User:Prioryman/Great Zimbabwe

Great Zimbabwe is a ruined city in the southeastern hills of Zimbabwe near Lake Mutirikwe and the town of Masvingo, close to the Chimanimani Mountains and the Chipinge District. It was the capital of the Kingdom of Zimbabwe during the country's Late Iron Age. Construction of the monument by ancestors of the Shona people began in the 11th century and continued until the 14th century. The city spanned an area of 722 ha and, at its peak, may have housed up to 18,000 people. After about 400 years of habitation, the city was abandoned and fell into ruin, though the reasons for its decline and fall are not known for certain.

Great Zimbabwe served as a royal palace for the Zimbabwean monarchy and would have been used as the seat of political power. One of its most prominent features were the walls, some of which were over five metres high and which were constructed without mortar. Although its size is exceptional, it was one of over 200 such sites with monumental, mortarless walls in southern Africa. Others include Bumbusi in Zimbabwe and Manyikeni in Mozambique, though Great Zimbabwe is the largest. The word "Great" distinguishes the site from the other small ruins, now known as 'zimbabwes', spread across the Zimbabwe Highveld. It is recognised as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO.

The earliest known written mention of the ruins was in 1531 by Vicente Pegado, captain of the Portuguese garrison of Sofala, who heard about it from traders and recorded it as Symbaoe. The first visits by Europeans were in the late 19th century, with investigations of the site starting in 1871. Many European archaeologists and politicians refused to accept that the ruins had been built by Africans, attributing it instead to the Phoenicians, Egyptians and Greeks, among others. Although it was demonstrated as early as 1906 that Great Zimbabwe had been constructed by local people, until as late as 1980 the white-supremacist government of Rhodesia put pressure on archaeologists to deny its construction by black people. The site has since been adopted as a national monument by the Zimbabwean government, and the modern independent state was named for it.

Name
Zimbabwe is the Shona name of the ruins, first recorded in 1531 by Vicente Pegado, Captain of the Portuguese Garrison of Sofala. He wrote that "the natives of the country call these edifices Symbaoe, which according to their language signifies court". The name contains dzimba, the Shona term for "houses". There are two theories for the etymology of the name. The first proposes that the word is derived from Dzimba-dza-mabwe, translated from the Karanga dialect of Shona as "large houses of stone" (dzimba = plural of imba, "house"; mabwe = plural of bwe, "stone"). A second suggests that Zimbabwe is a contracted form of dzimba-hwe, which means "venerated houses" in the Zezuru dialect of Shona, as usually applied to the houses or graves of chiefs.

Description
The remains of Great Zimbabwe consist of a variety of ruined stone enclosures built between the 11th and 15th centuries. They are clustered into three distinct architectural groups, constructed at differing times and exhibiting an evolving pattern of wall design, set in and above a valley some 25 km from the modern town of Masvingo. The oldest are the Hilltop Enclosures, set on a narrow ridge of granite on the north side of the valley. Below it is a series of Valley Enclosures of later date. Nearby, on a low granite shelf across the valley, is the Great Enclosure, the largest and one of the last structures built at Great Zimbabwe. The population would have lived in thatched huts constructed on round platforms of clay and granite gravel (dhaka), some of them – occupied by the elite – standing within the stone enclosures. Little now remains of these huts other than traces of their platforms.

While the site of Great Zimbabwe was probably occupied as early as the first centuries AD, nothing now remains from this period. The first permanent structures were built in the 11th century and the city grew to eventually cover an area of 1800 acre. Great Zimbabwe's ruins are some of the oldest and largest structures located in Southern Africa, and are the second oldest after nearby Mapungubwe in South Africa. Its walls are constructed from blocks of granite obtained from nearby hills where erosion causes them to exfoliate naturally in slabs that can easily be laid in courses. No mortar was used and there were no foundations, but the builders ensured stability by building each course slightly set back from the one below it, so that the walls tapered as they rose. Four distinct styles of wall-building have been identified, reflecting evolutions in the techniques used by the city's builders.

Hilltop Enclosures
The Hilltop Enclosures cover an area of about 100 by 45 metres (330 by 150 feet) at the top of the ridge, 80 m high, at the north end of the settlement. They comprise a number of stone enclosures linked by narrow walled alleys and approached by at least three paths up the ridge (to which a fourth has been added for modern visitors). The paths are flanked by stone walls which climb up the slope past terrace platforms. Inner and outer perimeter walls surround the ridge. It is thought that both nobles and commoners inhabited the terraces, the nobles living within the walls and the commoners without.

