By COLIN CAMPBELL
THE Queen of Sheba is described in the first Book of Kings, Chapter X, as having visited King Solomon in Jerusalem ''with camels bearing spices, and very much gold, and precious stones.'' She tested the wise king with ''hard questions,'' evidently got the right answers, and then departed as mysteriously as she had arrived.
But did she really exist? The question has been argued for years. Many scholars and archeologists have assumed that the biblical land of Sheba was in southwestern Arabia, where the ancient Greeks placed the Sabaeans and where some noble ruins testify to the inhabitants' former glory. So perhaps, since her country existed, the biblical Queen of Sheba existed.
One flaw in this hypothesis has been that Solomon ruled Israel in the 10th century B.C., three centuries earlier than the oldest known remains of Sheba's highest civilization.
But now an archeologist at the University of Pennylvania, James A. Sauer, who has headed an archeological project in the area of ancient Sheba for the past five years, argues that Sheba is older than some scholars have believed.
Dr. Sauer's hypothesis, stated in a recent paper on the project, is based partly on an excavation in a dry valley called Wadi al-Jubah, about 25 miles south of the remains of Sheba's capital at Marib, in the eastern region of present-day Yemen.
The cut was made in a likely-looking mound called Hajar at-Tamrah, the Mound of the Date Palm, and near its bottom archeologists found broken pottery and a piece of timber that radiocarbon tests indicated was from the 13th century B.C. In such tests traces of carbon 14, a natural radioactive isotope of carbon, are used to determine the age of fossil and archeological remains.
At another, larger mound, Hajar ar-Rayhani, American excavators have turned up pottery, ash and evidence of a copper foundry dating to the 7th century B.C., and the diggers still have several yards and several centuries to go before they reach the oldest layers of the mound.
Although such findings are still just hints, Dr. Sauer believes that further excavations will eventually provide evidence for those scholars who have assumed that Sheba was a considerable trading nation by the time of Solomon, and was thus capable of sending a monarch to pay a call on another rich monarch whose capital lay 1,400 miles to the north.
''These findings are very preliminary,'' Dr. Sauer said recently as he stood in his darkened office at the University of Pennsylvania Museum in Philadelphia. A satellite photograph projected on the wall beside him showed the Arabian Peninsula, a red and yellow block surrounded by bright blue seas. ''But they fit in with recent excavations in Saudi Arabia, where some very early finds have also turned up, also older than the 10th century B.C., and I think they demolish the idea that South Arabian civilization is too young to have sent a queen to Jerusalem.''
Although archeological excavations since the 1920's have convinced some specialists that southern Arabian civilization dates to the 10th or 11th century B.C., part of the evidence for this chronology comes from excavations in what is now the country of Southern Yemen rather than from the area around Marib, Sheba's capital. In ancient times there were several kingdoms in southern Arabia, including Hadhramaut, Main and Qataban as well as Sheba.
In Sheba, however, a great stone dam near Marib, an elegant temple to the local moon god, bronze and albaster statues and other signs of wealth and civilization are all considerably younger than Solomon's time. Riddle of Greek Alphabet
One other factor that has tended to cast doubt on the idea that Solomon and the Queen of Sheba actually met has been the argument by the Belgian scholar Jacqueline Pirenne that the many inscriptions from the ancient kingdoms of southern Arabia were based on the Greek alphabet, and that the area's high civilization, heavily influenced by the Greeks, probably dated back no further than about the 5th century B.C.
This thesis, which has been advanced since the mid-1950's, has been rejected by most American linguists and archeologists. The Americans say that the alphabets of southern Arabia derived, not from the Greek alphabet, but from northern Semitic alphabets such as the Phonecian, from which the Greek alphabet was also derived. But the Pirenne hypothesis has helped keep the matter of South Arabian chronology somewhat doubtful.
Commenting on Dr. Sauer's archeological work in general, Hershel Shanks, editor of Biblical Archeology magazine, said: ''He's very good on chronology. If he says it's 10th century or 13th century, it probably is.''
From Washington, Dr. Gus W. Van Beek, curator of anthropology at the Smithsonian Institution, said Dr. Sauer's project in Wadi al-Jubah was potentially important. Dr. Van Beek also believes in the plausibility of a Queen of Sheba visiting Solomon, although her visit would have been for trade and economic reasons, the normal modern explanation, rather than to test Solomon's wisdom.
Dr. van Beek cautioned, however, that carbon 14 dates could be misleading, and that further samples needed to be taken. Dr. Sauer agrees, and has pointed out that the piece of wood from Wadi al-Jubah that the carbon 14 test dated in the 13th century B.C. could already have been a century or more old when it was put to use in that settlement, and thus much older than the pottery and other signs of human culture found in the same layer. Civil War Hampers Research
Dr. Van Beek's own archeological research in southern Arabia makes him think that high civilization in the area dates to perhaps the 10th or 11th century B.C., when it was imported from the Tigris-Euphrates Valley and the eastern Mediterranean coast, but not as far back as the 13th century.
