zimbabwe: mystic rites and pious orgies

Who built Zimbabwe? And why did such an obscure archaeological question be of such lively general interest? … The thesis was that Zimbabwe’s main structure could not have been built later than 1100 B.C. The book was an assault on science called The Ancient Ruins of Rhodesia by two men working with Cecil Rhodes. It created a sensation in the late nineteenth-century….

In some passages of their book, Neal and hall threw away any scientific pretensions and waxed even more romantic than the German explorer Karl Mauch. “A score of ancient scenes are pictured in one’s mind,” they wrote. “The approaching priest with processional chant, the salutation of the emblems of the god, the light of altar fire and torch reflected upon the walls and upon the sacred golden fillet bound around the brows of the priests, the incense laden air, the subdued murmuring of the waiting crowd of worshippers, the mystic rites, dark enchantments, and pious orgies.”

The book was not merely a popular success. On the strength of it, Hall was made a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and traveled around England lecturing to learned gatherings on the subject of mystic rites and pious orgies. Meanwhile, other self-professed antiquarians hastened to their desks and to speaker’ lecterns to cash in on the Rhodesian vogue with romantic theories of their own. According to one, a phallic cult was known to have existed in southern India some four thousand years ago, and its members were the only logical builders of Zimbabwe’s tower.

According to another, the soapstone birds taken from Zimbabwe clearly represented the hawk, a symbol of maternity during Queen Hatshepsut’s time ( the second millennium B.C.). Furthermore, the elliptical shape of the “temple” suggested the shape of a womb. Ergo, as any fool could see, it was Queen Hatshepsut’s forebears who had built Zimbabwe, and Rhodesia was the Land of Punt, the queen’s birthplace. ( to be continued)