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The name Zimbabwe comes from Shona -
the language of the Mashona -
People meaning 'stone houses -

The Masons - key old home -
historic notes;
the story behind:
the Masonic Order -
the story behind the Masonic -
The Masons Golden AuKey -
Lionel Fanthorpe, Patricia Fanthorpe - 2006 - History -
Another of the important proto-Masonic legend associated
with King Solomon was the location of
his semi-legendary gold mines -
These mines were said to be -

Great Shona Mashona Zimbabwe
From the 1500s onwards many rumours made their way to Europe
about stone cities in the interior of southern Africa.

However, because Africa was considered an uncivilised continent,
they were passed off as the work of outsiders like King Solomon
and the Queen of Sheba, or of the wealthy Christian priest,
Prester John, who was thought to live somewhere in Africa.

So widespread were these ideas that the first European to
encounter the remarkable ruins of Great Zimbabwe in 1871 was
convinced that it was indeed the palace of the Queen of Sheba.

The earliest researchers who worked at Great Zimbabwe were so
certain that a mysterious race built it that they interpreted
everything that they saw according to this belief.

Their science and archaeology were so poor in some cases
that they actually damaged the sites.

However, the idea that Great Zimbabwe was built by a very ancient
race that lived some three to four thousand years ago
suited some people for political and economic reasons.
People like Cecil Rhodes, for example, actively promoted
this notion, as it provided an excuse to move into the area
and exploit its gold reserves.
He was able to justify his actions by arguing that he and
his British South Africa Company were members of a white
race that had formerly ruled in the area.
To his credit, Rhodes did try to stop the destruction
and ransacking of the site by treasure hunters.

In 1902, it was estimated that at least 2 000 ounces of
ancient gold ornaments had been stolen from the ruins.

Masses of gold bangles were found round the arms and legs of
the skeleton.
Heavy coils of iron bangles round one leg had rusted to a
solid mass, in which gold and glass spacing beads could
be distinguished.
The arms and neck had been surrounded by great numbers of gold
wire bangles… .
Where the skull had lain were found pieces of curiously shaped
gold plate, the convolutions of which suggest they had adorned
the wooden headrest of the corpse.
A bowl of gold plate … was found, together with a gold plate
bangle and a gold circlet and sheath or point, which
probably ornamented a staff of office.

Source: Leo Fouche, Mapungubwe: Ancient Bantu Civilization on the Limpopo. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1937, p.2.

Great Shona Mashona Zimbabwe



the “land of Ophir -


Jacob Hungwe (Zimbabwe):
I am a descendant of the royal house of Great Zimbabwe.
The Hungwe Dynasty.
The ruler was a Great Woman Queen, and her known name is
"Queen Of Sheba".
The Great Zimbabwe was a trading post, ant the ruler queen,
was a great traveller, as she had Gold to back her travels,
which became known as "King Solomon's Mines".
This can be proved by the fact that the surrounding area all
the way to Johannesburg South Africa is still Rich and
has an abundant supply of Gold,not to mention diamonds.
The Great Zimbabwean ruins according to biblical scriptures
and prophecy are to be there until the Messiah
(Jesus Christ) comes back to reign in the millenium
(1000 years)golden age, as it says that Kingdoms will
come to give tribute to the lion of Judah in Jerusalem,
inclusive of Queen of Sheba kingdom.
There are also some detailed secret things l am aware of
but am not supposed to reveal for cultural reasons
and the traditional law.

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1871 German geologist-explorer Karl Mauch (1837 - 1875) reached Great Zimbabwe in Rhodesia (now, Zimbabwe,



named after the mysterious ruined city), the ancient stone ruins he believed to be the location of the fabled Gold Mines of King Solomon, and state capital of the Queen of Sheba.

Mauch could not believe that the ancient temple ruins he found could have been built by Africans ...

Mysteries of Great Zimbabwe
By Peter TysonPosted 02.22.00NOVA
The first whispered reports of a fabulous stone palace in the heart of southern Africa began dribbling into the coastal trading ports of Mozambique in the 16th century. In his 1552 Da Asia, the most complete chronicle of the Portuguese conquests, João de Barros wrote of "a square fortress, masonry within and without, built of stones of marvelous size, and there appears to be no mortar joining them."

De Barros thought the edifice, which he never saw, was Axuma, one of the cities of the Queen of Sheba. Other Portuguese chroniclers of the day linked the rumored fortress with the region's gold trade and decided it must be the biblical Ophir, from which the Queen of Sheba procured gold for the Temple of Solomon.


