God made man, so the Africans say, because he loved to hear stories.
Here in Ethiopia, they have a story which is nearly 3,000 years old.
It's still told today in songs and fairy tales and sacred books.
It's a legend which leads to lost cities and forgotten civilizations.
We're inside the city here, a city of tens of thousands of people.
This is a search for a great ruler who was also an evil genie,
a worshipper of the sun and moon who believed in one god...
and she's a woman.
She's turned into a kind of fairy tale, demonised in Islam,
and then, in modern novels and films, she becomes a femme fatale.
This is a search for the Queen of Sheba.
(PIPES AND DRUMS PLAY)
- (FANFARE) - The legend begins in Jerusalem,
with the arrival of a mysterious foreign queen.
Do you think she will be as beautiful as we have heard?
She's come to meet the wisest king in the world, King Solomon.
Israel extends a warm welcome to Your Majesty.
I am grateful for Your Majesty's permission to visit your country.
(WOMEN ULLULATING)
(SINGING, DRUM BEATING)
Hollywood made Sheba a sex goddess, Solomon's lover,
and they made her white.
To Africans, she's black and a woman of power.
In Arabia, she's half human, half demon,
but everyone at least agrees that the tale begins here.
This Easter in Jerusalem is the beginning of a journey
to uncover the ancient links between Arabia, the Near East and Africa
but also, perhaps, to uncover the life of an extraordinary person,
who, it says in one version of the story, was not a woman but a world.
(ULLULATING, BELL RINGING)
As the Ethiopians tell it, the story begins 1,000 years before the time of Christ.
Queen of Sheba came to pay respects. She met King Solomon
and as you can see in the picture, she brought lots of valuable goods.
Lots of gold, incense and ivory tusks and so forth.
- So the treasures of Africa. - Treasures of Ethiopia.
- And do know we why she came? - Her religion.
- Oh, really? - Yes.
- So this isn't a trade mission. - Not at all, it's religion.
''And when the Queen of Sheba heard of Solomon concerning the name of the Lord,
''she came to probe him with hard questions.''
- What were the questions? - I'll leave that to the monks!
- Or to the priests! - Great, great.
(SINGING, BELL TOLLING)
(ULLULATING)
So the story of two rulers, a woman and a man, both founders of their nations.
Treasured by Christians, Jews and Muslims, their tale is in the Bible and the Koran
and it's been retold by storytellers ever since.
Now...
the Queen of Sheba was beautiful and wise
and wore a royal cloak with seven glittering stars.
She entered Jerusalem with an immense caravan of camels
laden with precious stones, gold and aromatic incense,
the like of which had never been seen before in Israel and has not been seen since.
Solomon greeted her and asked her, ''Why have you come?''
And she replied, ''I have heard that you are the wisest man on earth
''and I was curious to see if this could be so.''
And the queen tested Solomon with many clever riddles
but he answered all her questions
and, so the Bible says, satisfied all her desires.
But is the tale myth or history?
And why has it held such a fascination for so long?
She first appears in the Bible, in the 0ld Testament.
And this is the earliest surviving copy in the world.
(SPEAKING HEBREW)
- So it doesn't carry the headings at the top? - No, no, no, no.
But there's a conundrum. The Bible was put together centuries after the events.
No other evidence has ever been discovered that Sheba or Solomon existed.
Yeah, here it starts.
Here it starts, Chapter 10, verse 1.
(READS IN HEBREW)
The Queen of Sheba is arriving to Jerusalem
and in this chapter, you hear that she's not the only one.
All the kings of the world are coming to Jerusalem,
fascinated by this wunderkind, by King Solomon, so they all come to Jerusalem.
But we concentrate and focus on the Queen of Sheba, a woman.
So on the one hand it's a woman who comes but we hear nothing about her beauty,
we hear nothing about any relationship between the two of them,
but as you know very well, in later literature and in the Ethiopian tradition,
that actually they had a relationship, they had a son together,
the first king of Ethiopia.
