Free Republic

How many people under 40 in Britain today do you think have read H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines? Five, six… 50? It’s hard to know. If you’re lucky – or unlucky, depending on your point of view – you might have bumped into the 1985 film version with Richard Chamberlain, Sharon Stone and Herbert Lom in the unloved crevices of the TV schedule when only insomniacs or household spiders are deemed to be a risk. I ask the question because this year marks 100 years since the death of Sir Henry Rider Haggard as he was then, having been...

To the west of Ethiopia near the Sudanese border lies a place called the Asosa zone. This may be the location of the oldest gold mine in the world. Dating back some 6,000 years, it provided a key source of gold to the ancient Egyptian empire, whose great wealth was famous throughout the known world. It may even have supplied the Queen of Sheba with her lavish gifts of gold when she visited King Solomon of Israel almost 3,000 years ago. The excitement in this part of the world is more about the future, however. Some local inhabitants already make...

New findings from an archaeological excavation led this winter by Dr. Erez Ben-Yosef of Tel Aviv University’s Jacob M. Alkow Department of Archaeology and Near Eastern Cultures prove that copper mines in Israel thought to have been built by the ancient Egyptians in the 13th century BCE actually originated three centuries later, during the reign of the legendary King Solomon.Based on the radiocarbon dating of material unearthed at a new site in Timna Valley in Israel’s Aravah Desert, the findings overturn the archaeological consensus of the last several decades. Scholarly work and materials found in the area suggest the mines...