The Great Zimbabwe
Aerial view of Great Zimbabwe’s Great Enclosure and adjacent ruins, looking southeast (photo: Janice Bell, CC BY-SA 4.0)
For my first blog post of this week I am going to be focusing on the architectural landscapes of the Great Zimbabwe people in the sub-Saharan area. Aside from ancient Egypt, the stone complexes here are the largest in Africa built before the modern era. There aren’t a ton of ruins that have survived, but the ones that did are located about 4 hours from the capitol Harare. The ruins were inhabited by the Shona people until about 1450, the ruins were originally constructed between the 11th and 15th centuries. Great Zimbabwe was more than just one singular architectural landscape, in fact it is believed that there were about seven little states in the local region.
The really interesting piece is the fact that Great Zimbabwe can be categorized into just about three different areas. These include, “the Hill Ruin (on a rocky hilltop), the Great Enclosure, and the Valley Ruins” according to smart history. All three of these specific locations played a very important role in the Shona people’s survival, tradition, and religion. The hill was surrounded by a 30-foot-tall wall which included cylindrical towers with turrets able to be placed inside the walls and towers. The Great Enclosure was completed closer to the end of the Shona people, at 1450. This enclosure was similar to the Hill in which the walls had turrets inside them and reached about 32 feet tall. Within the enclosure there is another smaller wall that creates a narrow passageway that leads to the many different towers. The Valley Ruins were used in a very different way than the other two locations. The structures inside the Valley Ruins provide explanations of them being a site for long distance trading and commercial exchange. To back this belief by historians, “Archaeologists have found porcelain fragments originating from China, beads crafted in southeast Asia, and copper ingots from trading centers along the Zambezi River and from Central African kingdoms.” According to smart history. This is huge evidence to back the significant role this hub played in the trading markets of the world.
Site plan of Great Zimbabwe (modified from an original plan by National Museums and Monuments ofZimbabwe) from Shadreck Chirikure and Innocent Pikirayi, “Inside and outside the dry stone walls: Revisiting the material culture of Great Zimbabwe,” Antiquity 82 (December 2015), pp. 976-993. The letters refer to the types of stone construction (see figure 4).
Smart History link: https://smarthistory.org/great-zimbabwe/
Demerdash, Dr. Nancy, and Dr. Nancy Demerdash. “Great Zimbabwe.” Smarthistory, smarthistory.org/great-zimbabwe/.
Hi Justin,
ReplyDeleteI also did my first blog this week on Great Zimbabwe. This piece caught my eye because even though this structure was home to many, it is still considered art. In your blog post, you did a good job explaining the purpose of each of the three regions in Great Zimbabwe. I still wonder if the Shona people still live there or not? If not, how did they get carried out of there?
Amanda Garrett
I did my blog post on this artwork as well. I found it very interesting and fascinating. I thought the 3 sections of the enclosure was cool because of how different they were compared to each other. I also liked how the houses in the valley were built different than the other 2 sections.
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