SOAPSTONE CYLINDER FROM ZIMBABWE
OBJECT FROM TEMPLE OF PAPHOS. CYPRUS
The next find from Zimbabwe which we will discuss is the circular soapstone object with a hole in the centre, which at first is suggestive of a quern; but being of such friable material such could not have been the case. It is decorated round the side and on the top with rings of knobs, four on the side and four on the top; from the central hole a groove has been [[204]]cut to the side, and the whole is very well finished off. This thing is 2 feet 2 inches in circumference. We also found portions of a smaller bowl with the same knob pattern thereon. The use of this extraordinary soapstone find is very obscure. Mr. Hogarth calls my attention to the fact that in the excavations at Paphos, in Cyprus, they found a similar object, similarly decorated, which they put down as Phœnician. It is now in the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge, and is a cylindrical object of coarse white marble six inches in diameter and about four and three-quarter inches high. It is studded with round projecting studs left in relief on the marble, resembling in general disposition those on our soapstone find, and there is no question about the similarity of the two objects. They remind one of Herodian’s description of the sacred cone in the great Phœnician temple of the sun at Emesa, in Syria (Herodian, bk. v. § 5), which was adorned with certain ‘knobs or protuberances,’ a pattern supposed by him to represent the sun, and common in phallic decorations.
In the vicinity of the temple we also came across some minor objects very near the surface, which did not do more than establish the world-wide commerce carried on at the Great Zimbabwe at a much more recent date, and still by the Arabians—namely, a few fragments of Celadon pottery from China, of Persian ware, an undoubted specimen of Arabian glass, and beads of doubtful provenance, though one of them may be considered as Egyptian of the [[205]]Ptolemaic period. Glass beads almost of precisely the same character—namely, black with white encircling lines—have come from ancient tombs at Thebes, in Bœotia, and are to be found in almost every collection of Egyptian curiosities.
GLASS BEADS, CELADON POTTERY, PERSIAN POTTERY, AND ARABIAN GLASS
The pottery objects must have been brought here by Arabian traders during the middle ages, probably when the Monomatapa chiefs ruled over this district and carried on trade with the Arabians for gold, as European traders do now with objects of bright appearance and beads. Similar fragments have been found by Sir John Kirk in the neighbourhood of Quiloa, where in mediæval times was a settlement of [[206]]Arabs who came from the Persian Gulf, forming an hereditary intercourse between the Arabs and the east coast of Africa until the Portuguese found them there and drove them away three centuries ago. It is impossible that a collection of things such as these could have been brought together by any but a highly commercial race during the middle ages, and the Arabians alone had this character at the time in question.
