Big Zimbabwe, the fortress of monomotapa kings. Ruins of great zimbabwe

Zimbabwe One of the countries of South Africa. The country rose to prominence a few years ago when the President of Zimbabwe, the aged Robert Mugabe, began squeezing out the white population. Newspapers wrote about "black racism", pogroms and murders of white people and so on. many tourists

If I touch on the topic of places I would like to visit at least once, I always think of the ruins of Great Zimbabwe first of all. For me personally, even the most unfortunate photo is breathtaking =))) I dream of seeing it live one day...

“Behind this country,” wrote the Portuguese chronicler Eduardo Barbosa, who lived on the coast of Mozambique, in 1517, “lies the great kingdom of Benametapa, inhabited by pagans, whom the Moors call kaffirs. They are black and go naked to the waist.” Later, the Portuguese made bold attempts to reach this inland state and other countries known to them from the stories. So far they have had to content themselves with the gossip of the coastal dwellers.
Also, Europeans may have met those who came from more distant lands. These people often wore animal skins, but they wanted to buy cotton, camlot and silks, which were rich in the shops of Sofala. Some of them, the most noble, wore skins trimmed like tassels with the tails of fur-bearing animals, and were armed with “swords in wooden scabbards, richly decorated with gold and other metals, which they wear on the left, like us ...”
“They also have darts in their hands, and the rest carry bows and arrows of medium size,” continued the chronicler. “The iron tips are long and sharp. These are warlike people, and among them there are good merchants.
Coastal gossip mentioned several kingdoms located in the interior of the continent, but the state of Benametapa was considered the most powerful of them. Fifteen to twenty days' journey from the coast is Big city Zimbaohe, which has many houses made of wood and thatch. It is inhabited by pagans, and King Benametapa often stops there; this city is located six days' journey from Benametapa. The road there goes deep into the continent from Sofala to the Cape of Good Hope.
“The king usually stays in this city of Benametapi, in a huge building, and from this place merchants deliver gold from the center of the mainland to Sofala and exchange it with the Arabs without weighing for colored fabrics and beads, which are very much appreciated by them.”
Large stone ruins in the southeastern part of Zimbabwe (formerly Southern Rhodesia), which have become world famous ruins, located 400 kilometers in a straight line from the ancient port of Sofala. It is quite probable that "militant people and merchants", moving from the coast, reached them in twenty-six days. Barbosa, however, did not mention large stone ruins, but other Portuguese described them a few years later.

“In the center of this country,” writes Goish (born in 1501, when Barbosa first set sail on the Indian Ocean), “there is a fortress built of large heavy stones ... this is an interesting building, built with great ingenuity, according to stories, on the walls no traces of lime mortar are visible, which would have fastened these blocks ... in other places of the mentioned plain there are other fortresses built according to the same model, each of which is controlled by the royal governor. King Benametapa owns a huge fortune, and they serve him on their knees, trembling with reverence. De Barros, who made his notes at about the same time and no doubt used the same coastal gossip as a source of information, speaks of a wall "575 centimeters wide."

