Her original purpose may have been to quiz the great king, but it was the torrid love affair between the wise and powerful Israelite ruler and the mysterious monarch from the south that everyone remembers. Their legendary romance, celebrated in both Bible and Koran, begat epic poetry, Hollywood extravaganzas, musical works by George Frideric Handel and Charles Gounod and, according to Ethiopian tradition, an African dynasty that endured until Haile Selassie was deposed in 1974.
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 in religious works--not the most authoritative source.
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 of Marib, at the edge of the forbidding Arabian desert. "The Queen of Sheba," he asserts, "is likely to have lived in Marib and worshipped at Mahram Bilqis."
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.
In 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.