BOOKS.

THE RUINS OF MASHONALAND.*

ASIA has never been surveyed by archwologists, and they may find ruins there much more wonderful than any yet described in any other quarter of the world ; but among known ruins we can remember none more interesting than those which Mr. Bent in this book has so vividly described. About two hundred miles in a direct line from the Indian Ocean, in the country

between the Zambesi and the Limpopo, along the line of the Sabi River, exist a series of ruins of a gigantic kind, obviously erected by a race of fairly high civilisation, and as obviously intended to protect them when compelling the natives of the country to search for and extract gold. The ruins are so old that the very tradition of their origin has been lost ; yet they are well preserved, the huge structures having all been built "dry," that is, without mortar, though their builders knew its use, and being, therefore, free from the vegetable growths which, in the course of ages, destroy masonry. Mr. Bent, who was sent out by three Societies to investigate on the spot, found it not difficult to clear away the jungle in the enclosures, his black labourers working with little hatchets as skilfully and perseveringly as Europeans, and compre- hending the object sought so fully that they destroyed nothing they found. Mr. Bent encamped with his wife and an assistant for two months in the greatest of the ruins, the Great Zimbabwe, as it is called—the name means simply "the great kraal "—and gradually the character of the ancient structures clearly revealed itself to him. Below the hill a town had stood with an enclosure within it, a circular building of stone that had served as temple and as place of defence :—

"What appeared at first sight to be a true circle eventually proved elliptical—a form of temple found at Marib, the ancient Saba and capital of the SabEean kingdom in Arabia, and at the Castle of Nakab al Hajar, also in that country. Its greatest length is 280 ft. ; the wall at its highest point is 35 ft. above the ground, and 15 ft. at the lowest ; its greatest base thickness is 16 ft. 2 in., and its thinnest point is about 5 ft. In the structure of the wall one very noticeable feature is that the portion to the south-east is very much better built, and is both thicker and higher : here the courses are marvellously true, as if built with a levelling line, and the stones, of granite hammered into shape, are exactly the same size, whereas on the north-west side and in some of the interior walls, which are marked in a lighter colour on the plan, the courses begin to get slightly irregular, and the stones of unequal size, suggesting almost a different period of workman- ship; but then there is no point where the good definitely ends or the bad begins, except at a short gap on the northern side, where the good wall would seem to have been continued more in a northerly direction, and the inferior wall to have been brought round to meet it. There are three entrances to this circular building. The principal one, only 3 ft. wide, faces the hill fortress and the north. It has an odd curvature in it, constructed evidently true north, whereas all the other entrances are straight. Below this entrance runs a very substantial substructure wall, and the little space immediately inside it was covered with a thick cement, made out of powdered granite, out of which steps had been formed leading down to the various passages which converge here from the centre of the building. The presence of this concrete in use for flooring and steps in buildings constructed without mortar is interesting, showing that dry building was used not from necessity but from choice."

• The Ruined Cities of Mashonatand. By 3. T. Bent. London ; Longmans and Co.

The stones are bricks of granite hammered into shape, the facings are all uniform, and the building, which must have stood more than three thousand years, is, as a specimen of the -drybuilder's art, "without a parallel." Within it are two round towers built with wonderful care, obviously phallic in intention, and precisely similar to those which the Phcenicians erected in Byblos—one is pictured on a coin still extant—and, indeed, everywhere within the range of their wide'dominion :—

"Similar work is also found in the round temples of the Cabin, at Hadjar Kern in Malta, and the construction of these buildings bears a remarkable resemblance to that of those at Zimbabwe, and the round towers, or nuraghs, found in Sardinia may possibly be of similar significance MM. Perrot and Chipiez, in their History of Art in Sardinia,' speak of these nuraghs as forts or temples, around which the primitive inhabitants of the island once lived. They are 'truncated cones, built with stone blocks of different sizes, narrowing to the top. The stones are unhewn as a rule and laid on without mortar.' Here too we have a parallel for our monoliths, menhirs of unhewn stone, and also for the phalli, specimens of which are found carved on stone (p. 57, figs. 49 and 50), and here too the intricate plan of the fortresses suggests at once a parallel to those at Zimbabwe ; hence it would appear that the same influence was at work in Sardinia as in South Africa."

