Buried Treasure (1954) s05e03 Episode Script

AFRICAN DRUMMING Africa - big game and endless bush.
Every schoolboy knows his Africa, or thinks he does.
A baked, brown wilderness, and then, suddenly round a corner, is one of the strangest ruins in the world - Zimbabwe.
The name of the place is itself mysterious.
It may mean just "houses of stone", we don't know.
Many hundreds of years ago, Arab merchants had trafficked with the chiefs or kings here and knew of fabulous sources of gold in the interior of the country.
Thither, they said, King Solomon used to send every three years to draw an infinite quantity of gold.
King Solomon's Mines.
There, it was said, was the Ophir of the Bible.
There the agents of the Queen of Sheba built stone houses as trading depots for the gold on its way to the ports of the Red Sea.
A cloud of romantic legend was not dispersed by the finding of strange objects there.
And Phoenicians, Assyrians and Sabians were dragged in by gullible antiquaries to explain them.
No ancient site in the world, unless the Pyramids and Stonehenge, is more clogged than Zimbabwe with sticky romance.
Vague stories of it had already reached the Portuguese adventurers who landed on the East African coast in the 16th century.
By 1570, the Portuguese traders and missionaries had already drawn their first maps.
As they worked their way inland, they also left other relics in out-of-the-way places.
The chamber of a primitive cannon.
A gold medallion.
An ivory statuette of the Virgin, which was discovered in a gold mine.
From their travels, which these objects confirm, they brought back enough information to put Zimbabwe, or Simbaoe, on the map the first time.
300 years later, in 1890, this land was permanently occupied by Europeans.
A force of pioneers had set off northwards from what is now the Union of South Africa.
Leaguering their wagons against the attacks of the Matabele.
Hauling them through rivers.
Overcoming every difficulty in their quest of peace with profit.
At last, they reached what is now the capital of the Rhodesian Federation, Salisbury.
So Zimbabwe was once more brought to the notice of Europe.
It was no easy journey to the ruins for those tireless Victorians, with their inquisitive taste for natural curiosities.
If the transport wasn't running away, it was refusing to move at all.
But we have to be grateful to the indomitable Miss Alice Balfour - sister of a A J Balfour - because, in 1894, she took these photographs of the Zimbabwe ruins, which show the state they were in when they were found.
But it was gold that had brought people to Central Africa and it was gold hunting, in the surprising form of the so-called Ancient Ruins Company, that led to the earliest excoriation of Zimbabwe.
This was followed by the earliest excavations, which began to clear away a little of the romantic nonsense.
Recently, Mr Roger Summers, chairman of the Southern Rhodesia and Historical Monuments Commission, has continued with the work.
At present it is far too early to give any definite results from our dig.
Our sections have shown that the walls were built at different periods and in different ways.
The temple "just growed".
It wasn't planned in the way one plans a house.
That's about all I can say now.
There are lots of charcoal samples waiting for radiocarbon tests and, when they are done, there will be quite a lot more to add to the story of Zimbabwe.
But we still know astonishingly little about Zimbabwe.
Who built it, why, when? The first of these questions is, when? Here, imports from overseas help a little.
These beads were found by careful excavators beside African things amidst the ruins.
They came from India many centuries ago.
These pieces of pottery came from Persia.
The Persian writing on them shows their origin.
They must have left Persia about the 13th century.
This porcelain bowl travelled even further.
It came from China all the way to Zimbabwe in the 17th century.
These imports show that some of the buildings were already standing seven centuries ago.
Then, something else found here carried the date backwards twice as far.
This wall, one of the earliest of Zimbabwe, was partially supported by timbers of hard tamboti wood.
One of the timbers was submitted to a test, provided strangely enough by atomic science.
Its surviving radioactive content shows that it was cut about 600 AD and suggests that the oldest Zimbabwe was built about that time.
This science is not, I'm afraid, on the side of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba.
And now for Zimbabwe itself, as we can see it today.
Its most prominent feature is a fortress of masonry and natural rock crowning a rocky hill.
The fortress is approached by a steep climb.
At this place, where an eminent and substantial bishop is reported to have become grievously stuck on a recent visit, the ancient attacker was no less at the mercy of any determined defender.
If, in fact, he struggled to the summit, he arrived on this small natural platform in front of a high stone wall, pierced only by a small doorway.
Inside, the visitor finds himself in an ancient extension of the hilltop fortress.
In a remote way, Zimbabwe is like Athens.
It began as a hilltop fortress and palace, was extended as a sacred precinct in more peaceful times, and became the venerated acropolis or high place of a settlement in the valley below.
BIRDSONG On entering the acropolis, we see on side the walls and boulders that shut off the high places.
On the other side, there is a great accumulation of remains of huts, with the successive floors visible as lines in the bank.
