Great Zimbabwe and the Ophir myth

A real African gold city, and the racist Ophir myth that looted it

Great Zimbabwe stands in the hills of southeastern Zimbabwe near Masvingo, the largest stone structure in precolonial southern Africa. It was settled from around 1000 AD, built mainly between the 11th and 15th centuries by the ancestors of the Shona, and from the 13th century was the capital of the Kingdom of Great Zimbabwe, a state that may have covered 50,000 square kilometres. Older estimates put its people at 18,000 to 20,000; a recent study says no more than 10,000. Its rise has been linked to the decline of Mapungubwe from around 1300 and to gold in its hinterland, and UNESCO calls it an important trading centre renowned from the Middle Ages. It was abandoned in the 16th or 17th century.

It has three parts built at different times: the Hill Complex, the Valley Complex, and the Great Enclosure, whose mortarless granite walls stand as high as 11 metres and run some 250 metres around a conical tower. Its finest finds are eight Zimbabwe Birds, carved in soapstone on top of person-high monoliths, probably set in the Eastern Enclosure of the Hill Complex. With them came soapstone figurines, pottery, iron gongs, worked ivory, copper wire and bronze spearheads.

Then came the myth. Earlier writers such as the Portuguese João dos Santos had suggested a link to King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, and when the hunter Adam Render showed the ruins to the German explorer Karl Mauch in 1871, Mauch ruled out African builders at once, decided it copied the Queen of Sheba's palace, and claimed a wooden lintel must be Lebanese cedar brought by Phoenicians. Talk of Solomon and Sheba became so constant among settlers that the scholar James Theodore Bent said the names made him shudder, though Bent himself dug recklessly into the conical tower and destroyed the stratigraphy that could have dated it. Looters followed from the 1890s to the 1920s.

David Randall-MacIver's excavations of 1905 and 1906 found the objects Bantu in origin. Gertrude Caton-Thompson confirmed African builders in 1929, though she belittled them, and scholars had reached a consensus on its African origin by the 1950s. Even so, in the 1960s and 1970s the white government of Rhodesia pressed archaeologists to deny that black Africans had built it. When the new nation won recognition in 1980 it took its name from the city, and the soapstone bird is on its flag.