Author: Gerald Brisch

Mabel Bent and the ‘Bethel Seal’ controversy: a mystery still

“Much of the excitement of archaeology has come from the discovery of long-dead languages or their decipherment. The Rosetta stone; the Dead Sea Scrolls; Linear B are all phrases associated with great discoveries and, in some cases, great academic quarrels. Few of these, however, have been more intriguing than the controversy which arose from the discovery in 1957 of a fragment of a stamp seal, during excavations at Bethel, not far from
Jerusalem.” (I. Blake, ‘The Bethel Stamp Seal: A Mystery Revealed?’, The Irish Times, 16 August 1973)

The mystery begins

The famous clay stamp/seal acquired by the Bents in the Wadi Hadramaut in 1894 (Bent Archive).

In 1957 an inscribed, and seemingly insignificant, lump of pottery was found by the archaeologist James Kelso, 1.90 m below surface level while excavating at Tel Beitîn, the important Biblical site of Bethel, about 20 km north of Jerusalem, which was first  explored by William Foxwell Albright in 1934, a few years after Mabel Bent’s death in London in 1929. This modest clay find, best described as originally a rectangle c. 10 cm long and 7 cm high, inscribed, and with the remains of a ‘handle’ on the reverse – but found with the top left-hand corner broken off – was soon recognized as a stamp or seal, used presumably by a merchant for designating ownership, or contents, of traded merchandise, let’s say frankincense from Yemen.

Bent’s squeeze of the ‘Bethel Seal’ sent to Eduard Glaser for identification c. 1895 (Creative Commons, Austrian Academy of Sciences (OeAW), Library, Archive and Collections: Information & Service, Vienna, within the Project IF2019/27; Glaser Virtual World – All About Glaser (GlaViWo), AT-OeAW-BA-3-27-A-A727).

It was soon also recognized that the find was far from insignificant and very possibly far from home. Two scholars, Gus Van Beek and Albert Jamme, published the find a year later. note 1  In 1960 Jamme made a major discovery of his own that was to bring Mabel Bent into the story. While looking through a collection of paper ‘squeezes’ (papier-mâché impressions), note 2  Jamme had one of those flashes of association and recognized the startling similarity of the impression with the clay stamp dug up from Bethel a few years previously. He published his discovery with Van Beek in 1961, note 3  being of the ‘opinion that the two seals are identical, yet distinct’ and that the ‘South-Arabian character of the stamp… is beyond any possible doubt’ and totally ‘excludes the possibility that it was introduced in modern times’. To Van Beek and Jamme the seal proved an early link between the spice and luxuries routes of South Arabia, beginning some 2000 km to the south, and linking South Arabia with Palestine, King Solomon with the Queen of Sheba – a thesis that would have delighted Theodore Bent beyond measure. ‘We are of the opinion that the two seals are identical, yet distinct.’

A detail from “Map of Hadramut surveyed by Imam Sharif, Khan Bahadur to illustrate the explorations of Theodore Bent” (1900, from Southern Arabia). Click for the full map (Wikipedia).

Two seals? Kelso’s 1957 find and Glaser’s squeeze A 727 – the latter representing none other than Theodore’s find from the Al-Mashad region of the Wadi Doan in the Hadramaut, and the object illustrated (items 3 and 6) in the top image here (reproduced in Southern Arabia, opposite p. 436). Unfortunately it is not clear from Mabel’s diary, her Chronicle, where and when they acquired the object; its relative insignificance may be the reason – in contrast to the two other stamps/seals of copper and gold the couple also acquired in the Hadramaut.

For the Israeli scholar Professor Yigael Yadin the seals were too close for comfort, and in his 1969 paper note 4  he declares they are ‘but one and the same’ and therefore Van Beek and Jamme’s conjecture about the historical, even Biblical, link between the frankincense routes of the south and Bethel and beyond to the north was overstated and weakened. The gist of Yadin’s argument is that there is but one stamp, and that the Bents’ find had somehow arrived later at Bethel; indeed the similarities are so close that opinion still remains divided today – aggravated by the fact that the whereabouts of the stamp (or either stamp) are uncertain.

Beitin, late 19th century, by Felix Bonfils (Wikipedia).

In 1970 Van Beek and Jamme, note 5  and also Kelso, note 6  replied in further contributions to the debate, the tone of which grows cooler as the debate heats up. How was it possible that a stray find from the Hadramaut could reappear in ancient Bethel? ‘The coincidence, therefore, of the seal being lost at Bethel, one of the three temples citied in ancient Israel in which such a seal would likely be found because of their connections with incense trade, is altogether unbelievable… Since there were two identical but distinct stamps, the historical, economic, and cultural significance of the Bethel stamp remains as we originally described.’

Yadin’s torch, however, was picked up three years later, understatedly and brilliantly, by Ray Cleveland (1973), note 7  who put two and two together, hypothesizing that Mabel Bent might well have taken the stamp to Bethel and buried it there. Cleveland, in part, based his theory on Mabel’s note in her very odd little tract Anglo-Saxons from Palestine note 8  that she was in the course of writing while in in the region. He also suggested that, badly missing Theodore, her mental state was distressed. A reporter for The Irish Times (1973) note 9  quickly realized the human interest of all this – especially its associations with a prominent Irish family – and published easily the most accessible account of what was turning from a controversy into a melodrama.

For some reason Jamme does not seem to have countered confidently until 1990, note 10  even though his strongly-held views on the significance of the two stamps were under fire. But when he did reply he did not pull his punches, disregarding Cleveland’s paper as groundless in terms of Mabel’s fragile mental state and assuming that Cleveland was accusing her of simple fraud: ‘Such an accusation of fraud – unique in the annals of archaeology, levelled against a lady respected by everyone interested in ancient South Arabia and who, having died on July 3, 1929, could not defend herself – was shocking in itself.’ And thus: ‘Mrs. Bent’s memory was and remains unblemished and unscathed in spite of Cleveland’s charge. But the latter’s unprovoked, unsubstantiated indictment based on the uncalled-for intrusion upon the intimate, affective life of a widow has become the first true mystery of the whole affair because the reader cannot even remotely fathom what the reason behind such an irresponsible accusation of fraud might have been.’