But the Bible is quiet about it because it was too delicate to deal with,
the king of Israel having a relationship with a foreign woman and fathering a child.
So as a textual archaeologist, then, what's your feeling about the story?
Is it a fairy tale or do you think there's a historical kernel to it?
I'm very careful when it comes to historical kernels. I don't know.
It's a great fairy tale, anyway.
But is that all it is? Doesn't history itself become myth over time?
What we remember most is the power of the story.
And stories build up in layers over the centuries, like human life itself.
If Sheba was only a fairy tale, why did they remember her?
But if she was history, how do we find her?
I asked Israel's top archaeologist.
Can you find Solomon and Sheba in history?
The only thing that we can do is to go to Jerusalem,
to Judah, to the Highlands, the sites mentioned in the story,
and try to see whether there is evidence there to back the story.
And the answer is no. The answer is completely negative.
But don't despair. Professor Finkelstein thinks you can find Sheba
if you look beyond the Bible and far away from Israel.
What you have there in the story is a depiction of the great Arabian trade.
- The world has opened up in that story? - In that story.
And the world opened up only with Assyrian imperialism.
The first globalisation was Assyrian globalisation,
so it's the late 8th and early 7th centuries, the Assyrian century.
(MICHAEL) Right.
So you begin to see how the Bible story of Sheba might fit into a much bigger picture.
Around 700BC when the Assyrian empire in Iraq ruled the Near East,
trade boomed with Africa and Arabia.
And it wasn't just commodities and luxuries that travelled but religions, ideas and stories.
A foreign queen, exotic and mysterious,
comes bearing precious things never seen before.
So this is also a tale about how civilization grows,
how distant worlds make first contact.
But to find Sheba, do we head for Africa or Arabia?
In the ancient world the link between them and the Near East was Egypt.
(SPEAKING ARABIC)
To understand the big patterns in history you have to get an idea of the geography,
and this is a wonderful place to get an idea of the geography of Egypt.
Here in Luxor are two of the great trade routes:
the desert caravan route from Chad and Mali
and the route over from the Red Sea.
If the Queen of Sheba came from either place, these are the routes she might have taken.
And she wasn't the first.
Centuries before, the Egyptians had traded down to the Horn of Africa.
And they were looking for one thing above all else.
This is the mortuary temple of Queen Hapshepsut
from the 15th century BC.
In this place, there's a crucial clue to our story.
It's the tale of another queen who sent an expedition to a fabled land,
which sounds very much like the land of Sheba.
Come and have a look.
The journey was so remarkable that the queen had it depicted inside her house of eternity.
Seven great ships were sent down the Red Sea.
Their mission, to bring back incense,
incense to be burned on the altars of their gods, just to please them.
But as far as the Egyptians knew, incense trees only grew in one far-off land.
The name of the land: we call it Punt,
''Puwanet'', perhaps, in Ancient Egyptian.
But where was Punt? You have to follow the clues to see.
The incense trees are the most obvious.
You see the trees in their pots. This is what the Egyptians were after.
Another thing the Egyptians are bringing back is precious wood, ''wbny'': ebony,
one of the words we still use that comes from Ancient Egyptian.
Precious wood, incense, you see images of some of the animals.
Baboons, the Egyptians even bring baboons back.
The Egyptians were just brilliant at representing nature.
And these fish... You can even see the waves, here, the little zigzags of blue.
The fish are from the Red Sea, down at the point where Arabia and Africa meet.
So this is a wonderful narrative
of an Egyptian expedition, 500 years before the tale of the Queen of Sheba,
to what sounds like the incense coast of the Red Sea, the Horn of Africa and Arabia.
But where was the land of Punt? And was it the same as the land of Sheba?
So my plan was to try to track the Queen of Sheba, if I could,
all the way back to her homeland.
The clues pointed towards Ethiopia
and the first leg was the old caravan route from the Nile to the Red Sea.
You can still find traces of the ancient trade with Africa,
scratched by merchants and travellers so long ago.
There's the fertility god Min. Somebody's chiselled his willy out, if I can put it that way.