In fact, there is nothing to indicate that the Portuguese or other Europeans ever reached Greater Zimbabwe. If they did get there, then the records of this have either been lost or have not yet been published. In any case, they knew that there were several places called Zimbabwe. Speaking of inner fortresses, de Barros stresses that " locals they call all these buildings Zimbaoe, which in their language means "courtyard", for this can be called any place in which Benametapa can be located. They declare that, being royal property, all other dwellings belonging to the king bear the same name.
Today everything has become clearer. There are many ruins in South Africa and some of them have big size and a very interesting building.
Many square kilometers covered with terraces no less extended than those boasted by the "Azanians" in East Africa. Thousands of ancient mine workings have already been described - perhaps 60 or 70 thousand.
Most of the ruins were found in the south-central interior of the mainland, which includes the Republic of Zimbabwe, the southern border strip of the Republic of the Congo, the western border of Mozambique and the northern Transvaal in South Africa. In the course of more detailed studies of the boundaries of this area of ​​ancient buildings and mining may expand further. “The ruler of Benametapa,” Barbosa informed his readers in the sixteenth century, “owns a truly great country,” and there was no particular exaggeration in these words.
Not all ruins and ruins are the remnants of "truly great country". Perhaps, at one time or another, the king of Benametapa - Monomotapa directly or indirectly ruled for the most part present-day Mozambique and Zimbabwe. True or not, the diverse ruins of the "culture of Zimbabwe", scattered at a great distance from each other, are only a kind of "stone record" of the long and difficult path of social and political development. It refers to the history of the African civilization of the Iron Age and covers the centuries-old "building period".
Emerged during this long but successful period of African history in terms of technological development and social growth, the ruins of Greater Zimbabwe, as they exist today, date back more than a thousand years. Although simpler structures disappeared much earlier and could be created on the ruins of even more ancient dwellings made of wood, straw and clay. The earliest settlements were able to appear as early as the fifth or sixth century. But the latest of the ruins of Zimbabwe, which, including huge walls, rise above the head of a puzzled viewer against the blue sky, may have been built as early as 1700-1750. Thus, the walls of Great Zimbabwe and the "ruins of the houses" on which they rest can be considered evidence of a more or less long Iron Age, lasting at least 12 centuries.
The exact chronology of the construction of these structures, so majestic at the highest point of their development, is still not determined, and it may turn out never to be found out at all. There are several possible dates. Greater Zimbabwe itself, being a feudal capital that united several tribal unions and had a certain influence in southern lands, apparently reached its peak in the period from 1250 to 1750. At Mapungubwe, another important site further south on the banks of the Limpopo River in the present-day Transvaal, people settled for some time—quite a long time—before 900, and it did not empty until the eighteenth century, despite the succession several peoples lived. Large, finely finished buildings in the western part of the Republic of Zimbabwe - especially in Dhlo-Dhlo, Khami, Naletali - most likely belong to the seventeenth or even the eighteenth centuries. Most of the hillside terraces and stone-founded structures in eastern Zimbabwe (and Mozambique's western border) - Niekerk, Inyanga, Peñalonga - date from the same or even earlier times, although all of them could have been built on previous settlements, and some definitely rest on them.
Although the boundaries of this historical description are very blurred, it is exactly that. But it is possible to take a closer look at the problem and enrich this description with the details of real human experience.

Zimbabwe

Great Zimbabwe is a collection of stone ruins located a few kilometers from the main road linking Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe, with Johannesburg in South Africa. These ruins, along with other ruins, are famous and respected for the skillful combination of blocks and the complexity of the design, for the high surrounding walls and towers, round gates and obvious power, unity and order.

Two buildings stand out from the rest. The first, known as the "Acropolis", is a powerful defensive structure on top of a hill. The second, called the "Temple" or "Elliptical Building," rests below in the valley. They are made of local granite, skillfully chipped from wide "sheets" of rock exfoliated from the rocks. In general, the complex of structures located in the valley or towering on the stony mines above has a certain integrity and surprises with its expediency, which has nothing to oppose.
At first glance, the battlements seem to give the same impression they had on casual discoverers seventy and eighty years ago, the impression that the ancient fortresses of Mediterranean Europe would have given. A sense of strength and skill remains on closer inspection, but the exotic image disappears. The more you think about these buildings, the more they seem to be created by local craftsmen and craftsmen who worked without experiencing any external architectural influence that could help or direct their imagination in a certain direction. These buildings are distinguished by originality in everything, it seems that they owe nothing to the rest of the world.
It is interesting not only that the walls are end-to-end connected to each other without mortar. This was a hallmark of the Azani masonry, and similar examples can be seen further north in the walls of Jebel Uri in Darfur. It is striking that the fortress buildings seemed to have themselves grown from huge blocks, which are already excellent defensive fortifications, and the buildings from which the foundations remained seem to have been created in an attempt to build from stone what was previously built from clay and straw.

Anyway, then, as now, huge layers of flaked granite lay everywhere, and already there was a need for the construction of imposing buildings. It only took a little imagination to turn these blocks into good stone "bricks" or split them off even more by making fire on the rocks. In the Iron Age, from the first millennium BC. e., centralized power was increasing in the country - almost at the same time as in Western Sudan, and this inevitably necessitated the need to defend against rivals and demonstrate wealth and power. Having learned how to work iron and having experienced political ambitions, people faced the same phenomena as in the rest of the world.
Over time, simple masonry turned into arched gates, doors with wooden lintels, stepped tiered niches and alcoves, covered corridors, platforms that rise in slender silhouettes of monoliths, and other features characteristic of Zimbabwe. The fortress walls grew higher and higher until they reached grandeur and impregnability, noticeable even today: the “Elliptical structure” is ninety meters long and about seventy meters wide, and the surrounding walls reach nine meters high and six wide.
These walls protect the place where the ruler of a powerful state lived. They were covered with stucco, which was either copied from samples on the shore, familiar to merchants, travelers and sovereign envoys, or invented on the spot. The walls guarded the mysteries of those who smelted gold and other metals. Others nearby hid bird-like soapstone gods and house-temples of divine rulers, whose power also grew with the years. From above, people piled up clay and stone buildings, concentrated here and there and becoming more and more numerous with the development of crafts and trade. Their influence extended to those who went to the coast, and their strange stories reached maritime powers Europe, making scholars in libraries think that the throne of Prester John himself, the legendary ruler of inner Africa, has finally been found.

