Was the Queen of Sheba really a black woman from Nigeria?
By Simon Edge
The Express, Monday May 24 1999
A British Archaeologist believes he may have found the lost kingdom of the Queen of Sheba. The site, in the rainforests of Nigeria, is thousands of miles from her supposed home in Arabia.
The Bible tells how the Queen of Sheba travelled to King Solomon's court, bearing gold, jewellry and spices. Because of this, scholars have assumed she lived in Yemen, gateway of the spice route to Palestine. Others believe she may have been based in Ethiopia.
But Dr Patrick Darling, of Bournemouth University, says the Nigerian site, which he first visited in 1994 and has since been secretly mapping, is just as good a candidate.
"We have living proof that it was a powerful kingdom, and there are many links that have similarities to the Queen of Sheba legend," he said yesterday.
The site includes mud walls up to 70ft high and a 100-mile earthwork ditch. Its existence was first mooted by the Portuguese explorer Pacheebo Pereiro 500 years ago, and it has been a place of local pilgrimage for many years.
Dr Darling, who swore to secrecy the students who accompanied him to the site, said: "The earthwork, which is larger than the pyramids in Eygpt, was built in remembrance of some great figure. Stories talk of a powerful goddess or giantess."
But he admitted he has yet to find evidence of a royal palace.
In local legend, the Queen is known as Bilikisu Sungbo. Scholars accept that she was a wealthy but childless black woman, who probably bore little resemblance to Gina Lollobrigida, the Itallian sex symbol who immortalised her in the 1950s Hollywood film Solomon and Sheba.
Dr Darling said the
riches associated with her court would have been available in that part of West Africa.
"There was gold in Ghana, or the Gold Coast as it used to be called," he said. "Ivory also comes from that area." The only possible snag to the question is dating.
The Queen of Sheba is supposed to have lived 3,000 years ago, but preliminary soil samples from the site so far indicate that the settlement is only 1,200 years old[/B]....
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