Word: queen
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...When the Queen of Sheba heard of the fame of Solomon (fame due to the name of the Lord), she came to test him with hard questions. She came to Jerusalem with a very great retinue, with camels bearing spices, and very much gold, and precious stones ?" - 1 Kings 10: 1-2or "Greatness," but these are only titles. "Sheba" is simply an alternate spelling of Saba, the kingdom in modern-day Yemen where she is said to have reigned for a score of years beginning about 950 B.C. And while Cleopatra, the other storied beauty of Middle Eastern royalty...
...This state of historical ignorance may be about to end. An international team of archaeologists has been searching for hard evidence of the Queen's existence since 1988, and according to project field director William Glanzman of the University of Calgary, the solution to the mystery may lie amid the ruins of a 3,500-year-old temple complex in northern Yemen. Known in Arabic as Mahram Bilqis - "the Queen of Sheba's sanctified place" - the sprawling ruins are situated about 130 km east of Yemen's capital, Sana'a, and just a few kilometers from the ancient citadel...
...Glanzman's assertion would once have been considered ludicrous. That's because experts believed the earliest signs of civilization on the Arabian peninsula dated to just 700 B.C., more than 200 years after the Queen of Sheba's lifetime. But in the late 1980s, pottery shards from Wadi al-Jubah, not far from Marib, was found to be 3,500 years old. Suddenly, a wealth of other circumstantial evidence, both cultural and religious, made the Queen's existence seem a lot more plausible...
...fact, Westerners have been looking for the Queen at Mahram Bilqis since 1843, when Joseph Thomas Arnaud, a French apothecary, arrived in search of the spices she brought to Solomon. By then, the site had long since been abandoned. The temple itself had ceased to be used sometime in the 6th century A.D., and the expanding desert had covered much of the complex. Sheba searchers returned to the region sporadically, most recently in the 1950s, when American oilman and explorer Wendell Phillips led an expedition that was driven out by political upheavals in Yemen...
...Foundation for the Study of Man, which was the original sponsor of the current expedition. When the team arrived at Mahram Bilqis in 1998, most of the ruins were buried by sand drifts as deep as 8 m. While none of the sanctuary's existing masonry dates to the Queen's time, much of its layout remains as she would have seen it. The main entrance is marked by the remains of a portico - eight limestone pillars, today half submerged in the sand - that stands in front of a peristyle hall whose high masonry walls are inset with false windows...