The Bible tells us that its’ most fabled monarch, King Solomon, ruled the Holy Land from within the First Temple in Jerusalem. There he sat on a golden throne, surrounded by five hundred golden shields and effigies of golden animals. He dined on golden tableware. He drank from golden goblets.

What exactly was the source of this extravagant cache of wealth? The Old Testament relays that Solomon received a shipment of the precious metal – along with silver, sandalwood, precious stones, ivory, apes and peacocks - every three years from his personal mines in a faraway land named only as Ophir.

With biblical geography vague at best, the supposed location of Ophir remained a mystery for over a millennia, until Portuguese traders in 16th century stumbled upon the abandoned ruins of East Africa’s greatest sub-Saharan civilization, Great Zimbabwe. Thinking the freestanding, artfully constructed temples beyond the capabilities of the native “primitives,” they would go on to make erroneous attributions of the site to the Phoenicians, Greeks and Egyptians. Moslem traders who passed through the area circulated a different rumor: the city in the jungle was, in fact, the true location of King Solomon’s mines.

Surprisingly, that unchecked piece of information failed to circulate widely in Europe until the mid-19th century when a missionary named Merensky returned from Africa and published account claiming he had found the “gold fields of Solomon.” In 1885, the English author H. Rider Haggard cemented the conceptual link between “darkest Africa” and the wise king’s secret depot with King Solomon’s Mines – an adventure tale that also linked the legend with the Ethiopian traditional telling of a supposed sexual relationship between Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. Even today, the Lemba people of Southern Africa claim Semitic heritage – a fact recently confirmed by DNA testing.

The ruins themselves told a different story, however. By 1905, archaeologist David Randall-MacIver had dated their construction to the 11th century – a thousand years after Solomon’s time – and deemed them to be of solely African origin. While that classification has severed the

link between kingdom of Great Zimbabwe and Ophir for most, it hasn’t abated the tide of a speculation as to the mines’ true location. In the past century alone, the Timna Valley in southern Israel, the African side of the Red Sea, the coasts of Pakistan or India and Mahd adh Dhahab in Saudi Arabia have all been fingered as potential sites. The latter is the favored modern candidate, due to its proximity to an ancient trade route supplying Jerusalem…and evidence of long abandoned gold mining operation.

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