The top of the ridge is occupied by a series of enclosures of which the largest is the Western Enclosure, with perimeter walls 6.1 m high and nearly 5 m thick. It was evidently occupied for a very long time, as its floor consisted of a deep layer of superimposed hut foundations. As successive huts deteriorated with age, they were razed and their dhaka platforms were levelled off to provide foundations for new huts. The enclosure's purpose is not known but it may have had a ritual significance, as its main end wall is topped with a number of stone "turrets" which do not serve any obvious purpose. The smaller Eastern Enclosure incorporates towering granite boulders, each between 14 and 20 meters (... feet) high, and a series of artificial platforms. A number of stone pillars stood in the enclosure, each topped by one of the Zimbabwe Birds. Above it is a natural balcony that looks down into the enclosure and out across the surrounding countryside. Views differ about what this enclosure may have been used for; it may have been a ritual area, or alternatively it may have been the residence of the royal court or the chief shaman.

Great Enclosure
The most spectacular ruin at Great Zimbabwe, and the iconic symbol of the site, is the Great Enclosure – the largest single ancient structure in sub-Saharan Africa. It consists of a complex of structures surrounded by a wall 250 m in circumference, 11 m high and up to 6 m thick. Most of the buildings here were constructed up to 100 years before the perimeter wall, which was built in an anti-clockwise direction. The builders evidently got better as they went along, as the blocks at the start were poorly matched and crudely dressed, while those at the end were well matched and dressed, with a section of the terminating end decorated with a complex chevron pattern. There were three unfortified entrances

Settlement
The majority of scholars believe that Great Zimbabwe was built by members of the Gokomere culture, who were ancestors of the modern Shona in Zimbabwe. A few believe that the ancestors of the Lemba or Venda were responsible, or cooperated with the Gokomere in the construction.

The Great Zimbabwe area was settled by the fourth century of the common era. Between the fourth and the seventh centuries, communities of the Gokomere or Ziwa cultures farmed the valley, and mined and worked iron, but built no stone structures. These are the earliest Iron Age settlements in the area identified from archaeological diggings.

Construction and growth
The ruins that survive are built entirely of stone. Its most formidable edifice, commonly referred to as the Great Enclosure, has walls as high as 36 ft extending approximately 820 ft, making it the largest ancient structure south of the Sahara Desert. The city and its state, the Kingdom of Zimbabwe, appears to have flourished from 1200 to 1500, although a somewhat earlier date for its demise is implied by a description transmitted in the early 1500s to João de Barros. Its growth has been linked to the decline of Mapungubwe from around 1300, due to climatic change or the greater availability of gold in the hinterland of Great Zimbabwe. At its peak, Great Zimbabwe may have had as many as 18,000 inhabitants.

form three distinct architectural groups. They are known as the Hill Complex, the Valley Complex and the Great Enclosure. The Hill Complex is the oldest, and was occupied from the ninth to thirteenth centuries. The Great Enclosure was occupied from the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries and the Valley Complex from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries. Notable features of the Hill Complex include the Eastern Enclosure, in which it is thought the Zimbabwe Birds stood, a high balcony enclosure overlooking the Eastern Enclosure, and a huge boulder in a shape similar to that of the Zimbabwe Bird. The Great Enclosure is composed of an inner wall, encircling a series of structures and a younger outer wall. The Conical Tower, 18 ft in diameter and 30 ft high, was constructed between the two walls. The Valley Complex is divided into the Upper and Lower Valley Ruins, with different periods of occupation.

There are different archaeological interpretations of these groupings. It has been suggested that the complexes represent the work of successive kings: some of the new rulers founded a new residence. The focus of power moved from the Hill Complex in the twelfth century, to the Great Enclosure, the Upper Valley and finally the Lower Valley in the early sixteenth century. The alternative "structuralist" interpretation holds that the different complexes had different functions: the Hill Complex as a temple, the Valley complex was for the citizens, and the Great Enclosure was used by the king. Structures that were more elaborate were probably built for the kings, although it has been argued that the dating of finds in the complexes does not support this interpretation. Some researchers have presented an argument that the ruins may have housed an astronomical observatory, although the significance of the alignments upon which these claims are based is contested.

Notable artefacts
The most important artefacts recovered from the Monument are the eight Zimbabwe Birds. These were carved from a micaceous schist (soapstone) on the tops of monoliths the height of a person. Slots in a platform in the Eastern Enclosure of the Hill Complex appear designed to hold the monoliths with the Zimbabwe birds, but as they were not found in situ it cannot be determined which monolith and bird were where. Other artefacts include soapstone figurines, pottery, iron gongs, elaborately worked ivory, iron and copper wire, iron hoes, bronze spearheads, copper ingots and crucibles, and gold beads, bracelets, pendants and sheaths.