They stopped and had a sandwich and an Egyptian beer
at the side of the road here back in the...
So there's graffiti here extending from the 14th century BC, maybe the 15th.
Somebody called Socrates has left his graffito over there.
This is the debris of a kind of Roman period motel,
you know, a kind of Roman period fast food joint
on the route to Africa.
It's absolutely fantastic, isn't it?
But if you want to travel back in time, you have to try to see the world as they saw it.
When we Europeans look at the map,
we tend to see the Mediterranean and those familiar shapes of Italy and Greece.
In fact, to really imagine... to imagine this world as it is out here,
what you have to do... (LAUGHS)
is turn the map upside down.
Then you see how the world really is.
Here's the Mediterranean world. Frogs around a frog pond, we are, said Plato.
If you look at the ancient world from this way, it's Africa that looms large in the imagination.
Solomon was renowned as a lover of women.
His concubines and wives were too numerous to count
and he loved many foreign women.
Sheba agreed to stay in his palace only if he promised not to touch her
and he made her promise not to touch anything of his.
But Solomon was cunning.
One night, he ordered a magnificent banquet of the spiciest foods
and after it, Sheba was consumed with thirst.
Thinking he was asleep, she stole into Solomon's chamber
and took a glass of water.
But he was awake and he gripped her by the arm.
''You broke your promise,'' he said,
''and now I may touch something of yours.''
And he took her to bed and they made love.
And that night, Sheba had a dream
that a light moved across the sky from Israel to Ethiopia.
Massawa was once the haunt of Ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans.
Now it's recovering from a terrible civil war which split Ethiopia apart.
Salaam.
Arab dhows like this have sailed these coasts for centuries,
carrying incense between the Red Sea, Africa and Arabia.
(SPEAKING ARABIC)
Wow, wow.
Mohammed's ancestors were also boatmen,
he knows all about the India trade and trade from Iran, even in the 19th century.
My idea was to follow the incense route down the Red Sea,
hoping it would lead me to the kingdom of Sheba herself.
You might think it's impossible to find vanished ports from so long ago
but in fact an ancient traveller's guide survives, written by a Greek sea captain.
It's called ''The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea'',
which means ''The Travel Guide to the Red Sea''.
It lists the ports on the journey that we've come: Berenice, Ptolemais Theron in Sudan,
and the most important of them, Adoulis.
Now, in the Ethiopian legend, Adoulis was the port of the Queen of Sheba.
It's where she left for Jerusalem
and the guidebook says it lay opposite a hilly island in a deep bay.
We're inching our way in over a coral reef.
You can see it breaking around us, it must be very shallow here.
It's just... Oops, there we go. We've grounded.
Oh, bloody hell! Nearly lost my boots then.
It may not look much now but there was a big town here from the 3rd century BC,
a trading post leading into the heart of Africa.
Oh, a big herd of camels.
A big herd.
There were temples of volcanic stone dressed with marble.
They drank wine and olive oil imported from the Mediterranean.
And the locals here still tell stories about their decadence.
(SPEAKS 0WN LANGUAGE)
They... What, they wipe their bottoms with a fish, they had so many of them?
What he's saying is that people were so rich
that they can wipe their bottoms with fish.
That's one ancient custom which never caught on.
But in Ethiopian legend,
this is the place where the Queen of Sheba set foot again in her own land.
When the Queen of Sheba returned to Ethiopia,
she brought two special gifts.
The first was a golden ring, given to her by Solomon as a token of his love.
The second was far more precious: a child in her belly,
her son by Solomon.
His name was Menelik, which means ''son of the wise''.
Now, Menelik would become the king of Ethiopia
and the first of the Lions of the Tribe of Judah
from whom all the later kings of Ethiopia were descended.
And because of Menelik,
a new Jerusalem was built in Africa.
So Sheba's story isn't the usual fairy tale, where the princess marries her prince.
Sheba stays the woman of power and goes back to rule her own kingdom.
(BELL TOLLS)
That story of the Queen of Sheba is enshrined in the nation's holy book,
without which their kings couldn't rule.
