Author: Gerald Brisch

First an introduction by us (or skip directly to Professor Al-Jallad’s article).

The Bents’ final journey together (1896/7) sees the couple on the island of Soqotra in the Indian Ocean.

Mabel Bent’s diary for Monday, 21 December 1896 notes:

“We have not for years enjoyed such peace and safety. The people are most pleasant and do not worry us a bit by coming round our tents. We can walk about alone all over the place and yesterday T[heodore] and I went a long distance and found some inscriptions on a smooth rock, also a little hamlet, very clean (Haida), as is Kalenzia.” [our emphasis]

When the widowed Mabel Bent was writing up the event for her Southern Arabia (1900,  p. 351) she says:

“One day we two went some distance in the direction of the mountains, and came on a large upright rock with an inscription upon it, evidently late Himyaritic or Ethiopic, and copied as much of it as was distinguishable. Not far off was the tidy little hamlet of Haida.” [our emphasis]

Theodore Bent copied the inscriptions into his notebook on the spot, and Southern Arabia includes a copy of this (from an uncredited source, not Bent, as he died a few days after returning to London in May 1897).  Mabel’s ‘smooth rock’ has not been found; the text is in Dhofari.

To our knowledge the inscriptions have never been interpreted. Dhofari expert Professor Ahmad Al-Jallad has very kindly prepared the following short article (November 2025) for the Bent Archive. As his commentary includes a variety of symbols and diacritics we offer it as a pdf (click on the image below to access).

‘Theodore Bent’s Dhofari 1 inscriptions, Qalansiyah, Soqotra’ by Prof. Ahmad Al-Jallad (Nov. 2025)

Recommended background reading:

For a very valuable introduction, see J. Jansen van Rensburg (2018), Rock Art of Soqotra, Yemen: A Forgotten Heritage Revisited. Arts 7(4). See also D.B. Doe (1970), Socotra. An Archaeological Reconnaissance in 1967, Coconut Grove, Fla, Field Research Projects; V.V. Naumkin and A.V. Sedov (1993), Monuments of Socotra, Topoi, Orient-Occident 1993(3-2): 569-623.

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Prof. Rebecca Sweetman, Director of the British School at Athens, has chosen Bent’s short, stormy visit to Sikinos for our ‘Reading The Cyclades’ project, marking the 140th (1885-2025) anniversary of Theodore Bent’s classic The Cyclades, or Life Among the Insular Greeks. If you want to join in, just Messenger us! (photo: BSA)

Click here for other readings!

Sikinos [Bent’s Ch. 8: Sunday, 27 January 1884 – Friday, 1 February 1884]

Bent’s ‘storm-stayed’ chapter on Sikinos is read by Prof. Rebecca Sweetman, who very kindly takes some time off from her busy job as Director of the British School at Athens to make this contribution. We are particularly  grateful to her (coincidentally, she tells us she went to school near Mabel Bent’s birthplace, Beauparc, Co. Meath). Rebecca’s interests have long led her to the islands – having begun by writing on Roman and Late Antique Crete, she is currently working on the Cyclades, with a monograph (The Archaeology of the Cyclades in the Roman and Late Antique Periods – Globalization, Christianization and Resilience) due later in 2025 from Cambridge University Press.

The Bents had a happy relationship with the British School (founded in 1886) and were frequent guests at 52 Souedias Street (in April 1896 Theodore was asked to take charge of a small dig near the Athens Olympieion). Rebecca’s reading ends with the Bents’ ride to Sikinos’ atmospheric Episkopi monument, very recently restored to great acclaim. (By the way, Mabel has her 38th birthday on this remote Cycladic island.)

Transcribed from the American periodical  The Youth’s Companion, v. 81, No. 26, June 27, 1907: pp. 307-8.

