Mystery of Great Zimbabwe essays

Mystery of Great Zimbabwe essays The first reports of a fabulous stone palace in Southern Africa did not leave Africa until 1552. It was described by Joo de Barros in his book Da Asia as "a square fortress, masonry within and without, built of stones of marvelous size, and there appears to be no mortar joining them." Portuguese chroniclers of that time believed the stone palace to be the biblical city of Ophir, where the queen of Sheba procured gold for the temple of Solomon. These beliefs persisted until 1871, when Carl Mauch discovered the ruins. Unfortunately, Mauch was only able to boost the Portuguese theories, and was unsuccessful in proving the origins of the ruins. He concluded that a "civilized [read: white] nation must have once lived there." He tried to prove that the ruins had been built by the Queen of Sheba. He argued that the wood found there was very similar to the cedar of Lebanon, and therefore, had to have been brought over by the Phoenicians. Later, archeologists found that the wood that Mauch described was actually African sandalwood, a local hardwood. This discovery disproves Mauch's conclusions. In 1890, Cecil Rhodes with the British South Africa Company (BSA) decided to investigate further into Mauch's findings. Unfortunately, his racist views made his findings biased. Rhodes, working with another man named Theodore Bent, concluded based on the artifacts that "a prehistoric race built the ruins...a northern race coming from Arabia...closely akin the Phoenician and Egyptian...and eventually developing into the more civilized races of the ancient world." Although all of the evidence proved that the ruins were built my indigenous peoples, Rhodes and Bent tenaciously adhered to the idea of the ruin's non-black origins. Another archeologist named Richard Nicklin Hall followed in Rhode's and Bent's narrow-minded footsteps. Hall claimed that his investigation was removing the "filth and decadence of the Kaffir occupation." In rea...