Trade
Archaeological evidence suggests that Great Zimbabwe became a centre for trading, with artefacts suggesting that the city formed part of a trade network linked to Kilwa and extending as far as China. Copper coins found at Kilwa Kisiwani appear to be of the same pure ore found on the Swahili coast. This international trade was mainly in gold and ivory; some estimates indicate that more than 20 million ounces of gold were extracted from the ground. That international commerce was in addition to the local agricultural trade, in which cattle were especially important. The large cattle herd that supplied the city moved seasonally and was managed by the court. Chinese pottery shards, coins from Arabia, glass beads and other non-local items have been excavated at Zimbabwe. Despite these strong international trade links, there is no evidence to suggest exchange of architectural concepts between Great Zimbabwe and centres such as Kilwa.

Decline
A variety of causes for the decline and ultimate abandonment of the site around 1450 have been suggested. Possible factors may have included a decline in trade compared to sites further north, political instability and famine and water shortages induced by climatic change. The Mutapa state arose in the fifteenth century from the northward expansion of the Great Zimbabwe tradition, having been founded by Nyatsimba Mutota from Great Zimbabwe after he was sent to find new sources of salt in the north; this supports the belief that Great Zimbabwe's decline was due to a shortage of resources. Great Zimbabwe also predates the Khami and Nyanga cultures.

From Portuguese traders to Karl Mauch
Great Zimbabwe had contacts with traders from the Swahili-speaking coastal regions as early as the 11th century but there are no surviving written records of the city until the early 16th century, after its fall. Portuguese traders heard about the remains of the ancient city and wrote accounts of a monumental settlement linked with gold production and long-distance trade. Two of those accounts mention an inscription above the entrance to Great Zimbabwe, written in characters not known to the Arab merchants who had seen it. The Portuguese do not have visited Great Zimbabwe themselves but instead heard about it second-hand from Swahili merchants and traders who had penetrated the interior of the Zimbabwe plateau.

The first detailed description of Great Zimbabwe was published between 1532 and 1613 in João de Barros' work Da Asia. He wrote: "Symbaoe ... is guarded by a 'nobleman', who has charge of ... some of Benomotapa's wives therein... When, and by whom, these edifices were raised ... there is no record, but they say they are the work of the devil, for .... it does not seem possible to them that they should be the work of man.

Diogo de Couto, writing in the early 17th century, described "great stone edifices" near trading outposts in Zimbabwe and attributed them to the Queen of Sheba, whom he claimed had "commanded to be built for herself which are called Simbaoe by the Kaffirs [Africans], and which are like strong bulwarks. These the Kaffirs always consider to be the means by which the Monomotapa obtained dominion over all Kafraria from the Cape das Correntes to the great river Zambezi, which divides the land of Mocaranga, as they call all the country of Monomotapa from Mosimba."

The Portuguese attributed the ruins to the legendary Christian king Prester John, whose realm they believed was located somewhere in Africa. Great Zimbabwe was thought to be the fabled city of Ophir and source of the gold that was traded from the interior to the coast and on up to the Middle East. Their beliefs about Prester John came to be conflated with the Biblical accounts of the Queen of Sheba and the sources of King Solomon's wealth. During the second half of the 16th century they mounted military expeditions into the Zimbabwean plateau in unsuccessful attempts to find Prester John's kingdom and the lost city. Their accounts of a mysterious empire in the terra incognita of the interior were absorbed into European thought and were retransmitted in the geographical accounts of Purchas and the poetry of Milton.

The ruins came to wider attention after Adam Render, a German-American hunter, prospector and trader in southern Africa, came across them during a hunting trip in 1867. In 1871 he showed the ruins to Karl Mauch, a German explorer and geographer of Africa, who made three visits to the ruins and described them in detail before they were subjected to looting and archaeological excavations by subsequent visitors. Like many other white explorers and settlers, Renders and Mauch believed that Great Zimbabwe "could never have been built by blacks" (as Renders put it). Mauch suggested that the ruins were built to replicate the palace of the Queen of Sheba in Jerusalem, and claimed a wooden lintel at the site must be Lebanese cedar, brought by Phoenicians.