These stories were embellished, but if you think about it, not so much. Far from being Prester John of lost Christendom, Monomotapa was a religious figure by no means of a beggarly order. He was not the ruler of all inland Africa, but he was no doubt the head of a feudal state of various tribes, whose authority at the height of his reign extended to lands that were not much smaller than Mali, inherited by his contemporary Kanka Musa. His court did not shine with the splendor of the courts of the Holy Roman Empire or Plantagenet England, and his servants were illiterate. But in the eyes of the people of that time, at least in Africa and Europe, he looked rich and personable.
And, according to the records, the Europeans never got to him. From the outside world, no one came here, except for merchants who received special permission, and travelers from the coast - Africans and Arabs, who left no written traces behind them. Lifestyle internal civilization, its gods and customs, teachings, beliefs and social development revolved exclusively around their own axis. They achieved great development, but did not make a revolutionary break with tradition. They were not influenced by external cultures that could fertilize the local culture, bringing good results. But the true greatness of the accomplishments of these southern builders is best measured by the degree of isolation in which they lived.

King Solomon's Mines?

When Europeans first saw Zimbabwe, they did not believe that the ancestors of the Africans they knew, the "natives" whose land they were exploring and preparing to take, were capable of building these stone walls and massive buildings.
Prospectors, hunters, pioneers all perceived Zimbabwe and similar ruins, which were reported from time to time as strange marvels erected in an unknown but apparently distant past, in a country where people built only with clay and straw. Only Frederick Selous, the wisest of them, later claimed that Africans retained their art of stone building, even in a simplified form, as early as the late nineteenth century ...
But the rest agreed with Renders, the wandering hunter. He saw Zimbabwe in 1868 and had a low opinion of it. Or with Mauh, the German geologist who reached Zimbabwe in 1872 and announced on his return that he was clearly the work of the civilized people of antiquity - European-like pioneers in this forgotten land.
“This fortress on the hill,” said Mauch, “was without any doubt a copy of the temple of King Solomon on Mount Moriah, while the huge building in the valley - the “Elliptical building” - was also undoubtedly a copy of the palace where the Queen of Sheba stayed during stay in Jerusalem in the tenth century BC. e."
Little was added to this traveler's tales until, in 1890, a British column from Bechuanaland, encamped seventy miles from Great Zimbabwe, encountered the splendor of this gray giant, towering amidst the seclusion of rolling savannah. When confronted by the Mashon people—whom they considered downright savage—the pioneers, at least those who cared for more than their immediate goals, easily believed Mauch's version of Zimbabwe's origins. "Today," wrote one of them in 1891, when Imperial Britain had successfully conquered Mashonaland and Matabeleland (they would later become Southern Rhodesia), "in the land of Ophir, an Englishman is rediscovering the treasury of antiquity." After a few years, he continued the same theme in his notes: “It may be expected that the image of Queen Victoria will be minted on the gold with which King Solomon adorned his ivory throne and braided the cedar columns of his temple.” This optimistic point of view, even if it exaggerates the facts a little, has lived for a long time and exists to this day.
This has its own explanation. The Portuguese, borrowing the legend from the Arabs, connected the gold of Sofala with the treasures of Ophir, and this version became so popular in Europe that it gave Milton one of the kingdoms that the fallen angel shows Adam in " Paradise Lost". The pioneers of 1890 naturally hoped to find gold, and Ophir was most likely somewhere nearby. Moreover, they and those like them could not believe then - just as they cannot believe now - that these ruins were in any way connected with the local population, which they despised, considering them primitive and savage.