This extraordinary, in so many ways, piece, with its reference to Rider Haggard’s friend Theodore Bent, celebrity explorer of Great Zimbabwe in 1891, appeared in June 1907. The article is balanced exactly on the tipping point of the start of the shattering of the myth of Great Zimbabwe, so much based on Bent’s erroneous interpretation of the famous ruins, which, in turn, had not a little to do with Cecil Rhodes – indirectly one of the sponsors of the Bent expedition to the site in 1891.

This shattering began, it can be argued, with the head-on clash of two great studies – David Randall-MacIver’s Mediaeval Rhodesia (1906), in the vanguard of the ‘Africans-built-the-ruins’ movement, and R.N. Hall’s Great Zimbabwe (1905), fighting the rearguard ‘It-was-the-Phoenicians-or similar’ brigade, on whose side Haggard, as was to be expected, arrayed himself. ^note 1 

In the UK, Haggard’s article was published in Cassell’s Magazine ^note 2  (1907, June-Nov, pp. 144-51) a month later, July 1907, than the American version, but we cannot be certain when Haggard submitted these articles or on what terms. The Cassell version varies in several sections and layout, i.e. in it Haggard (p. 144) inserts a moaning paragraph or two complaining that in America his King Solomon’s Mines has been ‘pirated by the million’.  Understandably this pique has vanished from the American article.  Also, The Youth’s Companion version is dramatically illustrated with lithographs of Great Zimbabwe (including the famous soapstone bird illustrated below), which were circulating at the time and resembling Mabel Bent’s photographs in Bent’s Ruined Cities of Mashonaland (1892), whereas the Cassell version has fictional illustrations by Russell Flint. Cassell’s first published Haggard’s bestseller in late 1885, the same year that Bent’s great travelogue ‘The Cyclades‘ appeared.

‘The Real “King Solomon’s Mines”, by H. Rider Haggard’

Over twenty years ago the spirit moved me to attempt a story of African adventure, and as a result I wrote a book called “King Soloman’s Mines”. Now one of those old Romans who had such an extraordinary art of summing up gathered wisdom in a single sentence has informed us that books, like men, have their appointed destinies. Certainly this is so. Thus for “King Solomon’s Mines” I never expected any particular success. It was only a tale of adventure, and there seemed to be no reason why I should feel especially hopeful.

Indeed, if I remember right, this pessimistic attitude was shared by sundry publishers, who turned up their experienced noses at what has proved to be a sound investment in the way of fiction, until by chance it fell into the hands of the late Mr. W.E. Henley, who recommended it to Messrs. Cassell. Even when the manuscript found a publisher, I recollect, so small was my faith that I nearly disposed of the work outright for a small sum of money.

Yet “King Solomon’s Mines” has proved curiously successful. Twenty years have gone by, and it still flourishes. Old ladies still buy it under the impression that it is a religious tale, and other people, young and old, because it amuses them. During my recent journey through America I met scarcely any one who did not take the opportunity of informing me that he [sic] had read “King Solomon’s Mines”.

When I was a lad and a public servant in Africa I met many men who have now long passed away – the pioneers of settlement and exploration, or those who had first become acquainted with certain of the great savage races of the interior, or who had helped to shape history when at last these races and the white man found themselves face to face. Being of an inquiring character, I collected from them information which afterward enabled me to produce such books as “Nada the Lily” or that which I am discussing.

Thus, although I think that Mr. Baines, one of the first wanderers in much of the country which is now Rhodesia died shortly after I reached Natal, and I do not recall ever having spoken to him, I knew his family, and doubtless heard something of the country from them and others, with the result that the idea must have become implanted in my mind that it had once been occupied by an ancient people.

The Things I Did Not Know

How I came to conclude that this people was Phoenician I have now no idea. Nor, to the best of my memory, did I ever at any time hear of the great ruin of Zimbabwe, or that the ancients has carried on a vast gold-mining enterprise in the part of Africa where it stands. Still less did I know that diamonds existed elsewhere than Kimberley; indeed, that fact has only been discovered within the last few years. I introduced them only because they were more picturesque and easier to handle than gold would have been.

