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00:00God made man, so the Africans say, because he loved to hear stories.
00:21Here in Ethiopia, they have a story which is nearly 3,000 years old.
00:30It's still told today in songs of fairytales and sacred books.
00:39It's a legend which leads to lost cities and forgotten civilizations.
00:49Inside the city, a city of tens of thousands of people.
00:53This is a search for a great ruler who was also an evil genie, a worshipper of the sun and moon, who believed in one god.
01:05And she's a woman.
01:07She's turned into a kind of fairytale, demonized in Islamic tradition, and then in the modern world, in novels and films, she becomes a femme fatale.
01:21This is a search for the queen of sheep.
01:24This is a search for a great peace.
01:28This is a name that womenpeople and women only have 100 views in many Asian films.
01:31It's incredibly comprehensively in the world that seems to have STEP 6,000 years old.
01:33It was a distant years old and a
01:41thenmaresc from melimars and jacks from mme wild,
01:43and the best exists in pheerale, independent culture.
01:46So this became a major secret of the universe
01:48in the past and of the world that oputed by the end of the world or the third couuredi.
01:50The legend begins in Jerusalem
02:08with the arrival of a mysterious foreign queen.
02:11Do you think she will be as beautiful as we have heard?
02:15She's come to meet the wisest king in the world, King Solomon.
02:20Israel extends a warm welcome to your majesty.
02:25I am grateful for your majesty's permission to visit your beautiful country.
02:44Hollywood made Sheba a sex goddess, Solomon's lover, and they made her white.
02:50To Africans, though, she's black and a woman of power.
02:55In Arabia, she's half human, half demon.
02:58But everyone at least agrees that the tale begins here.
03:02This Easter in Jerusalem is the beginning of what I hope will be an extraordinary journey
03:06to uncover the ancient links between Arabia and the Near East and Africa,
03:11but also perhaps to uncover the life of an extraordinary person
03:16who, as it says in one version of the story, was not a woman but a world.
03:21As the Ethiopians tell it, the story begins a thousand years before the time of Christ.
03:33The Queen of Sheba came to pay respect.
03:40She made King Solomon.
03:42And as you can see in the picture, she brought lots of valuable goods.
03:48Lots of gold, incenses, and ivory tusks, and so forth.
03:54So, the treasures of Africa.
03:57Treasures of Ethiopia.
03:59And do we know why she came?
04:01A religion.
04:03Oh, really?
04:04Yes.
04:04So, this isn't a trade mission or anything like that.
04:06It's to do with religion.
04:07No, not at all.
04:08It's religion.
04:09And when the Queen of Sheba heard of the fame of Solomon concerning the name of the Lord,
04:14she came to prove him with hard questions.
04:17Do we know what the questions were?
04:19Well, I'll leave that to the monks or to the priests.
04:23Right, right.
04:24Yeah.
04:32So, the story of two rulers, a woman and a man, both founders of their nations.
04:39Treasured by Christians, Jews, and Muslims, the tale is in the Bible and the Koran.
04:45And it's been retold by storytellers ever since.
04:49Now, the Queen of Sheba was beautiful and wise and wore a royal cloak with seven glittering stars.
05:05She entered Jerusalem with an immense caravan of camels laden with precious stones, gold, and aromatic incense,
05:15the like of which had never been seen before in Israel and has never been seen since.
05:21Solomon greeted her and asked her,
05:23Why have you come?
05:25And she replied,
05:27I have heard that you are the wisest man on earth,
05:31and I was curious to see if this could be so.
05:35And the Queen tested Solomon with many clever riddles,
05:39but he answered all her questions,
05:43and, so the Bible says,
05:46satisfied all her desires.
05:49But is the tale myth or history?
06:00And why has it held such a fascination for so long?
06:05She first appears in the Bible, in the Old Testament.
06:08And this is the earliest surviving copy in the world.
06:21So it doesn't carry the headings at the top?
06:25No, no, no, no.
06:27But there's a conundrum.