This attitude has been exacerbated during wars of conquest in Matabeleland and Mashonaland. “The principle of shooting Negroes without warning,” declared a correspondent of the Matabele Times, advocating the need to stop the policy of such shooting, “is reminiscent of the laws of Donnybrook Fair (trans. hubbub, bazaar) and is more entertainment than justified means. We have done this until now, burning kraals because they were local kraals, and firing at fleeing natives just because they were black.” It would have been too presumptuous to expect these pioneers to think that such a "rabble" or any of its neighbors could have built Zimbabwe, the most impressive monument to vanished splendor they had ever seen, and the legend of Ophir naturally became firmly established.
For archaeologists who came here later, this "Legend of Ophir" brought bitter disappointment. After all, if Mashonaland gave Solomon his gold, he would have to share it with everyone who would come and start looking. By 1900, Mashonaland and Matabeleland had about one hundred and forty thousand claims for gold mining, and more than half of them were in ancient mining sites. It turned out that most of the ancient evidence of gold mining was destroyed, but this is nothing compared to the damage that was caused to the ruins themselves.
An explorer named Posselt began looting the ruins as early as 1880. Unsuccessful in his search for gold, he discovered some of the large soapstone birds for which Zimbabwe later became famous, and noticed during the course of his excavations that his porters treated the ruins with awe, "sit down and salute them solemnly, clapping their hands."
The main gate of Zimbabwe, as Posselt discovered, was in a ruined state, part of the wall had collapsed. “We climbed the wall and walked along it to the conical tower. Everything inside was covered with thick bushes, big trees towered above the undergrowth, and from them hung many lianas - "monkey ropes", along which we descended and entered the ruins. I did not see any human remains or tools, and the hope of finding any treasure was not justified. A deep silence reigned over everything.
Others readily followed. In 1895, a prospector named Neal, along with two other Johannesburg contributors, the venerable Maurice Gifford and Jefferson Clarke, founded a business they called The Ancient Ruins Company Limited. They took out a concession for this project from the British South Africa Company to "investigate all the ancient ruins south of the Zambezi". The campaign began in 1900, apparently on the orders of Cecil Rhodes, and in 1902 the newly formed Southern Rhodesian Legislative Council issued a decree protecting the ancient ruins. “But the damage done,” comments the official Schofield, “was enormous, as everything except gold was handled very casually.”
In 1902, Neil claimed to have personally explored forty-three of the one hundred and forty ancient ruins in existence, others no doubt doing the same, or nearly the same. Despite the fact that in five years the company found no more than fifteen kilograms of gold - however, if you transfer the account to museum objects, the weight is significant - no one will ever know how many gold items were discovered by other researchers, melted down and disappeared forever, or what else was damage has been done. Only the treasures of Mapungubwe, found and carefully preserved by scientists in the Northern Transvaal some forty years later, can give an idea of ​​what these "explorers of Ophir" discovered and destroyed.
Against the backdrop of everything, archaeologists, who had much less information than now, could not explain the origin of the buildings themselves. Difficulties increased because it was known that the Matabele were foreign invaders in this country anyway. So there were two hypotheses: "Phoenician" and "medieval".
According to the first theory, Zimbabwe existed for "at least three thousand years": there were two main periods of construction, the early - Sabaean - from 2000 to 1000 BC. e. and the second, "Phoenician", - a little earlier than 1100 BC. e. This hypothesis spoke of the pioneers of the "land of Ophir", and according to it there was no doubt that the natives had never had a hand in this creation of civilization. It has always been assumed that one or another people of the ancient era influenced Zimbabwe at different times.
“To the greater glory of the distant overseas homeland,” wrote Mr. B.G. Payver, the latest of the fanciful supporters of this hypothesis, foreigners are creating a new state in Africa. He is referring to the white settler communities of British Central Africa who hoped to gain "dominion" status in the future. “While they build and dig and dream and die, isn't history using them to repeat itself? Did the distant homeland send its sons, who, like foreigners in Africa, both dug and built, and scattered under the onslaught of the invaders? Is this the way we should follow through the valley of time?”
Of course not, answers the second hypothesis: you do not notice the evidence that is under your nose. These ruins belong to the local African civilization. They were built by the direct ancestors of the African peoples that you rule, and this happened not so long ago - much later than Saxon England faced the invasion of the Vikings and the Normans.

