Ikigai Daily
Menu
WonderAfrican urban archaeology fact

Great Zimbabwe, the stone city built by ancestors of the Shona people between the 11th and 15th centuries, has huge granite walls laid without mortar. It was the capital of a kingdom that traded gold towards the Indian Ocean coast.

Masvingo, Zimbabwe, 11th–15th centuries

ArchitectureArchaeologyTradeHistory

The story behind the card

The ruins spread over several square kilometres in the south-east of today's Zimbabwe, and at its height the city was probably home to up to 10,000 people. Its best-known structure, the Great Enclosure, has walls up to 11 metres high, some topped with chevrons, a zigzag pattern of set stones. Excavations found Chinese pottery, glass beads, coins from Arabia and a coin minted at Kilwa on the Swahili coast, signs of the city's place in Indian Ocean trade. Colonial writers claimed Africans could not have built it. David Randall-MacIver in 1905 and Gertrude Caton-Thompson in 1929 showed it was the work of the Shona's ancestors, yet Rhodesia's government kept promoting other theories until independence in 1980. Dzimbabwe means houses of stone in Shona, and the country took its name from the city.

Türkçe oku
Büyük Zimbabve, Şona halkının atalarının 11. ile 15. yüzyıllar arasında kurduğu bir taş kenttir; dev granit duvarları harç kullanılmadan örülmüştür. Kent, Hint Okyanusu kıyısına altın gönderen bir krallığın başkentiydi.
Masvingo, Zimbabve, 11.–15. yüzyıl

Kalıntılar bugünkü Zimbabve'nin güneydoğusunda birkaç kilometrekarelik bir alana yayılır; kent en parlak döneminde muhtemelen 10.000 kadar kişiye ev sahipliği yapıyordu. En tanınmış yapısı olan Büyük Çevre'nin (Great Enclosure) duvarları 11 metreye kadar yükselir; bazılarının üstünde taşların zikzak biçiminde dizildiği şevron desenleri vardır. Kazılarda Çin çanak çömleği, cam boncuklar, Arabistan sikkeleri ve Svahili kıyısındaki Kilwa'da basılmış bir sikke bulundu; bunlar kentin Hint Okyanusu ticaretindeki yerini gösterir. Sömürgeci yazarlar kenti Afrikalıların yapmış olamayacağını ileri sürdü. David Randall-MacIver 1905'te, Gertrude Caton-Thompson 1929'da kentin Şonaların atalarının eseri olduğunu gösterdi; yine de Rodezya hükûmeti 1980'deki bağımsızlığa kadar başka kuramları desteklemeyi sürdürdü. Şonaca dzimbabwe “taş evler” demektir; ülke de adını bu kentten aldı.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Great Zimbabwe
Get the mobile appAbout our cards

Related cards

These cards share a subject or reading mode with the card above.

WonderTrade

The Incense Route carried frankincense and myrrh, fragrant tree resins, from southern Arabia to Mediterranean markets for centuries, through a chain of caravan towns, wells, forts and water systems across the desert.

Frankincense and myrrh come from trees that grow in the dry lands of southern Arabia and the Horn of Africa. They were burned in temples and homes, and used in medicine, perfume and embalming. Pliny the Elder, writing his Natural History around AD 77, says the road from Thomna in southern Arabia to Gaza on the Mediterranean was divided into 65 camel stages, and that by the coast each camel-load had cost 688 denarii in water, fodder, lodging, tolls and payments to priests, guards and officials. Cities that controlled parts of the route grew rich, among them Shabwa in Yemen and the Nabataean capital Petra in today's Jordan, whose cisterns and dams stored scarce rain for the caravans.

Incense RouteRead card
WonderTrade

Kilwa Kisiwani, an island off the coast of Tanzania, was one of the richest Swahili trading cities from the 13th to the 15th century. It controlled the gold trade of the southern coast and built its mosques and palaces of coral stone.

The Swahili were Muslim African trading communities of the East African coast. Kilwa grew rich when its sultans took control of the gold trade at Sofala, in today's Mozambique, where gold from the Zimbabwe plateau reached the sea. Merchants brought cloth, glass beads and porcelain from Arabia, Persia, India and China. The Great Mosque, one of the oldest standing on the coast, and the vast Husuni Kubwa palace were built of coral stone. For some 500 years Kilwa minted its own coins, mostly copper, which have been found as far inland as Great Zimbabwe. A Portuguese fleet sacked the city in 1505 and its trade declined. UNESCO listed the ruins in 1981; they were on its danger list from 2004 until conservation work allowed their removal in 2014.

Kilwa KisiwaniRead card
WonderArchitecture

Angkor, capital of the Khmer Empire in today's Cambodia from the ninth to the fifteenth century, was ringed by giant reservoirs, moats and canals that stored monsoon rain and moved water across an urban area of about 1,000 square kilometres.

The largest reservoirs, called barays, are vast rectangles banked with earth: the West Baray, built in the eleventh century, measures about eight kilometres by two and still holds water. Moats such as the one around Angkor Wat framed temples modelled on the sacred mountain and surrounding oceans of Hindu and Buddhist cosmology. Radar and aerial surveys published in 2007, and airborne laser scanning (lidar) that saw through the forest in 2012, revealed roads, canals and house mounds across at least 1,000 square kilometres, the largest known pre-industrial settlement. Researchers still debate how much the barays watered rice fields. Tree rings show long droughts broken by intense monsoons in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, which damaged the network and probably contributed to Angkor's decline.

Angkor hydraulic systemRead card
WonderHistory

The Uluburun ship sank off Kaş in southern Turkey around 1300 BC, carrying copper, tin, glass and ivory gathered from across the Bronze Age Mediterranean.

In 1982 Mehmed Çakır, a sponge diver from Yalıkavak near Bodrum, reported strange metal 'biscuits with ears' on the seabed; they were copper ingots. The Institute of Nautical Archaeology, led by George Bass and then Cemal Pulak, excavated the wreck in 11 seasons from 1984 to 1994, with more than 22,000 dives. The cargo held about ten tonnes of copper and one tonne of tin, the right mix for bronze, along with glass ingots, elephant and hippopotamus ivory, ostrich eggshells, Baltic amber and a gold scarab bearing the name of Egypt's Queen Nefertiti. Its goods came from Cyprus, the Syrian and Canaanite coast, Egypt, the Aegean and beyond, about a century before that connected world collapsed. The finds are shown at the Bodrum Museum of Underwater Archaeology.

Ikigai DailyRead card
WonderArchitecture

Petra, the rock-carved city of the Nabataeans in southern Jordan, could thrive in the desert thanks to its water engineering: channels, dams, cisterns and reservoirs that caught springs, rain and flash floods.

The Nabataeans were an Arab people who grew rich from the caravan trade in incense and spices, and Petra was their capital. The city was at its height around the 1st century AD, until Rome annexed the kingdom in AD 106. In a region that gets only about 15 centimetres of rain a year, its channels, dams, tunnels and cisterns stored water through the dry months; the American Society of Civil Engineers estimates the system supplied 30,000 to 40,000 people. As trade routes shifted and earthquakes struck, the city declined. The Swiss explorer Johann Ludwig Burckhardt, travelling in disguise, brought it to European attention in 1812. UNESCO listed it in 1985.

PetraRead card
Next card in the archiveThe Shushtar Historical Hydraulic System in Iran is a network of dams, bridges, tunnels, canals and mills on the Karun River, much of it built in the 3rd century CE. It watered farmland, supplied the town and drove water mills.Read next →