This extremely rare photograph shows Mabel Bent taking tea with Moses Cotsworth and party in the Palestinian hinterland in 1900/1 (Moses Cotsworth collection, unknown photographer. Photo reproduced with the kind permission of Rare Books and Special Collections, Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, University of British Columbia).

What Jamme, and Cleveland, were unaware of was that Mabel was a frequent traveller to Jerusalem and Palestine in the first decade of the 1900s (and after Theodore’s death), and she soon began to demonstrate apparently irrational behaviour, taking sides in a romantic squabble between two British residents in Jerusalem. On another occasion, now over 60, she rode off mysteriously and alone into the countryside, falling off her mount and breaking her leg. note 11  A convert to British Israelitism, she became involved in the committee of the ‘Garden Tomb’ (Jerusalem), note 12  and began the bizarre Anglo-Saxons from Palestine referred to above which attempted to identify a tribal connection between the Jews and the British.

It seems apparent that Mabel believed that Theodore’s twenty years of travel and work were ultimately little valued by the establishment. She must have been disillusioned by the Royal Geographical Society both overlooking her husband and implicating her in the row over women RGS Fellows there. Stinging too, was the gradual unravelling of Bent’s theories on the history of the ruins at Great Zimbabwe. She must also have been hurt at some of the criticism aimed at Southern Arabia, the now-classic monograph Mabel assembled after Theodore’s death (from her Chronicles and his notebooks and articles). There are enough indicators that Mabel was fast becoming an outsider.

Map of Hadramaut surveyed by Imam Sharif, Khan Bahadur to illustrate the explorations of Theodore Bent (from ‘Southern Arabia’, 1900) Click for an enlarged image.

Returning to the ‘Bethel Stamp’, Jamme’s earlier claim that it represented a clear link between Solomon and the Queen of Sheba is not supported today, although it is important evidence of South Arabian contacts. The coincidence of two identical seals may be just that, a coincidence. After all, was it not possible that there was a sort of ‘mass production’ of these items going on from a prototype, with the stamp prone to breaking along a common fault and then being discarded? note 13  Kelso’s rational comment in 1970 (p.61) is still persuasive: ‘it seems reasonable to assume that [the stamp] was lost or deliberately abandoned by some incense caravan in the ninth century B.C.’

However, if Mabel was unhappy at Bethel, is it not also rather easy to imagine her in a lonely moment in the early 1900s dropping a broken clay stamp from the Hadramaut into a hole and covering it up – speaking the while to her dead husband, with whom she had travelled such landscapes for nearly twenty years, about how she had brought him, at last, to the end of the frankincense trail, among ‘the arrant spices of the sun’? What could be more forgivable – not deliberate archaeological fraud but, rather, fondness. And, indeed, there are three seals she mentions in Southern Arabia – where did she drop the other two? Jerusalem, Hebron, Mizpah? There is hope.

Albright and Kelso note 15  avoid any reference to the Bents, it would start too many hares, in their otherwise comprehensive account of the Bethel excavations. The chances of there being two arguably identical seals are so remote that the theory of Mabel Bent’s deliberate placing of her Hadhramaut stamp at the site is extremely persuasive. Again, it is worth mentioning that the stamp (stamps?) is lost. Much of the speculation on this delicious artefact presented in page 89 of Albright & Kelso 1968 would then sit uncomfortably:

‘In the 1957 campaign only commonplace objects were found… There was one important exception which was a unique pottery seal (ninth century B.C.)… found in mixed debris just outside the W wall of the city. It was used to seal the incense bags shipped out of Arabia and sold at Bethel and Jerusalem. The seal was so unique that its study was given 7½ pages in BASOR, No. 151, pp. 9-16. Its significance is well summarized in the last paragraph of that report. “The importance of this stamp for South Arabian and Palestinian studies can hardly be overstated. As perhaps the earliest South Arabian inscription known (except for rock inscriptions), it provides an invaluable peg for the study of South Arabian palaeography. Of equal importance is the light it sheds on relations between Palestine and South Arabia. Since it is the earliest (probably even the first) South Arabian object found in Palestine, it proves that contact had already been established between Israel and South Arabia early in the first millennium B.C., no more than two centuries and possibly only a few years after the visit of the ‘Queen of Sheba’ to Solomon. While this substantial historicity of this event has been increasingly accepted in recent years, this object carries us closer to that period than most scholars had dared hope. Moreover the fact that it was found at the temple city of Bethel enables us to define the nature of this contact with reasonable probability.”

‘An almost identical seal was found by A. Jamme in the famous Glaser collection of squeezes in Tübingen. It had been found in the central Hadhramaut. Thus we have two business documents by the same company covering sales territory between South Arabia and Palestine. BASOR, No. 163, pp. 15-18.’

Sources

Southern Arabia = Theodore and Mabel Bent, Southern Arabia, London, 1900.
Chronicle = The Travel Chronicles of Mrs. J. Theodore Bent, Vol.3, 2010, Oxford: Archaeopress.

