At some unknown period in the past the territory between the Zambesi and Limpopo rivers was occupied by people more advanced in knowledge than the Bantu who were found living there at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Their nationality is uncertain, and nearly everything connected with them is involved in mystery. They were miners, and were skilled in looking for gold-bearing reefs and in working them when found. It is not impossible, though it is only a conjecture of some writers, that traders from the great commercial city of Tyre on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean sea visited them, and that in holy scripture an account of those visits is given. The conditions mentioned of the fleets that went down the Red sea to Ophir in the time of Solomon are not inapplicable to voyages to the mouths of the Zambesi or to Sofala, and the articles—gold, silver, precious stones, almug trees, ivory, apes, and peacocks—with which they returned are all found in South-Eastern Africa, if by almug trees ebony or some other very hard wood is meant, by precious stones pearls, and by peacocks the bustards that to-day are called wilde pauwen (wild peacocks) by the Dutch colonists.

The object that brought the first traders to South Africa can only be conjectured. They may have come in search of ivory, which from very early times was a valuable article of commerce, and the fact that elephants were plentiful in the country may have been ascertained by hunters pushing their way down from the north.