘Ophir’. The Bible implies that it was an emporium of exotic merchandise, brimming with peacocks and frankincense, ivory, apes, silver, and gold.
From the start, I realised that Ophir was the buzz-word on which to concentrate, if I was ever to have a hope of discovering the source of Solomon’s wealth. Scholars and adventurers have searched high and low for Ophir for almost three thousand years. Ptolemy said it lay near the Straits of Malacca, and Christopher Columbus was sure he had found it in modern-day Haiti, while Sir Walter Raleigh thought it was hidden in the jungles of Suriname. Others have said it was in India and Madagascar, China and even in Peru. But at no time was the search for Ophir so great as in the 1880s. The gold and diamond bonanza in southern Africa, and the discovery of the ‘Great Zimbabwe’ ruins made the Victorians certain that the Ophir mystery had at last been solved. The young writer, Henry Rider Haggard capitalised on the hysteria, with his rattling novel King Solomon’s Mines, which first appeared in 1885.
As my research progressed, I became sure that Ptolemy, Columbus, Raleigh and Rider Haggard – not to mention my own father and grandfather – were all looking in the wrong place. They should to have been searching in Ethiopia.
We know that the Israelites gained their knowledge of mining and working gold from the Egyptians, during their slavery under the Pharaohs; we know, too, that the Egyptians mined their gold in Nubia, near Ethiopia’s western border (‘Nub’ actually meant ‘gold’ in ancient Egyptian). The Imperial family of Ethiopia claims descendancy from the child born to King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. But, most significant of all, Ethiopia has an extraordinary abundance of pure gold which – unlike other parts of Africa – is close to the surface and can be easily mined.
So I packed a Bible, some old clothes, hiking boots, and Ali Baba’s map; I bought myself a ‘Gold Bug’ metal detector, and a cut-price ticket to Addis Ababa. As the plane landed at the Ethiopian capital, I was overcome with fear. I sensed my father and grandfather peering down at me, shaking their heads in disappointment.
Sitting comfortably at home in London it was easy to talk about searching for King Solomon’s mines. The task at hand was made extra difficult: a foreigner travelling in Ethiopia with a metal detector and gold mining manuals is immediately suspected of being a spy. I had to keep the real reasons for my journey a secret. Then, as I wondered if I would be beaten like my ancestors, I met a young taxi driver called Samson.
Samson had worked as a miner in the illegal gold mines of southern Ethiopia; he spoke several tribal languages, and had studied the country’s history secretly by candlelight during the oppressive Derge regime. He took one look at Ali Baba’s map and cackled with laughter. It was rubbish, he said. Impressed by his candidness, I hired him on the spot.
I had heard that an important manuscript was preserved at a monastery in the extreme north of the country. My informant said that the text – known as the Kebra Negast (which translates as ‘The Glory of Kings’) – contained clues to the whereabouts of the mines. So we travelled northward, through the Highlands, and over the Simien Mountains, to a cliff face called Debra Damo. The monastery, which is perched at the top of a precipice, is home to three hundred male priests. No women or female creatures of any kind are permitted to ascend. Once at the base of the cliff, we deliberated how we could scale it. As we stood there, gazing up, a plaited leather rope was lowered down. I wrapped it around my waist, tied it in a reef knot and, as if by magic, I was pulled upwards.
An elderly monk led us through dark cloisters, thick with the pungent smell of incense. He swept a scarlet cloth away from a lectern, revealing a very large book: the Kebra Negast. Handwritten in ge’ez, the ancient language of Ethiopia, it recounts in detail the story of Solomon and Sheba. The monk translated some of the text in a whisper. I asked him if it gave the exact location of Solomon’s gold mines. He narrowed his eyes, and barked at Samson ferociously in Amharic. ‘What’s he saying?’ Samson replied: ‘He says that the book does have the answers, but we’re not to reveal them to foreigners like you, or else you’ll steal all the gold for yourself!’
We negotiated the cliff face once again, and beat a hasty retreat. Samson suggested we head to the south, where he’d mined gold for eight years. The journey took many days, as we travelled through some of the most dramatic landscape on the African continent. There were great expanses of farmland, where the wind rustled through the maize, endless forests, and rivers seething from heavy rains. In the West, our impressions of Ethiopia have been moulded by television images of drought and starvation, yet much of the country is lush, and astonishing in its beauty. Poverty is endemic, but the illegal gold mines near the small town of Shakiso offer anyone a chance of escape.
