Trade · c. 1220–1450 CE
Great Zimbabwe
Great Zimbabwe, near Masvingo (Zimbabwe)
Ancestors of today's Shona people began building in stone at Great Zimbabwe in the 11th century, and in the 13th and 14th centuries raised the Great Enclosure, whose mortarless walls stand up to 11 m high. The city was the capital of a kingdom that controlled the flow of gold from the Zimbabwean plateau to Swahili ports such as Sofala, and Chinese porcelain and glass beads found there show its links to Indian Ocean trade.
Decline set in from the 15th century as power shifted to the Mutapa and Butua kingdoms.
Why it mattered
Colonial-era writers credited the ruins to Phoenicians or the Queen of Sheba and Rhodesian authorities pressured archaeologists to deny African builders; only in the 1950s did its African origin become the scholarly consensus, making it a lasting symbol of pre-colonial African achievement.
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