47. The Great Enclosure and other stone
ruins at Great Zimbabwe, c. 1200-1440 (Zimbabwe)

The mysterious stone ruins at Great Zimbabwe are some of the oldest and most impressive monuments of southern Africa. Great Zimbabwe, or the “house of stone,” is an extensive area containing hundreds of such structures. Archaeology has shown this to have been an important trading centre, with a network of contacts stretching across the continent. The Enclosure may have held as many as 18,000 inhabitants at its height. The ruins are notable for their eschewal of rectilinearity: their walls form a series of fluent and elegant curves. Most impressive of all the sites is the Great Enclosure, whose walls extend for some 250 metres and reach 11 metres in height. The first Europeans to see the ruins were Portuguese traders in the 16th century. During the subsequent imperialist era, the notion that the structures were the work of Africans was widely discredited for racial and political reasons, but excavations have since proved that they were indeed an indigenous production, probably built by a people belonging to the Bantu linguistic family. It is unclear why the settlements were abandoned, but drought, disease or a decline in trade are current theories. The modern-day nation of Zimbabwe is named for the ruins.