Trajan
Veteran
In the 19th century, European visitors to this abandoned medieval city refused to believe that indigenous Africans could have built such an extensive network of monuments. Such ignorance was disastrous for the remains of Great Zimbabwe.
In the early 16th century, rumours of a mysterious fortress with gargantuan walls, abandoned in the African jungle, spread around Europe. Surrounded by goldmines and sitting on a 900-metre-high hill, the city was thought to represent the summit of a unique African civilisation which had traded with distant Asian countries, including China and Persia.
A Portuguese sea captain, Viçente Pegado, was one of the first foreigners to encounter the site, in 1531. He wrote: “Among the goldmines of the inland plains between the Limpopo and Zambezi rivers [is a] fortress built of stones of marvellous size, and there appears to be no mortar joining them … This edifice is almost surrounded by hills, upon which are others resembling it in the fashioning of stone and the absence of mortar, and one of them is a tower more than 12 fathoms high.”
Great Zimbabwe was constructed between the 11th and 14th centuries over 722 hectares in the southern part of modern Zimbabwe. The whole site is weaved with a centuries-old drainage system which still works, funnelling water outside the houses and enclosures down into the valleys.
At its peak, an estimated 18,000 people lived in the capital of the Kingdom ofZimbabwe. Only 200 to 300 members of the elite classes are thought to have actually stayed inside its massive stone buildings, watched over at night by guards standing on the walls, while the majority lived some distance away.
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It was said that Great Zimbabwe was an African replica of theQueen of Sheba’s palace in Jerusalem. The idea was promoted by the German explorer Karl Mauch, who visited in 1871 and refused to believe that indigenous Africans could have built such an extensive network of monuments.
“I do not think that I am far wrong if I suppose that the ruin on the hill is a copy of Solomon’s Temple on Mount Moriah,”Mauch declared, “and the building in the plain a copy of the palace where the Queen of Sheba lived during her visit to Solomon.” He further stated that only a “civilised nation must once have lived there” – his racist implication unmistakeable.
Other European writers, also believing that Africans did not have the capacity to build anything of the significance of Great Zimbabwe, suggested it was built by Portuguese travellers, Arabs, Chinese or Persians. Another theory was that the site could have been the work of a southern African tribe of ancient Jewish heritage, the Lemba.
Adding to the mystery, the indigenous people living around the site were said to believe it was the work of demons, or aliens, on account of its impressive size and the perfection of its workmanship.
In 1905, however, the British archaeologist David Randall-MacIver concluded the ruins were medieval, and built by one or more of the local African Bantu peoples. His findings were confirmed by another British archaeologist, Gertrude Caton-Thompson, in 1929, and this remains the consensus today. In the language of the builders’ descendents, the Shona people who live in the region today, Zimbabwe means “big stone houses” or “venerated houses”.
The city’s buildings were made of impressive granite walls, embellished with turrets, towers, decorations and elegantly sculpted stairways. The most notable of the buildings, an enclosure 250 metres in circumference and 9.75 metres high, was crafted with 900,000 pieces of professionally sliced granite blocks, laid on each other without any binders. Its perimeter columns were decorated with soapstone sculptures of a silhouetted bird with human lips and five-fingered feet.
More than 4,000 gold and 500 copper mines were found around the site, and it was suggested that for three centuries, 40% of the world’s total mined gold came from the area, compounding to an estimated 600 tonnes of gold.
Thousands of necklaces made of gold lamé have been discovered among the ruins.
Great Zimbabwe’s prosperity came from its position on the route between the gold producing regions of the area and ports on the Mozambique coast; over time it became the heart of an extensive commercial and trading network. The main trading items ranged from gold, ivory, copper and tin to cattle and cowrie shells. Imported items discovered in the ruins have included glassware from Syria, a minted coin from Kilwa, and assorted Persian and Chinese ceramics.
The period of prosperity at Great Zimbabwe continued until the mid-15th century, when the city’s trading activity started to decline and its people began to migrate elsewhere. The most common hypothesis to explain the abandonment of the site is a shortage of food, pastures and natural resources in Great Zimbabwe and its immediate surroundings. But the precise cause remains unclear.
