From this period Bent concentrated particularly on archaeological and ethnographic research. The years 1883-1888 were devoted to investigations in the Eastern Mediterranean and
Anatolia, his discoveries and conclusions being communicated to the
Journal of Hellenic Studies and other magazines and reviews; his investigations on the Cycladic island of
Antiparos are of note. In 1889, he undertook excavations in the
Bahrein Islands of the
Persian Gulf, looking for evidence that they had been a primitive home of the
Phoenician civilization; he and his wife returned to England via Persia (Iran), being introduced to Shah
Naser al-Din Shah Qajar along the way. After an expedition in 1890 to
Cilicia Trachea, where he obtained a valuable collection of inscriptions, Bent spent a year in
South Africa, with the object, by investigation of some of the ruins in
Mashonaland, of throwing light on the vexed question of their origin and on the early history of
East Africa. Bent believed the
Zimbabwe ruins had originally been built by the ancestors of the
Shona people. To this end, in 1891, he made, along with his wife and the Glaswegian surveyor Robert McNair Wilson Swan (1858-1904), a colleague from Bent's time on Antiparos in 1883/4, the first detailed examination of the
Great Zimbabwe. Bent described his work in
The Ruined Cities of Mashonaland (1892). Famously,
Victor Loret and
Alfred Charles Auguste Foucher denounced this view, and claimed that a non-African culture built the original structures. Modern archaeologists now agree that the city was the product of a
Shona-speaking African civilization. In 1893, he investigated the ruins of
Axum and other places in northern
Ethiopia, which had previously been made known in part by the researches of
Henry Salt and others. His book
The Sacred City of the Ethiopians (1893) gives an account of this expedition. Bent now visited at considerable risk the almost unknown
Hadramut country (1893–1894), and during this and later journeys in southern
Arabia he studied the ancient history of the country, its physical features and actual condition. On the
Dhofar coast in 1894-1895, he visited ruins which he identified with the
Abyssapolis of the
frankincense merchants. In 1895-1896, he examined part of the African coast of the
Red Sea, finding there the ruins of a very ancient gold-mine and traces of what he considered
Sabaean influence. While on another journey in South Arabia and
Socotra (1896–1897), Bent was seized with
malarial fever, and died in
London on 5 May 1897, a few days after his return. Mabel Bent, who had contributed by her skill as a photographer and in other ways to the success of her husband's journeys, published in 1900
Southern Arabia, Soudan and Sakotra, which she recorded the results of their last expedition into those regions. ==Collections==