ABSTRACT
Covering about sixty acres, the ruins of the Great Zimbabwe are the largest ancient stone buildings in sub-Saharan Africa. From the beginning they were associated in the West with romance and treasure. The Portuguese, who probably learned of them second hand from Arab traders in the sixteenth century, attributed them to the legendary Queen of Sheba. The speculations of later European travelers, who could not believe that such impressive buildings could have been constructed by indigenous Africans, were equally wild. In the nineteenth century, German explorer Carl Mauch, the first European to view the ruins and produce a written account of them, also attributed them to the Queen of Sheba, built in imitation of Solomon’s temple with cedars of Lebanon furnished by the Phoenicians. In 1891 Theodore Bent’s investigations led him to conclude that they had been made by peoples from the Arabian Peninsula. Journalist Richard Hall dug at the site from 1902 to 1904. His findings, not surprisingly, mirrored that of his predecessors: the Great Zimbabwe was constructed not by sub-Saharan Africans, but by an ancient people with roots in the Near East.