The view from Great Zimbabwe, which Europeans didn't "discover" until the 1870s Enlarge
Photo credit: © Karen Graham/iStockphoto

A CITY OF STONE
This notion persisted for centuries, right up until the monument's 19th-century European "discovery." That distinction fell to a young German named Carl Mauch. In 1871, Mauch, eager to seek for the fabled ruins of Ophir, penetrated deep into what is today southern Zimbabwe. In August, he reached the home of a lone German trader, who told him of "quite large ruins which could never have been built by blacks." On September 5, local Karanga tribesmen led Mauch to the site.
In the midst of a wooded savanna backed by bare granite hills stood a city of stone. Its beautifully coursed walls curved and undulated sinuously over the landscape, blending into the boulder-strewn terrain as if having arisen there naturally. Bearing no mortar, as de Barros had correctly heard, the walls nevertheless reached enormous height, standing as high as 32 feet over the surrounding savanna. Of fully 100 acres of these granite enclosures, not a single one was straight.
Mauch was looking at the greatest pre-Portuguese ruins of sub-Saharan Africa.


Inside the Great Enclosure at Great Zimbabwe Enlarge
Photo credit: Cicada Films

DIM VIEW
Unfortunately, Mauch, for all his tenacity, was "no thinker," as Peter Garlake, author of the definitive archeological text on Great Zimbabwe, deemed him. And Mauch only boosted the Portuguese theories of three centuries before. The soapstone and iron relics he uncovered told him that a "civilized [read: white] nation must once have lived there." From a lintel, he cut some wood that he described as reddish, scented, and very like the wood of his pencil. Therefore, he concluded, the wood must be cedar from Lebanon and must have been brought by Phoenicians. And therefore, the Great Enclosure—the edifice's most impressive structure, which local Karanga called Mumbahuru, "the house of the great woman"—must have been built by the Queen of Sheba.
Mauch was looking at the greatest pre-Portuguese ruins of sub-Saharan Africa.
As it turns out, Mauch's description of the wood aptly characterizes the African sandalwood, a local hardwood that later visitors also found in the walls of the Great Enclosure. But no one would know that for years.
In the meantime, Mauch's line of reasoning, distinguished as it was by the most purblind logic, perfectly suited Cecil Rhodes, whose British South Africa Company (BSA) occupied Mashonaland in 1890. (Mashonaland lies just to the north of Great Zimbabwe.) Inextricably steeped in his native country's racist views, Rhodes bought into Mauch's take without a second thought. Indeed, on Rhodes' first visit to the site, local Karanga chiefs were told that "the Great Master" had come to see "the ancient temple which once upon a time belonged to white men."


The highest of Great Zimbabwe's walls stand three stories tall. Enlarge
Photo credit: Cicada Films

IGNORING THE OBVIOUS
Eager to nail down the edifice's exotic origins once and for all, Rhodes and his BSA quickly sponsored an investigation of Great Zimbabwe. They hired one J. Theodore Bent, whose only claim to expertise lay in an antiquarian interest born of travels through the eastern Mediterranean and Persian Gulf. Bent adhered just as tenaciously as Rhodes to the notion of the city's non-black origin, though to his credit he didn't automatically swallow the link to the Queen of Sheba. (As he set to work at Great Zimbabwe, he later recalled, "the names of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba were on everybody's lips, and have become so distasteful to us that we never expect to hear them again without an involuntary shudder.")
All the artifacts Bent subsequently uncovered screamed "indigenous." Pottery sherds and spindle whorls; spearheads of iron, bronze, and copper; axes, adzes, and hoes; and gold-working equipment such as tuyères and crucibles—all were very similar to household objects used by the local Karanga. Yet Bent, clearly incapable of following where the evidence might lead him, concluded ("a little lamely and nebulously," notes Garlake) that "a prehistoric race built the ruins ... a northern race coming from Arabia ... closely akin to the Phoenician and Egyptian ... and eventually developing into the more civilized races of the ancient world."


All artifacts that Bent turned up pointed to an indigenous origin of Great Zimbabwe and its builders, but he would have none of it. Enlarge
Photo credit: Cicada Films

"RECKLESS BLUNDERING"
Bent was amateurish and narrow-minded but not utterly incompetent. The same could not be said of Richard Nicklin Hall, a local journalist and author of The Ancient Ruins of Rhodesia. In what would prove to be one of the most sickeningly misguided assignments in the history of archeological preservation, the BSA appointed Hall Curator of Great Zimbabwe, with a mandate to undertake "not scientific research but the preservation of the building."
Instead, Hall, hell-bent on finally settling the issue of its origins, launched into a full-scale "archeological" investigation. Claiming he was removing the "filth and decadence of the Kaffir occupation," he scoured the site for signs of its white builders, discarding from three to 12 feet of stratified archeological deposits throughout Great Zimbabwe. An archeologist who visited the site shortly after Hall left deemed his fieldwork "reckless blundering ... worse than anything I have ever seen."
Great Zimbabwe was home in its heyday to some 12,000 to 20,000 people.
Word eventually got back to the BSA of Hall's desecration of southern Africa's greatest archeological treasure, and he was dismissed. But the damage had been done. "Hall's disastrous activities left only vestiges of archeological deposits within the walls," wrote Garlake in his book Great Zimbabwe, "a paucity that was to inhibit all future scientific work."