Above the series of ruins, which almost fill the valley, in the strongest position on the nearest hill, stood a fortress, one wall of which is 30 ft. high and 13 ft. thick, on the summit or thinnest part :—

" The labyrinthine nature of the buildings now before us baffles description. In one place is a narrow sloping gully, 4 ft. across, ascending between two bculders, and protected, for no conceivable reason, by six alternate buttresses and a wall at the upper end, forming a zigzag passage narrowed in one place to 10 in. Walls of huge size OA off separate chambers. In all directions every- thing is tortuous ; every inch of ground is protected with but- tresses and traverses. Here too, as in the large circular building below, all the entrances are rounded off, and I imagine that here we have quite the oldest portion of the ruins, built at a time when defence was the main object. When they were able to do so with safety, they next constructed the circular temple below, and as time went on they erected the more carelessly put together buildings around, which I have described. The south-western end of this line of ruins was obviously a temple ; it has been lately used as a cattle pen by the chief, but the soil has not been disturbed. On removing the soil we came across a level cement floor, supported on an elaborate system of under-walls filled up with large stones on which the cement floor rested, as was the case in the raised platform in the circular temple below. In the centre stood the altar, an angular structure of small granite blocks, which fell to pieces a short time after exposure to the air : when we re- moved the soil which had buried this altar, around it. we found the phalli, the birds or soapstone pillars, and fragments of soapstone bowls, which I shall subsequently describe more in detail."

The object of these structures is perfectly clear. Their builders knew and worked the neighbouring gold-mines which are now attracting Englishmen to Mashonaland, and they either dreaded attack from abroad—that is, incursions from hostile tribes—or insurrections among their workmen, who must have been slaves, captured on the spot, and who, if the builders were Phcenicians, were probably treated with the savage cruelty which was the black spot in the energetic and far-sighted Phcenician character.

But who were the builders of Zimbabwe ? All circumstan- tial evidence seems to point to Phcenicians, who knew and kept all the secrets of the Indian Ocean, whose commerce stretched to South Africa, and who unquestionably sought gold and silver everywhere with the zeal, the cruelty, and the success of the Spaniards in South America. The buildings are Phoenician, the monuments with conventional vultures carved above them are Phcenician, all the religious emblems discovered are Phcenician, identical with others found in Cyprus. That, however, is not precisely Mr. Bent's conclusion. He writes without any of the customary cock.

sureness of archeologists, and is most careful to show that we can only approximate to certainty; but he inclines strongly to the view that the ruins are still older, that Mashonaland was the treasure-house whence, before Tyre had become magnificent, the Arabs drew the gold with which they originally supplied the Phcenicians and Egyptians, and which the most early authorities describe as almost inexhaustible.

Seven centuries before Solomon, a mighty kingdom existed on the coast of Arabia, known as the land of Punt, which was indubitably rich in gold ; and as gold does not exist in any part of Arabia, it must have been obtained from abroad, and where so easily as in Mashonaland, just opposite Arabia? That is, in fact, in Mr. Bent's judgment, as yet the full extent of our information. He says :—

