HITTITES IN AFRICA. 401 



evidences of orientation, and as a matter of fact I think we do 

 find it. The importance of orientation, of course, is due to the 

 fact that the orientation of a building fixes its date in conse- 

 quence of the chang-es brought about by the Precession of the 

 Equinoxes and the secular diminution of the obHquity of the 

 ecliptic, in the points where, at any particular place, the heavenly 

 bodies appear to rise, culminate and set. When these considera- 

 tions are applied to the ancient ruins in Rhodesia, we have been 

 told that they indicate dates for the construction of these build- 

 ings which fall in the second millennium B.C., and it is interesting 

 to note that at that time gold seems to have been comparatively 

 plentiful in the ancient world. Of course, owing to the slowness 

 of the change in the obliquity of the ecliptic, any date derived 

 from a consideration of the rising or setting sun at the solstices 

 (and it is on this that the orientation of the ruins in Rhodesia are 

 generally based) can onlv be roughly approximate, but within 

 certain definite limits the date obtained can be certainly relied 

 on. With regard to the ruins in Rhodesia, an isolated case of 

 orientation might be due to coincidence, in some cases there may 

 be uncertainty as to the date obtained owing to uncertainty as to 

 the point from which observations had been made, but owing to 

 the number of cases of orientation noted, the evidence in its cumu- 

 lative effect appears to me to be convincing. 



These points which I have already touched on are only some 

 )i those which have impressed me, and there are many others 

 which I will not have time to discuss ; but these, and indeed those 

 also of which I have spoken, have already been more ably dealt 

 with by Mr. J. Theodore Bent, Mr. R. N. Hall and others, with 

 whose conclusions, up to a certain point, I generally aeree. There 

 is, for instance, the interesting point of the preesnce in the 

 neighbourhood of the ruins of plants not native to the country, 

 and the important point of the distribution of the ruins throughout 

 the country, and the question of the purpose for which each 

 building may have been erected. 



To summarize the conclusions which may be drawn from the 

 evidence to be found in Rhodesia itself, it seems to me that we 

 may fairly conclude that, about 3,000 to 4,000 years ao-o, Rhodesia 

 was occupied by a people, possessed of a certain civilization, who 

 came to the country for the purpose of exploiting its e-old mines, 

 and who broueht with them miners experienced in mining mineral 

 lodes. We find that these people built towns in suitable localities 

 and erected lines of forts to protect their trade routes. It is 

 evident also that they possessed some administrative ability and 

 capacity for organization. 



We now come to the question : Who were the civilized peonies 

 of the second Millennium B.C., and from which of them could 

 have come the ancient miners of Rhodesia. Only a little time ago 

 we should have had to confess that the only civilized peoples of 

 that time of whom we had any real knowledge were the peoples 

 of Egypt and Babylonia, and in neither of these countries does it 

 seem probable that we shall be able to find the original home of 

 the ancient settlers in Rhodesia. 



The consideration of Babylonia in this connection may be 



