Myth Hunters | Episode 4: The Real King Solomon's Mines | Free Documentary History

[Music] according to the great stories of the Bible King Solomon son of David ruled Israel 3,000 years ago he was renowned for his wisdom his women and his astonishing wealth King Solomon surpassed all the kings on the earth in wealth and wisdom and when the rich powerful and exotic Queen of Sheba visited King Solomon she brought him gifts from the mystical land of ofia and she came to Jerusalem with a very great train with camels that bear spices and very much gold but where was oir where had all that gold come from did it even [Music] exist for thousands of years ancient Greeks Renaissance adventurers Victorian explorers and modern day scientists have searched for the source of Solomon's gold a mysterious place that would famously become known as King Solomon's Minds this is the story of one man who really believed he had found them and he did find something but it was not what he [Music] expected Carl Mal the explorer who would become forever linked with the discovery of King Solomon's Minds was a man of humble Origins was born in 1837 in steton a small town in Germany his father was a carpenter and later went to the Army and M had three siblings so the family was not very wealthy and maybe one could even say that they were poor but when he was a child he received a gift that changed his life forever for his 10th birthday present who received a world atlas which showed Africa as almost a total blank on the map and this really inspired Mal to become an explorer to fill in the gaps in the map of Africa at first Mark's interest had nothing to do with King Solomon he was attracted by the mystery of Africa and the opportunity it presented for an ambitious young boy Africa was a good destination for explorers because the interior of Africa was still unknown to Europeans and so there were still opportunities of heroism and Adventure as Mount Grew Older his obsession with Africa continued during this time he avidly consumed virtually every book on the geography of Africa from the 16th century onwards including the accounts in particular of the early Portuguese explorers and one story leapt from the page to catch M's eye in 1531 Vincente pagado a captain of a Portuguese Garrison on the southern coast of Africa wrote among the goldmines of the indland Plains between the Limpopo and zambisi River there is a fortress built of stones of marvelous size and there appears to be no mortar joining them he gard and his Portuguese explorers were convinced that this Fortress was the Palace of the Queen of Sheba and the gold mines were the source of King Solomon's [Music] wealth the Bible tells us that King Solomon was the son of the great King David who slew the giant Philistine Warrior Goliath how Solomon became celebrated for his wisdom his women and his fabulous wealth but the Bible also describes Solomon great meeting with the Queen of Sheba who brought him tons of gold and spices from her land she arrived at Jerusalem with a retinue of camels Laden with spices and other precious objects intended as gifts for Solomon and she gave the king 120 talant of gold and of spices very great store and precious stones there came no more such abundance of spices as these which the Queen of Sheba gave to King of them this is the story we all remember but in reality there is not a shred of evidence that Solomon or the Queen of Sheba ever existed or that any of this story was actually true as early as we can uh Trace our sources readers of the Bible have been fascinated by the question of where exactly Solomon's wealth comes from in the first century for example the Jewish historian Josephus speculated that his wealth came from India and ever since then interpreters have been struggling to piece together the clues in the Bible to figure out its exact location the Bible offers some intriguing clues about the source of Solomon's wealth it tells us for example that Solomon had to dispatch ships in order to retrieve this wealth Solomon's ships traveled to a place called ofir and also mentioned a place called tarish for the King had at Sea the Navy of tarish with the Navy of ham once in 3 years the Navy of tarish bringing in gold and silver Ivory and apes and peacocks no one knows the exact meaning of the words ofir and tarish ofir is often associated with gold kashish some scholars believe actually refers to a kind of ship meant for traveling long distances the location of these places is unknown but M had discovered an important clue Vincente pagado the Portuguese Captain who described The Fortress of marvelous size was based in sopa on the southern coast of Africa the Europeans who were looking for Solomon's wealth were not usually reading the Hebrew Bible they were usually reading the Greek or Latin translation of the Bible and in the Greek translation of the Bible the word ofir actually has an S appearing at the beginning of the word spelling Sophia so when the Portuguese arrived on the coast of Africa at a Port town called sofa they made a linguistic connection between the name of that Port town and the Greek Biblical word for ofia or Sophia believing that to be evidence that they had found the source of Solomon's well so could sopa be of fear M started digging for further evidence and again it was the Portuguese accounts that provided more clues Portuguese sailor by the name of Thomas Lopez arrived at the Port