Breakaway Destination Guides (International)

Among the gold mines of the inland plains between the Limpopo and Zambezi rivers is fortress built of stones of marvellous size, and there appears to be no mortar joining them. The natives of the country call these edifices Symbaoe, which according to their language signifies court.

When Portuguese traders first encountered the vast stone ruins of Great Zimbabwe in the sixteenth century, they believed they had found the fabled capital of the Queen of Sheba. Later travellers surmised that the site's impressive stone structures were the work of Egyptians. This complex of ruins from which the modern nation of Zimbabwe took its name is one of the country's greatest historical and cultural attractions. Great Zimbabwe, the largest ruins in Africa, covers almost 1,800 acres.

The complex, which wealthy Shona-speaking cattlemen built between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, may have housed as many as 40,000 people at its height.

Sited on an open wooded plain surrounded by hills, the ruins comprise the vast Great Enclosure complex, and on a nearby kopje the Hill Complex, a veritable castle of interlocking walls and granite boulders, while all around in the valley lie a myriad other walls. The ruins feature an array of chevron, herringbone and many other intricate patterns in its walls, and the astonishing fact is that despite the dry-stone technique used in Great Zimbabwe's construction (no mortar binds the stone blocks), the complex has endured for seven centuries.

A series of residential and ceremonial enclosures, the Hill Complex, built ca. A.D. 1250, sits atop a granite dome that overlooks the rest of the site. Construction of the interior of the Great Enclosure began sometime in the early fourteenth century. Its outer wall was built nearly 100 years later. The smaller Valley Complex, dated to the early fifteenth century, was the last of the architectural undertakings. (Lynda D'Amico)

Since Europeans first encountered the ruins of Great Zimbabwe, it has been the focus of ideological concern and conflict. Unwilling to believe that sub-Saharan Africans could have built such a structure, adventurers and ideologues long claimed the ruins a mystery, theorizing that ancient Phoenicians, Arabs, Romans, or Hebrews created the structures. In fact, since archaeologist Gertrude Caton-Thompson's excavations in 1932, it has been widely known that Great Zimbabwe is truly of Africa and less than 1000 years old.

Nonetheless, the White Rhodesians, whose ideology proclaimed the land "empty" of people and culture before they arrived, tried to rewrite history - even asserting that an African genesis for Great Zimbabwe was tantamount to treason. After the War of Liberation, the new nation, discarded the name of Cecil Rhodes and, looking to the past for nobler origins, chose the name Zimbabwe.

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