Here is a surviving part of the floor more clearly visible.
It is made from daga, or dried clay - a most important building material in Zimbabwe.
So is this piece of the curbed wall of a hut from another part of the site.
The place where a wooden post went is still visible.
Elsewhere, you get an even better idea of the round shape of these huts with their mud walls.
While here, where much of the hut was buried, the clay walls, the places where the wooden posts went, and even the remains of a post itself had survived.
Over the years, things have changed very little.
Today, in a living African village, one can see the clay, or daga, first being trampled into the right consistency by the men.
Then it is carried away and applied to the timber walls of the huts by the women.
Leaving then the accumulated remains of these mud huts, one reaches the older and more spectacular part of the Zimbabwe acropolis - the original fortress.
Here, vast granite boulders, which cling precariously to the summit of the hill, have been joined by walls and passages to form a series of formidable casemates and enclosures.
A look-out post had beams or flagpoles in its walls.
Another of these enclosures seem to have been of a particular holiness, although there is little today to show this on the surface.
Here, in what may have been the holy of holies, buried treasure in the form gold has been found in quantity.
Much of it went into the melting pots of the old Ancient Ruins Company, but some has survived in museum strongrooms.
Some of the ancient pestles and mortars for pounding the ore have been found.
They were the primitive predecessors of the massive iron pounders, which noisily crushed the newly quarried stone and quartz in a modern gold mine.
The crushed ore is then washed over a mercury-coated plate, where the mercury attracts the gold.
That sludge, which is being scraped up, is half mercury, half gold.
Any gold that is missed here is subsequently caught on these absorbent cloths.
The ancients used sheepskins for the same purpose, hence the legend of the Golden Fleece.
There is no doubt about the wealth of this mine.
I was shown several pieces of quartz where the gold was easily visible in veins and flecks to the naked eye.
But the most interesting thing to us about this mine is its sight.
It is one of the oldest in Rhodesia.
A small working, tucked away like many more in the recesses of the hills.
Adjoining the modern shaft, tapping the same seam is another, an ancient working, cleared and whitened now and possibly hundreds of years old.
These are some of the tools which were recovered from it.
Hammer stones for use in the breaking of the quartz.
In the museum at Bulawayo are other tools from these old mines, like this pick, which was found 140ft underground.
So was this primitive baler.
But now let us return to our Zimbabwe acropolis, the sacred enclosure produced treasure, also, of another kind - a soapstone bird.
Its purpose, we don't know, and it is therefore described, perhaps accurately, as a ritual object.
This one, with its climbing crocodile, still stands on its shaft.
It was recovered from one of the ruins which bestrew the valley below the acropolis.
These ruins are the remains of the town which grew up on the lower ground when the kings in their hilltop fortress had sufficiently imposed their authority upon the countryside.
These stone walls partitioned and enclosed individual compounds.
They appear now in meaningless confusion.
But they can be understood if, in imagination, you replace the missing clay huts.
These four walls, for instance, once abutted on a now vanished round hut.
Something like this.
So here on this sight, life must have been lived very much as if an African village of today.
It is not just imagination.
There is evidence everywhere.
The longhorned cattle, carved by the Zimbabwean people, are similar to those on the farms round about today.
Then take this pot, which this old lady is making.
VILLAGERS CHATTER When it's finished, it will not be very different from pots in the Bulawayo Museum which were found in the ruins.
And this old African didn't have to be told how these rocks were used.
There are a number amongst the ruins and they are clearly where assegais were sharpened.
Perhaps this beautiful bronze spearhead was sharpened on just such a rock before it was dropped for some archaeologist to find centuries later.
Today, a musician may play a kaffir piano with its vibrant steel notes.
MUSICIAN SINGS Nobody has yet found one of these at Zimbabwe.
But these gaming boards, carved in rocks, are common among the ruins and are still used today.
The game is rather like a cross between Halma and a Chinese checkers.
The player on the right won the shilling I wagered on this particular game.
For more serious occasions, a witch doctor might be called in to throw the dice or divining bones, which, for a fee, would reveal the past or the future, or settle domestic problems.
Divining bones identical with those used by which doctors today have been found on a site like Zimbabwe, near Bulawayo.
And ceremonial iron axes, such as you saw the witch doctor brandish a moment ago, have been found on several of the Zimbabwe sites.
Then, quite by chance, we found in this village a female figure blasted on the wall of a hut.
It recalled in the idiom of an African Picasso, the little pottery ladies of a much earlier age.
Their use was religious, or magical, the promotion, probably, of fertility.
Now from the ancient township of Zimbabwe in the valley, we must move up the gently rising ground to the most remarkable ruin of them all, the great building which, above everything, has made Zimbabwe famous and, indeed, unique.