Dr. Van Beek was a member of a major expedition in southern Arabia in the early 1950's that was organized by Wendell Phillips and included the eminent biblical archeologist William F. Albright. Dr. Van Beek conducted detailed investigations at Hajar Bin Humeid, a site south of where Dr. Sauer has been working. Hajar Bin Humeid was part of the ancient kingdom of Qataban. Today the site is in Southern Yemen, a Marxist country where a civil war was recently fought.
One reason that southern Arabian archeology is filled with uncertainties is that careful work in Yemen and Southern Yemen has been hampered by insecurity. The Phillips expedition abandoned its equipment and fled Sheba's capital by truck one morning, saying their lives had been threatened by hostile tribesmen. Now, more than three decades later, Dr. Sauer's archeologists are usually accompanied by armed Government guards. Domestication of the Camel
The Wadi al-Jubah is a valley that Dr. Sauer believes was once inhabited by people who made their living as the people at nearby Marib did, by irrigated agriculture, exploiting the water that periodically rushes down from the rainy mountains to the west. He suspects the ancient inhabitants also traded in frankincense and myrrh derived from plants native to southern Arabia and East Africa.
A key to the spice trade was the domestication of the camel, which some scholars date around the 12th century B.C. The camel was the only pack animal able to negotiate the long waterless marches between southern Arabia and the markets to the north, including Egypt and Mesopotamia as well as the Israel of Solomon.
Dr. Van Beek, Dr. Sauer and others argue that the reason the Queen of Sheba visited Solomon was to help assure that her incense would be properly distributed. Israel was strategically located between empires and was itself enjoying its wealthiest period. The temple in Jerusalem was said to have consumed huge quantities of incense. As for the gold and precious stones in the biblical account, they too might have come from southern Arabia or East Africa.
Unfortunately, the account of Sheba in the Bible provides few other details, and the elaborate tales about the Queen that have been told for centuries seem to have originated elsewhere. Some legends gave her a name: Nikaule in Greek, Bilqis in Arabic, Makeda in Ethiopic. Ethiopian stories about the Queen of Sheba became extraordinarily rich, and are still written in an alphabet closely related to the ancient Sabaean alphabet. Ethiopian tradition held that the country's kings were descendants of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. Other Problems Are Posed
Despite the leanings of some modern archeologists, the Biblical Queen of Sheba still poses many problems, according to Dr. Sauer and others.
For one thing, the ancient inscriptions of southern Arabia name many kings but no queens. There were queens elsewhere in ancient Arabia, according to Assyrian documents, but apart from the Biblical story and related traditions, no evidence has appeared of a queen in southern Arabia.
Dr. Karl Lamberg-Karlovsky, director of Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology, has followed Dr. Sauer's work with what he calls ''constructive skepticism.'' The carbon 14 dating is ''very tenuous,'' he said in a telephone interview. He also said there was no hard information on the relations between Wadi al-Jubah, Marib and Sheba, and little data to link the area with camels and camel caravans.
Dr. Lamberg-Karlovsky said it was jumping to conclusions to link Marib, Sheba and Wadi al-Jubah with a story in the Bible. Such stories, he suggested, sometimes cloud historical and scientific issues. Archeologists still know very little, he said, about the cultures of ancient southern Arabia.
Other archeologists, including Dr. Sauer, agree about the extent of archeological ignorance. The large mound of Marib, Sheba's capital, has barely been scratched by archeologists, and the Government of Yemen, whose capital is Sana, has responded cautiously to proposals to cut into it.
But Dr. Van Beek and others said the Dr. Sauer's approach was sound. His group has been conducting excavations that generally involve the painstaking analysis of every bead, bone, seed and shard.
One member of Dr. Sauer's project has been Albert Jamme, a leading expert on inscriptions from southern Arabia. Dr. Jamme was the chief epigrapher for the Wendell Phillips expedition in the early 1950's.
Other archeologists in the project include Jeffrey A. Blakely, William Glanzman and Abdu O. Ghaleb, all graduate students at the University of Pennsylvania, and Michael Toplyn of Harvard. The project is under the auspices of Harvard's Peabody Museum, Pennsylvania's University Museum and the American Schools of Oriental Research. The project has been largely financed by the American Foundation for the Study of Man, founded by Wendell Phillips. Mr. Phillips, who also made a fortune in the oil business, died in 1975.
No comments:
Post a Comment