But in 1867, I'm sorry to say, the book was stolen by the British.
Hello! Hello. Nice to meet you again.
Hello. Hello.
Now, I have brought with me from England
here, this is the letter...
..from Yohannes, King of Ethiopia,
writing to Queen Victoria.
He's saying the British have taken the book from Ethiopia, please return it.
(MAN SPEAKING NATIVE LANGUAGE)
This is the book! The very book.
''This volume was returned to the King of Ethiopia
''by order of the trustees of the British Museum,
''December 14th, 1872.''
The central story of this book,
whose name, after all, is ''The Glory of Kings'',
is the story of the affair between Solomon and Sheba,
because the dynasties of the kings of Ethiopia all trace their ancestry back to Solomon and Sheba.
Could he read just a little bit of this for us?
- It's in Geez, no? - It's in Geez! It's in Geez!
This is the oldest language of Ethiopia.
(KESSIS READS)
(MAN) First she went to Jerusalem and she met Solomon
and he treat her very nicely and she stay, like, six months there.
Is it true that Solomon fell in love with the Queen of Sheba?
The centre of the book is the love relationship between Queen of Sheba and Solomon.
- While she was in Jerusalem, she got pregnant. - And the name of the child is Menelik.
- Yeah! - His name was Menelik.
So that's how the Queen of Sheba came to be the mother of the Ethiopian nation.
But the Kebre Nagast, the Book of Kings, also names the city where she ruled.
And our search now takes us north from Addis Ababa
to the spiritual heart of Ethiopia and the centre of a forgotten empire,
the legendary capital of the Queen of Sheba, Aksum.
When we think of the ancient world, we tend to think of Aztecs and Incas and Babylonians.
The Ethiopian empire of Aksum
has been the last of the ancient civilizations to enter Western consciousness.
And yet it's the first great civilization of sub-Saharan Africa.
(WOMEN SINGING)
Ethiopia has been Christian since Roman times.
It may be the earliest Christian country in the world.
(SINGING)
It's the night of Mary, tomorrow is the day of the Virgin Mary,
and over in the old church, there's something else going on.
(DRUMS BEAT SLOW RHYTHM BENEATH LOW, DIRGE-LIKE SINGING)
Listen to this!
It's unearthly, isn't it?
All night, the priests will stand in vigil, guarding the holiest relic in Africa,
a divine gift from Solomon's Jerusalem.
And the little chapel over there is the place where, all Ethiopians believe,
is the Ark of the Covenant,
the little wooden box containing the two marble tablets
given by God to Moses on Mount Sinai.
When Menelik grew up, he desired to meet his father, King Solomon,
so he went to Jerusalem and presented himself to the king.
''Greetings, Your Majesty, from my mother, the Queen of Ethiopia,'' he said.
''I am Menelik, your son.''
At first, Solomon doubted the boy and refused to accept him as his own,
but when Menelik showed him the golden ring, the token he had given to Sheba,
Solomon rejoiced and invited Menelik to stay and rule with him.
But Menelik's heart lay in Africa with his mother and he insisted on returning home.
And with him, he took the most precious relic in the temple of Jerusalem,
the Ark of the Covenant.
(BIRDSONG)
The Ark of the Covenant, or the Tabot as they call it,
is still here, protecting Ethiopia.
No-one may see it and the guardian can never leave the shrine until he dies.
The closest you or I can get is to drink holy water from his teapot.
It's amazing how powerful these mythologies are, isn't it?
No Ethiopian doesn't believe that this is a true story
and that the Ark of the Covenant is not inside that building.
(SPEAKING NATIVE LANGUAGE)
At the period of King Menelik I, he brought the Tabot to Ethiopia,
Menelik, son of Solomon, son of David.
How was it that such a sacred item came back to Ethiopia?
- (TRANSLATOR) God's will. - (MICHAEL CHUCKLING) Great!
The discretion of the priesthood everywhere. ''It was God's will that it came back here.''
But does Aksum really go back to Bible times?