06:28The Bible text was only put together centuries after these events.
06:32No other evidence has ever been discovered that Sheba, or Solomon, existed.
06:41Yeah, here it starts.
06:43Here it starts.
06:45Chapter 10, verse 1.
06:46So the Queen of Sheba is arriving to Jerusalem,
07:01and actually in this chapter you hear that she is not the only one.
07:05All kings of the world are coming to Jerusalem.
07:07They are fascinated by this wunderkind, by King Solomon,
07:13so they all come to Jerusalem.
07:14But we concentrate and focus on the Queen of Sheba, a woman.
07:19So on the one hand, it's a woman who comes,
07:21but we hear nothing about her beauty,
07:23and we hear nothing about any potential relationship
07:27between the two of them.
07:29But as you know very well,
07:31that in later literature and in the Ethiopian tradition,
07:34that actually they had a relationship,
07:37they had a son together, the first king of Ethiopia.
07:41But the Bible is very quiet about it,
07:43because it was too delicate to deal with.
07:46The king of Israel having a relationship with a foreign woman,
07:50fathering a child, etc.
07:52So as a textual archaeologist,
07:55what's your feeling about the story?
07:58Do you think it's just a fairy tale,
08:00or do you think there's a historical kernel to it?
08:03I'm very careful when it comes to historical kernels.
08:07I don't know.
08:08It sounds like a great fairy tale anyway.
08:15But is that all it is?
08:17Doesn't history itself become myth over time?
08:21What we remember most is the power of the story.
08:24And stories build up in layers over the centuries,
08:29like human life itself.
08:33If Sheba was only a fairy tale,
08:36why did they remember her?
08:38But if she was history,
08:40how do we find her?
08:41The only thing that we can do is really to go to Jerusalem and to the other sites,
09:02to Judah,
09:03to the highlands,
09:04and to the sites mentioned in the myth and in the story,
09:07and try to see whether there's evidence there to back the story.
09:12And the answer is no.
09:15The answer is completely negative.
09:16But don't despair.
09:22Professor Finkelstein thinks you can find the real Sheba
09:25if you look beyond the Bible and far away from Israel.
09:30With the Queen of Sheba,
09:32what you have there in the story
09:33is in fact a depiction of the great Arabian trade.
09:37The world has opened up, hasn't it, in that story?
09:40In that story.
09:41Yeah.
09:41And the world opened up only with Assyrian imperialism.
09:45The first globalization, you know, was Assyrian globalization.
09:50So it's the late 8th and early 7th centuries.
09:52Okay.
09:53The Assyrian century.
09:55Right.
10:00So you begin to see how the Bible story of Sheba
10:03might fit into a much bigger picture.
10:05Around 700 B.C.,
10:08when the Assyrian Empire in Iraq ruled the Near East,
10:12trade boomed with Africa and Arabia.
10:15And it wasn't just commodities and luxuries that traveled.
10:17It was religions, ideas, and stories.
10:25A foreign queen, exotic and mysterious,
10:29comes bearing precious things never seen before.
10:31So this is also a tale about how civilization grows,
10:38how distant worlds make first contact.
10:41But to find Sheba, do we head for Africa or Arabia?
10:49Well, in the ancient world, the link between them and the Near East was Egypt.
11:01I always think, if you want to understand the big patterns in history,
11:12you have to get an idea of the geography.
11:14And this is a wonderful place to get an idea of the geography.
11:17Here in Luxor, you've got two of the great trade routes coming out of Africa and Arabia.
11:29The caravan route over the desert from Chad and Mali.
11:32And the route over from the Red Sea.
11:34And the route over from the Red Sea.
11:36If the Queen of Sheba came from either of those places,
11:38then these are the routes she might have taken.
11:40And this is a wonderful place to get an idea of the geography of Egypt.
11:43And this is a wonderful place to get an idea of the geography of Egypt.
11:45Here in Luxor, you've got two of the great trade routes coming out of Africa and Arabia.