Looting and destruction
Although Mauch was inclined towards conservation, those who followed in his footsteps in Cecil Rhodes' newly established Rhodesia were not. Rhodes himself visited the site in 1890 and told local chiefs that he had come to see "the ancient temple that once upon a time belonged to white men." He was keen to establish that the area was wealthy, both to justify his takeover of Mashonaland and to validate his search for treasure. He had made his money from diamond mining in South Africa but had missed the gold rush in Witwatersrand; as a consequence, he wanted Rhodesia to be a "second Rand".

Rhodes appointed J. Theodore Bent was appointed by Rhodes to excavate the ruins. He had no formal archaeological training, but had travelled widely in Greece and Asia Minor. His publications, which introduced the ruins to English readers, claimed that the ruins had been built either by the Phoenicians or the Arabs. Robert Swan, a colleague of Bent's, wrote to the Royal Geographical Society following a visit to several ruins in Rhodesia, claiming that the presence of gold, exotic woods and birds, which he took to be a match for the biblical account of the riches brought from Ophir by Solomon's emissaries.

Other theories on the origin of the ruins, among both white settlers and academics, had the common view that the original buildings were probably not made by sub-Saharan Africans. The Sheba legend, as promoted by Mauch, was so pervasive in the white settler community as to cause Bent to say: "The names of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba were on everybody's lips, and have become so distasteful to us that we never expect to hear them again without an involuntary shudder. " The myth of a non-African origin was firmly established in the popular mind by Rider Haggard's novel King Solomon's Mines, published in 1886.

An unfortunate side-effect of Mauch's claims of links with the fabulously wealthy King Solomon and Queen of Sheba was that treasure hunters were attracted to Great Zimbabwe with the goal of looting it for buried gold. The English traveller Thomas Baines published a "Map of the Gold Fields of South Eastern Africa" in 1877 showing Great Zimbabwe as the "supposed realm of the Queen of Sheba". The worst damage was caused by the site's first curator, Richard Nicklin Hall, a British journalist who was appointed by Rhodes in 1902. He wrote in his book The Ancient Ruins of Rhodesia (1902) that Great Zimbabwe had been built by "more civilised races" than the local peoples. Hall declared his intention to "remove the filth and decadence of Kaffir [African] occupation" and did so by indiscriminately removing a 2 m deep layer of soil over the site, destroying great quantities of archaeology and indiscriminately digging for gold and buried treasure. He was later accused of consciously setting out to eradicate archaeological evidence that would have demonstrated Great Zimbabwe's African provenance. After two years of wanton destruction, he was dismissed from his position.

First scientific site excavations: evidence of Shona and Gokomere culture origin


The first scientific archaeological excavations at the site were undertaken by David Randall-MacIver in 1905–1906. In Medieval Rhodesia, he wrote of finding objects that were of African origin and declared that the ruins were "unquestionably African in every detail." His conclusions were rejected by Cecil Rhodes, who banned further independent archaeological explorations of the site for the next quarter of a century. An all-female expedition led by Gertrude Caton-Thompson in 1929 demonstrated even more conclusively that the site was indeed created by Africans. She commented: "Examination of all the existing evidence, gathered from every quarter, still can produce not one single item that is not in accordance with the claim of Bantu [African] origin and medieval date." However, her findings were, like those of Randall-MacIver, politically inconvenient to the authorities and were rejected out of hand.

Since the 1950s, there has been consensus among archaeologists as to the African origins of Great Zimbabwe. Artefacts and radiocarbon dating indicate settlement in at least the fifth century, with continuous settlement of Great Zimbabwe between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries and the bulk of the finds from the fifteenth century. The radiocarbon evidence is a suite of 28 measurements, for which all but the first four, from the early days of the use of that method and now viewed as inaccurate, support the twelfth to fifteenth centuries chronology, In the 1970s, a beam that produced some of the anomalous dates in 1952 was reanalysed and gave a fourteenth-century date, as do dated finds such as Chinese, Persian and Syrian artefacts also support the twelfth and fifteenth century dates.

Gokomere
Archaeologists generally agree that the builders probably spoke one of the Shona languages, based upon evidence of pottery,  oral traditions and anthropology and were probably descended from the Gokomere culture. The Gokomere culture, an eastern Bantu subgroup, existed in the area from around 500 AD and is believed, from archaeological evidence, to constitute an early phase of the Great Zimbabwe culture. The Gokomere culture likely gave rise to both the modern Mashona people, an ethnic cluster comprising distinct sub-ethnic groups such as the local Karanga clan and the Rozwi culture, which originated as several Shona states. Gokomere-descended groups such as the Shona probably contributed the African component of the ancestry of the Lemba. Gokomere peoples were probably also related to certain nearby early Bantu groups like the Mapungubwe civilisation of neighbouring north-eastern South Africa, which is believed to have been an early Venda-speaking culture.

