Reviews

054

Sheba: Through the Desert in Search of the Legendary Queen

Nicholas Clapp
(New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2001) 372 pp., $26

Is there a more resplendent woman in the pages of the Old Testament than the queen of Sheba—she who has inspired so many artists throughout history, including the likes of Flaubert, Browning, Kipling and Yeats?

According to 1 Kings 10, she burst indignantly upon King Solomon’s court, having heard of his wisdom and determined to test it. She arrived (from where we do not know) with a “great retinue, with camels bearing spices, and very much gold, and precious stones.” In the masculine ancient Semitic world, the queen’s appearance must have been shocking, and yet she unburdened herself to Solomon, telling him “all that was on her mind.” Satisfied that the Israelite king was deserving of his formidable reputation, the queen presented him with the riches in her possession: “Never again did spices come in such quantity as that which the queen of Sheba gave to King Solomon.” In return, Solomon satisfied “every desire [the queen of Sheba] expressed.”

The queen appears in the Koran, as well. Known as Bilqis, the daughter of a djinn, she rules over the royal city of Kitor. Her relationship with Solomon is depicted as tense, though she ultimately submits to him and to a single god, Allah.

Ethiopian Coptic tradition maintains that from the union of Solomon and Sheba a son was born, named Menelik—not just any son, but the first of a string of Abyssinian dynasts stretching down to Haile Selassie.

Who was this mysterious queen of Sheba, whose name never appears in Egyptian or Assyrian records? According to most chronologies, Solomon ruled the United Monarchy of the Israelites in the tenth century B.C. Also in the tenth century B.C. a people called the Sabeans inhabited what is now Yemen, in southern Arabia. But were these people and the biblical Shebans one and the same? Or did the queen of Sheba come from northern Arabia, or perhaps Ethiopia?

Nicholas Clapp—adventurer, documentary filmmaker, amateur archaeologist and historian—last wrote about leading an intrepid group of people across Arabia’s Empty Quarter in search of the lost city of Ubar. In Sheba, he dusts off his global positioning equipment and sets off on another quest—to find evidence of the historical queen. Clapp is an amateur in the best sense of that word, for his spirit and enthusiasm are unflagging. The fact that years of diligent study and excavation have failed to uncover what he aims to find does not daunt him. But he is also, as an eager amateur, a bit naive. Early in the narrative, for example, we find him in Jerusalem, armed only with his curiosity, searching for traces, he says, of the United Monarchy, the period of kings David and Solomon. “I left the Old City through the Damascus Gate,” Clapp writes, “looking for I wasn’t sure what. Reassurance that the Bible was to be believed? Evidence that it wasn’t?” What startling innocence this statement reveals! If only such evidence could be found by casually perambulating the Old City.

I imagine that Clapp, as he roamed the streets of Jerusalem knocking on various doors (such as that of the École Biblique et Archéologique Française) and asking about the whereabouts of the lost Sheban queen, must have seemed something of a crackpot. (At the doors of the École Biblique, a priest informed Clapp, presumably in deadpan, that “regretfully nobody was about who would have anything to say that would shed light on the queen of Sheba.”)

Clapp’s search also took him to the Negev Desert; to Palmyra, where, according to one account, the queen of Sheba was laid to rest; to Yemen, the land of the Sabeans; and to Ethiopia.

Danger lurked along the way. In Yemen, according to Clapp, hostile tribes delight in kidnapping hapless westerners and holding them for 055ransom. And then there’s the unforgiving climate. While at a temple in Palmyra with his daughter Christina, Clapp tried to ignore a “towering cyclonic cloud” of sand bearing down upon them, while photographing an intriguing relief depicting a veiled woman: “Everyone was hastening to reach the shelter of the precinct’s west gate. Most of the group made it, but not Christina and I. Sand stung our eyes, gritted our hair, poured down our necks … I managed to shoot a few pictures.” (I love the cool sobriety of that last sentence: Sand cyclone be damned, Clapp’ll get the job done.)

The most compelling evidence for a historical queen of Sheba can be found in what is now Yemen. For many years, scholars dated the beginnings of southern Arabian civilization to around 800 B.C., a date that was seriously challenged in 1951, when archaeologists Gus Van Beek and Don Dragoo, working at Hajar bin Humeid, came up with the first pottery sequence for the region. Van Beek determined that the South Arabic alphabet dated to the 12th century B.C., far older than anyone had previously thought. We now know that the Sabeans were a prosperous commercial people in the early centuries of the first millennium B.C.^a Clapp singles out the ancient Sabean city of Ma’rib: “The upshot is that well before the days of the queen of Sheba, Ma’rib was a major city with an agricultural base that was both dependable and bountiful. The Sabeans were extraordinarily well off even without trade in incense and spices. Grant them that trade and they would be, as in the myth of ‘Kitor to the East,’ the envy of nations.” This Sabean kingdom may well have sent its queen 1,500 miles across the Arabian sands to visit the northern powers, such as Solomon’s Israel.

But what of the Ethiopian claim to the queen of Sheba? Clapp suggests that the Sabeans may have crossed the Red Sea in the first millennium B.C. and colonized Ethiopia. The archaeological site of Yeha, with its temple rich in South Arabic inscriptions, might have been the “centerpiece of a Sabean outpost established for the same reason the queen of Sheba may have journeyed to Jerusalem: to further the trade in incense and spices.”

Without archaeological evidence, this is all mere speculation. If there is any truth to it, however, “it would be possible for both Yemen and Ethiopia to claim a tenth-century biblical queen of Sheba. Though based in Yemen, she would have had dominion over Ethiopia. And here would be an answer to the oft-posed question ‘Was she black?’ The answer would be ‘She—from Arabia—probably not. Many of her people—in Ethiopia—yes’.”

Sheba: Through the Desert in Search of the Legendary Queen