When I wrote of King Solomon’s Road I never guessed that the old-world Road of God, as I think it is called, would be discovered in the Matoppos; when I imagined Sheba’s Breasts I was ignorant that so named and shaped they stand – vide the latest maps – not far from the Tokwe River, guarding the gate to Great Zimbabwe, near to which, in truth, or so I believe, Solomon had the mines that poured the gold of Ophir into his coffers.

I never knew of the ancient workings, whereof so many have since been found, or of the treasury with the swinging doors of stone which now is said to have an actual existence. All of these, so far as this and other books are concerned, were the fruit of imagination, conceived, I suppose, from chance words spoken long ago that lay dormant in the mind.

But of the Matabele, who in the tale are named the Kukuanas, I did know something even in those days. Indeed, I went very near to knowing too much, for when, in 1877, my dead friends, Captain Patterson and Mr. J. Sergeaunt, were sent by Sir Bartle Frere on an embassy to their king, Lobengula, I begged the government of the Transvaal, whose servant I was at that time, for leave to accompany them.

If I Had Gone On!

That was refused, as I could not be spared from my office. So I rode with them a few miles, and returned. Had I gone on, my fate doubtless would have been their fate, for Lobengula murdered them both very cruelly, also my two servants, whom I had lent them, and poor young Thomas, the missionary’s son. The names of those two servants, Khiva, the bastard Zulu, and Ventvogel, the Hottentot, I have tried to preserve in the pages of “King Solomon’s Mines”. In life they were such men as are there described.

So much for legends and romance. Now let us come to the facts.

If any reader will take the trouble to consult a modern map of central South Africa, he [sic] may see a vast block of territory bounded, roughly speaking, by the Zambezi on the north and the Transvaal on the south, by Barotseland and Bechuanaland on the west, and by Portuguese East Africa on the east, measuring perhaps six hundred miles square.

Scattered over all this huge expanse are found ancient ruins, whereof about five hundred are known to exist, while doubtless many more remain to be discovered. These ruins, in spite of certain late theories to the contrary, it would seem almost certain – or so, at least, my late friend, Theodore Bent, and other learned persons have concluded – were built by people of Semitic race, perhaps Phoenicians, or, to be more accurate, South Arabian Himyarites, a people rendered somewhat obscure by age. At any rate, they worshiped the sun, the moon, the planets, and took observations of the more distant stars. Also, in the intervals of these pious occupations, they were exceedingly keen business men. Business took them to South Africa, where they were not native, and business kept them there, until at last, while still engaged on business, or so it seems most probable, they were all of them slain.

Their occupation was gold-mining, perhaps with a little trading in “ivory, almug-trees, apes and peacocks – or ostriches – thrown in. They opened up hundreds of gold reefs, from which it is estimated that they extracted at least seventy-five million pounds’ worth of gold, and probably a great deal more. They built scores of forts to protect their line of communication with the coast. They erected vast stronghold temples, of which the Great Zimbabwe, that is situated practically in the center of the block of territory delimited above, is the largest yet discovered. They worshiped the sun and the moon, as I have said. They enslaved the local population by tens of thousands to labor in the mines and other public works, for gold-seeking was evidently their state monopoly.

They came, they dwelt, they vanished. That is all we know about them. What they were like, what were there domestic habits, what land they took ship from, to what land returned, how they spent their leisure, in what dwellings they abode, whither they carried their dead for burial – of all these things and many others we are utterly ignorant.

The thing is strange, almost terrifying to think of. We modern folk are very vain of ourselves. We can hardly conceive a state of affairs on this little planet in which we shall not fill a large part, except for some obscure traces of blood, our particular race, the Anglo-Saxon, the Teutonic, the Gallic, whatever it may be, has passed away and been forgotten. Imagine London, Paris, Berlin, Chicago, and those who built them, forgotten! Yet such things may well come about; indeed, there are forces at work in the world, although few folk give a thought to them, which seem likely to bring them about a great deal sooner than we anticipate.

