Mystery of Great Zimbabwe
The first reports of a fabulous stone palace in Southern Africa did not leave Africa until 1552. It was described by Joao de Barros in his book Da Asia as "a square fortress, masonry within and without, built of stones of marvelous size, and there appears to be no mortar joining them." Portuguese chroniclers of that time believed the stone palace to be the biblical city of Ophir, where the queen of Sheba procured gold for the temple of Solomon. These beliefs persisted until 1871, when Carl Mauch discovered the ruins.Unfortunately, Mauch was only able to boost the Portuguese theories, and was unsuccessful in proving the origins of the ruins. He concluded that a "civilized [read: white] nation must have once lived there." He tried to prove that the ruins had been built by the Queen of Sheba. He argued that the wood found there was very similar to the cedar of Lebanon, and therefore, had to have been brought over by
" Although all of the evidence proved that the ruins were built my indigenous peoples, Rhodes and Bent tenaciously adhered to the idea of the ruin's non-black origins. worse than anything I have ever seen. Rhodes, working with another man named Theodore Bent, concluded based on the artifacts that "a prehistoric race built the ruins. " Hall's disastrous investigation prompted the BSA to send a competent archeologist to the site. The walls were two times as thick as they were wide, they were built with no mortar, and in some spots, were as smooth as s modern brick wall. By the mid-15th century, trade shifted to the north and local resources dwindled to very low levels. closely akin the Phoenician and Egyptian. An archeologist called Hall's fieldwork "reckless blundering. Also, we still have to figure out things like how the residents managed to monopolize the area, to what degree it was a religious center, and why it was abandoned. Later, archeologists found that the wood that Mauch described was actually African sandalwood, a local hardwood.
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Acceptance Essays
