33-1 ORIGIN OF ZIMliABWE-CULTURE. 



of reduction plant and cyanide process, and modern times treat- 

 ment. But the Globe and Phoenix is only (me of hundreds of 

 properties which have been, or still are being operated upon, on 

 which are extensive ]M'e-historic wcjrkings. 



It is toying with the problem to suggest, as does the author 

 of ■' AledicCval Rhodesia," that this inconceivably vast amount of 

 gold was mined for and exported between the eleventh and 

 seventeenth centuries of this era. Historic record of these gold 

 regions, commencing with Massoude, Alburuni, and VA Ward; 

 in the tenth century, Edrisi, Ibn Sayd, El llakoni and Abd-el- 

 Rassai in the twelfth century, all describe our natives as bar- 

 barians, and as ignorant of the real value of gold, to which they 

 preferred iron and brass, as obtaining what gold dust thev traded 

 by washing sand in river-beds, which gold we are told they 

 bartered for brass, glass beads, and cocoa-nuts. 



Be it also remembered, that the liartering with natives for 

 gold dust obtained by washing river sand, as recorded bv Arabian, 

 Persian, and Portuguese historians of this country, commencing 

 at the end of the ninth century and continuing imtil the eighteenth 

 century, be the amount great or small — and the historians w^ere 

 disgusted with its paltry amount — does not explain or account for 

 a single pennyweight or grain of the many sccm'cs of millions of 

 potmds" value of gold once extracted from the lock mines of 

 Rhodesia. Moreover, the medi?eval chroniclers have not a single 

 word to say of the rock mines, save that they were " ancient," 

 " most ancient," that they were so old that they w^ere the mines 

 from which the gold of Solomon was obtained, that in their time 

 they riever yielded a single grain of gold, and that the natives 

 possessed nc shred of tradition as to who had worked in them. 



But there is another important aspect of our pre-historic 

 rock-mining remaining to be considered. The mining papers, on 

 technical mining grounds, emphatically dissented from Dr. 

 ATaciver's hazarded conjecture as to the period of Rhodesia's 

 pre-historic gold output. But on other grounds, in which finance 

 journals also joined issue with Dr. ^Taciver, was the objection 

 raised. When was all this vast amount of gold bullion placed on 

 the gold market of the world? Not, they contended, within the 

 last 1.500 or 2,000 years. T am not now speaking of gold from 

 surface scratchings or river-bed sand of the decadent period. 

 Gold was not then a world-wide currency as it is to-day. It 

 could only have been so placed, without disturbing standard 

 values, had its imi:)ort into Asia covered centuries of time. This 

 is exactly paralleled by our local evidences. The histories of 

 ancient We.stern Asia are only now being opened ; most of them 

 are still closed volumes. What they may have to say as to 

 Rhodesia's ancient gold output cannot at present be conjectured. 

 But just as Professor Sayce. Professor Ramsay, and Dr. Keane. 

 three of the greatest scholars of Biblical antiquities, have in- 

 formed me that Arab and Indian records yet unexamined may, 

 and probably will, throw considerable additional light on the 



