400 HITTITES IN AFRICA. 



Portuguese, as exemplified in the bronzes of Benin ; but this 

 analogy does not appeal to me, as it seems to me that develop- 

 ment on the lines of decorative art such as these is what a know- 

 ledge of the negro might have led one to expect, as a possibility 

 in the past, and may lead one to foresee, as a still greater proba- 

 bility in the future. However this may be, the evidence which 

 has so far been brought forward in support of the view that the 

 buildings in Rhodesia were the work of natives seems to me to 

 be altogether too slight to support such a conclusion. 



If on the other hand we turn to the possibility of these build- 

 ings being the work of foreign intruders into South Africa, we 

 are not met on the threshold of our enquiry by any inherent 

 improbability in such a supposition, and it seems advisable to 

 consider who these intruders may have been, and at what time 

 their intrusion took place. 



The simplest method of attempting to solve these problems 

 seems to me to be that of first seeing if any direct evidence can 

 be found as to the time at which the ancient buildings in Rhodesia 

 were erected. At the outset of our enquiry we have the fact that 

 in some of the ruins trees are growing, which must have taken 

 a long time, probably centuries, to attain their present growth ; 

 and we must also consider the possibility that a considerable time 

 may have elapsed between the last occupation of the buildings 

 and the beginning of the growth of the trees. We have next to 

 consider that at the time of the earliest Portuguese visitors to 

 the country, the buildings were even then considered very old, 

 and this seems to have been the opinion of Portuguese, Arabs 

 and natives alike. There is a strong presumption, therefore, that 

 the period we are seeking cannot be found during the last eight or 

 nine hundred years, and a consideration of the history of the 

 world during the thousand years preceding this, renders it ex- 

 tremely improbable that any extensive mining could have been 

 carried on in Rhodesia during that time, so that it would seem 

 necessary to attribute to the ruins an age of at least 2,000 years; 

 in fact argument on this line would carry the date back some 

 centuries before the Christian era. But we have the possibility 

 of a more definite clue of great importance in the orientation of 

 several of the ancient buildings in Rhodesia. In these days, 

 when, as the result of centuries of accurate observation, the length 

 of the year is known to a fraction of a second, and the construc- 

 tion of the calendar presents no difficulty, we are liable to forget 

 that this has not always been the case, and that to civilized 

 peoples of an earlier day the correct determination of some 

 definite date in the year was a matter of great importance and of 

 some difficulty. It is probably for this reason that we find many 

 ancient buildings (generally temples) constructed on an astronomi- 

 cal basis, sometimes for the observation of certain fixed stars, 

 sometimes for the observation of the sun at the Equinoxes, but 

 more generally for the observation of the rising or settins" sun at 

 the solstices. This orientation we find in the temples of Egypt 

 and Greece, and even in such structures as Stonehenge and the 

 stone circles of Brittany and other places, and if the ruins of 

 Rhodesia are ancient, we should exoect to find in them some 



