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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Mention should perhaps here be made of Professor Gustav Oppert’s Tharshish and Ophir (Berlin, 1903), in which the learned author claims to offer “a final solution” of the problem. But he leaves the question exactly as it stood over three decades ago, is still lost in the tangle of time-worn etymologies, and takes no notice at all of the revelations made by Messrs. Hall and Neal in the Ancient Ruins. The vast body of archæological evidence derived in recent years from the Rhodesian remains is thus completely ignored, and fresh light excluded from the only source whence it might have been drawn. On the other hand, Professor Oppert, rather than admit a Tharshish in the Indian Ocean, suggests that the Tharshish of Kings and Chronicles either means “the sea,” possibly the origin of the Greek word [Greek: thalatta] itself, or else was by the authors of those books foisted into the texts instead of Ophir. Hence where Tharshish occurs as the objective of Solomon’s gold expeditions we are to read Ophir, although the original Ophir is allowed to have been where I place it on the south coast of Arabia. Now the Greek word [Greek: thalatta] is Homeric, and when the Homeric poems were first sung there were no Greeks in the Indian Ocean. Hence, even if the wild etymology could be admitted, it would not serve, and this essay cannot be accepted as “a final solution of the old controversy.”[11] It is pleasant to be able to add that my solution has been accepted as final by some of Professor Oppert’s fellow-countrymen—the editor of the Coloniale Zeitung amongst others—who declares that “the problem seems now really solved.”[12]