And see also a previous article on this site: Mabel and the vanished ‘Bethel Seal’

Footnotes

Note 1: Van Beek, G.W. and Jamme, A., ‘An Inscribed South Arabian Clay Stamp from Bethel’, Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 151, 1958, 9-16.
Return from Note 1

Note 2: Squeeze ‘A 727’ from Eduard Glaser’s collection. It is noteworthy that this squeeze arrived in the Glaser archive. Theodore was in the habit of sending his squeezes for translation to Prof. Dr. D.H. Müller (e.g. Southern Arabia: 436).
Return from Note 2

Note 3: Jamme, A. and Van Beek, G.W., ‘The South-Arabian Clay Stamp Again’, Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 163 (1961): 15-18.
Return from Note 3

Note 4: Yadin, Y., ‘An Inscribed South-Arabian Clay Stamp from Bethel’, Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 196 (1969): 37-45. (This article is also extremely valuable in terms of the author’s researches into the whereabouts of some of Theodore Bent’s finds.)
Return from Note 4

Note 5: Van Beek, G.W. and Jamme, A., ‘The Authenticity of the Bethel Stamp Seal’, Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 199 (1970): 59-65.
Return from Note 5

Note 6: Kelso, J.L., ‘A Reply to Yadin’s Article on the Finding of the Bethel Seal’, Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 199 (1970): 65.
Return from Note 6

Note 7: Cleveland, R.L., ‘More on the South Arabian Clay Stamp Found at Beitîn’, Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 209 (1973): 33-6.
Return from Note 7

Note 8: Bent, Mabel V.A., Anglo-Saxons from Palestine; or, The imperial mystery of the lost tribes. London, 1908.
Return from Note 8

Note 9: Blake, I., ‘The Bethel Stamp Seal: A Mystery Revealed?’, The Irish Times, 16 August 1973.
Return from Note 9

Note 10: Jamme, A., ‘The Bethel Inscribed Stamp Again: A Vindication of Mrs. Theodore Bent’, Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 280 (1990): 89-91.
Return from Note 10

Note 11: ‘Dear Sir William… Thank you for sending me the flower pictures. I like them very much. Of course I know there is nothing to find in Palestine that is new. I was there the winter before last and camped out by myself 10 weeks in Moab and Haura. I had my own tents and no dragoman. This winter I only got to Jebel Usdum and arrived in Jerusalem with a broken leg, my horse having fallen on me in the wilderness of Judea… I cannot walk yet but am getting on well and my leg is quite straight and long I am  thankful to say… Yours truly, Mabel V.A. Bent’ (Letter to Kew director W.T. Thiselton-Dyer, 19 April 1904/Kew Archives: Directors’ Correspondence).
Return from Note 11

Note 12: Crawley-Bovey, A.W., The Garden Tomb of Golgotha and the Garden of the Resurrection, Jerusalem (n/d but c. 1925, London – ‘Revised and enlarged by Mrs. Theodore Bent and Miss Hussey’).
Return from Note 12

Note 13: ‘It would have been remarkable if she did not carry with her little momentos of her former conjugal happiness.’ (Cleveland 1973: 36).
Return from Note 13

Note 14: ‘Jerusalem, Hebron, Mizpah, and Bethel [being] the only biblical towns mentioned in Anglo-Saxons from Palestine’ (Cleveland 1973, but see Jamme 1990 (footnote 10 above), who refutes this).
Return from Note 14

Note 15: Albright & Kelso – The Excavation of Bethel (AASOR XXXIX), American Schools of Oriental Research, 1968, Cambridge, pp. xi, 8, 89, 123, Pl. 118.
Return from Note 15

 

Mabel Bent, Isabella Bird, and Hadji Abdullah the dragoman – Persia, 1889/90

The Bents’ route through Persia, March–May 1889. Drawn by Glyn Griffiths. © The Bent Archive.
The Bents’ route through Persia, March–May 1889. Many of the sites were also visited by Isabella Bird the following year (Map: Glyn Griffiths, the Bent Archive).

Alas, far safer then than now…

19th-century explorers in Persia, or anywhere else come to that, needed someone local – part Sancho Panza, part Passepartout – to ease things along: a translator, fixer, door-opener, guard, chaperone, cook, medic, accommodation officer, transport manager, therapist, whatever was required. The best could expect generous remuneration, the worst, summary dismissal!

Good or bad, these men (women dragomans please make yourselves known), would base themselves around ports of entry, where they might expect foreigners (themselves, of course, good or bad) in need of their services.

The British Residency at Bushire at the turn of the 19th century, a hotel for the Bents in 1889 when they stayed with the Ross family (Wikipedia).

One such port at the time of interest to us was Bushire, Persia (Iran, eastern shores of the Persian Gulf), administered by British officials  – and let’s single out in particular (until 1891) the affable and highly respected Resident, Irishman Edward Charles Ross (1836-1913), who would open the Residency (with its tennis court, billiard room, and other facilities) to explorers (he was a keen antiquarian himself), arrange sight-seeing, lend his private yacht, and generally, with his wife and family, entertain.

Naturally enough, when celebrity explorers Theodore and Mabel Bent, after excavating the ‘Mounds of Ali‘ in Bahrain in early 1889, decided ‘then and there‘ to ride south-north through Persia as the first leg of their return to London, they promptly crossed the Gulf to Bushire and the ‘hospitable roof’ of the Ross family, arriving early February 1889. Mabel, as ever, surprised her hosts:  “They were all amazed indeed when they heard of our resolution to ride those 1300 miles or more ‘with a lady’, for not more than 3 ladies have done this before, and 2, Mme. Dieulafoy and Mrs. Phelps, a very fat American, in man’s attire, and as the days go on they are still more amazed at seeing me sitting serenely wondering what saddle I shall have.” (Travel Chronicles of Mrs Theodore Bent, Vol. 3, 2010, pp.28-9) note 1 

Ross was also able to provide a dragoman, of sorts, for the Bents: “We had as our personal servant and interpreter combined … Hadji Abdullah, half Persian, half Arab. He was the best to be obtained, and his English was decidedly faulty… He had been a great deal on our men-of-war; he also took a present of horses from the Sultan of Maskat to the Queen [Victoria, in 1886], so that he could boast ‘I been to Home,’ and alluded to his stay in England as ‘when I was in Home’.” (Mabel Bent, Southern Arabia, 1900, p.2)

Isabella Bird-Bishop (Wikipedia).

Serendipitously, this dragoman, Hadji Abdullah, whom the Bents employed to guide them on their way through Persia, leaving him over 1000 km away in Tabriz,  was also hired (almost exactly a year later, early 1890) by that other great lady explorer Isabella Bishop (née Bird, 1831-1904), whom the Bents will have met frequently at the Royal Geographical Society and other gatherings of worthies. (Isabella was famously elected a Fellow in the first pick of lady travellers; Mabel was put forward for the second pick in 1893/4, just when the RGS voted to accept no more.)