As we think to-day, so doubtless these Phoenicians, or Himyarites, or whoever they may have been, thought in their day. Remember, it must have been a great people that without the aid of steam or firearms could have penetrated, not peacefully, we may be sure, into the dark heart of Africa, and there have established their dominion over its teeming millions of population.

Under the Conquerors

Probably the struggle was long and fierce – how fierce their fortifications show, for evidently they lived the overlords, the taskmasters of hostile multitudes; yes, multitudes and multitudes, for there are great districts in Rhodesia where, for league after league, even the mountainsides are terraced by the patient, laborious toil of man, that every inch of soil might be made available for the growth of food. Yet these fierce Semitic traders broke their spirit and brought them under the yoke; forced them to dig in the dark mines for gold, to pound the quartz with stone hammers and bake it in crucibles; forced them to quarry the hard granite and ironstone to the shape and size of the bricks they were accustomed in their land of origin, and, generation by generation, to build up the mighty, immemorial mass of temple fortresses.

When did they do it? No one knows, but from the orientation of the ruins to the winter or summer solstice, or to the northern stars, scholars think that the earliest of them were built somewhere about two thousand years before Christ . And when did they cease from their labors, leaving nothing behind them but these dry-built walls – for, although they were proficient in the manufacture of cement, they used no mortar – and the hollow pits whence they had dug the gold, and the instruments with which they treated it? That no scholar can tell us, although many scholars have theories on the matter. They vanished, that is all. Probably the subject tribes, having learned their masters’ wisdom, rose up and massacred them to the last man; and in those days there was no historian to record it and no novelist to make a story of the thing.

Solemn, awe-inspiring, the great elliptical building of Zimbabwe still stands beneath the moon, which once doubtless was worshiped from its courts. In it are the altars and the sacred cone where once the priests made prayer, or perchance offered sacrifice of children to Baal and to Ashtaroth.

On the hill above, amidst the granite boulders, frowns the fortress, and all round stretch the foundation blocks of a dead city. Here the Makalanga, that is, the People of the Sun, descendants without doubt of the Semitic conquerors and the native races, still make offerings of black oxen to the spirits of their ancestors – or did so till within a few years gone. The temple, too, or so they hold, is still haunted by those spirits; none will enter it at night. But out of the beginning of it all these folk know nothing. If questioned, they say only that the place was built by white men “when stones were soft”; that is, countless ages ago.

What a place it must have been when the monoliths and the carven vultures, each upon its soapstone pillar, stood in their places upon the broad, flat tops of the walls, when the goldsmiths were at work and the merchants trafficked in the courts, when the processions wound their way through the narrow passages and the white-robed, tall-capped priests did sacrifice in the shrines!

Where did they bury their dead one wonders. For of these, as yet, no cemetery has been found. Perhaps they cremated them and cast their ashes to the winds. Perhaps they embalmed them, if they were individuals of consequences, and sent them back to Arabia or to Tyre, as the Chinese send their dead to-day, while humbler folk were cast out to the beasts and birds. Or perhaps they still lie in deep and hidden kloofs among the mountains.

This, at least, is evident, that during their long centuries of occupation, for all these ruins reveal various periods of building that must have been separated by great stretches of time, the dead were many. Indeed, a few have been found – not at the Great Zimbabwe, but at Mundie, at Chum and at Dhlo-dhlo. These were interred beneath the granite cement of the floors, perhaps under the dwelling of the deceased, who was laid on his side, with his head resting upon a stone or wooden pillow of the ancient Egyptian pattern, eathernware pots standing about him, his gold ornaments still upon his person, and cakes of gold within his pouch to pay the expenses of his last long journey. If he were a high official also, his gold-headed and gold-ferruled rod of office was laid in the tomb with him.

One of these departed, who dwelt, or, at any rate, was buried at Chum, was a giant. Messrs. Hall and Neal say that he was over seven feet high, his shin-bone being more than two feet in length. As much as seventy-two ounces of gold have been found buried with a single ancient, and at Dhlo-dhlo my friend, Major Burnham, D.S.O., found more than six hundred ounces of that metal, nearly all of it, I think, manufactured. Also he found skeletons, and within them barbed arrowheads, showing how they met their deaths, some of which arrowheads I still have, although whether these date from ancient or from medieval times I cannot say.

