Remains of the Great Enclosure: the most popular explanation for Great Zimbabwe’s abandonment is a shortage of food, pastures and natural resources. Believed to have been the spiritual and religious centre of the city, its ruins extend some 100 metres by 45 metres. The oldest, the Hill Complex, was occupied from the ninth to the 13th centuries. The ruins are divided into three main architectural zones: the Hill Complex, the Great Enclosure and the Valley Complex. In the words of the Zimbabwean archaeologist and art historian Peter Garlake, the site displays “an architecture that was unparalleled elsewhere in Africa or beyond”. Great Zimbabwe is a fusion of manmade and natural beauty a complex of 12 groups of buildings spread over 80 stunning hectares of the Mutirikwi valley. 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. 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. Imported items discovered in the ruins have included glassware from Syria, a minted coin from Kilwa, and assorted Persian and Chinese ceramics. The main trading items ranged from gold, ivory, copper and tin to cattle and cowrie shells. 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. Thousands of necklaces made of gold lamé have been discovered among the ruins. 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. The function of the Great Enclosure’s conical tower has been the subject of much speculation. Its perimeter columns were decorated with soapstone sculptures of a silhouetted bird with human lips and five-fingered feet. 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. The city’s buildings were made of impressive granite walls, embellished with turrets, towers, decorations and elegantly sculpted stairways. In the language of the builders’ descendents, the Shona people who live in the region today, Zimbabwe means “big stone houses” or “venerated houses”. His findings were confirmed by another British archaeologist, Gertrude Caton-Thompson, in 1929, and this remains the consensus today. 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. Another theory was that the site could have been the work of a southern African tribe of ancient Jewish heritage, the Lemba.Īdding 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. 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. “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. 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. It was said that Great Zimbabwe was an African replica of the Queen of Sheba’s palace in Jerusalem.

Today, the ruins of Great Zimbabwe are a shell of the abandoned city that Captain Pegado came across – due in no small part to the frenzied plundering of the site at the turn of the 20th century by European treasure-hunters, in search of artefacts that were eventually sent to museums throughout Europe, America and South Africa.

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