Word: queen
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...trouble begins even before you enter the mausoleum that Emperor Shah Jahan built for his second wife, Queen Mumtaz Mahal. The crowds are huge (the site attracts 40% of the tourists who travel to India). And because authorities have banned fossil-fuel vehicles in the area, visitors must rent electric cars or carts drawn by horses or camels to get close to the mausoleum, even as flies swarm around the animals and the dung they scatter across the potholed roads...
What nobody knows for sure, though, is whether this storied queen actually existed--or even what her name might have been. The Arabs call her Bilqis (thought to be a religious honorific), the Greeks Black Minerva and the Ethiopians Makeda, or "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, is mentioned in contemporary secular texts, the Queen of Sheba appears only...
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 80 miles east of Yemen's capital, Sana'a, and just a few miles 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...