"A splendidly written book, full of information and brilliant in reasoning and style." -Journal of the Royal African Society, 1902

Novelist Rider Haggard in his historical fiction novel "King Solomon's Mines" depicts Solomon's gold mines as being located in Africa. As it turns out, Haggard's work of fiction may have been based on a kernel of truth. For, in his 1901 book, "The Gold of Ophir," ethnologist/geographer Augustus Henry Keane (1833–1912) uses historical sources and comparative linguistics to make the case that King Solomon's Mines were located in Rhodesia and Ophir was an Arabian port that collected the gold and distributed it to King Solomon.

In introducing his book, Keane writes:

"When the Portuguese first rounded the Cape, and swept tumultuously into the eastern seas, they hurried, like their Spanish rivals in the Western Hemisphere, everywhere in quest of gold and the other treasures of the Orient. On capturing Sofala, in 1505, they at once built a stronghold which they called Fort Ophir, because they found the 'Moors,' that is, the local Arab traders, trafficking in gold, which they immediately concluded must be the 'Gold of Ophir.'"

About the author:

Augustus Henry Keane (1833–1912) was an Irish Roman Catholic journalist and linguist, known for his ethnological writings.

He was born in Cork, Ireland. He was educated in Cork, Dublin and Jersey, and graduated at the Roman Catholic College, Dublin.

Keane was editor of the Glasgow Free Press from 1862. He and his deputy Peter McCorry turned the first Scottish Catholic newspaper into a campaigning sheet, setting the Irish priests against the Scottish priests, and in particular the vicars-apostolic.

He studied in Germany and taught at Hameln; and became a linguist. He taught languages including Hindustani at the Hartley Institute, Southampton; a chair of Hindustani was created for him at University College, London, in 1883, but he left it in 1885. He then spent a period lecturing on ethnology at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Keane belonged to the "philological" group of British linguists, with Richard Garnett, Thomas Hewitt Key, Isaac Taylor, John Horne Tooke and Hensleigh Wedgwood. He began attending meetings of the a Royal Anthropological Institute in 1879, read papers there, and became a Fellow, serving as vice-president. He was granted a Civil List pension in 1897. Keane was a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.

Works

Handbook of the History of the English Language

Ethnology of the Egyptian Sudan

Codex Fejrvry-Mayer

The Early Chartered Companies

Man, Past and Present

Ethnology. In Two Parts

Asia: Northern and Eastern Asia

The Boer States: land and people (1900)

The World's Peoples