Nothing could have prepared me for the mines. They were like a scene from a Hollywood epic of the Old Testament: hundreds of men, women and children drenched in mud, digging the ground, many just with their hands. They had excavated a massive crater the size of a football pitch. At the bottom of the pit was the yellow sandy silt, which Samson told me contained the gold dust. The silt was scooped onto rounded wooden pans and hurled to the surface in a relay.
The mine is one of many to have sprouted up in southern Ethiopia over the last fifty years. The alluvial seam probably wasn’t worked in ancient times, as it would have been depleted long ago. But what was so interesting was that the mining techniques in use there were virtually identical to those devised five millennia ago by the Egyptians. Solomon’s slave labour force mined tons of gold in the same way – using wooden trays, sluices and panning pools. The big difference was that the people I saw mining near Shakiso were not slaves, rather they were working for themselves – goaded on by greed.
Life was cheap there, especially for the fraternity of young miners, many of whom worked in tunnels, digging down to the seam. In the monsoon, when the ground is softened by rains, fatalities are common. The tunnels collapse, burying brave men alive. The risks may explain the miners’ lifestyle. In the makeshift village adjacent to the pit they spent their money as fast as they earned it. All kinds of illicit services were available in the dark grass-roofed shacks – gut-rot araki, gambling and prostitution galore. I was impressed that Samson could ever have broken free from such a destructive existence. He told me that one morning he glanced into a sliver of broken mirror and saw not himself, but the Devil. He fled to Addis Ababa to begin a new life.
Eventually we left the mine and travelled on westward, following another lead. In the 1920s an eccentric Englishman – called Frank Hayter – claimed to have found a cave on a remote mountain, near to the border with Sudan. In the cave, he said, he came upon a cache of gold and precious stones. He thought the find was somehow connected to King Solomon’s mines.
Once in western Ethiopia we hired a herd of savage mules. They resented having to work, and bit anyone who got near them. They bucked, too, tossing both Samson and me onto the ground. We made the long trek to the mountain, through forests and stretches of deep adhesive mud. It rained for six days without stopping for a moment. The search for Frank Hayter’s cave was indescribably uncomfortable. I kept the muleteers going with handfuls of monosodium glutimate powder. (Travels in Peru taught me always to carry a supply of powder, for use when morale is low).
We scoured the mountain for three days, but the only cave we came to ended after a few feet in a natural stone wall. If the cave was indeed there it eluded us, yet I felt certain that we were close to where Solomon got the gold for his temple.
By the time we finally reached the main road, morale was very low, made worse by mule bites and the constant downpour. Samson and I hitch-hiked towards the capital. We stopped for the night in the small town of Nejo and put up at the only hotel which wasn’t a brothel. Its Ethiopian owner, Berehane, overheard us talking of gold and Solomon’s mines. It turned out that his grandfather was an Italian prospector, called Antillo Zappa. I knew from my research that Zappa had been a great friend of Frank Hayter, and had mined gold nearby.
Next morning Berehane led us out of the town and across open fields. There, on an exposed hillside we came to a series of pits. They had evidently once been much larger, filled in over the centuries by natural erosion. Berehane said that local people often found shards of pottery, and that his grandfather believed that the pits were very ancient indeed. Without mounting a full scale archaeological dig it would be impossible to say whether the pits near Nejo were some of King Solomon’s mines. But, given the location and abundance of pure gold in the area, I think it’s a strong possibility.
As we left Nejo and drove eastward towards Addis Ababa, I smiled to myself. Perhaps at last, I pondered, I could now draw my family’s obsession with Solomon’s mines to an end.
(C) Tahir Shah, 2002
Ends
After an hour of negotiation, I slid a thick wad of Israeli shekels across the counter and left with the map. Anyone else may have scoffed at the object, or laughed at my gullibility. After all, Jerusalem’s Old City is cluttered with Holy Land bric-a-brac (I’ve been offered ‘splinters’ from the Cross there before, and even what a salesman claimed were Christ’s thumb bones). I knew from the start that Ali Baba’s map was suspect merchandise, for it had no place names or co-ordinates. But to me it symbolised a family obsession.
In the 1920s my grandfather, Sirdar Ikbal Ali Shah, an Afghan traveller and scholar, searched for King Solomon’s mines in southern Arabia. He felt certain that Solomon had acquired his gold in what is now Yemen; but he had to cut his expedition short after being accused of spying. Thirty years later, my father carried on the search, scouring the Red Sea coast of Sudan. He found no gold either, but did come across a great labyrinth of what seemed to be ancient mine shafts. There was no carbon on the tunnel walls, a point which confused him, as burning torches would have been needed to illuminate the galleries. When he raised the matter with his Sudanese guide, the man replied that the answer was obvious: the mines were worked, he said, by Solomon’s army of jinns. As supernatural beings, they had no need for light.