11:47The caravan route over the desert from Chad and Mali.
11:49And the route over from the Red Sea.
11:50If the Queen of Sheba came from either of those places,
11:53then these are the routes she might have taken.
12:04And she wasn't the first.
12:06Centuries before, the Egyptians had traded down to the Horn of Africa.
12:13And they were looking for one thing above all else.
12:20It's the mortuary temple of Queen Hatshepsut in the 15th century B.C.
12:28In this place, there's a crucial clue to our story.
12:33It's the tale of another queen who sent an expedition to a fabled land,
12:38which sounds very much like the land of Sheba.
12:41Come and have a look.
12:44The journey was so remarkable that the queen had it depicted
12:48inside her house of eternity.
12:53Seven great ships were sent down the Red Sea.
12:57Their mission, to bring back incense.
13:00Incense to be burned on the altars of their gods,
13:04just to please them.
13:08But as far as the Egyptians knew,
13:11incense trees only grew in one far-off land.
13:15The name of the land, we call it Punt.
13:17Punt, Puinet, perhaps, in ancient Egyptian.
13:20But where was Punt?
13:23You have to follow the clues to see.
13:26Incense trees are the most obvious.
13:28You see the incense trees in their pots.
13:30This is what the Egyptians were most after.
13:33Another thing the Egyptians are bringing back is precious wood.
13:38Wibony.
13:39Ebony.
13:40One of the words we still use in modern English comes from ancient Egyptian.
13:43Precious wood.
13:45Incense.
13:46You see images of some of the animals up here.
13:48Baboons.
13:49The Egyptians even bring baboons back.
13:52The Egyptians are just brilliant at representing nature.
13:57And these fish, you can even see the waves here.
14:01Can you see the waves?
14:02The little zigzags of blue.
14:03Fish are from the Red Sea.
14:05Down at the point where Arabia and Africa meet.
14:10So what you've got here is a wonderful narrative of an Egyptian expedition 500 years before the
14:15tale of the Queen of Sheba to what sounds like the incense coast of the Red Sea, the Horn of Africa and Arabia.
14:22But where was the land of Punt and was it the same as the land of Sheba?
14:29So my plan was to try to track the Queen of Sheba, if I could, all the way back to her homeland.
14:48The clues pointed towards Ethiopia, and the first leg was the old caravan route from the Nile to the Red Sea.
15:00Along it, you can still find traces of the ancient trade with Africa, scratched by merchants and travellers so long ago.
15:08There's the fertility god Min, only somebody's chiselled his willy out, if I can put it that way.
15:18They obviously stopped and had a sandwich and an Egyptian beer at the side of the road here.
15:25So there's graffiti here extending from the 14th century BC, maybe the 15th.
15:31Somebody called Socrates has left his graffito over there.
15:38This is the debris of a kind of Roman period motel, isn't it?
15:46You know, a kind of a Roman period fast food joint on the route to Africa.
15:52It's absolutely fantastic, isn't it?
16:01But of course, if you want to travel back in time, you have to try to see the world as they saw it.
16:08You see, when we Europeans look at the map, we tend to see the Mediterranean and those familiar shapes of Italy and Greece, don't we?
16:18In fact, to really imagine this world as it is out here, what you have to do is turn the map upside down.
16:28Now, then you see how the world really is.
16:33Here's the Mediterranean world.
16:34It's small, frogs around a frog pond we are, said Plato.
16:38So if you look at the ancient world from this way, it's Africa that looms large in the imagination.
16:42Solomon was renowned as a lover of women.
16:52His concubines and wives were too numerous to count, and he loved many foreign women.
17:00Sheba agreed to stay in his palace only if he promised not to touch her,
17:05and he made her promise not to touch anything of his.
17:10But Solomon was cunning.
17:13One night, he ordered a magnificent banquet of the spiciest foods,
17:18and after it, Sheba was consumed with thirst.
17:22Thinking he was asleep, she stole into Solomon's chamber and took a glass of water.