The Verdict of Clear Evidence

The second theory - archaeologically and scientifically based - was first voiced by David Randall-McIver, an Egyptologist who studied the stone ruins of Southern Rhodesia in 1905. Based on surveys of seven sites in which neither he nor anyone else had discovered a single object "belonging to a period prior to the fourteenth or fifteenth century", he concluded that the ruins of Great Zimbabwe and others like them were African in their origin and date back to the Middle Ages or a little later.
In architecture, "domestic or military, there is no trace of the Oriental or European style of any period", while "the character of the structures that form an integral part of these stone ruins is undoubtedly African", and "the crafts and industries represented the objects found in the dwellings are typically African, except when the objects are imported goods from a well-known medieval period."
This verdict, made by the first qualified archaeologist who explored the ruins (moreover, he was the first to respect the cultural layers), was met with a fair amount of irritation and rejection by the supporters of the "Phoenician" hypothesis. Such disputes raged, and such explosive political and racist innuendos were carefully concealed that, a quarter of a century later, the British Association, which sent Rendall-Maciver to Africa, sent a second expedition there. It was entrusted to the capable hands of Dr. Gertrude Cayton-Thompson, whose report "The Culture of Zimbabwe" with the delicacy and clarity of a diamond, as well as with outstanding archaeological insight, confirmed what MacIver had previously said. This still classic work of the English school of archeology today remains, if not the final authority in judgments about Zimbabwe and its towers, then an indispensable guide for anyone who wants to understand this subject in detail.
“When analyzing all the existing objects collected at the sites,” Cayton-Thompson concludes, “still not a single object has been found that is not related in origin to the Bantu and does not date back to the Middle Ages.” A little further on, the researcher adds: "I certainly cannot accept the oft-repeated and compromising suggestion that Zimbabwe and similar buildings were built by local workers under the direction of a 'superior' alien race or an observer." No doubt there may have been external influences too: the conical tower may be the result of an imitation of the Arab minarets seen on the coast of the Indian Ocean, while the stucco along the surrounding walls may have its Muslim antecedents (as was the case in the ruins of the tenth century city of Karakkhoja in Chinese Turkestan). . But the builders were Africans, and the state to which they belonged was also African.

