off the throne, which remained in Egypt until Sennacherib conquered that country. After Sennacherib's fall Hezekiah gained possession of it, but when Josiah was slain by Pharaoh Necho, the latter took it away. However, according to rabbinical accounts, Necho did not know how the mechanism worked and so accidentally struck himself with one of the lions causing him to become lame; Nebuchadnezzar, into whose possession the throne subsequently came, shared a similar fate. The throne then passed to the Persians, whose king Darius was the first to sit successfully on Solomon's throne after his death; subsequently the throne came into the possession of the Greeks and Ahasuerus. Freemasonry Masonic rituals refer to King Solomon and the building of his Temple. Masonic Temples, where a Masonic Lodge meets, are an allegorical reference to King Solomon's Temple. Places The Solomon Islands, a country and archipelago in Melanesia, were named for King Solomon by the Spanish navigator Álvaro de Mendaña, who became the first European to see the islands in 1568. In literature, art, and music Literature In H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines (1885) the protagonists discover multiple settings said to have belonged to or to have been built at the request of King Solomon, such as 'Solomon's Great Road' and the mines themselves. Also, the two mountains which form the entrance to Kukuana Land (where the mines are located in the novel) are referred to as 'Sheba's Breasts' which could be an allusion to the Queen of Sheba, with whom King Solomon had a relationship, or Solomon's mother, who was named Bathsheba. When in the mines, the characters also contemplate what must have occurred to prevent King Solomon from returning to retrieve the massive amounts of diamonds, gold and ivory tusks that were found buried in his great 'Treasure Chamber'. In The Divine Comedy, the spirit of Solomon appears to Dante Alighieri in the Heaven of the Sun with other exemplars of inspired wisdom. In Friedrich Dürrenmatt's Die Physiker, the physicist Möbius claims that Solomon appears to him and dictates the "theory of all possible inventions" (based on Unified Field Theory). Solomon appears in Kipling's Just So Stories. In Neal Stephenson's three-volume The Baroque Cycle, 17th-century alchemists like Isaac Newton believe that Solomon created a kind of "heavier" gold with mystical properties and that it was cached in the Solomon Islands where it was accidentally discovered by the crew of a