50 Fun Facts About Great Zimbabwe

Which people's ancestors built Great Zimbabwe?

The Karanga, a south-central Shona group, are considered the direct builders.

Near which modern Zimbabwean city do the ruins stand?

The city carried a colonial name honouring Queen Victoria until 1982.

What distinction does Great Zimbabwe hold in southern Africa?

The stone city spans 7.22 square kilometres.

From which century did Great Zimbabwe serve as a kingdom's capital?

Settlement began around 1000 AD; the site was abandoned in the 16th or 17th century.

What binds the blocks of Great Zimbabwe's walls together?

The Great Enclosure's walls rise without any mortar.

How high are the walls of the Great Enclosure?

They extend for roughly 250 metres.

What are the three architectural groups of the ruins?

The Hill Complex is the oldest of the three.

What stands between the inner and outer walls of the Great Enclosure?

It is 5.5 metres across and 9 metres high, and appears on Zimbabwe's coat of arms.

What peak population did a 2017 statistical study estimate for Great Zimbabwe?

Older estimates ran as high as 18,000 to 20,000; the 2017 study in PLOS ONE argued the site never held more than about 10,000 people at once.

Great Zimbabwe covered a similar area to which medieval European city?

The surviving stone ruins span 730 hectares.

What does the Shona word dzimba, in the name Zimbabwe, mean?

One theory reads the full name as large houses of stone; another as venerated houses.

Who first recorded the name of the ruins, as Symbaoe, in 1531?

He was captain of the Portuguese garrison at Sofala and said the word meant court.

Roughly how many smaller stone zimbabwes have been identified across southern Africa?

Examples include Bumbusi in Zimbabwe and Manyikeni in Mozambique.

Which earlier state did Great Zimbabwe replace as the interior's chief trading centre around 1300?

That predecessor lay south of the Limpopo in today's South Africa.

Which two exports flowed from Great Zimbabwe to the Indian Ocean via Swahili ports?

Traders travelled the Save and Runde rivers, possibly by canoe, to reach ports such as Sofala.

Which Swahili port most likely funnelled Chinese ceramics to Great Zimbabwe?

Longquan green-glazed stoneware and blue-and-white porcelain of the 14th and 15th centuries were found.

Coins from which region have been excavated at Great Zimbabwe?

Chinese pottery shards and glass beads were also found.

How many soapstone Zimbabwe Birds are the most important artefacts from the site?

Theodore Bent recorded six large and two small, with pedestals suggesting there had been more.

Which bird do the Zimbabwe Birds most likely represent?

In Shona culture the bateleur is a good omen and a messenger of god.

Roughly how tall are the soapstone bird sculptures themselves?

They stood on columns more than 90 centimetres tall.

Which hunter carried off a Zimbabwe Bird in 1889 and sold it to a Cape magnate?

He paid a local man named Andizibi with blankets and some other articles.

In which Cape Town house did the buyer of the 1889 bird display it?

He put stone replicas three times the size on the gates of his English house near Cambridge.

What did South Africa receive in 1981 in exchange for returning four Zimbabwe Birds?

The fifth bird stayed in Cape Town until 2026.

A pedestal of one bird was sold to a museum in which city in 1907?

It was reunited with the upper part for an exhibition in Belgium in 1997.

Which German explorer recorded the ruins in 1871 while searching for biblical Ophir?

He was shown the site by Adam Render.

Which biblical figure did Mauch link the ruins to?

He even claimed a wooden lintel was Lebanese cedar brought by Phoenicians.

Which patron funded Theodore Bent's 1891 excavation at the ruins?

Bent's book The Ruined Cities of Mashonaland credited Phoenicians or Arabs as builders.

Who carried out the first scientific excavations at the site in 1905–1906?

His book Medieval Rhodesia concluded the builders were ancestors of the Shona.

Which archaeologist confirmed the site's Bantu origin after a twelve-day visit in 1929?

She announced her findings to the British Association meeting in Johannesburg.

By which decade had the site's African origin become scholarly consensus?

Rhodesia's white government nonetheless kept pressuring archaeologists to deny it.

Which Senior Inspector of Monuments left Rhodesia over censorship of the site's origins?

Guidebooks, textbooks and radio programmes were censored daily.

What did the Rhodesian government claim explained Persian bowls and Chinese celadon at the site?

Rhodesians found it inconceivable that indigenous Africans built the structures.

In what year was the newly independent country renamed after the site?

The soapstone bird was retained from the old flag as a national symbol.

Which colonial antiquarian's amateur diggings caused notable damage to the ruins?

Later reconstruction attempts caused further damage.

According to oral tradition, which royal led people north from Great Zimbabwe to found the Mutapa Empire?

He was said to be searching for salt.

Which city near Bulawayo rose as Great Zimbabwe declined and became a World Heritage Site in 1986?

It was capital of the Torwa dynasty's Kingdom of Butua for about 200 years from around 1450.

Which two rivers meet at the site of the state Great Zimbabwe replaced around 1300?

Its elite moved onto Mapungubwe Hill around 1220 during a dry period.

What does the name of the nearby city, renamed in 1982, mean in Shona?

An earlier renaming to Nyanda was dropped because it means one who has lice.

What were the dhaka pits at Great Zimbabwe used for?

The system could hold more than 18,000 cubic metres of water.

What were most of Great Zimbabwe's ordinary dwellings made of?

The stone structures were royal or official buildings and elite dwellings.

Which culture farmed the valley from the 4th to 7th centuries but built no stone structures?

They mined and worked iron, and the later Gumanye people are ancestors of the Karanga.

Which spirit mediums, according to Ken Mufuka, lived at the Hill Complex shrine?

They acted as the conscience of the state and kept the founders' traditions.

Which of the three complexes at Great Zimbabwe is the oldest?

The Hill Complex was occupied from the 11th to 13th centuries, before power shifted down to the Great Enclosure and the valley.

Roughly how far do the Great Enclosure's walls extend?

The walls reach 11 m high and are built entirely without mortar.

How large an area do the surviving stone ruins of Great Zimbabwe span?

That is about 1,800 acres of stone construction, though the state it ruled likely covered around 50,000 square kilometres.

In which century did major construction at Great Zimbabwe begin?

Building continued until the 15th century, and the city was abandoned in the 16th or 17th century.

Which Portuguese explorer described the edifices in a 1506 letter to King Manuel I?

He wrote that they belonged to the larger kingdom of Ucalanga, presumably the Karanga dialect group of the Shona.

Which group, with religious practices resembling Judaism, also claims to have built Great Zimbabwe?

The Lemba claim was documented by William Bolts to the Austrian Habsburg authorities in 1777.

Which coastal town's new Zambezi route to the goldfields helped trigger the city's decline?

The route ran via Mutapa and Ingombe Ilede, feeding the rise of Khami, capital of the Kingdom of Butua.

How far north were salt, cattle, grain and copper from Great Zimbabwe's networks traded?

Regional trade complemented the long-distance gold and ivory commerce that flowed to Swahili ports.