Lemba
The construction of Great Zimbabwe is also claimed by the Lemba. This ethnic group of Zimbabwe and South Africa has a tradition of ancient Jewish or South Arabian descent through their male line, which is supported by recent DNA studies, and female ancestry derived from the Karanga subgroup of the Shona. The Lemba claim was also reported by William Bolts (in 1777, to the Austrian Habsburg authorities), and by A.A. Anderson (writing about his travels north of the Limpopo River in the 19th century) — both of whom were told that the stone edifices and the gold mines were constructed by a people known as the BaLemba. Robert Gayre strongly supported the Lemba claim to Great Zimbabwe, proposing that the Shona artefacts found in the ruins were placed there only after the Bantu conquered the area and drove out or absorbed the previous inhabitants. However, Gayre's thesis is not supported by more recent scholars such as Garlake or Pikirayi.

Tudor Parfitt described Gayre's work as intended to "show that black people had never been capable of building in stone or of governing themselves", although he adds: "The fact that Gayre... got most of his facts wrong, does not in itself vitiate the claims of the Lemba to have been involved in the Great Zimbabwe civilisation." He says that Mufuka, among others, supports the hypothesis of construction by the Lemba or the Venda.

Recent research
More recent archaeological work has been carried out by Peter Garlake, who has produced the comprehensive descriptions of the site, David Beach  and Thomas Huffman, who have worked on the chronology and development of Great Zimbabwe and Gilbert Pwiti, who has published extensively on trade links. Today, the most recent consensus appears to attribute the construction of Great Zimbabwe to the Shona people. Some evidence also suggests an early influence from the probably Venda speaking peoples of Mapungubwe.

Damage to the ruins
Damage to the ruins has taken place throughout the last century. The removal of gold and artefacts in amateurist diggings by early colonial antiquarians caused widespread damage, notably diggings by Richard Nicklin Hall More extensive damage was caused by the mining of some of the ruins for gold. Reconstruction attempts since 1980 caused further damage, leading to alienation of the local communities from the site.

Political implications
Martin Hall writes that the history of Iron Age research south of the Zambezi shows the prevalent influence of colonial ideologies, both in the earliest speculations about the nature of the African past and in the adaptations that have been made to contemporary archaeological methodologies. Preben Kaarsholm writes that both colonial and black nationalist groups invoked Great Zimbabwe's past to support their vision of the country's present, through the media of popular history and of fiction. Examples of such popular history include Alexander Wilmot's Monomotapa (Rhodesia) and Ken Mufuka's Dzimbahwe: Life and Politics in the Golden Age; examples from fiction include Wilbur Smith's The Sunbird and Stanlake Samkange's Year of the Uprising.

When white colonialists like Cecil Rhodes first saw the ruins, they saw them as a sign of the great riches that the area would yield to its new masters. Gertrude Caton-Thompson recognised that the builders were indigenous Africans, but she characterised the site as the "product of an infantile mind" built by a subjugated society. Pikirayi and Kaarsholm suggest that this presentation of Great Zimbabwe was partly intended to encourage settlement and investment in the area. The official line in Rhodesia during the 1960s and 1970s was that the structures were built by non-blacks and the government censored archaeologists who disputed this. According to Paul Sinclair, interviewed for None But Ourselves:

This suppression of archaeology culminated in the departure from the country of prominent archaeologists of Great Zimbabwe, including Peter Garlake, Senior Inspector of Monuments for Rhodesia, and Roger Summers of the National Museum.



To black nationalist groups, Great Zimbabwe became an important symbol of achievement by black Africans: reclaiming its history was a major aim for those seeking majority rule. In 1980 the new internationally recognised independent country was renamed for the site, and its famous soapstone bird carvings was retained from the Rhodesian flag and Coat of Arms as a national symbol and depicted in the new Zimbabwean flag. After the creation of the modern state of Zimbabwe in 1980, Great Zimbabwe has been employed to mirror and legimitise shifting policies of the ruling regime. At first it was argued that it represented a form of pre-colonial "African socialism" and later the focus shifted to stressing the natural evolution of an accumulation of wealth and power within a ruling elite. An example of the former is Ken Mufuka's booklet, although the work has been heavily criticised.

Some of the carvings had been taken from Great Zimbabwe around 1890 and sold to Cecil Rhodes, who was intrigued and had copies made which he gave to friends. Most of the carvings have now been returned to Zimbabwe, but one remains at Rhodes' old home, Groote Schuur, in Cape Town.