Searching For Sheba

By Michael D. Lemonick And Andrea Dorfman

Her original purpose may have been to quiz the great king, but it was the torrid love affair between the wise and powerful Israelite ruler and the mysterious monarch from the south that everyone remembers. Their legendary romance, celebrated in both Bible and Koran, begat epic poetry, Hollywood extravaganzas, musical works by George Frideric Handel and Charles Gounod and, according to Ethiopian tradition, an African dynasty that endured until Haile Selassie was deposed in 1974.

What nobody knows for sure, though, is whether this storied queen actually existed--or even what her name might have been. The Arabs call her Bilqis (thought to be a religious honorific), the Greeks Black Minerva and the Ethiopians Makeda, or "Greatness," but these are only titles. "Sheba" is simply an alternate spelling of Saba, the kingdom in modern-day Yemen where she is said to have reigned for a score of years beginning about 950 B.C. And while Cleopatra, the other storied beauty of Middle Eastern royalty, is mentioned in contemporary secular texts, the Queen of Sheba appears only in religious works--not the most authoritative source.

This state of historical ignorance may be about to end. An international team of archaeologists has been searching for hard evidence of the Queen's existence since 1988, and according to project field director William Glanzman of the University of Calgary, the solution to the mystery may lie amid the ruins of a 3,500-year-old temple complex in northern Yemen. Known in Arabic as Mahram Bilqis--"the Queen of Sheba's sanctified place"--the sprawling ruins are situated about 80 miles east of Yemen's capital, Sana'a, and just a few miles from the ancient citadel of Marib, at the edge of the forbidding Arabian desert. "The Queen of Sheba," he asserts, "is likely to have lived in Marib and worshipped at Mahram Bilqis."

Glanzman's assertion would once have been considered ludicrous. That's because experts believed the earliest signs of civilization on the Arabian peninsula dated to just 700 B.C., more than 200 years after the Queen of Sheba's lifetime. But in the late 1980s, pottery shards from Wadi al-Jubah, not far from Marib, was found to be 3,500 years old. Suddenly, a wealth of other circumstantial evidence, both cultural and religious, made the Queen's existence seem a lot more plausible.

In fact, Westerners have been looking for the Queen at Mahram Bilqis since 1843, when Joseph Thomas Arnaud, a French apothecary, arrived in search of the spices she brought to Solomon. By then, the site had long since been abandoned. The temple itself had ceased to be used sometime in the 6th century A.D., and the expanding desert had covered much of the complex. Sheba searchers returned to the region sporadically, most recently in the 1950s, when American oilman and explorer Wendell Phillips led an expedition that was driven out by political upheavals in Yemen.

Phillips died in 1975, but his sister, Merilyn Phillips Hodgson, has continued his work; she now heads the American Foundation for the Study of Man, which was the original sponsor of the current expedition. When the team arrived at Mahram Bilqis in 1998, most of the ruins were buried by sand drifts as deep as 26 ft. While none of the sanctuary's existing masonry dates to the Queen's time, much of its layout remains as she would have seen it. The main entrance is marked by the remains of a portico--eight limestone pillars, today half submerged in the sand--that stands in front of a peristyle hall whose high masonry walls are inset with false windows. This entrance hall in turn opens onto a vast ovoid, some 300 ft. across, that formed the sanctuary itself. The ovoid is enclosed by a thick, curving wall of limestone blocks covered with inscriptions, some of which are more than 40 ft. long. The AFSM team believes the remains of the wall, along with additional inscriptions, extend more than 30 ft. beneath the sand, and it is exploring the site using ground-penetrating radar and other high-tech tools.

The archaeologists' radar has already located the remains of other structures, part of a vast temple complex covering more than 15 acres. In addition to a thicket of buildings on either side of the hall, the radar has spotted a water well and what appears to be a grand causeway linking Mahram Bilqis with the ancient citadel of Marib, which rises above the desert about three miles to the north. A separate team from the German Archaeological Institute, meanwhile, has uncovered dozens of multistory mausoleums in a cemetery area southwest of the oval enclosure. "We have excavated less than 1% of the entire site," Glanzman marvels. "This is the largest and one of the most important pre-Islamic sanctuaries on the Arabian peninsula. It's really, really huge."

The excavations have also showed that the temple was a major pilgrimage center long before the Queen of Sheba was born. The evidence--inscriptions, wall paintings, fragments of bronze statues, pottery vessels, animal bones and 2,000-year-old pieces of frankincense that still retain their distinctive fragrance--indicates that the site was used continuously from at least 1200 B.C. until the 6th century A.D. The potsherds are particularly important, Glanzman says. "They may be the key to sequencing the archaeological history of the region. The technology is very sophisticated and shows a high level of civilization." References in the inscriptions reveal that the temple was dedicated to Almaqah, the southern Arabian god of the moon and of agricultural fertility.

Glanzman suspects that all religious ceremonies took place within the oval-shaped sanctuary, which he calls "the business end" of the complex. Exactly what those rituals involved remains a puzzle because the team has not yet formally excavated the area. The abundance of animal bones in the debris that was used as fill within the enclosure wall, however, as well as a partial inscription on the wall detailing the regulation of animals brought to the sanctuary, suggests that sacrifices were common. A radar sounding within the oval confirmed that it too is littered with architectural debris, and a preliminary dig turned up the remains of a collapsed structure with huge inscriptions. "The letters are half a meter high, so they could be read from the ground like a billboard," says Glanzman. "We also expect to find lots of platforms for altars and statues."

Many of the hundreds of inscriptions date from about the 8th century B.C. to the 4th century A.D. Although the oldest ones were carved several centuries after the Queen's lifetime, they contain priceless information about her kingdom's political and social history, including a chronology of Sabaean kings (the first that researchers have found), as well as the names of other important visitors to Mahram Bilqis and their genealogies and tribal affiliations. Since some of the names are female, one of them could be that of the Queen of Sheba.

The team--which includes scientists from Canada, the U.S., Yemen, Britain, the West Bank, Germany and Australia, as well as local Bedouin tribesmen--recently completed another field season. But they estimate that it will take another 10 to 15 years just to uncover all the buildings at Mahram Bilqis and the surrounding pathways--and even then most of the site will remain unexplored.

Eventually, the Yemeni government plans to restore and reconstruct the sanctuary in hopes of transforming it into what Glanzman calls "an eighth wonder of the world"--a tourist attraction comparable to the Pyramids or the Acropolis. (Yemen's political instability, though, makes that scenario unlikely anytime soon.) It also intends to petition UNESCO to designate Mahram Bilqis as a World Heritage Site.

As for the goal of discovering the Queen's true identity, the task may well prove impossible. "In order to know who she was, we would need to find an inscription in Hebrew, and find it on an object that was unequivocally linked to the 10th century B.C.," Glanzman says. "That's like trying to find a needle in a haystack that's been buried under 10 meters of sand."