King Solomon's Mines is an 1885 popular novel[1] by the English Victorian adventure writer and fabulist Sir H. Rider Haggard.

It tells of an expedition through an unexplored region of Africa by a group of adventurers led by Allan Quatermain, searching for the missing brother of one of the party.

[2] By the late 19th century, explorers were uncovering ancient civilisations and their remains around the world, such as Egypt's Valley of the Kings and the empire of Assyria.

Inner Africa remained largely unexplored and King Solomon's Mines, one of the first novels of African adventure published in English, captured the public's imagination.

Research published in September 2013 has shown that this site was in use during the 10th century BC as a copper mine possibly by the Edomites,[3][4] who, the Bible reports, were rivals of and frequently at war with King Solomon.

[5][6][7] The Bible does refer to King Solomon having sent out, in partnership with his Phoenician allies, trading expeditions along the Red Sea, which brought exotic wares and animals from Africa to Jerusalem.

Muslim traders in Sofala, Mozambique, told Portuguese travellers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that the region's gold mines belonged to King Solomon and that he built the now-ruined city of Great Zimbabwe.

His original Allan Quatermain character was based in large part on Frederick Selous, the British white hunter and explorer of Africa.

Reaching a mountain range called Suliman Berg, they climb a peak (one of "Sheba's Breasts"), enter a cave and find the frozen corpse of José Silvestre,[b] the 16th-century Portuguese explorer who drew the map in his own blood.

Thereafter, to protect themselves, they style themselves "white men from the stars"—sorcerer-gods—and are required to give regular proof of their divinity, considerably straining both their nerves and their ingenuity.

However, a scuffle with Foulata— a Kukuana woman who became attached to Good after nursing him through his injuries sustained in the battle—causes Gagool to be crushed under the door, though not before fatally stabbing Foulata.

After some despairing days sealed in the dark chamber, they find an escape route, bringing with them a few pocketfuls of diamonds from the trove, enough to make them rich.

Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian also visited several lost cities, and Lee Falk's The Phantom was initially written in this genre.

Haggard's use of the first-person subjective perspective also contrasts with the omniscient third-person viewpoint then in vogue among influential writers such as Anthony Trollope, Thomas Hardy, and George Eliot.

The narrator tries to discourage the relationship, dreading the uproar that such a marriage would cause back home; however, he has no objection to the lady, whom he considers very beautiful and noble.

Kukuanaland is said in the book to be forty leagues north of the Lukanga river, in modern-day Zambia, which would place it in the extreme southeast of the present Democratic Republic of Congo.

The 1985 film, King Solomon's Mines, was a more tongue-in-cheek parody of the story, followed by a sequel in the same vein: Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold (1987).

In 2008, a direct-to-video adaptation, Allan Quatermain and the Temple of Skulls was released by Mark Atkins, which bore more resemblance to Indiana Jones than the novel.

In 2004, King Solomon's Mines, a two-part TV mini-series starring Patrick Swayze as Allan Quatermain, aired on the Hallmark Channel.