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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My statements regarding the long-standing relations of the Northern Semites with the peoples of Madagascar and South Africa as far as Sofala are thus fully supported by the greatest authority on the subject. But there are some minds so constituted that they seem incapable of accepting a new revelation. They can do nothing but stare super vias antiquas, and will strain every nerve to minimise the force of facts and arguments pointing at conclusions which run counter to their deep-rooted prejudices. I here reproduce the famous “Zimbabwe Zodiac” (Fig. 2.), which was found near Great Zimbabwe, and shows the twelve signs of the Zodiac carved round the rim, as described by the late Dr. Schlichter in the Geographical Journal for April, 1890. This specialist tells us that “the signs coincide in every respect with other finds which Bent and others have made in Zimbabwe. One of the pictures is an image of the sun analogous to the sun-pictures which Mauch and Bent found on the monoliths of Zimbabwe, and analogous also to finds in Asia Minor which belong to the Assyro-Babylonian period.” But a writer in the Guardian attempts to destroy the significance of this document by asserting that the Zodiac or its nomenclature is of Greek origin and consequently of no great age. Now the Hon. Emmeline M. Plunket has recently (1903) published a work on Ancient Calendars and Constellations, in which she maintains that the Babylonian Calendar, with its Zodiacal signs, dates from 6000 b.c., that is, about 8,000 years ago. It is true that this estimate is not clearly made out. But on the other hand, the reader may be assured that Miss Plunket does not hold by the “Greek” theory. Nor does F. Delitzsch, who reminds us that “when we distinguish twelve signs of the Zodiac and call them Ram, Bull, Twins, etc., in all this the Sumero-Babylonian culture is still a living influence down to the present day.”[7] Nor does Sayce, who points out that the Babylonian account of the Flood occurs in the eleventh book of the epic of Gisdhubar corresponding approximately with the eleventh sign of the Zodiac, at that time Aquarius, just as the fifth book records the death of a monstrous lion by Gisdhubar, answering to the Zodiacal Leo and so on. He further observes that “the Zodiacal signs had been marked out and named at that remote period (certainly before 2000 b.c.), when the sun was still in Taurus at the beginning of spring,”[8] and, let me add, when the Greeks had not yet been heard of, but when the great Gnomon, or Conical Tower, had possibly already been erected by the Semitic builders of Great Zimbabwe.