In the early 16th century, rumours of a mysterious fortress with gargantuan walls, abandoned in the African jungle, spread around Europe. Surrounded by goldmines and sitting on a 900-metre-high hill, the city was thought to represent the summit of a unique African civilisation which had traded with distant Asian countries, including China and Persia.
A Portuguese sea captain, Viçente Pegado, was one of the first foreigners to encounter the site, in 1531. He wrote: “Among the goldmines of the inland plains between the Limpopo and Zambezi rivers [is a] fortress built of stones of marvellous size, and there appears to be no mortar joining them … This edifice is almost surrounded by hills, upon which are others resembling it in the fashioning of stone and the absence of mortar, and one of them is a tower more than 12 fathoms high.”
Great Zimbabwe was constructed between the 11th and 14th centuries over 722 hectares in the southern part of modern Zimbabwe. The whole site is weaved with a centuries-old drainage system which still works, funnelling water outside the houses and enclosures down into the valleys.
At its peak, an estimated 18,000 people lived in the capital of the Kingdom ofZimbabwe. Only 200 to 300 members of the elite classes are thought to have actually stayed inside its massive stone buildings, watched over at night by guards standing on the walls, while the majority lived some distance away.
....
It was said that Great Zimbabwe was an African replica of theQueen of Sheba’s palace in Jerusalem. The idea was promoted by the German explorer Karl Mauch, who visited in 1871 and refused to believe that indigenous Africans could have built such an extensive network of monuments.
“I do not think that I am far wrong if I suppose that the ruin on the hill is a copy of Solomon’s Temple on Mount Moriah,”Mauch declared, “and the building in the plain a copy of the palace where the Queen of Sheba lived during her visit to Solomon.” He further stated that only a “civilised nation must once have lived there” – his racist implication unmistakeable.
Other European writers, also believing that Africans did not have the capacity to build anything of the significance of Great Zimbabwe, suggested it was built by Portuguese travellers, Arabs, Chinese or Persians. Another theory was that the site could have been the work of a southern African tribe of ancient Jewish heritage, the Lemba.
Adding to the mystery, the indigenous people living around the site were said to believe it was the work of demons, or aliens, on account of its impressive size and the perfection of its workmanship.
In 1905, however, the British archaeologist David Randall-MacIver concluded the ruins were medieval, and built by one or more of the local African Bantu peoples. His findings were confirmed by another British archaeologist, Gertrude Caton-Thompson, in 1929, and this remains the consensus today. In the language of the builders’ descendents, the Shona people who live in the region today, Zimbabwe means “big stone houses” or “venerated houses”.
The city’s buildings were made of impressive granite walls, embellished with turrets, towers, decorations and elegantly sculpted stairways. The most notable of the buildings, an enclosure 250 metres in circumference and 9.75 metres high, was crafted with 900,000 pieces of professionally sliced granite blocks, laid on each other without any binders. Its perimeter columns were decorated with soapstone sculptures of a silhouetted bird with human lips and five-fingered feet.
More than 4,000 gold and 500 copper mines were found around the site, and it was suggested that for three centuries, 40% of the world’s total mined gold came from the area, compounding to an estimated 600 tonnes of gold.
Thousands of necklaces made of gold lamé have been discovered among the ruins.Great Zimbabwe’s prosperity came from its position on the route between the gold producing regions of the area and ports on the Mozambique coast; over time it became the heart of an extensive commercial and trading network. The main trading items ranged from gold, ivory, copper and tin to cattle and cowrie shells. Imported items discovered in the ruins have included glassware from Syria, a minted coin from Kilwa, and assorted Persian and Chinese ceramics.
The period of prosperity at Great Zimbabwe continued until the mid-15th century, when the city’s trading activity started to decline and its people began to migrate elsewhere. The most common hypothesis to explain the abandonment of the site is a shortage of food, pastures and natural resources in Great Zimbabwe and its immediate surroundings. But the precise cause remains unclear.
