Word: shebas
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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...
...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 of Marib, at the edge of the forbidding Arabian desert. "The Queen of Sheba," he asserts, "is likely to have lived in Marib...
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...
...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...
...matter - in fact, Gore's lawyers were happy to have it over with, so they can start Monday in court. David Boies spent Sunday afternoon confidently explaining why Harris may well have been declaring herself Queen of Sheba, for all the legal issues yet unresolved and all the hand counts unfinished. Contesting an officially certified presidential election? Child's play, Boies told reporters, and don't worry. "Everything's going to be over on December 12." He wants to spend the next two weeks suing in Miami-Dade, Nassau and even Palm Beach, which he says was too hard...