Town of sofa in southern Africa in 1502 and there he was greeted by Muslims who told him of native sources described something very curious they described how ships belonging to Solomon would arrive once every 3 years and extract from a nearby town a tremendous amount of gold and they went with the Servants of Solomon to AIA and took then 450 talant of gold which they delivered to King Solomon they had the right name sopa was AIA and they seem to have found the gold so if the Portuguese were right they may have stumbled upon one of the most amazing finds ever Mal was certain he had cracked it King Solomon's wealth was in southern Africa and he was determined to find it but he realized that he was woefully underqualified so for the next 11 years he devoted his entire life to getting ready for his Africa Expedition every day he prepared himself both mentally and physically for the day when he would realize his dream M was always good in school and he was interested in Natural Science and would have liked to go to university but his parents like the financial means to pay for his expedition he trained as a teacher and became a private tutor in Austria M must have been really determined to go to Africa in all these years he didn't have support he didn't have any money but he still continued with his plans he taught himself English French and Arabic he tried to acquire specialist knowledge through Reading specialist books and magazines like pitman's geographical news in his spare time he studied Latin medicine and astronomy he visited the botanical garden and the Natural History Museum in gas where he was working at that time as a teacher there he gained some knowledge in botany geology and natural history he built his own collections of minerals and insects in 1863 Mal was convinced he was ready so he wrote to August Peterman the editor of Germany's highly respected geographical magazine his aim was to sell himself as an Explorer worth investing in I believe intellectually and considering my modest means I have done all that could be done but the body too requires preparation for such Enterprises by walking 6 miles or more each day in every Seas season over any ground often without any food or drink till my return to the point of departure and always wearing the same warm clothes I have tried to steal my body apart from this I have not neglected gymnastics and musket in stature I'm tall and heavily built and I'm in excellent heal considering these facts I believe that I am capable of taking part in an expedition on these lines Mal's letter received an immediate reply from the Magazine's editor peterman's response was uh negative and rather discouraging he uh explained to Ma how difficult in strange such an exploration would be but he proposed that if ma should actually manage to get to Africa he would consider um publishing letters or reports despite peterman's rejection at the age of 26 after 11 years of preparation Mal was ready to go but uh Mal decided to spend a few months researching in London before he actually went to South Africa and uh by the end of that time he'd actually run out of money Mal worked as a deck hand on a steamship to fund him himself before arriving in Durban South Africa in January [Music] 1865 his quest could now [Music] begin with only the beest of Necessities a small pocket compass hunting knife blanket painting equipment and handgun ma set out to explore southern Africa in pursuit of the land of oir in June [Music] 1865 I have tried to acclimatize myself by walking diligently around the country unconcerned if I roam across unknown Countryside for 2 to 3 days without food or even if I should have an unpleasant encounter with the largest [Music] carnivores but Mal soon ran into trouble Mal's travels were not all straight forward he went through a great deal of suffering almost to the point of starvation this was the fifth day of hunger for me and it can be understood that I contemplated the future with a jaist view even small birds seemed to fly away from me while I am still miles away from them no pheasant nor Partridge was to be seen and an hourong effort to try to catch fish also failed hungry thirsty tired with almost insupportable pain in my knee I still had to cover 25 miles and bad luck would have it that I didn't get a chance for a final shot and thus did not get anything to eat in desperation M sent a messenger with a letter to August Peterman the editor of Germany's geographical magazine to support his African Expedition this time his luck was in Peterman appealed to his readers to support Mal we believed that he had to be helped he is the only able Explorer in the whole of South Africa at the moment it would appear as a patriotic and scientific duty to support herau and not leave him helpless in the far off interior pet man's appeal uh for support for ma in his magazine was successful several of his readers donated small sums as M didn't have any money himself it was really helpful for him but in comparison to other explorers it was still a very small sum however these donations did help Mal continue his exploration of Southern Africa for the next 8 [Music] years two years into his journey Mal entered the tarti region an area located on the borders of Botswana and Zimbabwe and with the help of the famous British Hunter Henry Hartley Mal made his first significant discovery [Music] on the 27th of July 1867 heartley brought me the