All around you, there are traces of an older, pre-Christian world.
Everywhere you look, there's column tops, great pieces of masonry,
monolithic pieces of sculpture, huge columns, here.
Just look at this over here. It's all built out of the remains of the ancient world.
The giant stones of Aksum include the biggest obelisk ever carved.
The legend says they go back before the Pyramids and Stonehenge.
But in reality, Aksum starts only in the 1st century,
far too late for the Bible story.
So where was the city of the Queen of Sheba?
(AFRICAN MUSIC 0N CAR RADI0 )
Where in Ethiopia can we get back to the time of the Bible?
In order to get back to that time, say the 7th or 8th century BC,
we've got to go now to an obscure village on the road to the Red Sea.
(CHILDREN SHOUTING)
(MICHAEL) Hello, hello, hello, hello!
This is the sacred hill of Yeha.
According to a local legend, this, not Aksum, was the palace of the Queen of Sheba.
This is one of the most mysterious places in Africa.
A Portuguese missionary came here in the 1520s and says inside this circle of walls
were noble buildings and the remains of a giant tower.
But he was wrong: it's not a tower,
it's actually the remains of an ancient temple,
one of the most ancient buildings in Africa south of the Sahara.
The date of this amazing structure, it's before 600BC, could just be right.
This wasn't just a sort of provincial temple, it's a great royal building, isn't it?
But the other clues here are a baffling, tantalising surprise.
This is part of a frieze that ran around the inside wall of the ancient temple
and it shows ibex heads, stylised ibex heads.
What does that mean?
You see, those friezes are not African but Arabian.
Oh! Thank you, thank you.
So was Yeha built by an Arabian empire? Was Sheba herself an Arab?
The next clue was shown to me inside the storeroom by a very proud guardian.
This... Oh, look at this! Look, look, look.
Fantastic. Fantastic.
- Where were these found? - (SPEAKS NATIVE LANGUAGE)
(TRANSLATOR) By the temple.
These were found right by the temple.
Just look at the wonderful cutting of these here.
This is the Sabaean script, the script of the ancient kingdom of Saba in the Yemen
in south Arabia.
It's turning out to be quite a detective story!
Here we are in the middle of Africa with a great temple built in the south Arabian style,
with inscriptions in the ancient script of the Yemen
and cult images of the kingdom of Saba.
At some point, these two lands were ruled by the same dynasty
and it suggests that the next stage of our journey should take us to the Yemen.
(PIL0T) Good morning and welcome...
(MICHAEL) Modern borders so often just divide us, don't they?
You might think Arabia and Africa are separate worlds
but in fact their cultures have intertwined for millennia.
Just look at the map. At their closest, Arabia and the Horn of Africa are 15 miles apart,
less than the English Channel between France and Britain.
In ancient times, the Yemen ruled in Ethiopia
and then Aksum ruled in Arabia
and their people have shared myths and heroes ever since.
These old caravan cities of the Yemen
have traded with the Near East overland for 3,000 years.
This is the Great Bazaar of old Sana'a
and a fantastic place it is, too.
And...I'm looking for the incense bazaar.
This is Arabia Felix, ''Arabia the Happy'',
and the Incense Coast here was the great producer of myrrh and frankincense.
We're going to try and find the incense market.
And this rocky lump is what they coveted most.
(LAUGHS) Instant testing!
This is what the people of the ancient world burned for their gods.
Ah!
So that's myrrh.
And it's what the Queen of Sheba brought to Solomon.
Absolutely fantastic.
It is the densest, drowsiest, thickest,
perfumed scent that you ever imagined.
There's one of the Roman writers, he says that people here,
so many incense caravans came through, that the people became easy-going,
drowsy with the beautiful scent of the incense.
And here in the Yemen, there's another tale of the Queen of Sheba.
King Solomon could command even the djinns and spirits
and he could talk to the birds.
One day, he was flying through the skies on his magic carpet of green silk,
a flock of birds wheeling around his head,
when he realised his favourite lapwing was missing.