Ages and ages after the ancients had been destroyed or left the country, there was another empire here, that of Monomotapa, and semi-savage kings, of whom Mr. Wilmot tells us in his book, held their courts in the Zimbabwes, The Portuguese used to fight with these people, and to send missionaries to make Christians of those who survived.

Thus from documents preserved in the Vatican it appears that in 1628 one Brother Louis, having defeated the emperor and his army of a hundred thousand men, went on to the Great Zimbabwe, “the court of the king, and there”, he says, “I built a little church and put up a crucifix I had brought with me and a statue of the Blessed Virgin of the Rosary.”

Sixty or seventy years before this, also, Father Gonsalvo Silvera was murdered by the Emperor of Monomotapa under circumstances which would be well worth relating if I had the space. Two generations later Father Alphonsus, travelling up the Zambezi, into a tributary of which the body was thrown, alleges that he was shown a place where it still lay uncorrupted. He could not visit it, however, because – as the report went – it was carefully guarded by tigers!

But of these Zimbabwes, ancient and medieval, the legends are endless. Now they are the heritage of the Anglo-Saxon race:  and new dead, Maj. Allan Wilson and his companions, who fell fighting overwhelming odds on the banks of the Shangani, lie within the shadow of their walls, which still wrap the secrets of those who built them in time-worn stone and impenetrable silence.

Bent and Haggard were acquaintances, then friends, from the 1880s. In any list of likely candidates for the famous story-teller’s Alan Quartermain, Bent would be near the top.

In 1896, Theodore went on a bicycle tour with his friend Nigel Gresley to some English eastern counties and spent a day with Haggard and his wife. Gresley later published an account of the tour:

“From Beccles we hastened on [c. 8 miles], reaching Ditchingham about dusk. We had the pleasure of staying at Ditchingham House, where we were most kindly and agreeably entertained by Mr. Rider Haggard, the well-known and talented author of many leading Works of Fiction, notably, perhaps, the novels ‘She’, ‘King Solomon’s Mines’, and ‘Jess’. Mr. and Mrs. Rider Haggard are surrounded in their home by innumerable objects of art, carved oak, statuary, paintings illustrating scenes from his works, and many rare and valuable Curios picked up during their travels in Mexico, South Africa, and other parts of the world. We greatly enjoyed our 24 hours stay under their hospitable roof.”  (A Week on Wheels in East Anglia… Touring in Norfolk and Suffolk with Theodore Bent… [1896, Witmore & Son, Dursley]).

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Researches throw up Bent bits all the time – some don’t make it into articles or into our main pages. Nevertheless they are interesting (we think) and might perhaps be useful to some in their studies of mid-19th century travellers and their times.

After all, Theodore and Mabel were partial to the odd sidetrack (look at the map) and this Bent Miscellany might well lead you down some…

Snippets are added regularly, latest first, so return as often as you like. We include references and links wherever possible and if you want to cite www.tambent.com that would be appreciated.

Updated October 2025

Professor Ahmad Al-Jallad is conducting fascinating work (2025) on the Dhofari script – the conventional name for the undeciphered alphabet found in the hills of Dhofar (Ẓufār) and desert regions, stretching from Oman to Yemen’s al-Mahrah governorate and Socotra, where the Bents recorded several inscriptions.

The Paddington Times, Friday 2 August 1895: “Yet women are under a sex disqualification when a poor little squabble among men arises, whether or not one of them, like Mrs. Theodore Bent, the wife of the distinguished traveller of Mashonaland, who has done the work of a dozen explorers, has friends who expect that her additions to the scientific knowledge of the day will be acknowledged as they would be if she were of the other sex.”