news that when following a wounded elephant he passed several pits duck into quartz I came to a site which I recognized as a smelting place on examining some recent Stones I found [Music] gold highly pleased I ran back to the camp to impart the good news when M discovered the first gold field he was really delighted uh that he had made such a big and great uh Discovery the following day M discovered another Goldfield could these be the minds of King [Music] Solomon word of the gold mine spread like wildfire across the southern African plains prompting one of its earliest gold rushes as newspapers headlined his great discovery Germany's geographical magazine believed Mal was on to something much bigger concerning the gold Fields discovered by Ma it is not improbable that they are identical with the oia of the Bible and with the places from which Solomon obtained his wealth in [Music] Gold but if finding goldmines was encouraging for M to be really sure that he was in the land of ofir he had to find the city worthy of the great Queen of Sheba in the same year that M discovered the goldfields of tarti he began to hear rumors of an abandoned city with huge stone walls described by locals as fabulous buildings Mal was told that the city lay in the mountainous country between the two largest rivers in southern Africa the zambesi and the Lim [Music] poo in May 1871 Mal wrote confidently to his country's geographical magazine to tell them he wanted to dedicate his next expedition to the newly United German people I shall make it the highest Duty in my profession to add honor to the name of the German Nation I expect that my next Journey will offer such opportunity the discovery of the ruins of AIA would be a point which would be envied by other nations for the next 3 years M searched for the ruins he shot elephant and rabbit for food and suffered great hunger and exhaustion M tried to get to to the ruins for a long period and often failed and had to come back to the European settlements Mal survived robberies and attempted to win the trust of local tribes throughout his travels he had to form alliances with the tribal rulers he feared the native people around him he thought that uh they might even kill him and was at one time held prisoner in matab land until he came to an arrangement for his release but eventually local kuranga tribesmen brought him face to face with the Magnificent W [Music] City finally on the 5th of September 1871 I was lucky enough to be the first white man to set eyes on them the ruins represent A Mighty Fortress consisting of two parts of which one on a mountain of about 400 ft with very large Boulders is separated by a narrow Little Valley from the second which stands on a slight rise M just couldn't believe his eyes nothing like it have been seen south of the Equator and it just shouldn't have been there Mal was convinced that he had finally found the ruins of the queen of sheba's Palace but how could he be sure ma set about examining the structure of the ruins and found that the walls were built of stone without any mortar this matched exactly with Vincente bado's 16th century description of the ruins he had read as a teenager among the gold mines of the Inland Plains between the Limpopo and zambesi River there is a fortress built of stones of marvelous size and there appears to be no mortar joining them mount's Next Step was to work out who had created it he couldn't believe that such a structure could have been built by native Africans M's view was supported by the local tribesmen I have learned from the local inhabitants that they themselves have lived here for only 40 years is and that the region was quite uninhabited before that time all are absolutely convinced that white people once inhabited the region for even now they are signs of habitations and iron tools which could not have been produced by blacks so if the palace was built by white people where did they come from Mount turned to the Bible for Clues there is no description of ofir in the Bible but there is a description of the building of King Solomon's legendary [Music] Temple and the King commanded and they brought great Stones costly stones and huge stones to lay the foundation of the house as he looked at the structures that comprise the Great Zimbabwe he noticed a resemblance to the Temple of Solomon as it's described in the Bible and to other structures that archae ol ologist were only then beginning to learn about M considered it likely that the palace was built by an ancient people called the [Music] Phoenicians in the 1850s and 60s archaeologists began to excavate colonies that the Phoenicians had established throughout the Mediterranean and also sites in their homeland of Phoenicia in what is now Lebanon and this Ral to Europeans this complex vast far-reaching civilization that predated the Greeks and Romans that had spread throughout the Mediterranean and had an impact on culture reaching from the Middle East to North Africa it's really really Inspire the imagination of many Europeans who began to believe that the Phoenicians were capable of traveling great distances the Phoenicians built their structures without mortar and there was no Mort at this site but this in itself wasn't proof what else may there be to link it to the Phoenicians again the Bible offered a clue it made it clear that Cedarwood was a critical ingredient at the [Music] time and it was covered with cedar