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King Solomon, the Bible's wisest king possessed extraordinary wealth. The precise location of his legendary mines has been one of history's great unsolved mysteries. Long before Rider Haggard's classic adventure novel "King Solomon's Mines" produced a fresh outbreak of gold fever, explorers, scientists and theologians had scoured the world for the source of the king's astonishing wealth. In this book, Tahir Shah takes up the quest, using as his leads a mixture of texts including The Septuagint, the earliest form of the Bible, as well as geological, geographical and folkloric sources.
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Time and again the evidence points towards Ethiopia, the ancient kingdom in the horn of Africa whose imperial family claims descent from Menelik, the son born to Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. Tahir Shah's trail takes him to a remote cliff-face monastery where the monks pull visitors up on a leather rope, to the ruined castles of Gondar, and to the churches of Lalibela, hewn from solid rock. Tahir Shah's account of his journey in search of the facts behind the fiction is every bit as exciting as Rider Haggard's.
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