This version of the origin of Zimbabwe has withstood all serious objections since it was put forward by G. Cayton-Thompson.
In the light of recent evidence, it appears to be subject to revision on only two counts. Radiocarbon dating has shown that the earliest possible start date for construction is pre-European. medieval period, and the type of people who began their creative activity here - according to the finds of bones in Mapungubwe, which can also be used for research in Zimbabwe - could be different from the Bantu-speaking peoples who built the later buildings, whose direct descendants are so well known now. If indeed they differed in the same way as in Mapungubwa, then these differences manifested themselves in a more pronounced mixture of Hottentots and Negroids than that observed among the Bantu-speaking peoples of later times, and for this they were no less native to Africa ...
The extensive conclusions made by Cayton-Thompson more than half a century ago - as well as before her by Randall-Maciver and other scientists working in this field, after her, for example, by Summers - are based on various material evidence: on Chinese porcelain, amenable to dating, on beads from India and Indonesia, which are also dateable to some extent, and on other objects imported from other countries. In addition, the possible direction of the evolution of local stone construction was taken into account, which slowly moved from the concept of a hut made of clay and straw to imitation of it in stone, and from there to tall buildings Zimbabwe. This does not contradict what is known about the traditions and religion of the Bantu peoples. It is possible that they made good use of what little the Portuguese could learn from African and Arab "coastal" travelers.
“In the center of this country,” de Barros wrote, relying on rumors in 1552, “there is a square fortress, stone outside and inside, built of huge blocks, and it is not visible that they are connected to each other by mortar. The wall has a width of 575 centimeters and is not very high in relation to the width. An inscription was made above the door of this building, which some Mauritanian merchants, pundits who came there, could neither read nor say what its approximate content was. The fortress is surrounded on almost all sides by hills, on each of which there is also a fortress, similar to the first with masonry and the absence of mortar, and one of these buildings is a tower of more than twenty-two meters in height.
Perhaps the fanciful description is full of errors, but these are lines dedicated specifically to Zimbabwe, which has survived to this day, although its walls were almost certainly rebuilt at a later time. The square shape of the fortress is certainly an exaggeration: there is no evidence that anything like it ever existed in Rhodesia, while the inscription mentioned here may have been nothing more than a decoration - a stucco frieze that crowned the newer walls ...
It is worth noting that this evidence is much more serious than any already found in the interior of Kenya, Tanzania or Uganda, and this is because it includes evidence of coastal trade. This kind of activity, during which Chinese porcelain and other goods from the Indian Ocean countries were supplied to South Africa, does not seem to have moved further north. If he still managed to do this, traces of trade have yet to be found there. But here, in the south, the evidence is more serious, just as the buildings of this southern Iron Age are more impressive, more developed with technical side and testify to greater social unity than the stone ruins of East Africa.
Between the developed trade and these vast ruins there is more than just a casual connection. "Trade relations with India," notes Cayton-Thompson, "were certainly strong, and I believe that trade was one of the main stimuli that led to the development of the local culture of Zimbabwe." The warriors and merchants from the hinterland, as Barbosa called them, must have achieved power in their Iron Age, not only because they knew how to use iron, but also because they had many trade links with the outside world. Thus, they prospered and developed under the influence of the same stimulus that gave the coast ocean trade or the old Sudan - trade in the Sahara.
One may wonder why all this happened here, in the southern regions of Central Africa, and not in the north, located geographically closer to India and the Arabian Peninsula. The answer will be complete when archaeologists and historians properly study this problem. But most likely, it will be based on one big difference between the two regions: copper and gold were abundant in the south and almost absent in the north. And as early records confirm again and again, these metals were exactly what the first foreign traders in Africa appreciated. In search of them, they were almost always forced to move far into the interior of the continent. Thus, the newcomers exerted an influence on the more southern regions that stimulated growth and development that was absent or much less pronounced in the north. This Iron Age civilization of South Africa was primarily a mining civilization, and of course the direction of its development was closely related to the fate of coastal trade.
The question of how carefully the numerous mountain mines of this ancient land were controlled by the builders and rulers of fortresses, palaces and stone villages remains open. The relationship between mines and buildings is the central unsolved mystery of the Rhodesian Iron Age and may hold the key to a detailed chronology of the period from the sixth to the sixteenth century. There are many difficulties here. In 1929, Wagner showed that the boundaries of ancient mining—for gold, copper, tin, or iron—are much more extensive than the known boundaries of ancient ruins, and it appears that Great Zimbabwe itself was not associated with mining, although there much evidence of metal smelting has been found.
Despite all that, the old mines, stretching by the thousands across the southern hinterland from the border of the former Belgian Congo (modern Katanga copper belt) to Natal (in South Africa) and Bechuanaland (Botswana), played a decisive role in the development and prosperity of Zimbabwean culture. The roar of its iron picks and the heat of its coal-fired ovens were as important a backdrop to medieval Rhodesia as the railroads were to Europe the century before last. By the eighteenth century, if not much earlier, copper strips and H-shaped blanks were the recognized local currency, these tribes and peoples rotated within the boundaries of their time and space, already living in the age of metals.
Who were they? An exact chronology has not yet been given to researchers, but there is agreement among reputable scientists not only about the sequence of events, but also about what type of peoples were included in them.

Medieval Rhodesia

According to Caton-Thompson, the foundations of Zimbabwe "belong to the period between the ninth and thirteenth centuries, and perhaps a little later, when ... as the presence of porcelain shows, these places were literally teeming with life." But the first building, in her opinion, is a century or two older than the earliest date. The beginnings of Zimbabwean culture thus date from the same time that El-Masudi, reporting on the coastal states of the Zinj, described "the country of Sofalu, where gold and other wonders are found in abundance."