Shortly before his death five years ago, my father cautioned me not to bother searching for Solomon’s mines – declaring it to be a waste of time and money. I had never given much thought to continuing the family tradition, but Ali Baba’s map changed all that.
I spent almost two years doing research, turning to texts such as the Septuagint, the oldest known version of the Old Testament. It describes the magnificent temple that Solomon constructed in Jerusalem, near to where the Dome of the Rock now stands. The building’s interior was overlaid with the purest gold – supposedly brought from the mysterious land of ‘Ophir’. The Bible implies that it was an emporium of exotic merchandise, brimming with peacocks and frankincense, ivory, apes, silver, and gold.
From the start, I realised that Ophir was the buzz-word on which to concentrate, if I was ever to have a hope of discovering the source of Solomon’s wealth. Scholars and adventurers have searched high and low for Ophir for almost three thousand years. Ptolemy said it lay near the Straits of Malacca, and Christopher Columbus was sure he had found it in modern-day Haiti, while Sir Walter Raleigh thought it was hidden in the jungles of Suriname. Others have said it was in India and Madagascar, China and even in Peru. But at no time was the search for Ophir so great as in the 1880s. The gold and diamond bonanza in southern Africa, and the discovery of the ‘Great Zimbabwe’ ruins made the Victorians certain that the Ophir mystery had at last been solved. The young writer, Henry Rider Haggard capitalised on the hysteria, with his rattling novel King Solomon’s Mines, which first appeared in 1885.
As my research progressed, I became sure that Ptolemy, Columbus, Raleigh and Rider Haggard – not to mention my own father and grandfather – were all looking in the wrong place. They should to have been searching in Ethiopia.
We know that the Israelites gained their knowledge of mining and working gold from the Egyptians, during their slavery under the Pharaohs; we know, too, that the Egyptians mined their gold in Nubia, near Ethiopia’s western border (‘Nub’ actually meant ‘gold’ in ancient Egyptian). The Imperial family of Ethiopia claims descendancy from the child born to King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. But, most significant of all, Ethiopia has an extraordinary abundance of pure gold which – unlike other parts of Africa – is close to the surface and can be easily mined.
So I packed a Bible, some old clothes, hiking boots, and Ali Baba’s map; I bought myself a ‘Gold Bug’ metal detector, and a cut-price ticket to Addis Ababa. As the plane landed at the Ethiopian capital, I was overcome with fear. I sensed my father and grandfather peering down at me, shaking their heads in disappointment.
Sitting comfortably at home in London it was easy to talk about searching for King Solomon’s mines. The task at hand was made extra difficult: a foreigner travelling in Ethiopia with a metal detector and gold mining manuals is immediately suspected of being a spy. I had to keep the real reasons for my journey a secret. Then, as I wondered if I would be beaten like my ancestors, I met a young taxi driver called Samson.
Samson had worked as a miner in the illegal gold mines of southern Ethiopia; he spoke several tribal languages, and had studied the country’s history secretly by candlelight during the oppressive Derge regime. He took one look at Ali Baba’s map and cackled with laughter. It was rubbish, he said. Impressed by his candidness, I hired him on the spot.
I had heard that an important manuscript was preserved at a monastery in the extreme north of the country. My informant said that the text – known as the Kebra Negast (which translates as ‘The Glory of Kings’) – contained clues to the whereabouts of the mines. So we travelled northward, through the Highlands, and over the Simien Mountains, to a cliff face called Debra Damo. The monastery, which is perched at the top of a precipice, is home to three hundred male priests. No women or female creatures of any kind are permitted to ascend. Once at the base of the cliff, we deliberated how we could scale it. As we stood there, gazing up, a plaited leather rope was lowered down. I wrapped it around my waist, tied it in a reef knot and, as if by magic, I was pulled upwards.
An elderly monk led us through dark cloisters, thick with the pungent smell of incense. He swept a scarlet cloth away from a lectern, revealing a very large book: the Kebra Negast. Handwritten in ge’ez, the ancient language of Ethiopia, it recounts in detail the story of Solomon and Sheba. The monk translated some of the text in a whisper. I asked him if it gave the exact location of Solomon’s gold mines. He narrowed his eyes, and barked at Samson ferociously in Amharic. ‘What’s he saying?’ Samson replied: ‘He says that the book does have the answers, but we’re not to reveal them to foreigners like you, or else you’ll steal all the gold for yourself!’