17:28But he was awake, and he gripped her by the arm.
17:33You broke your promise, he said, and now I may touch something of yours.
17:40And he took her to bed, and they made love.
17:45And that night, Sheba had a dream that a light moved across the sky from Israel to Ethiopia.
17:58Masawa was once the haunt of ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans.
18:22Now it's recovering from a terrible civil war, which split Ethiopia apart.
18:28Arab dhows like this have sailed these coasts for centuries,
18:38carrying incense between the Red Sea, Africa, and Arabia.
18:43My idea was to follow the incense route down the Red Sea,
18:47hoping it would lead me to the kingdom of Sheba herself.
18:50You might think it's impossible to find vanished ports from so long ago,
18:57but in fact, an ancient traveller's guide survives,
19:01written by a Greek sea captain.
19:03It's called the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea,
19:09which roughly translated means the travel guide to the Red Sea.
19:13And it lists the ports on the journey that we've come.
19:15Now, in the Ethiopian legend, Adulis was the port of the Queen of Sheba.
19:30It's where she left for Jerusalem.
19:32And the guidebook says it lay opposite a hilly island in a deep bay.
19:37So we're just trying to inch our way into the shore over a coral reef.
19:55You can see it breaking around us.
19:56It must be very, very shallow here.
20:01Oops, there we go.
20:02We've grounded.
20:02Oh, bloody hell.
20:11Nearly lost my boots then.
20:21It may not look much now,
20:23but there was a big town here from the 3rd century B.C.,
20:27a trading post leading into the heart of Africa.
20:30There were temples of volcanic stone dressed with marble.
20:39Wow.
20:40They drank wine and olive oil imported from the Mediterranean.
20:44And the locals here still tell stories about their decadence.
20:49That's one ancient custom which never caught on, thank goodness.
21:16But in Ethiopian legend, this is the place where the Queen of Sheba set foot again in her own land.
21:23When the Queen of Sheba returned to Ethiopia, she brought two special gifts.
21:33The first was a golden ring, given to her by Solomon as a token of his love.
21:39The second was far more precious.
21:43A child in her belly.
21:45Her son by Solomon.
21:47His name was Menelik, which means son of the wise.
21:53Now, Menelik would become the king of Ethiopia and the first of the lions of the tribe of Judah,
22:01from whom all the later kings of Ethiopia were descended.
22:05And because of Menelik, a new Jerusalem was built in Africa.
22:12So Sheba's story isn't the usual fairy tale, where the princess marries her handsome prince.
22:37Sheba stays the woman of power and goes back to rule her own kingdom.
22:53Here in Addis Ababa, that story of the Queen of Sheba is enshrined in the nation's holy book.
22:59Without that book, their kings couldn't rule.
23:01But in 1867, I'm sorry to say, the book was stolen by the British.
23:08Hello. Thank you. Hello. Nice to meet you again. Hello. Hello.
23:14Now, I have brought with me from England, here, this is the letter from Johannes, king of Ethiopia,
23:27writing to Queen Victoria, saying the British have taken the book from Ethiopia.
23:34Please, will you return the book?
23:40This is the book. This is the very book.
23:42This volume was returned to the king of Ethiopia by order of the trustees of the British Museum,
23:49December the 14th, 1872.
23:55The central story of this book, whose name, after all, is the glory of kings, the Kever and Agast,
24:01is the story of the love affair between Solomon and Sheba,
24:04because the dynasties of the kings of Ethiopia all trace their ancestry back to Solomon and Sheba.
24:11Could he read a little, just a little bit of it for a second, for a second, for a second?
24:15It's in Giz. It's in Giz. Yeah, yeah, this is the oldest language of Ethiopia.
24:27First, she went to Jerusalem and she met Solomon and he treated her very nicely and she stayed like six months there.
24:36Some people say that Solomon fell in love with the queen of Sheba. Is this story true?
24:44The center of the book is that, the relationship, the love relationship between the queen Sheba and king Solomon.
24:48Oh, right.
