Читать книгу Great Zimbabwe, Mashonaland, Rhodesia. An account of two years' examination work in 1902-4 on behalf of the government of Rhodesia онлайн

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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.