A series of radiocarbon tests confirmed the truth of this statement and supplemented it with some new facts. Controls carried out in 1952 in Chicago and repeated in 1954 in London used two pieces of drainage wood found at the base of one of the walls of the Elliptical Building. During the experiments, it turned out that these fragments belong to the time between 591 (plus or minus one hundred and twenty years) and 702 AD. e. (plus or minus ninety-two years). This dating is not as accurate and reliable as it might seem. Partly because the time frame is dauntingly wide, from the fifth century to the end of the eighth, and partly because African sandalwood, known for its durability, was used in the tests. Builders could use it much later than the life of the tree or use it in the construction of stone walls after someone else used it to build other buildings that have not survived ...
Thus, excavations in Zimbabwe continued. In 1958, Summers and Robinson examined the foundations of the "Acropolis" and the "Elliptical Building", hoping to find out if possible whether the "ash layer" or "cultural layer" known to lie beneath these structures belonged to another settlement. Caton-Thompson left this question open, although she leaned towards the version that the "cultural layer" was created by the builders themselves, perhaps in the eighth or ninth century, when they erected the first buildings. But the work carried out in 1958 showed that most likely there was an earlier settlement, and later this was confirmed.
Hence the assertion is true that certain peoples of the Stone Age lived on the site of Great Zimbabwe in the sixth or seventh centuries, and possibly even more. early time. We know from Clarke's work on the Calambo Falls that the Iron Age began on this southern plateau at the beginning of the first millennium. The Calambo site may not have been the only early Iron Age settlement: although no traces of iron mining and smelting have been found near Zimbabwe itself, the processes of growth and migration that began under the influence of iron working technology almost certainly forced people to explore new places.
There is another suggestion that the earliest pre-stone construction in Zimbabwe was carried out by the Hottentots or another South African people who already knew how to use metals.
Little is known about the movements of peoples in southern Central Africa in the Middle Ages and beyond. How does this meager historical knowledge fit in with the archaeological finds? So far, not very good. But most prominent researchers are now trying to distinguish three main periods in the history of Zimbabwe: pre-Monomotap, Monomotap (first Shona) and Shangamir (second Shona).
The first of these came to an end in the twelfth century, but when it began is not yet known exactly. The fourteenth century is usually given as the earliest date. Summers called this period the time of the A1 people of the Rhodesian Iron Age, who learned to use and work with iron, a skill, like themselves, most likely came from the north. They settled where later they began to build stone houses.
These peoples may have been the first Bantu-speaking inhabitants of the Rhodesian plateau. The modern Sotho people call their ancestors the Batonga, and there is some reason to believe that they were the early wave of the great migration of peoples that swept south, which, along with iron and other things, gave birth to the predecessors of the modern local population most of mainland Africa. When they appeared, what racial type they belonged to, how much they resembled the Calambo settlers of the early Iron Age, whether they displaced, for example, the people who created the "cultural layer" in Zimbabwe or formed it themselves - all these questions remain unanswered, and to find they are basically impossible.
But the influx of people, mostly from the north or northwest, continued for centuries. Around the twelfth century, the Shona people, the great pioneers of much of sub-Saharan Africa, traveled south from the Zambezi and occupied Zimbabwe. They are known to archaeologists as the Rhodesian Iron Age B1 people, and their dominion over Zimbabwe apparently lasted until 1450. Then they, led by the chief of the title Mwanamutapa (Monomotapa), united most of Southern Rhodesia and much of Mozambique. This was followed by feudal wars. The southern rulers went away, founding their own empire, led by a man titled Shangamire or Mambo. These rulers built impressive fortresses and stone settlements at Naletali, Dhlo-Dhlo, Regina, Khami and other places. Further south, beyond the Limpopo, other branches of the same people, the Rozvi and the Venda, occupied Mapungubwe and the neighboring area.
Shortly after 1500, these southern chiefs rebuilt the structures in Great Zimbabwe, supposedly enlarging them, and this appearance has largely survived to the present day. In 1834, the Nguni conquerors came from the south to the north and destroyed this state, disturbing the peace southern civilization almost the same as the northern nomads who destroyed the once more ancient and not so technically developed culture of the "Azanians" in East Africa.
Short story conquest can be misleading to anyone if taken too literally. What is known about past communities - and Mapungubwe has shed enough light on this - shows that there was no such mechanical succession of peoples who completely succeeded each other. There was something more than the replacement of one powerful ruling group by another. Each leader and his warriors conquered, won, remained to live in the occupied lands and, no doubt, taking women from the local population as wives, quickly merged with the defeated people.
Although ruled by various outsiders, the settlements on the southern plateau of Rhodesia and its neighboring countries were probably in continuous social processes. Perhaps, if we use archaeological terms, the tribes of a pronounced non-Negroid type were gradually replaced by Negroid people. Sociologically speaking, these slowly developing peoples of the Rhodesian Iron Age went through a steady process of growth, the physical embodiment of which, in our opinion, was expressed in the development of architecture. From an economic point of view, their progress was due to the steady development of commercial relations with the coast, mainly through the trade in metals and ivory, as well as the purchase of cotton goods and luxury goods. These peoples not only did not remain, in the words of some scholars, "undeveloped and did not remain in primitive savagery" while "magnificent historical pictures swept past", on the contrary, they actively and successfully progressed.

(Excerpt from the book by N. N. Nepomnyashchiy and N. V. Krivtsov "Unknown Africa")