This is the oval enclosure, the so-called Temple, sometimes known by the clumsy name of the Elliptical Building.
Its purpose is unknown.
It may have been a palace, or indeed a temple, or both.
Certainly, a number of huts stood inside it.
If we look at a simplified plan of the ruined walls and partitions and then add a number of huts, we begin to get an idea of its appearance sometime during its heyday.
As well as evidence of living quarters inside the great wall, we find traces of metalworking.
Ingots of metal were cast from moulds like these.
Tools like this iron axe were made.
Or this bronze razor.
Or this little copper finger ring.
As well as skilled metalworkers, they were practical builders in stone.
The surrounding walls of the Great Enclosure are of great thickness - 20ft wide at the bottom are narrowing to 10ft at the top.
They are built of blocks of granite without mortar.
These blocks were obtained in a simple fashion.
Let me tell you.
Nearly all the ruins are built near exposed masses of granite.
This rock is often naturally seamed or laminated in horizontal layers and a fire lit upon the surface buckles the uppermost layer, ao that it is easily detached and then broken into suitable lengths.
We tried out this method with a practical experiment.
After two hours or so, the fire was cleared away.
The granite had already split and, with a little more heaving and some water, we had a reasonable number of building blocks, demonstrating the effectiveness of this simple method.
Even our most critical spectators seemed to approve.
These blocks are then easily fitted into place by a trained builder.
He works first on the outer face, building it up layer by layer with the flat sides of the blocks outward.
Then he fills in the packing behind.
In this way, the walls of the Great Enclosure were built to their present immense height with no mortar of any sort, using enough granite to build a modern small town.
Back inside the temple, we are now going towards its most remarkable feature, the famous tower.
Its approaches are decorated in a simple but effective way.
Three black bands of masonry lead the eye onto it.
It stands 20ft high and seems to be solid.
What was it for? To carry a flagstaff or totem? Does it in fact contain a walled-up cavity? If so, containing what? Nowhere else is there anything like it.
It is a genuine mystery, another "ritual object".
And certainly so-called ritual objects are numerous in the many buildings in the Zimbabwe series.
There are iron gongs, such as occur also in West Africa, strange-shaped bells.
And this ivory statuette.
Was he the priest perhaps, like those who may have conducted ceremonies at the foot of the tower? Then there are these little carved lions like miniature bookends.
How little we really know about these strange and sometimes rather attractive things.
The present plan of the Great Enclosure is itself a mystery.
This high, narrow passage is part of a complex of walls and passages without apparent rhyme or reason.
Mostly the walls are severely plain.
But, now and then, they are surprisingly relieved by friezes or panels of darker stone.
Or granite blocks set in a chequer or zigzag pattern.
The best example at Zimbabwe is on top of the so-called temple.
But the most elaborate example of all is at the little hilltop site of another Nalatale, about 70 miles from Bulawayo.
This is a Zimbabwe in miniature.
A little hilltop palace, not very often visited, but actually the gem of the whole series.
Inside it, are more remains of the familiar round mud huts.
I left Zimbabwe and its kindred sites more impressed than when I came.
Albeit the privacy of the bush or the wilderness, which is their birthright, is now increasingly tempered by tourism and curiosity.
Both are forgivable afflictions.
In a countryside like that of Rhodesia, not overburdened by obvious vestiges of antiquity, they harmonise with a growing popular interest in the past.
And as problems which advancing research still leaves unsolved, they remain a challenge to the historian and the archaeologist.
What in fact do we know about Zimbabwe and its many kindred sites spread through Rhodesia? There are nearly 500 of them of one sort or another.
Well, at first, their builders liked rocky hilltops, dominating sometimes a wide landscape and, in some cases, as in Zimbabwe itself, clearly defensible.
Secondly, they occur only granite rock, which was their main and easiest source of arterial.
Thirdly, they seem to occur in a zone of major rainfall, as we ourselves experienced only too vividly at Zimbabwe.
This suggests that wealth in the form of cattle and crops was also a consideration.
Fourthly, the occupants of these cloud-wrapped fortresses were evidently kings or chiefs, and doubtless priests, as well, and they drew revenue from the gold trade, although their palaces are not usually found close beside the ancient gold workings.
Fifthly, the trade which this gold supported dates back into the first 1,000 years AD, when Arab and Indian traders had long voyaged in dhows like this up and down the east coast of Africa.
On the other hand, this Dutch gin bottle shows that some of these buildings were constructed only during the past two or three centuries.
This bottle was buried about the year 1,700, during building operations.
What then do all these bits and pieces of evidence add up to? It must be confessed, they still add up to mystery.
Yes, Zimbabwe is still a mystery and I personally like it nonetheless for that.
It will at least keep my friends the Rhodesian archaeologists out of other mischief for many years to come.