above upon the beams Cedar was a wood famously found in modern day Lebanon the obvious place to look for the wood was where it supported the stone structure M didn't really have the materials or the Manpower required for a major exploration of the site but he did take some samples of the wood I cut some splinters off the Cross Beam over the northern entrance the wood is still quite healthy of reddish color the comparison of it with the wood of my pencil shows great similarity and therefore I suppose strengthened by further hypothesis that it must be Cedarwood convinced that the cedar trees didn't exist on the lower zambesi Mal was sure that it must have been brought there by Solomon's Phoenician Builders from Lebanon as the Bible says now therefore command thou that they humi seedar out of Lebanon suddenly it all came together for M here was a city that no African could have built it was constructed by Phoenicians in the same style as King Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem the Phoenicians used Stone without mortar and brought Cedarwood from Lebanon to make the supporting beams and the local name for sop is Sophia like ofia in the Bible and to top it all Mal had also discovered the two gold mines the source of Solomon's wealth so surely this was it I believe that I do not Er When I suppose that the ruin on the mountain is an imitation of the solomonic temple on Mount Mariah ruin on the plane a copy of that Palace in which the Queen of Sheba dwelt during her visit to Solomon besides they conform best with the well-known Phoenician buildings Natives and Arabs would have built differently even the fact that I could not find a trace of inscriptions anywhere appears to me to confirm the justification of my opinion for nowhere do we read that Solomon had an inscription of any kind fixed to his Temple I believe ofia is the present sofla or Safara by which name it is known and pronounced in the interior for Mal there could be no doubt AIA was not in the Middle East it was here in southern Africa all the [Music] time Ma's longtime supporter August Peterman still waiting for further details details from Mal quickly published a brief report on his great [Music] discovery it is already known from newspaper reports that on the 5th of September 1871 K ma discovered the Magnificent ruins in the mountainous country between the Limpopo and the zambesi about 40 Mi Inland from sopa of which the old Portuguese reports tell and which were connected with King Solomon's ofia Expeditions in early [Music] times Ma's great discovery made a huge impact around the world and in particular inspired the Great British novelist H rer hagard to write his famous book King Solomon's Minds H writer Haggard's King Solomon's Minds was the most successful Adventure novel of the 19th [Music] century ha go tells the tale of one man's Quest Into the Heart of Africa to discover the legendary King Solomon's minds and he went on to tell me how he had found in the far interior a ruined city which he believed to be the oir of the Bible when suddenly he said to me lad did you ever hear of the sullon mountains up to the northwest of the mush Kumi country I told him I never had oh well he said said that is where Solomon really had his [Music] Minds overnight the book's title King Solomon's Minds a phrase no one had ever used before entered into popular Legend and that novel was widely read by people in Europe and it incited their curiosity and motivated other wouldbe explorers to travel to Africa and search of the gold and wealth that they believed they could find in Ryder Haggard became one of the richest and most successful novelists ever thanks to M's [Music] Discovery the one person who got very little out of it however was M himself when Mar came back to Germany he hoped that he would be rewarded with a position at a natural history museum but I think the lacking University degree and um maybe even his personality uh were aspects which made it difficult for him impoverished and sick Mal was forced to take work in a cement factory he suffered dreadfully from depression I he had a liver disease as a result of his African travels his body was racked with pain continually and uh as his neighbor said he was often drunk because his medicine didn't work anymore so he was drinking alcohol instead he spent his last days uh in a hotel above a railway station near stutgart sleeping on the third floor and slept in an armchair next to an open window and one night fell from the window his neighbor found him just in the early morning and brought him to the hospital in stutgart his spine was broken and both his legs were paralyzed 37-year-old Carl ma died in hospital a few days later on the 4th of April 1875 it is uncertain whether his death was accidental or [Applause] self-inflicted with his death so died his reputation his writings were largely ignored by the academic world M's discoveries went virtually unrecognized at the time they were published in a mere 52 pages in AUST peterman's journals and and if you couldn't read German you would never have noticed them and it wasn't until 1960 that his journals were actually published in full form but at least thanks to Mal King Solomon's Minds seem to have been discovered and for many years people believe that the ruin in southern Africa was the site but at the start of the 20th century even this Legacy was [Music] challenged now a new generation of explorers