The Paddington Times, Friday 16 September 1898: “The British Association this year met at Bristol for the third time, and has just concluded its business… In every section room last week ladies formed the majority of the audience. They were not of the butterfly class, rushing from place to place in search of novelty, but serious students from college classrooms and laboratories, who had travelled long distances to see and hear the great authorities of the scientific world. Many of the girls were themselves teachers, and keenly interested in scientific research. The papers by ladies were few in number, but noteworthy. The three great lady travellers of our time came to the front, modest, self-contained, accurate, and enthusiastic, each in her own domain – Mrs. Bishop, Mrs. Bent, and Miss Kingsley.”

Mid-Surrey Times, Saturday 15 May 1897: “Mr. Bent was always accompanied by his wife, one of whose functions was to look after the commissariat. Mr. Bent was a thorough believer in tea on his travels, and did not advise anyone to explore on spirits. The larder of the travellers usually included desiccated soups, corned beef and beef essence, potted meats, condensed milk, and, last but not least, some sackfuls of dry bread, for long experience taught Mr. and Mrs. Bent both what to avoid and what to add to there travelling impediments.”

From The Youth’s Companion, v. 81, no. 26, June 27, 1907, pages 307-308

In the article ‘The Real “King Solomon’s Mines”, by H. Rider Haggard’: ‘These ruins [Great Zimbabwe], in spite of certain late theories to the contrary, it would seem almost certain, – or so, at lease, my late friend, Theodore Bent, and other learned persons have concluded,- were built by people of Semitic race, perhaps Phoenicians, or, to be more accurate, South Arabian Himyarites, a people rendered somewhat obscure by age. At any rate, they worshiped the sun, the moon, the planets, and took observations of the more distant stars.’

From The Youth’s Companion, v. 82, no. 20, 14 May 1908, page 235

‘Afraid of safety-pins. It is not easy to realize the bondage to fear under which barbarous people live on account of their superstitious ignorance. Mrs. Theodore Bent tells in her book, “Southern Arabia”, how she tried to make a present of a safety-pin to a native woman, and what a storm of indignation was occasioned by her act. On our arrival at our camping-ground and while we were waiting for our tents to be ready, I was surrounded by women all masked. They seemed highly astonished at a safety-pin which I was taking out, so I gave, or rather offered it, to an old woman near me. She wanted to take the pin, but several men rushed between us and roared at us both, and prevented my giving it to her. I stood there holding it out and she stretching out her hand, and one or two men then asked me for it for her. I put it down on a stone, and she took it away and seemed pleased; but a man soon brought it back to me on the end of a stick, saying they did know these things and were afraid of them.’ (credit: Digital Library@Villanova University)

From The Youth’s Companion, v. 98, no. 52, December 25, 1924, page 852

in ‘Fireflies by J. Renwick Metheny’. ‘It does not pay robbers to get themselves or their horses shot. Like men of other occupations, they want to lose nothing. It is not from cowardice but from prudence that they resort to stratagem. Osman Oghlu, of whom Theodore Bent wrote so fascinatingly, fought with reckless courage against an overwhelming force of armed men; and at that he had no chance of escape… (credit: Digital Library@Villanova University)

From The Youth’s Companion,  v. 71, no. 41, October 14, 1897, page 477

In ‘The Breath of Allah in Six Chapters, Chapter 1’ by Charles Asbury Stephens (1844-1931). ‘”The English at Aden call it the Valley of the Hadramut”, replied the young engineer. “It lies eighty or a hundred miles inland from the barren south coast of Arabia, which stretches easterly from the Straits of Bab-el-Mandeb to the Persian Gulf. In the days of King Solomon in the long centuries of the Roman Empire, the Vale of Hadramut was known as the country from which frankincense was brought, but since the era of Mohammed little has been heard of it. The fanaticism of the Moslem seyyids shut it up from the world till the year 1893, when an English traveler and his wife, Mr. and Mrs. Theodore Bent, succeeded in so far winning the confidence of the sultans, or Arab princes, as to be permitted to enter the vale and reside there for a time.”‘ (credit: Digital Library@Villanova University)

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