''Where were you?'' he asked the lapwing when it returned.
''I have come to you from the land of Sheba,'' the lapwing replied,
''and listen to this, I'm telling the truth, there I found a woman reigning over the people.
''She is possessed of every virtue and has a most splendid kingdom
''but she and her people do not worship God. They worship the sun.
''Satan has seduced her and taken her from the true path.''
So in Arabia, there's a new slant on the tale.
Sheba is a dangerous female spirit from the land of djinns and genies,
whose power must be contained.
This is where the Yemeni knife comes in useful.
And what a place to find the best restaurant in the world.
So we've been travelling all day, we've had a breakdown, nothing to eat
and you arrive in a place like this and it's absolutely wonderful.
This is Bir Ali on the Arabian Sea.
It's the start of the incense route into the interior
and you can see the history in the faces of the people,
faces that look Malaysian and Indian, faces that look Arabian.
Oh, thank you.
Well, we've been suitably fed.
We're on the beach at Bir Ali near to the ruins of Qana.
Qana was the great port in the days when Arabia's wealth was not oil but incense...
..days recalled in the Holy Koran, ''the glittering kingdom of Saba,
''whose queen worshipped the moon and the stars. ''
When the Queen of the South entered Jerusalem,
Solomon had been warned that she was no ordinary woman.
Her face and body were beautiful but she had a dark secret.
Solomon had the glass floor of his palace polished until it shimmered as if it were water.
When the Queen entered his palace and stood on the floor, she thought it was a pool
and fearing that her silk skirts might become wet, she lifted them up
and the whole of Solomon's court gasped with astonishment
to see she had a hairy leg and a cloven hoof
like a goat.
- You just chew it slowly? - Yeah.
After a night dreaming of genies, we had a morning pick-me-up, a mouthful of khat.
Another custom shared by Arabia and Africa.
An acquired taste, obviously.
Chasing the Arabian story of Sheba, we headed into the Wadi Hadramaut.
I'm hoping to get to speak to an imam, a religious scholar,
to ask him about the Muslim legend of the Queen of Sheba,
the Queen of the South, as the Holy Koran calls her.
But it may take a bit of negotiation because this is the heartland of Yemeni Islam
and it's not easy for outsiders to get to talk to key religious figures.
Nice people, they have respect for you.
The south people, they're respectful of British people.
Think of what's happening internationally and there's still respect towards the British.
We went to the great mosque in Shibam,
hoping to find a scholar who would explain the meaning of the Koran's story of Sheba.
So it sounds as if this isn't the best place to talk to a religious scholar,
we can't go inside,
so I think to find out more about the Islamic legend, we need to look elsewhere.
Shibam. It's one of the most beautiful of ancient cities,
with its skyscrapers of mud brick, a Manhattan in the desert.
Salaam, salaam.
Finally, we were invited into the home of Imam Jafar.
(MICHAEL) What a beautiful room.
The room of a scholar. They're all the same, aren't they?
A big mess with thousands of books everywhere!
I love the wind-up gramophone.
(IMAM CHANTING)
And very sweetly, the Imam sang to me the verses from the Koran about Sheba.
(CONVERSATION IN ARABIC)
Yeah. And her name is mentioned clearly with the Koran,
the Bilqis, or Queen of Sheba, in the Koran.
- ''Balqa''. - ''Balqa''.
(MICHAEL) This is her name?
And in the Koranic tradition, she is from south Arabia, no question?
Yes. (SPEAKS ARABIC)
- Yes, yes, yes. - So in sura 27 in the Holy Koran,
isn't there some tradition that when she came to Jerusalem her legs were hairy?
For Jafar, it was a deformity cured by faith.
She's like a genie and during the stay with King Solomon,
she becomes a worshipper of the one true God and then she is cured.
And the scholarly tradition, the imam is saying, is
that this is not a symbolic narrative but a literal narrative.
So here in Arabia, another name for the queen and another story.
But here she's the queen of a real kingdom.
For Arab scholars, the Koran shows that she ruled in Saba, in the heart of the Yemen.