The celebrated painter of horses, John Charlton (1849-1917) was on the scene to record the presentation of the Sultan of Muscat’s five Arab horses to Queen Victoria at Windsor in December 1886. It is possible that the dragoman Hadji Abdullah, employed by the Bents in 1889 and Isabella Bird in 1890, is represented in one of the faces we see. (‘The Graphic’, 18 December, 1886 (detail)).

The formidable Isabella Bird writes: “I lost no time in interviewing Hadji, — a Gulf Arab, who has served various travellers, has been ten times to Mecca, went to Windsor with the horses presented to the Queen by the Sultan of Muscat, speaks more or less of six languages, knows English fairly, has some recommendations, and professes that he is ‘up to’ all the requirements of camp life. The next morning I engaged him as ‘man of all work’, and though a big, wild-looking Arab in a rough abba and a big turban, with a long knife and a revolver in his girdle, scarcely looks like a lady’s servant, I hope he may suit me, though with these antecedents he is more likely to be a scamp than a treasure.” (Journeys in Persia and Kurdistan, Vol. 1, 1891, p. 5)

Bird, it seems, dispensed with Hadji’s services near Hamadan (August 1890), 200 km south of Tabriz, so his journey home to Bushire, assuming that was where he was based, was a good deal shorter than his trip back the previous year after his ride with the Bents! Interestingly, Bird makes no reference to the Bents in the letters home she eventually turned into her Persian book. It seems unlikely that Hadji made no mention at all of the British husband and wife explorers.

Jane Dieulafoy (1851-1916) French archaeologist, of whom Mabel Bent was, perhaps, a little envious (Wikipedia).
Note 1:  Jane Dieulafoy (1851-1916) brilliant French archaeologist, excavator of Susa, had visited some of the Persian sites enjoyed by the Bents a few years earlier and had written several bestsellers about her travels in the region overall. Mabel was always ready, keen even, to criticise her! Mrs. Phelps remains untraced and it would be very good to know more about her. See also the Bents devoted Greek dragoman from Anafi in the Cyclades, Mathew Simos.
Return from Note 1

A compilation of the Bents’ Persian tales will appear in 2026.

“DWELLERS IN TENTS – Every man, says a philosopher, is a wanderer at heart. Alas! I fear the axiom would be truer if he had confined himself to stating that every man loves to fancy himself a wanderer, for when it comes to the point there is not one in a thousand who can throw off the ties of civilized existence – the ties and the comforts of habits which have become easy to him by long use, of the life whose security is ample compensation for its monotony. Yet there are moments when the cabined spirit longs for liberty.” (Gertrude Bell, Safar Nameh. Persian Pictures – A Book of Travel, London, 1894, p. 83)

Reading “The Cyclades” – Vanessa Gordon on Naxos

Vanessa Gordon

Who better than Vanessa Gordon, author of The Naxos Mysteries, to read extracts from the Bents’ eventful Xmas 1883/4 visit to that island 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.

Click here for other readings and if you would like to join in, do contact us.

 

Naxos [Bent’s Ch. 14: Sunday, 23 December 1883 – Monday, 7 January 1884]

The Naxos Mysteries: 1 – 4 (Vanessa Gordon, 2025).

Our third reading from Bent’s extended Naxos chapter taken from his classic 1885 Cyclades travelogue is provided by Vanessa Gordon, author of the six books in the series The Naxos Mysteries, all to do with ‘archaeology, mystery and murder on the beautiful Greek island of Naxos’, involving her lead character, the archaeologist Martin Day; all themes, not totally disconnected from Theodore Bent’s narrative. note 1 

The statue of Apollonas, Naxos. Mabel Bent writes in her diary: “We had a great deal of difficulty in the morning about starting to go and see an unfinished colossal statue said to be of Apollo, 1½ hour off near the sea… We had to leave the mules and climb with hands as well as feet to the quarry and on to the statue, which is enormous and very rough and weather worn.” (Wikipedia)

We should not be surprised, therefore, to find Theodore and Mabel making cameo appearances in two of Vanessa’s books – The Search for Artemis (2021, pp. 39-49, 129-30) and The House in Apíranthos (2024, p. 142) – this latter village featuring prominently in her reading here.

In this extract, Bent makes one of the earliest descriptions in English of the gigantic statue of ‘Apollo’ at Apollonas, and listen out, too, for references to the village of Komiaki (Koronida), where the Bents first encountered their mercurial dragoman Manthaios Simos, from neighbouring Anafi. As faithful as mercurial, Simos was instrumental in the rescue of the desperately ill Bents, east of Aden, in early 1897.

Area of Apíranthos, Naxos, Cyclades (Google Maps).

The Secrets of Stelida, Vanessa’s seventh title in her series is released on 25 February 2026. She writes: ‘I love the mystery genre, which enables me to explore the magic of Greek antiquity, the wonderful landscape and the cuisine of Greece, and the rich complexities of human nature. In The Naxos Mysteries I try to appeal to both the mind and the heart of my reader, engaging them in the passions and tragedies of the characters in a context of discovery and exploration.’

Note 1: See also Vanessa’s article (March 2026) on references to the Bents in the Naxos Mysteries.
Return from Note 1

Interviewing Mabel Bent

“Mrs Bent was a middle aged lady, she wore a man’s helmet and a monocle and a short skirt and knee breeches and leather leggings.” Llewellyn Cambria Meredith (1866-1942), the Bents’ headman and wagonmaster on their 1891 Great Zimbabwe expedition. Quoted in R.H. Wood, Heritage of Zimbabwe 16(1997): 55-66. (The Bent Archive. Mabel Bent, a studio portrait, very possibly taken in Cape Town in 1891).

