At Oke-Eri, a small community on the outskirts of Ijebu-Ode in Ogun State, there is a grave where no grass has ever grown. Women cannot enter. Dogs cannot enter. A British colonial officer named Captain Ross reportedly ignored both prohibitions, brought his wife and his dog, and watched the dog die before leaving the compound and his wife collapse on the road back to Ijebu-Ode. The grave belongs to Oloye Bilikisu Sungbo, known to the Ijebu as the woman who came from Ethiopia, visited King Solomon in Jerusalem, returned across the African continent, and died in the forest of the Ijebu. The earthwork she commissioned as her memorial, Sungbo's Eredo, stretches 160 kilometres around the ancient Ijebu kingdom, moves 3.5 million cubic metres of earth and sand, one million cubic metres more than the Great Pyramid of Giza, and constitutes one of the largest man-made structures in the history of Africa...
The Story
The Hebrew Bible calls her the Queen of the South, coming from a distant land with camels bearing spices, gold, and precious stones, to test Solomon with hard questions. The Quran names her Bilqis, a queen of extraordinary power who was brought under Solomon's authority through divine diplomacy. The Ethiopian national epic, the Kebra Nagast, the most detailed single account of her life anywhere in world literature, calls her Makeda, Queen of Aksum, and places her kingdom in the highlands of the Horn of Africa, the territory of modern-day Ethiopia and Eritrea. The Arabian tradition places her kingdom in Saba, modern-day Marib in Yemen, across the Red Sea from Ethiopia. The academic consensus now holds that the Sabean civilisation straddled both sides of the Red Sea, encompassing both the Ethiopian highlands and southwestern Arabia as a single maritime commercial empire. She was therefore simultaneously Ethiopian and Arabian in the way that a modern head of state governing an island nation is neither land nor sea but both. The Ijebu tradition identifies her as Bilikisu, the Islamic form of Bilqis, who came from Ethiopia, settled in Ijebuland during her old age, and died there.
Now address the direction of travel, because the direction is the evidence that no one has adequately mapped. She came from Solomon's court in Jerusalem heading southward and westward. The route from Jerusalem to the Ethiopian highlands was the standard caravan path of the ancient world, down the Levantine coast or through the Sinai and into the Nile Valley, then south along the Nile toward Meroe and Aksum. But the Ijebu tradition says she came all the way from Ethiopia to Ijebuland. That is not a random southwestward drift. It is a deliberate journey along one of the oldest trade corridors in African history, the trans-Saharan and Sahelian route that connected the Horn of Africa and the Nile Valley to the Niger basin and the coastal West African forest zone. That route was the commercial highway of the ancient world long before any European entered the equation. Gold, ivory, and spices from the Lagos and Niger Delta region moved northeastward along that corridor toward the Nile and the Mediterranean. It was the same route that carried the Sudanic and Nilotic populations documented throughout this series into the territory of present-day Yorubaland.
The dating problem is an obstacle the story must acknowledged. Archaeology dates Sungbo's Eredo to approximately 800 to 1000 CE. King Solomon reigned around 970 to 931 BCE. The gap between those dates is nearly 2,000 years, a discrepancy that Dr. Patrick Darling of Bournemouth University acknowledged directly after his 1999 excavations, stating that the most cogent argument against the Sheba identification at the moment is the dating. Ground Penetrating Radar investigations conducted in 2023 and published in a peer-reviewed geophysics journal confirmed the existence of subsurface structures consistent with a formal tomb at Oke-Eri, establishing beyond scientific doubt that someone of enormous authority is buried there. What the GPR cannot determine is the identity of that person or the century of burial.
Two explanations resolve the dating tension without dismissing the tradition. The first is that Bilikisu Sungbo was not the Queen of Sheba herself but a later queen from the same Sabean or Ethiopian civilisational tradition who carried the same name, Bilqis being the Islamic honorific title for a queen of her stature, the way Pharaoh was not a personal name but a title. She would have been a medieval West African queen of Ethiopian or Arabian origin, wealthy beyond local comparison, who commissioned the largest earthwork in sub-Saharan African history and died in Ijebuland having traveled the same trans-Saharan corridor that older generations of her civilisation had used for millennia. The second explanation, less comfortable for historians but worth stating, is that the Sabean civilisation's presence in West Africa was earlier and more sustained than current dating frameworks acknowledge, and that the Eredo's 1000 CE dating reflects renovation and expansion of an older structure rather than original construction.
What is not in dispute is the scale of what she left behind. An earthwork 160 kilometres long and up to 20 metres high, enclosing the entire ancient Ijebu kingdom, built in laterite soil with engineering precision, visited by thousands of Christian, Muslim, and traditional pilgrims annually, on Nigeria's UNESCO World Heritage tentative list since 1995, is not the memorial of an ordinary woman. It is the monument of a sovereign. The Ijebu who built it for her, or who allowed her to commission it on their territory, were acknowledging someone whose authority and resources dwarfed anything the local political landscape had previously produced.
What would a queen of such Calibre be looking for? Possibly home, in the deepest sense. Not to a geographic location but to a civilisational root that the the Yoruba and the east Africa shared through the Nilotic corridor. Where was she coming from? May be From Solomon's Jerusalem, through the Nile Valley, through the Sahel, down the ancient trade route that connected the Mediterranean world to the West African forest zone. Why did she not leave? The forest of the Ijebu received her, and she built the largest structure in the history of sub-Saharan Africa on its soil, which suggests she was not merely passing through. She was making a declaration of permanence.
What implications does this have for Nigeria? The Nigerian government must urgently pursue full UNESCO World Heritage Site designation for Sungbo's Eredo, converting it from tentative to confirmed status, and fund a dedicated protection and restoration programme that treats it with the same institutional seriousness given to the pyramids of Egypt, whose scale it rivals. Second, a multidisciplinary research consortium combining archaeologists, geneticists, historians of the Sabean civilisation, and Yoruba traditional historians must be formally constituted to investigate the Bilikisu Sungbo question comprehensively, specifically examining whether skeletal remains at Oke-Eri can yield DNA evidence that could be compared against ancient Sabean and Ethiopian genetic profiles. Third, the Ogun State Ministry of Culture and Tourism must develop a world-class heritage interpretation centre at Oke-Eri and Sungbo's Eredo that presents the full global civilisational context of this site, including the Nilotic corridor trade routes, the Sabean civilisation's trans-African reach, and the Ijebu's own ancestral connection to the same cultural matrix as claimed in some quarters that produced the woman buried in their forest.
She came a long way. The Ijebu forest was the last place she rested. No grass grows there still. That is the Story of Sungbo Eredo IJEBU called Queen Sheba!!!
Ire ooo.
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