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lectures > lectures spring 2002

In Search of King Solomon's Mines

Speaker: Tahir Shah
18 May 2002

King Solomon, the Bible's wisest king, also possessed extraordinary wealth. He built a temple at Jerusalem which was said to be more fabulous than any other landmark in the ancient world, heavily adorned with gold. The precise location of this legendary land has been one of history's great-unsolved mysteries. Long before Rider Haggard's classic adventure novel, King Solomon's Mines, produced a fresh outbreak of gold fever, explorers, scientists and theologians had scoured the world for the source of the king's astonishing wealth. Tahir Shah describes how last year he too took up the quest, using as his leads a mixture of texts, including The Septuagint, the earliest form of the Bible, as well as geological, geographical and folkloric sources. Time and again the evidence points towards Ethiopia, the ancient kingdom in the horn of Africa whose imperial family claims descent from Menelik, the son born to Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. Tahir Shah's trail takes him to a remote cliff-face monastery where the monks pull visitors up on a leather rope, to the ruined castles of Gondar, and to the churches of Lalibela, hewn from solid rock. In the south, he discovers an enormous illegal gold mine, itself like something out of the Old Testament, where thousands of men, women and children dig with their hands. But the hardest leg of the journey is to the accursed mountain of Tullu Wallel, where legend says there lies an ancient shaft, once the entrance to King Solomon's Mines.

Tahir Shah is the author of eight books, chronicling a wide range of unusual and outlandish journeys. In addition, he makes documentaries, writes screen-plays, works as a journalist and photographer.
For Shah there is nothing so important as deciphering the hidden underbelly of the lands in which he travels. He shuns well-trodden tourist paths, and avoids celebrated landmarks, preferring instead to position himself in a dusty café and observe life go by.
His most recent book, In Search of King Solomon's Mines, takes the reader through Ethiopia on the quest for the source of Solomon's fabulous wealth. The search has also been made into a documentary film.
His previous work -- Trail of Feathers -- took him to Peru on the scent of the 'birdmen' who dwell deep in the upper reaches of the Amazon.
Before that, he studied magic and illusion under an Indian godman (Socerer's Apprentice) and, before that again, he searched for the secret puzzle of Gondwanaland (Beyond the Devil's Teeth).