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Great Zimbabwe rises as a stone city on the gold trade

13th–14th centuries CE·Economy & trade·Southern Africa (Zimbabwe)·
13th–14th centuries CEDate
Economy & tradeCategory
24Empires active
Date
13th–14th centuries CE
Category
Economy & trade
Region
Southern Africa (Zimbabwe)
Era
Post-Classical / Medieval
Significance

Between roughly the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries the Shona capital of Great Zimbabwe became the largest stone-built settlement in sub-Saharan Africa, housing perhaps 18,000 people at its mid-fourteenth-century peak.

Skilled masons used local granite, which fractures into regular blocks, to raise mortarless dry-stone walls; the Great Enclosure, with walls up to eleven metres high and some 250 metres in circumference, ranks among the largest ancient structures south of the Sahara. The city's wealth rested on cattle, on inland gold mining, and above all on long-distance commerce: gold and ivory flowed from the interior to the Swahili port of Sofala and on into the Indian Ocean trade. Excavations have yielded Chinese porcelain, Persian and Arab glass, and coins from Kilwa, showing that this southern African capital was plugged into a trading world stretching to China. Great Zimbabwe is powerful evidence of indigenous African state-building and urbanism, and the soapstone birds found there became the national emblem of the modern country that took its name.

See the world map in 13th–14th centuries CE →More economy & tradeThe Post-Classical / Medieval era

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