Irishwoman and celebrity explorer Mabel Bent (a.k.a. Mrs J. Theodore Bent) was, understandably, much in demand for media interviews; her exploits over twenty years fascinated readers internationally.

Although there was a cadre of notable solo women travellers at the turn of the 20th century, adventuring British husband-and-wife teams were rare.

Mabel is often credited as being the first Western woman to explore remote regions in the three areas of the world that interested the inseparable couple  (married 1877) – the Eastern Mediterranean, Africa, and Arabia. For example, Mabel, a role model for Freya Stark in many ways, was trekking through the notorious Wadi Hadramawt (Yemen), three decades before the indomitable latter.

Here is a selection from the many interviews Mabel gave to newspapers and periodicals:

1893: “The Gentlewoman – The Illustrated Weekly Journal for Gentlewomen”, No. 175, Vol. VII, Saturday, November 11, 1893.

1893-4: Two interviews for ‘Lady of the House’ (September 1893 and July 1894).

1895: “Mrs Theodore Bent – The Queen of Explorers”. ‘The Newry Telegraph’ for Thursday, 3rd January 1895.

1895: The Bents: a rare interview from ‘The Album’, 8th July 1895.

1903: Mabel V.A. Bent: ‘In the Days of My Youth: Chapters of Autobiography’, Mainly About People, 10, Issue 240 (17 January 1903), pp. 72-3. 

People come and go: to the memory of the kind William Pryor Binney, H.B.M. Consul on Syros and friend to the Bents

The kind William Pryor Binney (21 July 1839 – 12 March 1888), date unknown, presumably the 1870s, and perhaps wearing the medal of Chevalier from the King of Greece, or ‘the order of the Saviour and Order of the Iron Cross from the Emperor of Austria’. (From the ‘Genealogy of the Binney family in the United States’ 1886).

Wonderful to hear (3 Jan. 2026) that a team of volunteers has cleared up the charming but neglected Westerners’ Cemetery on Syros (Greek Cyclades), a small area that leads to the immaculately tended Commonwealth War Graves/Syra New British Cemetery, below  Ano Syros. The original Westerners’ Cemetery site, including the memorial to William Pryor Binney, has been so badly maintained that the Commonwealth War Graves Commission even has a warning on its webpage, imploring those who want to visit to take great care: “Please remain within the pathway while accessing the CWGC plot due to danger of tripping on debris and being hit by falling stone from the damaged walls.”  See the end of this article for photos.

 

People come and go; everyone travels; everyone leaves traces of their travels. You will find such a trace on a memorial in the rarely visited Westerners’ cemetery in Ermoupoli, on Cycladic Syros, near the junction of Taxiarchon and Katramadou, on the way to Ano Syros. The cross and monument of some grandeur is of fine Tinos marble; the inscription testifies to the trickiness of English lettering for Greek masons; it was expensive, and the deceased’s family wished to honour a significant man. There is no space for the word ‘kind’:

William Binney’s grave in the Westerners’ cemetery, Syros (detail) (The Bent Archive).

“To the Memory of William Pryor Binney, H.B.M. Consul, Divisional Manager Eastern Telegraph Company. Born in Halifax Nova Scotia, Canada, the 21th [sic] July 1839, died at Syra the 12th March 1888. The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord. Job 1, 21.”

The year of Binney’s birth, however, is given as 1840 in an arcane ‘Genealogy of the Binney family in the United States’, published by Charles James Fox Binney in 1886 (Albany, N.Y., J. Munsell’s Sons):

“William Pryor Binney, son of Stephen and Emily (Pryor) Binney, of Moncton, N[ew] B[runswick], was born July 21, 1840; married Polexine [Polyxena/Πολυξένη] Pateraki, daughter of the late George Pateraki[s], of Constantinople. Mr. Binney is the general manager of the submarine telegraph cable in the kingdom of Greece and Turkey, has held the office for twenty-five years past, and in 1884, lived at Syra, Greece. He is H.B.M. consul at Syra. Had no children in 1873. He had the title of Chevalier from the King of Greece and decoration of the order of the Saviour and order of the Iron Cross, from the Emperor of Austria.”

Stephen Binney (1805–1872), William’s father (from ‘Genealogy of the Binney family in the United States’, 1886).

The first Binney to surface, one captain John, of Nottinghamshire, set sail with his wife Mercy in 1678 or 1679, for Hull, Massachusetts. There, with John now a ‘fisherman’ and ‘gentleman’, the couple (with their six children) became the ‘ancestors of almost all of the name’. In the 19th century one of their descendants, Stephen Binney (1805–1872), a merchant of Halifax, and later first mayor, married Emily Pryor (1808 and still living in 1884); the couple had seven children, one of whom was our William Pryor Binney and Mabel remembers him for posterity as ‘kind’. As Halifax mayor, in early 1842 Stephen made the long Atlantic crossing to London with a message of congratulations on behalf of the city to Queen Victoria on the birth of her son (later King Edward VII). During his extended absence his business affairs at home suffered and he sought new opportunities, buying property near Moncton (New Brunswick). From his new base, Stephen Binney set up a successful wharf and shipyard, making a new start as a wholesaler, trading in timber and agricultural produce. With its access to the Bay of Fundy, and William’s father thrived as a merchant ship-owner, with a vessel that bore his own name, the ‘Stephen Binney’.

Pryor-Binney House, 5178 Morris Street, Halifax, Nova Scotia, B3J, Canada (Heritage Division NS Dept. of Tourism, Culture and Heritage, 2005)

It was Stephen’s father (William’s grandfather), Hibbert Newton Binney, who forged links initially with the Pryors, when the two families cooperated on the building of a fine house in Halifax in 1831, and which H.N. Binney then bought outright in 1834. The ‘Pryor-Binney House’ still stands at 5178 Morris Street, Halifax.

