Ancie7it Mariners 63 



buildings and their methods of mummification we know quite 

 definitely that the people of Madagascar and South East Africa 

 did receive this alien culture, most probably from Phoenician 

 sailors (see map A), between the tenth and the eighth centuries 

 B.C. It is probable that this intercourse between the shores of 

 Southern Arabia and Rhodesia was still taking place at the time 

 of the " Periplus." We knoAv that it was in progress in the 

 fifteenth century A.D., for Vasco da Gama found in Mozambique 

 Arab ships laden with gold, silver and pearls. 



The old culture which was planted in these regions nearly 

 thirty centuries ago was thus kept alive right up till the coming 

 of the Portugese. Even if the great building at Zimbabwe was 

 erected at the time of Vasco da Gama, it was not inspired by 

 negro invention, but was merely the expression of alien ideas and 

 practices which had been operating in Mashonaland for more 

 than twenty centuries. 



The mention of silver raises an important problem, for it is 

 naturally to be assumed that the metal came from Mashonaland. 



Many writers, from the time of Heeren onwards, have dis- 

 cussed the problem of the source of the vast supply of silver that 

 King Solomon appears to have had at his command, so that he 

 "made silver to be in Jerusalem as stones" (I. Kings X, 27). 

 No doubt most of it came from Asia Minor and Spain, perhaps 

 also from the Caucasus and Persia, or not impossibly even from 

 Turkestan or the Altai, for the abundance of silver in Persia in 

 the early times of its monarchy suggests that the latter sources of 

 supply were being tapped then and possibly during the preceding 

 centuries also. 



But in the Old Testament we are told that Solomon " made 

 a navy of Tarshish at Eziongeber, which is beside Eloth, on the 

 shore of the Red Sea, in the land of Edom. Hiram sent in the 

 navy his servants, shipmen who had knowledge of the sea, with 

 the servants of Solomon. And they came to Ophir and fetched 

 from thence gold four hundred and twenty talents, and brought 

 it to King Solomon" (I. Kings IX, 28). "For the king's ships 



