Book Report: Search for Queen of Sheba Lures Writer to Arabian Desert

By John Roach
for National Geographic News

June 18, 2001

The Queen of Sheba's visit to King Solomon takes up 13 lines of the
Bible. Those lines created a legend that has spawned thousands of pages
of literature, sculptures, paintings, circus acts, operas, and even a
restaurant in Houston, Texas.

But did the queen really exist?

To find out, author and documentary filmmaker Nicholas Clapp embarked on an adventure that took him from the musty Oriental Division of the New York Public Library to dank monasteries in Jerusalem to the scorching heat of the Arabian desert.

"I thought it wouldn't be too much of a project. How much can you make of 13 lines in the Bible?" said Clapp, who recounts his adventure and discoveries in a recently published book, Sheba: Through the Desert in Search of the Legendary Queen.

Biblical Queen

Sheba appears in the Bible in I Kings 10:1-13. Having heard "the fame of Solomon," Sheba comes "to test him with difficult questions." Solomon has an answer for each question. Awed by his wisdom, Sheba gives him bountiful gifts and great praise. Solomon, in turn, grants Sheba all her wishes, and then she returns home.

The Bible passage does not say where home was for Sheba, but describes the riches she brought as "camels laden with spices, great quantities of gold, and precious stones." The lingering mystery has prompted much conjecture and fed many myths and legends about the queen of Sheba.

Christian Ethiopians claim to be descended from Menelik, the son of Sheba and Solomon, who is presumed to have been conceived during their biblical meeting. To Arabs, Sheba was Bilqis, a queen of the incense-rich lands of ancient Saba in what is now Yemen.

Earthly Queen

Scholars believe that if there were an actual Queen of Sheba and she did visit King Solomon, it would have happened about 950 B.C.

Early research dated Saba back to 650 B.C. By the time Clapp began his search for the historical queen, however, archaeologists had used carbon-14 dating to show that Saba had an alphabet, and thus civilization, that dated back to 1200 B.C.

"I was prepared for whatever I might find," said Clapp. "Re-dating of the alphabet showed all things could have happened."

Although he never found tangible evidence for a historical Queen of Sheba, Clapp chased several leads before he settled on compelling evidence that such a queen existed in what is now Yemen.

In Israel, he learned about a religious pilgrim who claimed to be a living queen of Sheba. In Ethiopia, he pursued the myth of Menelik, who is said to have filched the Ark of the Covenant.

But it was in Yemen where Clapp came closest to the object of his pursuit. Using space images and a device for global positioning system navigation, Clapp conspired with drivers dazed by qat (a narcotic leaf) to follow an ancient caravan route leading to ruins where Sheba's tomb may lie.

"With that civilization now coming into focus, the biblical account of Sheba and Solomon assumes the marking of a real event and by association gives Solomon credibility as a historical figure," Clapp notes in his book.

Bibical Queen Revised

The Yemeni ruins of Ma'rib and Sirwah indicate that the Sabeans were an advanced civilization with characteristics that match legends about Sheba, said Clapp. The sites also allow for an archaeological interpretation of I Kings 10:1-13.

According to Clapp, Sheba was probably a powerful merchant queen of Saba who capitalized on the domestication of the camel to open trade routes to the Fertile Crescent Israel, Damascus, Sidon, and Tyre.

In this interpretation, her visit to King Solomon, a hill country chieftain, was a high-powered trade meeting.

The "difficult questions" Sheba asks Solomon in their biblical meeting may have centered on long-range trade, said Clapp. And the gifts she is said to have given to Solomon "a hundred and twenty talents of gold and great quantities of spices and precious stones" are commodities for distribution.

In turn, Solomon gave Sheba "all she expressed a wish for." Clapp says that in mercantile terms, that wish might have been for passage to the lucrative markets of the Fertile Crescent. The phrase also raises the possibility of an affair of the heart, giving greater credence to the myth of Menelik.

Excavation of the Ma'rib and Sirwah sites is ongoing. "Will there be a day when the Queen of Sheba's tomb is discovered?" Clapp asks. "[The civilization] went on for 1,800 years, not one of their tombs have been found yet. There is a huge trove of discovery to come."