One of William’s brothers was Moncton’s head of Customs, Irwine Whitty Binney (b. 1841). It was probably Irwine, as prosperous clan head, who supervised in some way William’s funeral in 1888, in the quiet Westerners’ cemetery on Syros. William’s widow, Πολυξένη, being Orthodox, probably rests in the Greek cemetery a few 100 metres away. We don’t know when the couple married (1860s?); Polyxena’s father, George Paterakis, was from Constantinople, and probably of some standing. The Binneys had had no children by 1873.

The former premises of the Eastern Telegraph Company, Syros, now the Merchant Marine Academy of Syros for Marine Deck Officers.

And of William’s career? And how he came to Syros? Follow the money. William, as part of a very  well-to-do and successful extended family who made their livings from commerce, merchant-shipping and the sea, was clearly ambitious to compete and strike out on his own; and quite prepared to travel and leave traces of his own. By the mid 1880s maritime nations were being linked by the invention of undersea cable-telegraphy, and the needs of the British Empire provided a booming market for companies in this sector. One of these was the Eastern Telegraph Company, a consolidation, in 1872, of a dynamic group of telegraphy businesses, involving some 23,000 miles of cabling by the late 1880s. This enterprise, of course, morphed eventually into today’s Cable and Wireless plc. A pivotal routing and operations hub for the Eastern Mediterranean, and British interests East, was based on Syros, and its capital, Ermoupoli, the main ‘port’ for all (‘new’) Greece before the growth of Pireaus around 1900. It was plain commercial sense that the Eastern Telegraph Company’s regional cable station and depot should be built on a (then) disconnected rock (Νησάκι), a hop from Ermoupoli’s seafront. The solid building (which probably housed Binney’s consular office too) still stands and now houses the island’s Merchant Marine Academy.

Announcement of William Binney’s appointment as ‘Her Majesty’s Consul in the Islands in the Greek Archipelago’ (‘The London Gazette’, 24145/5113, Tuesday, October 27, 1874).

William Binney held the important post of general manager for ETC’s Syros hub by 1883 at least, if not earlier; it is recorded that he had already been an employee for 25 years by around that date. His skillset obviously included diplomacy, and in 1874 we learn that “the Queen has been graciously pleased to appoint William Pryor Binney, Esq., to be Her Majesty’s Consul in the Islands in the Greek Archipelago, to reside in the Island of Syra [Foreign Office, September 5, 1874. The London Gazette, 24145/5113, Tuesday, October 27, 1874, and ‘The Morning Post’ of Wednesday, October 28, 1874].

 

Presumably this appointment helped Binney acquire his gongs, i.e. “the title of Chevalier from the King of Greece and decoration of the order of the Saviour and order of the Iron Cross, from the Emperor of Austria.” His duties would have included looking after his country’s interests and personnel in the region and reporting on the activities of potential rivals. Copies of communications between William and the UK Foreign Office can be found in the FO Volumes of the British Consuls in Greece, in the National Archive, Kew (i.e. 1881 FO 32/534; 1882 FO 32/546; 1892 FO 32/644; 1893 FO 32/653).

And as well as all this, Mabel Bent refers to William as not only fastidious, but ‘kind’ (she adds ‘so’ and underlines it). Theodore Bent met Binney first in Athens, in late November 1883. He became a friend it seems as well as Consul, providing the Bents with information and letters of introduction to contacts in the Cyclades generally. Theodore at this time was not particularly influential and it seems that Binney was being helpful to a British citizen as part of his consular duties. One of the contact names he slipped into Theodore’s pocket was Robert M.W. Swan, a Scottish miner on Antiparos. Swan was later to be central to Bent’s expedition to ‘Great Zimbabwe’ for Cecil Rhodes in 1891. But by then Binney was dead.

Let’s leave the last paragraphs on kind William Pryor Binney to Mabel Bent, as recorded in the pages of her Greek ‘Chronicles’. The final reference to his fatal illness comes as a shock:

A watercolour of Syros in the mid 19th century by Edward Lear; ‘the old sparkly pile’ he called it (diary entry for Wednesday, 6 April 1864).

“[Saturday, 1 December 1883] We had a quick but very rough passage, starting at 7 and getting [to Syros] about 3.30 a.m. Wednesday [28 November]. The ‘Pelops’ was quite new and very clean and I should have slept well but for the fleas. We landed at Ermoupolis at 6.30 and sat on the balcony overlooking the port for 2 hours as there was no bedroom vacant, nor did we get one till 5 o’clock. Mr. John Quintana, H.B.M. Vice Consul on whom Theodore called, came and fetched us and we spent 2 hours at the Consulate in Mr. Binney, the Consul’s room, very large and nice and so tidy. Mr. Binney must be a most orderly man for everything was ticketed and docketed. Theodore called on him in Athens, says he is like a slight Greek, foreign accent and Greek wife.” [Mabel Bent’s Greek ‘Chronicles’, pages 7–8]

“[Tuesday, 18(?) December 1883]. Rode 1½ hour to the nearest point to Antiparos carrying only our night things and a card of introduction from Mr.  Binney for Mr. R. Swan who has a calamine mine on this island.” [Mabel Bent’s Greek ‘Chronicles’, page 21]

“[Saturday, 22 March 1884] We fortunately got a room at the Hôtel d’Angleterre [Syros] and thoroughly enjoy ‘taking mine ease in mine inn’. We packed a box of our spoils for England and this afternoon I rode and the others walked to Ano or Upper Syra, a hideous place with a view over this barren island. We got very tired of Syra by Friday and as we found a kaïke of Kythnos or Thermiá we packed and prepared to start. But the strong Boreas would not permit ships to leave the port so after constant expectations up to Sunday morning the 23rd we gave up and went to church, a very poor little place and very ‘low’, according to the wishes of Mr. Binney the Consul. Afterwards we lunched with Mr.  Binney, Mr. Quinney the parson, being there also. N.B. Mr. Binney’s clerk is Mr. Finney.” [Mabel Bent’s Greek ‘Chronicles’, page 54]

“[Thursday, 26 January 1888] We only got to Syra on Thursday. We landed

The Syra British Cemetery
The Syra British Cemetery, Ermoupoli, near the junction of Taxiarchon and Katramadou, on the way to Ano Syros (photo: Alan King).

and found to our sorrow that our kind consul Mr. Binney was dreadfully ill.” [Mabel Bent’s Greek ‘Chronicles’, page 228]

“[Saturday, 25 February 1888] On Thursday… about 4 we left ‘The Town’ [Constantinople] in the ‘Alphée’ for Syra, picking up letters at the post on the way. We had no remarkable fellow passengers and reached Syra on Saturday morning about 4… We went to church on Sunday to a tidy little chapel, which they say will be closed if Mr. Binney is no longer there to keep it up.” [Mabel Bent’s Greek ‘Chronicles’, page 234]

William Binney’s grave in the Westerners’ cemetery, Syros (The Bent Archive).

