Great Zimbabwe

Great Zimbabwe is the stone ruins of a medieval city in southeastern Zimbabwe, built and expanded by Bantu-speaking Shona ancestors between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries as the capital of the Kingdom of Zimbabwe. Its most famous structure, the Great Enclosure, is a curved outer wall of coursed granite blocks laid without mortar, one of the largest ancient structures south of the Sahara. At its height the city and its surrounding settlements are estimated to have housed around 18,000 people, sustained by cattle herding and control of regional gold and ivory trade routes to the Indian Ocean coast. The ruins gave modern Zimbabwe its name, and their dry stone walling technique, found nowhere else in the region at this scale, is the defining evidence of a sophisticated indigenous state that early European visitors long refused to credit to African builders.