We negotiated the cliff face once again, and beat a hasty retreat. Samson suggested we head to the south, where he’d mined gold for eight years. The journey took many days, as we travelled through some of the most dramatic landscape on the African continent. There were great expanses of farmland, where the wind rustled through the maize, endless forests, and rivers seething from heavy rains. In the West, our impressions of Ethiopia have been moulded by television images of drought and starvation, yet much of the country is lush, and astonishing in its beauty. Poverty is endemic, but the illegal gold mines near the small town of Shakiso offer anyone a chance of escape.
Nothing could have prepared me for the mines. They were like a scene from a Hollywood epic of the Old Testament: hundreds of men, women and children drenched in mud, digging the ground, many just with their hands. They had excavated a massive crater the size of a football pitch. At the bottom of the pit was the yellow sandy silt, which Samson told me contained the gold dust. The silt was scooped onto rounded wooden pans and hurled to the surface in a relay.
The mine is one of many to have sprouted up in southern Ethiopia over the last fifty years. The alluvial seam probably wasn’t worked in ancient times, as it would have been depleted long ago. But what was so interesting was that the mining techniques in use there were virtually identical to those devised five millennia ago by the Egyptians. Solomon’s slave labour force mined tons of gold in the same way – using wooden trays, sluices and panning pools. The big difference was that the people I saw mining near Shakiso were not slaves, rather they were working for themselves – goaded on by greed.
Life was cheap there, especially for the fraternity of young miners, many of whom worked in tunnels, digging down to the seam. In the monsoon, when the ground is softened by rains, fatalities are common. The tunnels collapse, burying brave men alive. The risks may explain the miners’ lifestyle. In the makeshift village adjacent to the pit they spent their money as fast as they earned it. All kinds of illicit services were available in the dark grass-roofed shacks – gut-rot araki, gambling and prostitution galore. I was impressed that Samson could ever have broken free from such a destructive existence. He told me that one morning he glanced into a sliver of broken mirror and saw not himself, but the Devil. He fled to Addis Ababa to begin a new life.
Eventually we left the mine and travelled on westward, following another lead. In the 1920s an eccentric Englishman – called Frank Hayter – claimed to have found a cave on a remote mountain, near to the border with Sudan. In the cave, he said, he came upon a cache of gold and precious stones. He thought the find was somehow connected to King Solomon’s mines.
Once in western Ethiopia we hired a herd of savage mules. They resented having to work, and bit anyone who got near them. They bucked, too, tossing both Samson and me onto the ground. We made the long trek to the mountain, through forests and stretches of deep adhesive mud. It rained for six days without stopping for a moment. The search for Frank Hayter’s cave was indescribably uncomfortable. I kept the muleteers going with handfuls of monosodium glutimate powder. (Travels in Peru taught me always to carry a supply of powder, for use when morale is low).
We scoured the mountain for three days, but the only cave we came to ended after a few feet in a natural stone wall. If the cave was indeed there it eluded us, yet I felt certain that we were close to where Solomon got the gold for his temple.
By the time we finally reached the main road, morale was very low, made worse by mule bites and the constant downpour. Samson and I hitch-hiked towards the capital. We stopped for the night in the small town of Nejo and put up at the only hotel which wasn’t a brothel. Its Ethiopian owner, Berehane, overheard us talking of gold and Solomon’s mines. It turned out that his grandfather was an Italian prospector, called Antillo Zappa. I knew from my research that Zappa had been a great friend of Frank Hayter, and had mined gold nearby.
Next morning Berehane led us out of the town and across open fields. There, on an exposed hillside we came to a series of pits. They had evidently once been much larger, filled in over the centuries by natural erosion. Berehane said that local people often found shards of pottery, and that his grandfather believed that the pits were very ancient indeed. Without mounting a full scale archaeological dig it would be impossible to say whether the pits near Nejo were some of King Solomon’s mines. But, given the location and abundance of pure gold in the area, I think it’s a strong possibility.
As we left Nejo and drove eastward towards Addis Ababa, I smiled to myself. Perhaps at last, I pondered, I could now draw my family’s obsession with Solomon’s mines to an end.
(C) Tahir Shah, 2002
Ends
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