24:49While she was in Jerusalem, she got pregnant.
24:52And the child, the name of the child is Menelik?
24:56Yeah.
24:56Yeah.
24:56Yeah.
24:57Him and the bigots.
24:58Yeah.
24:58The name was Menelik.
25:06So that's how the queen of Sheba came to be the mother of the Ethiopian nation.
25:16But the Kebra Nagast, the book of kings, also names the city where she ruled.
25:22And our search now takes us north from Addis Ababa to the spiritual heart of Ethiopia and the center of a forgotten empire, the legendary capital of the queen of Sheba, Axel.
25:36When we think of the civilizations of the ancient world, we tend to think of Aztecs and Incas, of Babylonians and Egyptians.
25:57The empire of Aksum here in Ethiopia has been the last of the civilizations of the ancient world to enter the Western consciousness.
26:07And yet, it's the first great civilization of sub-Saharan Africa.
26:27Ethiopia has been Christian since Roman times.
26:46It may just be the earliest Christian country in the world.
26:57It's the night of Mary.
27:00Tomorrow is the day of the Virgin Mary.
27:04And over in the old church, there's something else going on.
27:21Listen to this.
27:22It's unearthly, isn't it?
27:27All night, the priests will stand in vigil guarding the holiest relic in Africa, a divine gift from Solomon's children.
27:57Jerusalem.
28:09And the little chapel over there is the place where all Ethiopians believe is the Ark of the Covenant,
28:18a little wooden box containing the two marble tablets given by God to Moses on Mount Sinai.
28:25When Menelik grew up, he desired to meet his father, King Solomon.
28:34So he went to Jerusalem and presented himself to the king.
28:37Greetings, your majesty, from my mother, the queen of Ethiopia, he said.
28:43I am Menelik, your son.
28:46At first, Solomon doubted the boy and refused to accept him as his own.
28:51But when Menelik showed him the golden ring, the token he had given to Sheba,
28:56Solomon rejoiced and invited Menelik to stay and rule with him.
29:01But Menelik's heart lay in Africa with his mother, and he insisted on returning home.
29:08And with him, he took the most precious relic in the Temple of Jerusalem, the Ark of the Covenant.
29:17The Ark of the Covenant, or the Tabot as they call it, is still here protecting Ethiopia.
29:35No one may see it, and the Guardian can never leave the shrine until he dies.
29:42The closest you or I can get is to drink holy water from his teapot.
29:47It's amazing how powerful these mythologies are, isn't it, in all religions.
30:02No Ethiopian doesn't believe that this is a true story,
30:07and that the Ark of the Covenant is not inside that building.
30:17But does Axum really go back to Bible times?
30:27All around you, there are traces of an older, pre-Christian world.
30:34Everywhere you look, there's column tops, great pieces of masonry,
30:41monolithic pieces of sculpture, huge columns here.
30:45Just look at this over here.
30:50The whole thing's built out of the remains of the ancient world.
30:58The giant stones of Axum include the biggest obelisk ever carved.
31:04Legend says they go back even before the pyramids and Stonehenge.
31:08But in reality, Axum starts only in the first century,
31:13far too late for the Bible story.
31:15So where was the city of the Queen of Sheba?
31:29Where in Ethiopia can we get back to the time of the Bible?
31:33In order to get back to that time, say, the 7th or 8th century B.C.,
31:39we've got to go now to an obscure little village on the road to the Red Sea.
31:44Hello, hello, hello, hello, hello.
31:55Hello.
31:55This is the sacred hill of Yehar.
32:14According to a local legend, this, not Aksum,
32:18was the palace of the Queen of Sheba.
32:25This is one of the most mysterious places in the whole of Africa.
32:29A Portuguese missionary came here in the 1520s
32:32and says inside this circle of walls were noble buildings
32:37and the remains of a giant tower.
32:42But he was wrong. It's not a tower.
32:45It's actually the remains of an ancient temple,
32:48one of the most ancient buildings in Africa south of the Sahara.