emerged and they were very different gone were the days of romance and biblical literalism this was a time for archaeology and science biblical archaeology really started in the mid 1800s when we had mostly uh theologians religious uh figures going out and trying to confirm people and places and events in the Bible as time went on these early geographers and theologians are replaced by professional archaeologists one of these new professionals was British born David Randall mver famous for his scientific approach to [Music] archaeology in 1905 3,000 years after King Solomon's Reign Randall mver made Seven carefully detailed examinations of Carl M of fear the first thing he did was to date the buildings by examining the pottery Unearthed in the Dig he was able to tell when they were made and Randall MAA quickly learned something revealing they are unquestionably African in every detail and belong to a period which is fixed by Foreign imports as in general medieval in other words one of the key foundations of Ms of fear theory was wrong David R miva was the first person to identify a medieval date and dating was really important because the all of the foreign Origins thesis going right back to Carl Mar and his sort of biblical uh interpretation depended on Great Zimbabwe being a lot older than it was thousand of years older the Great Zimbabwe ruins were not built by an ancient and vanished white civilization as was currently believed but were of purely African origin and that they dated from about the 14th century a second of his key findings would also be challenged Mal was convinced that the structures had been built by Phoenicians with wood and stone brought from Lebanon Randall macka assessed and dismissed his interpretations as incredulous and found no such evidence whatsoever David Gran Maca said look everything I found here is identical to local African materials remains and so on and he just said well that clearly means it must be African there is no sort of lay underneath the style of the buildings cannot be proved to ow anything to foreign influences all characteristics of Oriental and European architecture entirely absent following in Randall maa's footsteps the formidable British archaeologist Gertrude kton Thompson led the first all female excavation of the ruins in 1929 and made the next assault on M's theory of AIA g k Thompson was sent over by the British Association in order to kind of provide a final answer Kon Thompson dug deeper in scale than anybody else before her she sunk six trenches into the ground around the main buildings and excavated in areas undisturbed by previous visitors when she had finished dating the site she declared examination of all the existing evidence gathered from every quarter still can produce not one single item that is not in accordance with the claim of a medieval date if by indigenous we mean An Origin born of the country on which they stand then the ruins are in my opinion indigenous in a full sense of the term in the early days of archaeology claims by amateurs by explorers could stand for decades before somebody would actually come in and test what they had said and either prove or disprove so it was a matter of 30 or 40 years before the archaeologist came in and really started Excavating and said yes this is connected with King Solomon's minds or no it isn't and in the case of that City the answer was no it's not your claim is is [Music] wrong so everything Mal had said about the ruins was wrong even down to the piece of wood he had taken from one of the supporting beams it had not come from the cedar trees in Lebanon but was in fact a local African Sandalwood Mal's scientific techniques were much more primitive than those used today so for example to identify the wood that was used in the structures he found at the Great Zimbabwe he didn't rely on some elaborate chemical analysis instead he simply looked at the wood and compared it to the wood he was using in his own pencil and of course there was another Factor Mal was a product of the Victorian age which had very different views on black Africa ma was convinced that Great Zimbabwe must have been built by white Builders and the idea that it could have been built by an African people didn't come to his mind which goes along with the um European thinking at that time that the African indigenous population was a naturalistic uncivilized people without a history and without a civilized culture so believing that Great Zimbabwe might have been built by an African people would have meant a contradiction to this firmly established View so does all this mean that Carl Ma's Quest turned out to be worthless in a strange sort of way no because while M's conclusions were ridiculed his discovery of the ancient city in 1871 has turned out to be one of the most important archaeological finds in all of [Music] Africa known today as Great Zimbabwe or great of stones these ancient ruins have become one of Africa's most prized national monuments and a UNESCO world heritage site Great Zimbabwe is representative of African achievement brilliant African achievement in the medieval period archaeological evidence suggests that Great Zimbabwe was built between the 12th and 15th centuries by ancestors of the Shona people who had settled in the region nearly a thousand years before and who still inhabit Zimbabwe today from a peasant Village it grew into a very prosperous political and