Kind William Pryor Binney died 16 days after Mabel’s last reference to him, on 12 March 1888, of what she doesn’t say. (Appropriately, the new British Cemetery behind where he lies takes in the scattered Commonwealth war burials from the islands of the Cyclades.) He was not yet 50. Another William took over from him as Consul at Syros, W.H. Cottrell. People come and go; everyone travels; everyone leaves traces of their travels.

[The extracts from Mabel Bent’s diaries are taken from ‘The Travel Chronicles of Mrs J Theodore Bent‘, Vol. 1. Archaeopress, Oxford, 2006, and see also Theodore Bent’s ‘The Cyclades‘]

See also Alan King’s article on Binney and the Syra cemetery here.

[If you enjoyed reading about the likeable William Binney, you might enjoy a recent (2020) online article on him by Panagiotis Kouloumbis of Syros Today.]

The following three photographs (Jan. 2025) show the results of volunteers’ recent efforts “to clear the weeds, cut the bushes, throw the rubble and sweep”. The final resting place of Mabel Bent’s particular friend, William Pryor Binney (1839-1888), and the others buried there, is once again respected. Many thanks to all involved.

Syros Westerners’ Cemetery, recently cleaned by a group of volunteers over three days (Jan 2026). The large memorial on the right is the reverse side of William Pryor Binney’s grave. Reproduced with permission.
Syros Westerners’ Cemetery, recently cleaned by a group of volunteers over three days (Jan 2026). Reproduced with permission.
Syros Westerners’ Cemetery, recently cleaned by a group of volunteers over three days (Jan 2026). The doorway leads to the Commonwealth War Graves section of the cemetery. Reproduced with permission.

Gold, Frankincense, and Mabel – The Bents at Christmas

One of the pottery incense-burners the Bents brought back from the Wadi Hadramaut in 1893/4 (As1926,0410.37, © The Trustees of the British Museum; CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

The pottery incense-burner, intended for frankincense and other aromatic resins, that the Bents brought back from the Wadi Hadramaut in 1893/4. It remained in Mabel Bent’s personal collection until 1926, when it was donated to the British Museum with several others (As1926,0410.37-41). 

The Bents at Christmas

For celebrity explorers, the Bents preferred to be homebirds come Christmas, swapping solar topees for deerstalkers, and quitting their London townhouse at 13 Great Cumberland Place for their country residence at Sutton Hall, Macclesfield (northern England), or Ireland (Mabel’s family home at Newtonbarry, Co. Wexford). Of their nearly 20 years of explorations (in the 1880s and ’90s), together, they were only out of Britain on December 25th, it seems, for the years 1882 (Chios, then a Turkish island), 1883 (Naxos, Greek Cyclades), 1891 (steaming home from Cape Town, South Africa), 1893 (Wadi Hadramaut, Yemen), 1894 (Dhofar, Oman), 1895 (Suez, Egypt), and 1896 (Sokotra island, Yemen). Theodore Bent never lived to celebrate another, he was to die in London in May 1897, aged just 45.

From Schoff’s ‘Periplus’ (1912), with its many references to the travels of the Bents (archive.org).

The Bents’ 1893-4 adventures around Christmas time took them to the fabled lands of gold, frankincense, and myrrh, all gifts associated with Theodore’s theories of trade links and contacts between the populations of Southern Arabia and the various regions around today’s Ethiopia, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe. In particular, it was the famous trade in the fragrant gum that dribbles from several species of Boswellia trees (frankincense), and its trade routes – especially the branch that began in Dhofar, Oman – that fascinated the explorer; he wrote several articles on the subject, i.e. ‘Exploration of the Frankincense Country, Southern Arabia‘ for The Geographical Journal (Vol. 6 (2) (Aug), 109-33), and ‘The Land of Frankincense and Myrrh‘ for The Nineteenth Century (Vol. 38 (224) (Oct), 595-613). (It is quite possible that the Dhofar trail reached north up to Bethel (Beitin) in the modern West Bank, and that Mabel, as an offering to her dead partner, left there, in the early 1900s, the notorious pottery seal (now lost) from a sack of frankincense destined for western lamps. The couple had acquired the seal as their caravan moved east along the Wadi Hadramaut in 1893/4.)

Theodore’s above articles are well worth the read, but let’s let Mabel add some 1894 Christmas and New Year details from her diary, her ‘Chronicles‘ she calls them, written as the couple travel along coastal Dhofar:

“About 6 came, very smart with bourkas on their faces…” Mabel Bent’s doodle in her ‘Chronicle’ as she writes. (Hellenic Society Archive, London).

“Christmas Eve [Monday, 1894]. On waking, the smaller boy came to kiss my hand and before I was up the ladies said they were coming. I was afraid to put them off. First I sat up and put on a jacket, and finding time allowed, I put on a skirt and got up. Combed down my hair and feeling sure that stockings would not be missed, I sat with bare feet, refreshing my memory with civil speeches. About 6 came, very smart with bourkas on their faces a sort of square frame of gold braid and spangles, with a black stick down the middle. They had a great deal of coarse jewellery on with mock pearls and very bad turquoises.