32:55The date of this amazing structure, it's before 600 BC, could just be right.
33:07This wasn't just a sort of provincial temple.
33:10It's a great royal building, isn't it?
33:17But the other clues here are a baffling, tantalising surprise.
33:23This is part of a frieze that ran around the inside wall of the ancient temple,
33:31and it shows ibex heads, stylised ibex heads.
33:38What does that mean?
33:46You see, those friezes are not African, but Arabian.
33:50Oh, thank you, thank you.
33:53So was Yeha built by an Arabian empire?
33:56Was Sheba herself an Arab?
34:00The next clue was shown to me inside the storeroom by a very proud guardian.
34:07This.
34:08Oh, look at this, look at it, look, look, look.
34:12Fantastic.
34:13Where were these found?
34:20Yeah, by the temple.
34:22By the temple.
34:24These were found right by the temple.
34:26Just look at the wonderful cutting of these here.
34:33This is the Sabean script, the script of the ancient kingdom of Sabah in the Yemen,
34:39in South Arabia.
34:51It's turning out to be quite a detective story, isn't it?
34:54Here we are in the middle of Africa,
34:56with a great temple built in the South Arabian style,
35:00with inscriptions in the ancient script of the Yemen,
35:04and Celt images of the kingdom of Sabah.
35:09At some point, these two lands were ruled by the same dynasty.
35:14It suggests that the next stage of our journey should take us to the Yemen.
35:18That's what we are in the region.
35:30Modern borders so often just divide us, don't they?
35:52You might think Arabia and Africa are separate worlds,
35:56but in fact their cultures have intertwined for millennia.
36:00Just look at the map, at their closest Arabia and the Horn of Africa are 15 miles apart,
36:09less than the English Channel between France and Britain.
36:14In ancient times the Yemen ruled in Ethiopia, and then Aksum ruled in Arabia,
36:20and their people have shared myths and heroes ever since.
36:30These old caravan cities of the Yemen have traded with the Near East overland for nearly 3,000 years.
36:54This is the great bazaar of Old Sanaa.
37:03A fantastic place it is too.
37:07And I'm looking for the incense bazaar.
37:12This is Arabia Felix, Arabia the happy, and the incense coast here was the great producer of myrrh and frankincense in the ancient world.
37:22We're going to try and find the incense market.
37:31And this rocky lump is what they coveted most.
37:35Instant testing.
37:37This is what the people of the ancient world burned for their gods.
37:46So that's myrrh.
37:48They use it in...
37:49And it's what the Queen of Sheba brought to Solomon.
37:52It's absolutely fantastic.
37:53It is the densest, drowsiest, thickest perfumed scent that you could ever imagine.
38:01There's a passage in one of the Roman writers, he says the people here...
38:05There were so many incense caravans coming through that the people became lazy and easy-going.
38:12They were drowsy with the beautiful scent of the incense.
38:16And here in the Yemen, there's another tale of the Queen of Sheba.
38:23King Solomon could command even the jinns and spirits, and he could talk to the birds.
38:33One day, he was flying through the skies on his magic carpet of green silk, a flock of birds wheeling around his head,
38:42when he realized his favorite lapwing was missing.
38:46Where have you been?
38:48He asked the lapwing when it returned.
38:50I have come to you from the land of Sheba, the lapwing replied.
38:55And listen to this, I'm telling the truth.
38:58There, I found a woman reigning over the people.
39:02She is possessed of every virtue and has a most splendid kingdom.
39:08But she and her people do not worship God, they worship the sun.
39:14Satan has seduced her and taken her from the true path.
39:19So in Arabia, there's a new slant on the tale.
39:36Sheba is a dangerous female spirit from the land of jinns and genies whose power must be contained.
39:44The Yemeni knife comes in useful.
