Kingdom of Great Zimbabwe

The Kingdom of Great Zimbabwe was a powerful southern African state built by ancestors of the Shona people, renowned for the spectacular dry-stone architecture of its capital, the largest ancient stone city in sub-Saharan Africa.

The site gives the modern nation of Zimbabwe its name, derived from the Shona term meaning 'houses of stone.' Monumental construction at Great Zimbabwe began in the eleventh century, and the kingdom is conventionally dated from around 1220, flourishing especially in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, though the dates are scholarly conventions and the surrounding area was settled far earlier. The kingdom's prosperity rested on cattle herding and, above all, on its position controlling the flow of gold and ivory from the interior to the Swahili trading ports of the Indian Ocean coast, particularly Sofala. Archaeological finds at the site, including Chinese porcelain, Persian and Arab ceramics and glass, and coins from the coastal trading city of Kilwa, attest to its integration into the wider Indian Ocean commercial world. The capital was a substantial urban centre, home to perhaps as many as eighteen thousand people at its height, dominated by impressive stone complexes: the hilltop Hill Complex and the massive Great Enclosure, with its famous curving walls and conical tower, all constructed without mortar from precisely fitted granite blocks. Because the builders left no written records, the names of individual rulers are unknown, and much about the kingdom's political organisation and religion is inferred from archaeology and later Shona traditions. By around 1450 the capital and most of the kingdom were largely abandoned, a decline attributed to the exhaustion of local resources such as soil, pasture, salt, and timber under the pressure of a large population, together with the shifting of trade routes northward in favour of rival successor states. Power passed to those successors, the Kingdom of Mutapa to the north and the Torwa state to the southwest, which carried forward its traditions of stone-building and gold trade.