things, and that in which men most vary, so
it is naturally called in to explain what is otherwise inexplicable.

What, then, was the religion of those who built this shrine, if shrine
it was? The ornamentation of that part of the outer wall which faces the
rising sun suggests sun-worship. The phalli (if they are phalli) point
to one of the Oriental forms of the worship of the forces of nature. The
birds' heads may have a religious significance, and possibly the
significance which it is said that vultures had in the Syrian
nature-worship. These data give some slight presumptions, yet the field
for conjecture remains a very wide one, and there is nothing in the
buildings to indicate the particular race who erected the Fort and the
Temple (if it was a temple). However, the tower bears some resemblance
to a tower which appears within a town wall on an ancient coin of the
Phoenician city of Byblus; and this coincidence, slight enough, has,
in the dearth of other light, been used to support the view that the
builders belonged to some Semitic race.

Had we nothing but the ruined walls of Zimbabwye, Dhlodhlo, and the
other spots where similar ruins have been observed, the problem would be
insoluble. We could only say that the existing native races had at some
apparently distant time been more civilized than they are now and
capable of building walls they do not now build, or else we should
suppose that some now extinct race had built these. But there are other
facts known to us which suggest, though they do not establish, an
hypothesis regarding the early history of the country.

In very remote times there existed, as is known from the Egyptian
monuments, a trade from South-east Africa into the Red Sea. The
remarkable sculptures at Deir el Bahari, near Luxor, dating from the
time of Queen Hatasu, sister of the great conqueror Thothmes III. (B.C.
1600?), represent the return of an expedition from a country called
Punt, which would appear, from the objects brought back, to have been
somewhere on the East African coast.[8] Much later the Book of Kings (1
Kings ix. 26-28; x. 11, 15, 22) tells us that Solomon and Hiram of Tyre
entered into a sort of joint adventure trade from the Red Sea port of
Ezion-geber to a country named Ophir, which produced gold. There are
other indications that gold used to come from East Africa, but so far as
we know it has never been obtained in quantity from any part of the
coast between Mozambique an