" As to the vexed question of the land of Ophir, I do not feel that

it is necessary to go into the arguments for and against here. Masho- naland may have been the land of Ophir or it may not ; it may have been the land of Punt or it may not ; Ophir and Punt may be identical, and both situated here, or they may be both elsewhere. There is not enough evidence, as far as I can see, to build up any theory on these points which will satisfy the more critical inves- tigation to which subjects of this kind are submitted in the pre- sent day. All that we can satisfactorily establish is that from this country the ancient Arabians got a great deal of gold ; but as gold was in common use in prehistoric times, and lavishly used many centuries before our era, there is no doubt that the supply must have been enormous, and must have been obtained from more places than one. 'Tyre heaped up silver as the dust, and fine gold as the mire of the streets,' Zechariah tells us (ix. 3), and the subject could be flooded with evidence from sculptural and classical sources ; and though the output from the old workings in Mashonaland is seen to have been immense, yet it can hardly have supplied the demand that antiquity made upon it. The study of Arabian and Phcenician enterprise outside the Red Sea is only now in its infancy—we have only as yet enough evidence to prove its extent, and that the ruins in Mashonaland owe their origin to it."

We cannot presume to argue with Mr. Bent on his own sub- ject; yet we would suggest one thought for his consideration

which his own book, with its careful plates and plans, has excited in our minds. Would not an Arab kingdom possessed of the gold-bearing region of Mashonaland have been too strong for the extremity of fear which the ruins everywhere suggest ? The early Arabs were bold sailors, they could have gone to Mashonaland in thousands, and they could hardly have been defeated by any native tribes. Is it not more probable—we offer Mr. Bent the conjecture only for what it is worth—that they obtained the gold which they undoubtedly possessed by peaceful barter, or by settlement among unwarlike aborigines, and that the Phcenicians, having discovered the source of the gold, took the mines both from them and the aborigines, and, being in

incessant fear of attack from Arab settlers heading their own enslaved workmen in revolt, constructed these marvellous

defences, and the ruins all along the Sabi by which they conveyed their gains to the coast, and to the ships which bore them to the north, where Solomon, as lord of Tadmor, once found them a depot, and claimed the heavy toll on everything passing between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean, which gave him his enduring repute as the richest potentate in the world ? We have little evidence that the Sabcean worship or the worship of Punt was akin to that of Tyre, while we know absolutely that the worship maintained in Zim- babwe was. And all the structures, with their needless perfec- tion of detailed defences, are precisely such as a small body of fighting mariners, possessed of superior knowledge and deter- mined to rule in order to work their gold-mines, would have erected, and, indeed, did on a smaller scale erect in many of their commercial colonies. The total absence of any cemetery, which justly amazes Mr. Bent, would be quite natural if the ruling caste in Zimbabwe were very few, and either embalmed or burned their dead. The bodies of dead slaves would be thrown away to rot. We shall doubtless, as the white population in Mashonaland thickens, get much more information ; and till

that is obtained, it is best to retain the judgment in suspense; but we cannot yet give up the theory that the Phcenicians were the builders of the ruins in Mashonaland. Why should

the Arabs, who never lost sight of the African coast, and who never were weak for battle, if they had known the secret of the gold-mines, have ever ceased from their attempts to work them ? The Phcenician theory explains so much that is obscure in the history of the ancient world, and especially the wealth of Solomon, who cannot have traded for himself, or have accumulated his wealth or gained his ascendency over the Phcenicians, except as temporary master of the only route which connected their Eastern and their Western commerce. As we have said, we shall get more knowledge as the country fills up ; and meanwhile we are indebted to Mr. Bent for a charming and unpretentious book, which, with its careful drawings, enables us to realise fully what it was he found, and what are the chances that we shall yet find more. Those chances are considerable, for there are other ruins not yet surveyed, and the drybnilders understood the secret of defying the jungle, which in that region ought to eat up every abandoned structure, but leaves these nnmortared walls of granite bricks as solid after three, or it may be four, thousand years, as it leaves the huge boulders of rock which in the neighbourhood of Zimbabwe

strew the slopes. The on./ real danger is lest the white settlers now swarming in should use all rains they find as

quarries, and we suppose Mr. Cecil Rhodes and his Company will have authority suffieient to prevent that. Meanwhile, everything discoverable should be photographed at once with the greatest care, a precaution by which the French have pre- served much knowledge of the almost equally wonderful ruins in Cambodia