Great Zimbabwe: mortar-free walls, bronze beasts, and the stolen Shona craft
The Shona built Great Zimbabwe with mortar-free granite walls and cast bronze animal figures, a specialist craft that is still hard to reproduce. From 1890, colonial rule credited Phoenicians, Solomon, or the Queen of Sheba, let diggers tear through the layers, then kept the story alive in books and museums. This is the historical-suppression theory: what was stolen was Shona capability, and power took the city by taking the story of who built it.
Read in Vietnamese →Great Zimbabwe stands near Masvingo in southern Zimbabwe today. Shona people built and expanded the city from about 1100 to 1450. The site covers nearly 800 hectares and includes the Hill Ruins, the Great Enclosure, and the Valley Ruins. Its builders split granite and stacked it into walls without mortar. They built houses, courts, narrow passages, and a conical stone tower.
The city was the centre of a large state. Its population in the fourteenth century may have exceeded 10,000. Excavations found glass beads, Chinese porcelain, Persian ceramics, coins from Kilwa on the East African coast, and bronze figurines of animals. These objects show that Great Zimbabwe had links to Indian Ocean trade routes. Its inhabitants managed cattle, gold, craft production, and goods moving through the highlands. The bronze animal figures and the mortar-free granite masonry belong to the same story: they are specialist Shona craft, a real skill set that is hard to reproduce today.
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