40:11And what a place to find the best restaurant in the world
40:28So we've been traveling all day, we've had a breakdown, we've had nothing to eat
40:33and you arrive in a place like this and it's absolutely wonderful
40:38This is Bir Ali on the Arabian Sea
40:45It's the beginning of the incense route up into the interior
40:48and you can see the history and the faces of the people all around
40:51all the faces that look kind of Malaysian and Indian, faces that look Arabian
41:08the end of the 19th century
41:20Well, we've citably fed
41:24We're on the beach at Bir Ali near to the ruins of Khanna
41:27Kana was the great port in the days when Arabia's wealth was not oil, but incense.
41:41The days recalled in the Holy Quran, the glittering kingdom of Sabah, whose queen worshipped the moon and the stars.
41:57When the queen of the south entered Jerusalem, Solomon had been warned that she was no ordinary woman.
42:07Her face and body were beautiful, but she had a dark secret.
42:13Solomon had the glass floor of his palace polished until it shimmered as if it were water.
42:20When the queen entered his palace and stood on the floor, she thought it was a pool,
42:25and fearing that her silk skirts might become wet, she lifted them up.
42:30And the whole of Solomon's court gasped with astonishment to see she had a hairy leg and a cloven hoof, like a goat.
42:44Chasing the Arabian story of Sheba, we now headed deep into the Wadi Hatrarut.
42:51I'm hoping to get to speak to an imam or religious leader, religious scholar,
42:56to ask him about the Muslim legend of the queen of Sheba or the queen of the south, as they call her in the Holy Quran.
43:03But it may take a little bit of negotiation, because this is the heartland of Yemeni Islam.
43:09And it's not always easy for outsiders to get to talk to the key religious figures.
43:14Sheba, it's one of the most beautiful of ancient cities, with its skyscrapers of mud brick.
43:32A Manhattan in the desert.
43:35Finally, we were invited into the home of Imam Jafar.
43:54Oh, how beautiful. What a beautiful room.
43:59The room of a scholar. They're all the same, aren't they?
44:04A big mess. Thousands of books everywhere.
44:08Look at the wind-up gramophone.
44:21And very sweetly, the imam sang to me the verses from the Koran about Sheba.
44:27But her name is mentioned clearly with the Koran, you know, the Balqis, or Queen of Sheba, in the Koran.
44:42Balqa. Balqa. Balqa. This is the name. This is her name.
44:47And in the Koranic tradition, she is from South Arabia, no question.
44:50She is from this part of the world.
44:52Yes.
44:53Yes.
44:54OK.
44:55OK.
44:56So, in Surah 27, in the Holy Koran, isn't there some tradition that when she first came to Jerusalem, her legs were hairy?
45:11For Jafar, it was a deformity cured by faith.
45:16She's like a genie.
45:17Yeah.
45:18And during the stay with King Solomon, she becomes a worshipper of the one true God.
45:23And then she is cured.
45:25And they interpret this scholarly tradition, the imam is saying, is that this is not a symbolic narrative.
45:31It is interpreted as a literal narrative.
45:33So, here in Arabia, another name for the queen and another story.
45:46But here, she's the queen of a real kingdom.
45:49For Arab scholars, the Koran shows that she ruled in Sabah, in the heart of the Yemen.
45:56To get there, we needed to follow one of the great caravan routes of history.
46:00A route old even when the youthful prophet Muhammad himself, peace be upon him, led his camels across the sands of Arabia.
46:11And the only way was to cross the edge of the desert of the empty quarter.
46:15When you think that the Arabian desert is as big as Western Europe, you can see why the kingdom of Sabah remained hidden for so long.
46:36The further we go along this desert trail, the closer we get to the real life history.
46:42And the next stop on this trail is the real life kingdom of Sheba.
46:49Now, because of its remoteness, the kingdom of Sheba had never suffered war, and its people were fabulously wealthy.
47:10For according to the Holy Koran, God himself had given a special sign of favor to its people long ago.
47:19Eat of the sustenance provided by your lord, and be grateful to him.
47:25For you live in a land which is beautiful and fortunate.
47:30And Sheba was so fertile that it looked like an earthly paradise.