Christmas Day [Tuesday, 1894]. We rose with the sun and walked off to a mass of ruins about a mile off. There was a great deal of vegetation and sheets of a most lovely creeper with a large flower, white when new, pink when older, and then there comes a red pear-shaped fruit, with hot seeds in it. The ruins are Himyaritic and reminded us of Adulis and Koloe in Abyssinia… returning we sat in a grove of coconut palms and drank much water from the nuts, which were showered from the trees in rather a terrific way. The men stuck their throwing sticks in the ground and by banging the nuts down on the points skinned them.

[Wednesday] December 26th [1894]. I was asked to go down to the harem early. The ladies had not so much finery on. They were most kind and gave me many things to eat, coffee, awfully sweet, and sherbet of orgeat, ditto, halweh and pahpa and nutmegs broken up and some seeds and some leaves called tamboul, and chunam, and things I did not eat for I do not want my teeth to become red… We had 2 more days of waiting and, at last, were told we should positively start on Saturday 28th and were expecting at least to start in the evening, but when at length all the camels were got together there were no ropes, sticks to tie the loads to, or any other thing, so we had to wait till next day.

The expeditions
Map showing the expeditions of Theodore & Mabel Bent, 1883-1897 (drawn by Glyn Griffiths; (c) The Bent Archive).

Leave Dhofar. Sunday 29th December [1894]. We set off at 12. There was the greatest confusion over the loading; neither men not beasts were accustomed to deal with anything but sacks of frankincense. The camels roared incessantly, got up before they were finished and shook off their loads, or would not kneel, or ran away loaded, and then there was a great deal of unloading and abandoning everything and shouting and quarrelling and much difficulty about making up saddles for us. Theodore and Imam Sheriff and Hassan and I each have a separate camel and 6 of the servants ride in pairs while one walks.

New Year’s Eve [Monday, 1894]. Did not get off till 10, though we breakfasted before sunrise… Theodore’s camel was a very horrid one and sat down occasionally and you first get a violent pitch forward, then an equally violent one back and a 2nd forward; this is not a pleasant thing to happen unexpectedly… We were all most dreadfully stiff and tired and again too late to do anything in the way of unpacking more than just enough for the night. The quantities of flowers Theodore has already got must, I think, already exceed all the 150 of last year [in the Wadi Hadramaut]. There are a great many lobàn trees, or rather shrubs (frankincense)…” (extracts from The Travel Chronicles of Mabel Bent, Vol. 3, pages 249-50, Archaeopress 2010)

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

“… and yesterday T and I went a long distance and found some inscriptions on a smooth rock, also a little hamlet, very clean (Haida), as is Kalenzia.” ‘Kalenzia I. of Sokotra 1897’ (17.5 x 25 cm), Bent’s watercolour from early 1897 (undisclosed collection, reproduced with permission).

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:

Map relating to the Bents’ 1896/7 visit to Soqotra, the arrow indicating the general location of the inscription under discussion (‘Southern Arabia’, 1900, opp. p.342).

“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)

Copy of the Dhofari 1 inscriptions from Theodore Bent’s 1896/7 travel notebook, pp. 9-10 (Hellenic Society Archive/School of Advanced Study, University of London; CC).

 

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.

 

Reading “The Cyclades” – Sikinos

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]

Prof. Rebecca Sweetman, Director, British School at Athens (BSA).

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.

“Few remains in Greece are more perfect than this temple of Apollo …” Episkopi, Sikinos, before the recent restoration works (Rebecca Sweetman).

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.)

 

The Real “King Solomon’s Mines”, by H. Rider Haggard (1907)

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

Bent’s friend, celebrated novelist Sir Henry Rider Haggard KBE (1856-1925) (Wikipedia).

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.

From page 431 of ‘Black & White’, April 2, 1892, engravings based on Bent’s watercolours of four views of Great Zimbabwe (1891). The main caption reads ‘Pre-Mahomedan Relics in South Africa – Excavations at the Great Zimbabwe. From sketches by J. Theodore Bent’ (© The Bent Archive 2025).

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

‘To and fro swayed the mass of struggling warriors.’ One of Flint’s illustrations in Chapter 8 of Cassell’s 1907 edition of ‘King Solomon’s Mines’ (Project Gutenberg).

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.

Haggard’s ‘carven vultures’. Mabel Bent’s (presumably) photo of the famous soapstone birds the Bents removed from Great Zimbabwe in 1891 but which were reclaimed by Cecil Rhodes later. No originals remain in the UK , only a replica cast in the British Museum (not on display) (from “The Ruined Cities of Mashonaland”, 1892, p. 181).

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.

‘Golden Rhinoceros of Mapungubwe’, c. 11th century CE, gold foil, Monomotapa-Zimbabwe Culture, University of Pretoria Museums (Sian Tiley-Nel, Wikipedia).

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.

An undated, cryptic letter from Bent to Rider Haggard, addressed from Sutton Hall the Bents’ country residence, outside Macclesfield, north-western England (Bent Archive).

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]).

Note 1: For a well-illustrated unpicking of the Ancient/Semitic v. Modern/African dispute that raged for decades, see ZimFieldGuide.com’s online post (undated).
Return from Note 1

Note 2: Only accessible within the US.
Return from Note 2

Reading “The Cyclades” – Ios

Delighted to add P.M. Iannetta’s choice of Ios 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 credits: see link)

Click here for other readings!

Ios [Bent’s Ch. 7: Wednesday 23 January 1884 – Sunday 27 January 1884]

P.M. Iannetta; Ios harbour in the 1930s (after Liddell 1954); Ekaterina Lorenziadis’ costume (National Historical Museum, Athens); Ios, the Chora today (Joshua Doubek: Wikipedia).

English language teacher and island-hopper P.M. Iannetta narrates the Bents’ landing on Ios – ‘Little Malta’ – and their first impressions of the main town. We meet mayor Lorenziadis and his family and are treated to a fashion show by his daughter Ekaterina – the dress she is modelling is now on display at the National Historical Museum, Athens.