To get there, we needed to follow one of the great caravan routes,
a route old when even the youthful prophet Mohammed, peace be upon him,
led his camels across the sands of Arabia.
And the only way was to cross the edge of the desert of the Empty Quarter.
Just imagine it, a giant caravan with 1,000 camels and 20,000 people
looming out of the heat haze like a moving city.
You can see how you can get lost in the desert like you can get lost at sea.
That's why we've taken a Bedouin guide, Abdul Karim.
Unfortunately, it's Abdul Karim who's screwed up.
When you think that the Arabian desert is as big as western Europe,
you can see why the kingdom of Saba remained hidden for so long.
The further we go along this trail, the closer we get to the history.
And the next stop on this trail is the real-life kingdom of Sheba.
Now, because of its remoteness,
the kingdom of Sheba had never suffered war
and its people were fabulously wealthy.
For according to the Holy Koran, God himself had given a special sign of favour to its people,
long ago.
Eat of the sustenance provided by your lord and be grateful to him.
For you live in a land which is beautiful and fortunate.
And Sheba was so fertile that it looked like an earthly paradise.
Two great gardens, one on the right hand, one on the left,
and everywhere, the air was heavy
with the scent of frankincense and myrrh.
At dawn, we arrived at last in the fertile valley of Marib,
the ancient kingdom of Saba.
Saba's wealth came from the incense trade
but its secret was this giant dam, the biggest in the world.
This is what made Saba into the earthly paradise remembered in the Koran.
This is just one of the sluice gates.
A stupendous piece of architecture, isn't it?
It's 750 yards across to the northern end,
the water would've been 50 yards deep.
Just from this dam alone they could create 100km of agricultural land
that fed 50,000 people.
So the story comes full circle.
A search which began with a fairy tale
has brought us to a real civilization from the time of the Bible legend.
In the fields near the city, they found the temples of the gods of Saba,
the moon god Almaqah, lord of the ibexes.
And on the walls, the same script we saw in Ethiopia.
In around 700BC, growing in self-confidence,
the civilization of Arabia reached out to a wider world.
The rulers of Saba began to send out embassies to the Near Eastern world,
sending treasure and spices and frankincense to the powers of the day,
just as in the Biblical story of the Queen of Sheba.
(HORN HONKS)
Now Marib is just a truck stop on the road between Saudi and 0man.
The fabulous civilization remembered by the Bible, the Ancient Greeks and the Koran
has been forgotten.
Except, that is, for the Queen of Sheba herself.
Alien and exotic, she is the eternal female, fantasy mother and lover,
woman of power, cloven-footed demon.
She has passed beyond history and become a myth.
We've been on this extraordinary journey around the Red Sea,
searching for a legend and trying to put that legend into a real history.
But the final goal of our journey isn't the famous monuments of Marib, it's this derelict hill,
which is still inhabited after 3,000 years.
0nly it's not a hill, it's a ruined city,
built on top of the ruins of earlier cities...
..layer upon layer of human life.
These are the last people of ancient Saba.
Does the little boy know where there are pieces of stone with old Sabaean writing on?
(MAN SPEAKING ARABIC)
So further up? OK. Let's go and have a look.
0ld Marib's days as a living city are almost over.
Its crumbling towers are due for demolition.
Oh, yes! Come and look at this!
The archaeologists are waiting.
Fantastic. How about that?
It's the entire city. At Shibam, you see the houses built in the traditional mud brick way,
but here, there's so much stone because this was the capital,
the buildings were stone built.
And so, even though what you're looking at is the last 300 years of the existence of the city,
it's built out of the remains of...
more than 2,500 years of the city's past.
And these are the last people living on the site. When they're gone, that'll be it.
How about this?
But that's not the end of the story.
For one thing this journey has taught me
is that myths live on above all in the hearts of the people.
- So what is this here? - (MAN SPEAKING ARABIC)
(SPEAKING ARABIC)
Down there, little Mohammed told me, the Queen of Sheba had her palace
and I think she probably did.