Commercial Kingdom from 1150 to 1450 with a population of more than 10,000 its development and growth was centered on agriculture mainly cattle and its massive gold and ivory trade went as far as Arabia and China they found Ming Pottery there they found Arabic Pottery there Indian beads and so on so clearly it was part of a a much larger trade system and to conjure up that kind of trade position it and to be able to build such a large site and so such a sophisticated site it must have been controlling all sorts of agricultural resources no one is certain why Great Zimbabwe went into Decline and was left abandoned in the 15th century but many suspect it was due to the collapse of trade political instability and famine now the whole world can recognize that Great Zimbabwe is a fantastic Place amazing achievement uh you know structurally it's it's an amazing a beautiful place beautifully built and so on but also it's representative of a very sophisticated African culture taking place its significance is probably you know in its short is summed up by the fact that it the name of the country derives from it there are not many countries that derive their name from an archaeological site and it's welld [Music] deserved if Carl Mal had realized this at the time of his Discovery in 1871 he really could have changed the way the world viewed African [Music] civilizations but of course there is another question does all this mean that the story of King Solomon's Minds is simply a legend with no real basis in history at all the Bible doesn't actually mention King Solomon's Minds it mentions the wealth of Solomon along with wisdom and women the three W's but it doesn't say where his wealth actually came from so it's all made up by H writer Haggard in his novel gang Solomon's mind and as archaeologists we can't be driven by a novel written in the last 100 years to to uh to dictate what we're looking for in the hundred years after M's death nothing was found to substantiate the belief that King Solomon or his great wealth ever existed but recently little by by little modern scientific archaeologists are finding some evidence and one of the most exciting discoveries of recent times was the evidence of Solomon's father's existence King David in the early 1990s 9394 there was an inscription found at a site in the North of Israel T Don it was from an ancient inscription dating to about the middle of the 9 Century BC the inscribed stone contained the letters bit David and are identical to the Hebrew and early Aramaic words for House of David and these words are believed by many archaeologists to be an authentic reference to the Bible it said that a king from the House of David had done such and such b David the House of David and that's the first mention of either David or the House of David that's ever been found [Music] if we were talking in say even the late 1980s I would have said that there is no evidence whatsoever for either David and Solomon outside the Bible when the inscription at ton was found then that put the debate to rest it was clear that David did exist and I really do think it's just a matter of time before there is something attesting to the reign of Solomon at that time may not be too far away in an arid region in modern day Jordan south of the Dead Sea archaeologists believe they may have found mines created around the time of King Solomon in 1000 BC we found hundreds of ancient mines uh we found metal production sites and we decided just based on the surface remains that we would start to do an intensive excavation at one of these sites which in Arabic means the ruins of copper assuming that King Solomon did have mines one of the things we have to ask is what kind of Mines are they are they gold mines are they copper mines I would actually argue they're more likely to be copper mines than he's making his money from the buying and selling of copper copper may not be gold but during the Bronze Age it was an essential element in the manufacturer of tools and weapons so it was incredibly valuable what we discovered was that atas there were two major centuries of copper production on an industrial scale and that was in the 10th Century BC and the 9th century BC that is the time of Solomon so some have been wondering whether we've got King Solomon's Minds here we haven't found Solomon's minds but I think our results put the issue of Solomon's minds or let's say the solomonic kingdom and its reach back on the table so far the ancient Greeks Renaissance adventurers and vict torian explorers have all tried and failed to find King Solomon's Minds now the search continues into the 21st century and maybe the archaeologists in Jordan Will discover the source of Solomon's great wealth only time will tell but of course even if they do there is so far nothing to suggest his wealth has anything to do with someone called the Queen of Sheba the evidence for her remains entirely [Music] elusive

Channel: Free Documentary - History

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Keywords: Free Documentary, Documentaries, Full Documentary, documentary - topic, documentary (tv genre), History, History Documentaries, free documentary history, myth hunters, history documentary, myths, mythical history, historical myth, religious artefacts, bbc history, strange history, alternate history

Id: x0d6xo31j5E

Length: 48min 0sec (2880 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 16 2024