The Land of Ophir.

Waimate Daily Advertiser, Volume IV, Issue 294, 11 December 1902, Page 1

The Land of Ophir.

The theory that Soloman’s land of Ophir was situate in East Africa ifipds fresh support in a book just published by Dr Carl Peters, the African explorer, as the result of his latest journeyings aud investigations in East Africa. “ I have brought back,” he told an interviewer, “ what I believe to be final proofs that the district between the Zambesi and Sab stretching from the Indian Ocean almost as far back as Bechuanaland, and including part of Portugese East Africa, and most of Phodesia, w r as King Solomon’s Klondike. It was likewise the Klondike of the Queen of Sheba, and before her day had contributed to the wealth of Egypt. Yet, with whole nations getting gold from this wonderful 750,030 square miles in greater or less quantities for 4000 years, apparently only the surface of it has been touched.” r The deeper you go the richer 1 becomes the mine, and Dr Peters firmly believes the country is the richest the world ever knew. Dr Peters seems to take a good many things for granted, the confidence of his hearers, among other things, and he deals less in argument than in assertion, though he may go more thoroughly into the matter in his book. He believes the Punic tribes first discovered the Land of Ophir, and then the Egyptians ' levied tribute on them, and set up colonies. Long after this the Queen of Sheba, whose country was in Arabia, was mistress of the whole East African coast, and all the gifts she took to Solomon were the products of that land. “ From my own rendering from the Hebrew and from the outside facts,” remarked the explorer, “ I should say that there is a lapse of time between the tenth and eleventh verses of Ist Kings x., for it appears that it was the Queen of Sheba who told Solomon and his naval ally Hiram about the Land of Ophir, and that she granted them a concession for working the mines, and provided them with pilots to lead them to the place. One can guess at the tremendous amount of gold Solomon and Hiram got from these mines from the estimate, based on Bible figures, that on one trip alone they took £53,000,000, estimating the value by weight.” With regard to the statement that they brought gold and silver, ivory and apes and peacocks, Dr Peters gets over the difficulty caused by the absence of peacocks in East Africa by substituting guinea fowl for them, throwing the blame for the alleged mistake on the translators of the Bible. ‘*lf the facts don’t agree with my arguments,” he says in effect, “so much the worse for the facts.” The area he has been exploring is undoubtedly one of the most interesting open to modern scientific investigation. It must at some time have been closely populated, as is shown by the ruins of 500 cities and temples that have beenjfound, but whether it will ever prove a modern Ophir remains to be seen, despite Dr Peter’s confident assertions.