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Great Zimbabwe
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How it came to be
Great Zimbabwe stands in the hills near Masvingo in south-eastern Zimbabwe. People settled there from around 1000 AD; ancestors of the Shona began building in stone in the 11th century, and by the 13th century it was the capital of the Kingdom of Great Zimbabwe. Stone construction continued into the 15th century.
Its wealth came from controlling trade routes from the goldfields of the plateau to the Swahili coast, where gold and ivory passed through ports such as Sofala into Indian Ocean trade. The ruins form three groups: the Hill Complex, the oldest, the Valley Complex and the Great Enclosure, whose walls reach 11 m high and run about 250 m. Eight soapstone Zimbabwe Birds were recovered from the site.
European investigation began in 1871, and antiquarians looted the ruins between the 1890s and 1920s while colonial writers denied that Africans had built them. Excavations by David Randall-MacIver in 1905–06 and Gertrude Caton Thompson in 1929 pointed to African builders, and archaeologists have agreed on this since the 1950s. In 1980 the newly independent country took its name from the site and put the bird on its flag; UNESCO listed it in 1986.
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