As I drew closer to it, I began wondering if it was a mirage. The splendor of the scene was like something out of the Arabian Nights. It was a large oasis, walled all around, lush with palm trees, and embracing enough tents and shacks to categorize it as a small city. In the center of it was a palace the likes of which l’d never seen. It seemed to be formed of pure gold, shimmering in the sunlight, its turrets crowned with rubies and emeralds. It was a mighty solid structure, yet its over-all appearance was ethereal, other-worldly. Nothing like it had survived to the Twentieth Century.
Still, in my travels I had seen ancient ruins of such gingerbread housing. The crumbs were unearthed in South Arabia, the area which includes Yemen and the Hadramaut and extends into Ethiopia. They confirmed the Bible story of the Queen of Sheba and testified to a very hip civilization ruled over by her. It existed around 950 B.C., the heyday of the Hebrews, when King Solomon ruled.
Evidence is that the Shebans were one up culturally on the Hebrews and both were way ahead of the cats of Europe. While English men were still painting their behinds blue, and the Viking civilization was still almost two thousand years off, and the Greeks were just getting off the ground, the Shebans and the Hebrews had already devcloped the three R’s6 and a swinging culture.
Sheba lay smack in the middle of the trade route between India and Africa. The country’s bag was buying and selling and they did it so well that they became the fattest folk of their time. They were way ahead in other ways as well. Some of their engineering techniques would not be rediscovered for two thousand years. They built dams (the remains of one, near Marib, reveal principles of construction not seen again until the 1930s in the U.S.), erected rnultistoried pads, developed indoor plumbing facilities including flush toilets, mastered the techniques of forging and molding metals and their Kultur was snobby-rich in works of art and sculpture7 .
However, Sheba was far from being a Utopia. The Queen ran a tight ship and at times it was Queeg-ish to an extreme. There were scads of Sheban rulers post- and ante-Balkis, the Queen of Biblical renown, but Sheba reached its peak during her reign.
It was a reign glossy with the wealth of an economy leaning on slavery. The Shebans not only kept slaves, they bought and sold them. The masters were Negro, the slaves mostly Caucasian savages captured in Northern Arabia. The nomadic drift southward took many hundreds of years and there were whole generations of whiteys who cringed under Sheban whip and whim. The Shebans saw pale skins as proof of inborn inferiority and drummed up a biological theory in which black meant human and white something halfway between animal and human. Archeology shows that the white slaves accepted the verdict unquestioningly.
Being white-skinned myself, this knowledge didn’t exactly reassure me as I approached the gates to the oasis-city. It seemed pretty certain to me that I was roughly in the time period of Sheban civilization -- diffcult as that was for me to swallow. There just wasn’t any other time in history when this sort of architecture and opulence existed.
There were two guards at the gate. Both wore flowing, Arab-style-robes in rich colors. Both wore turbans. Both carried curved swords with murderous blades. They did a double take at my garb as I reached them.
“Hi there, fellows,” I greeted them “Hot, isn’t it?”
“Shalom.” One of them spoke.
I recognized the Semitic greeting and drew hope from it. If they spoke some sort of Arabic dialect then I might be able to communicate with them. The Semitic colonization of Ethiopia was made via Sheba and it seemed possible that they might speak a dialect with which I could cope.
But with their next words my hopes were dashed. The universal “shalom” was not related to the rest of their speech. Their lingo was Semitic, probably Himyaritic8 from what I knew of semantics, but it was beyond my comprehension. We were reduced to sign language.
They got it across to me that I should follow one of them to the palace. Here he turned me over to another guard with an explanation that was obviously puzzled, although I still couldn’t understand the words. This guard led me through plush corridors to some sort of anteroom. Here I waited under the scrutiny of a third sentry.
Finally I was ushered through a door into a room that was even more luxurious than the ones I’d passed through. There were more guards stationed along the walls. Two white women were dusting the beautifully crafted furniture. A white man was serving food to two or three negroes clustered around a divan at the far end of the room. As he moved away from them, I got my first look at the figure stretched out on the divan.
I gasped. It was an imposing vision of true nobility. The figure had the grace and beauty of a black panther. I don’t mean to imply that there was anything savage about her. There wasn’t. Hers was the sort of beauty which conveys culture and sophistication and unquestionable queenliness. Yet with it all there was an impression of dainty femininity.
She wore a simple green gown made of silk and covering her from her shoulders to her ankles. Her arms were bare save for a golden bracelet and they seemed made of sculptured, highly polished onyx. Her neck was long and sleek, her face high cheekboned and sensual, the lips very full and mahogany-red, the nostrils wide yet delicate and expressive. Her eyes were a warmer, lighter brown, set far apart, the kind of eyes capable of expressing tenderness or fury with equal ease. Her hair was long and tightly curled, as shiny black as her skin. On top of her head she wore a simple crown of silver.
When the guard had escorted me to her, she addressed me directly. The only word I recognized was “Balkis,” which I realized was her name. “Balkis”! The Queen of Sheba! I answered by pointing to myself and speaking my own name: “Steve Victor.”
She spoke again. Her voice was very soft, not unfriendly. I realized she was attempting to communicate in another language, one different from that which she’d first used. It was no use. I still couldn’t understand.
Then she spoke in a third language. Suddenly I could understand her! My jaw dropped open and I almost laughed aloud. The Queen of Sheba was speaking Yiddish!
“Vas machst du?” That’s what she said to me. “Vas machst du?”
Chapter Two
SOME ARE BORN JEWISH; SOME ACHIEVE JEWISHNESS; and some have Jewishness thrust upon them. I fell in the last category. At least part of the reason was linguistic.
I’ve traveled a great deal in my line of work and therefore Yiddish is a must language for me. Although I’ve been in many places where I didn’t speak the native tongue, I’ve almost always been able to find someone who speaks Yiddish and could act as interpreter for me. Now I needed no interpreter, for Balkis, Queen of Sheba, spoke Yiddish as well as I did9 -10 .
After we’d exchanged initial salutations, however, she switched back to Himyaritic for a conversation with a large, fierce-looking black man in baggy Arabian trousers and turban. I couldn’t understand what they were saying, but the fellow’s attitude was obviously hostile. His tone to Balkis was subservient, but when he gestured toward me, it became nasty. She cut him off firmly and he bowed and backed away a few feet.
“Tabari is suspicious of you. He asks for credentials,” Balkis told me in Yiddish. “I have told him that the tongue of the Israelites proves you come from Jedidiah, he who is Solomon.”
“Tabari,” I gathered, was the name of the hostile hunky who still stood glaring at me. If he pushed for credentials, then I was in trouble. As for the rest of what Balkis had said, my mind whirled with consideration of its meaning.
“Jedidiah” was another name for Solomon, King of ancient Israel. That much I remembered from Biblical history. Still, I was reasonably sure that Yiddish couIdn’t be the language of the ancient Israelites. They spoke Hebrew, a Semitic language of the Canaanite group, another version of the Himyaritic which the Shebans used. It wasn’t until later in my Sheban stay that I realized that Balkis_ not having had any direct contact with Hebrew at this time — had jumped to the conclusion that they spoke Yiddish because the white European slaves the Shebans bought and sold had adopted the dialect to communicate in the Arab lands. It was a mixture of European and Semitic tongues and Balkis had assumed it was the native language of the Israelites and therefore mastered it as a courtesy in preparation for her visit to Solomon.