47:37Two great gardens, one on the right hand, one on the left.
47:43And everywhere, the air was heavy with the scent of frankincense and myrrh.
47:51At dawn, we arrived at last in the fertile valley of Marib, the ancient kingdom of Sabah.
48:12Sabah's wealth came from the incense trade, but its secret was this giant dam, the biggest in the world.
48:27This is what made Sabah into the earthly paradise remembered in the Koran.
48:33This is just one of the sluice gates.
48:48It's a totally stupendous piece of architecture, isn't it?
48:52It's 750 yards across to the northern end.
48:57The water would have been 50 yards deep in the middle.
49:00Just from this dam alone, they could create 100 kilometers of agricultural land that fed 50,000 people.
49:09So the story comes full circle.
49:15A search which began with a fairy tale has brought us to a real civilization from the time of the Bible legend.
49:24In the fields near the city, they found the temples of the gods of Sabah, the moon god, Al-Makha, lord of the Ibexes.
49:44And on the walls, the same script we saw in Ethiopia.
49:51In around 700 BC, growing in self-confidence, the civilization of Arabia reached out to a wider world.
50:01And at just this time, the rulers of Sabah here began to send out embassies to the Near Eastern world,
50:07sending treasure, spices and frankincense to the powers of the day, just as in the biblical story of the Queen of Sheba.
50:21Now, Marib is just a truck stop on the road between Saudi and Oman.
50:39The fabulous civilization remembered by the Bible, the ancient Greeks and the Koran has been forgotten.
50:51Except, that is, for the Queen of Sheba herself.
51:03Alien and exotic, she is the eternal female.
51:08Fantasy mother and lover, woman of power, cloven-footed demon.
51:13She has passed beyond history and become a myth.
51:25We've been on this extraordinary journey around the shores of the Red Sea, searching for a legend and trying to put that legend into a real history.
51:47But the final goal of our journey isn't the famous archaeological monuments of Marib.
51:53It's this derelict hill, which is still inhabited after 3,000 years.
51:59Only it's not a hill. It's a ruined city, built on top of the ruins of earlier cities.
52:09layer upon layer of human life.
52:17These are the last people of ancient Saba.
52:21Does the little boy know where there's any good pieces of stone with old writing of the Sabaeans on?
52:27Yeah?
52:37So, further up?
52:39Yes.
52:40OK. Let's go and have a look.
52:43Old Marib's days as a living city are almost over.
52:47Its crumbling towers are due for demolition.
52:50Oh, yes! Come and have a look at this.
52:53The archaeologists are waiting.
52:56Fantastic. How about that?
52:58It's just the entire city.
53:00You know, at Shebam, you see the houses are all built in the traditional mud brick way.
53:05But here, there's so much stone, because this was the capital of the kingdom of Sheba.
53:09All the great buildings were built out of stone.
53:11And so, even though what you're looking at now is really just the last 300 years of the existence of the city,
53:18it's built out of the remains of more than 2,500 years of the city's past.
53:25And these are just the last people living on the site.
53:28When they're gone, that'll be it.
53:31But that's not the end of the story.
53:45For one thing this journey has taught me,
53:48it's that myths live on above all in the hearts of the people.
53:52So, what is this here?
53:53It's this.
53:54It's this.
53:55It's this.
53:56It's this.
53:57Down there, little Muhammad told me, the Queen of Sheba had her palace.
54:05And I think she probably did.
54:17Next time on In Search of Myths and Heroes.
54:20A journey through history and legend in search of a hero for all time.
54:25King Arthur.
54:27A quest for the round table.
54:30The magic sword Excalibur.
54:32And...
54:33It is magic.
54:34The Holy Grail.
54:35For more about ancient myths and their modern meaning,
54:49continue the journey at pbs.org.
54:52In Search of Myths and Heroes is available on videocassette and DVD.
55:00The companion book to the program is also available.
55:03To order, call PBS Home Video at 1-800-PLAY-PBS.
55:09.
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55:28.