ODSECS 18: Rebekah Mitsein

The Queen of Sheba’s Mines: African Solomonic Discourse and the European Geographical Imagination

Abstract: In the wake of the Age of Discovery, Europeans strove to square their ever-widening understanding of the world with a lingering belief in the historicity of the Bible. Two of the holy grails of sacred geography were the location of Ophir (the city from which Solomon acquired the materials to build his temple) and the location of Sheba (whose most famous Queen visited Solomon to test him on his wisdom, accompanied by a caravan of hundreds of camels loaded with precious gifts). These weren’t merely esoteric academic quandaries. Cartographers to propagandists to poets who sought to glorify and legitimize European expansionist agendas harnessed their allegorical potential: Solomon was the first great navigator and the first lawful global power because he relied on trade rather than conquest to enrich his kingdom and build his temple. Whichever monarch succeeded in locating and establishing their own trade with his ancient partners would shine as Solomon’s spiritual successor on the world stage. Through the early modern period and into the eighteenth century, the notions that Ophir had been in Mozambique and Sheba in Abyssinia gained increasing traction in the European geographical imagination for a unique reason: the Africans who inhabited these regions instigated and perpetuated them. Swahili traders told travelers stories about how Solomon’s djinn built the ruins of Great Zimbabwe, a local Bantu group claimed to be descended from the sailors who had crewed Solomon’s ships, and Ethiopian Christians long held that Solomon and the Queen of Sheba were the father and mother of their imperial dynasty. This presentation unpacks how representations of east Africa as they appear on maps by Abraham Ortelius and Jean Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville, in travel writing by James Bruce, and in cartographic poetry by John Milton, Thomas Heyrick, and John Dyer were produced at the intersection between these African Solomonic discourses and the European desire to usher in a new Christian order of global commerce.