Great Zimbabwe

The largest stone structure in sub-Saharan Africa

Great Zimbabwe — the source of the modern country's name — was the capital of a Shona kingdom that flourished between AD 1100 and 1450 in what is now southeastern Zimbabwe.

At its peak around 1350 the city housed about 18 000 people and controlled the gold trade from the goldfields of the Zimbabwe plateau to the Swahili coast ports of Sofala and Kilwa, and from there onward to India and China.

The Great Enclosure — an elliptical wall of dressed granite blocks laid without mortar, 250 metres in perimeter, 11 metres tall, 5 metres thick at the base — remains the largest stone structure in sub-Saharan Africa built before the colonial era.

Built without mortar, without metal tools

The Shona masons quarried granite from outcrops on the surrounding plateau using thermal expansion. Building fires on a granite sheet, then drenching the heated stone with water to crack the rock along controlled fractures.

The blocks were then shaped with iron chisels and laid in courses without mortar, each course slightly stepped back from the one below for stability. The walls have stood through six centuries of seasonal rainfall without significant repair. The decorative chevron pattern along the upper courses of the Great Enclosure is purely ornamental.

Gold, ivory, and Chinese porcelain

Trade goods recovered from Great Zimbabwe include Chinese celadon ceramics from the Ming dynasty, Persian glassware, Indian carnelian beads, and Arabic silver coinage from Kilwa.

The Shona were exporting gold (perhaps three to seven tonnes a year at the kingdom's peak), ivory, copper and animal skins through a long supply chain into the Indian Ocean trade network. The pre-colonial African economy at this date was integrated into the same Indian Ocean commercial system as medieval China, India, Persia and the Arab world — a fact systematically obscured by twentieth-century colonial historiography.

Denial in three colours

When Karl Mauch became the first European to visit the site in 1871, the prevailing colonial assumption was that Africans could not have built it.

Mauch attributed the construction to the biblical Queen of Sheba. Later writers proposed the Phoenicians, the Arabs, or some mysterious white "northern" civilisation. The Rhodesian government, after formal archaeological investigations confirmed an indigenous Shona origin, suppressed the findings.

British archaeologist Gertrude Caton-Thompson's definitive 1929 demonstration that the city was African in origin was politically inconvenient and was attacked for decades. The Zimbabwean state, since independence in 1980, has taken the city's name as its own — the silhouette of the soapstone Zimbabwe Bird excavated from the site appears on the modern Zimbabwean flag.