David Randall-MacIver, the first archeologist to study Great Zimbabwe, declared it unequivocally of African origin. Enlarge
Photo credit: Cicada Films

ARCHEOLOGY BEGINS
Contrite, the BSA hired archeologist David Randall-MacIver, protégé of the great Egyptologist Flinders Petrie, to investigate the site. Hall's polar opposite in almost every way, Randall-MacIver quickly concluded that former mud dwellings within the stone enclosures "are unquestionably African in every detail and belong to a period which is fixed by foreign imports as, in general, medieval."
While MacIver's careful work set the stage for the sound archeological inquiry of Great Zimbabwe, racial prejudice surrounded the monument until quite recently. In the 1960s and 1970s, as the edifice grew into a potent symbol of the African Nationalist movement, the white government of Rhodesia set about suppressing the findings of prehistorians who claimed that Africans had built Great Zimbabwe. (Garlake, for one, was forced out of the country.) But those problems went away when Zimbabwe, as the country is known today, achieved majority rule two decades ago, and now we can look at Great Zimbabwe free of racial overtones.
"VENERATED HOUSES"
Many believe that "Zimbabwe" is a contraction of the Shona phrase dzimba dza mabwe, "houses of stone." (The Shona are Bantu people of Zimbabwe and southern Mozambique.) Garlake, for his part, feels the word more likely derives from dzimba woye, "venerated houses," a term usually reserved for chiefs' houses or graves.
Either way, archeological investigation has shown that the edifice's monumental walls did once enclose houses. Great Zimbabwe was a city, home in its heyday to some 12,000 to 20,000 people. To this day, daga, a clayey conglomerate of gravel that is Africa's most common indigenous building material, still stains the soil within Great Zimbabwe a robust red color.
While few traces of the mud houses remain, the towering stone walls stand in mute testimony to the city's former greatness. Quarried from the nearby granite hills, the rock used in the walls' construction easily split along fracture planes, giving the stones a cuboidal shape that lent itself to stacking without need of mortar. Ranging from four to 17 feet thick, Great Zimbabwe's walls are about twice as high as they are wide. This results in a very sturdy structure, which spreads its pressure evenly over the ground and adjusts well to subsidence. When two walls meet, they abut eachother with unbroken vertical joints; there are no interlocking stones. In the finest walls, workers knapped and dressed the stones so well that the coursing is as smooth as a modern brick wall.
Whites did not build Great Zimbabwe, blacks did, and this fact only deepens the sense of mystery.
The Great Enclosure is the largest single prehistoric structure south of the Sahara. Looking from the air like a giant gray bracelet, its elliptical Outer Wall is more than 800 feet long and contains an estimated 182,000 cubic feet of stone, more than in all the site's other ruins combined. Garlake believes the Great Enclosure, which encircles a series of smaller stone walls and a Conical Tower shaped like a stone beehive, was likely a royal residence.


Archeologists have determined that the Conical Tower is completely solid. Its original purpose remains unknown. Enlarge
Photo credit: Cicada Films

RISE AND FALL
While the site was occupied in ancient times—iron was in use there by the third century A.D.—its rise to prominence, and the advent of the finest walls, occurred in the 14th and 15th centuries during a florescence in trade. Great Zimbabwe happened to lie right on the route between the region's gold-producing regions and ports such as Sofala on the Mozambique coast, where merchants traded African gold and ivory for beads, cloth, and other goods from Arabia and farther east. The site may also have been a religious center, as evidenced by stone monoliths and "altars" found throughout the site, along with enigmatic soapstone birds and figures that, says Garlake, "point to the important role of ritual and symbol in the art and architecture of Great Zimbabwe."
By the mid-15th century, however, the balance of trade had shifted to the north. Local resources had also apparently dwindled to dangerously low levels from overuse, and salt was scarce. Whatever the cause, Great Zimbabwe's people abandoned their once-glorious stone city, leaving the site a ruin that Mauch found 400 years later inhabited by local Karanga people who had no idea of its history.


The Lemba, including their spiritual leader Professor Matshaya Mathiva (seen here), believe their ancestors erected Great Zimbabwe. Enlarge
Photo credit: Cicada Films

UNSOLVED MYSTERIES
Despite decades of study, mysteries still cling to Great Zimbabwe like ivy. How did its residents manage to monopolize trade in the area? To what degree was it a religious center? Why was it abandoned? Even the question that, as Garlake said about the site itself, "has given rise to such strong, widespread, and often bizarre emotional responses"—who built it?—has been only partly answered.
To wit: Which Africans built it? Many tribes, including the Shona and Venda, maintain that their ancestors were responsible for Great Zimbabwe, but the Lemba are "particularly insistent," says University of London scholar Tudor Parfitt. "They claim that one of their clans, the Tovakare, were the actual builders of Zimbabwe," Parfitt says. "They even call them Tovakare Muzimbabwe, which means 'the ones that built Zimbabwe.'"
Certain evidence appears to support the Lemba claim. For instance, unlike other Bantu tribes, who bury their dead in a crouched posture, the Lemba bury theirs in an extended position, as did the ancient Zimbabweans. One of the strongest pieces of evidence concerns trade, Parfitt says. "Great Zimbabwe was a civilization that was constructed very largely on wealth generated from cattle and trade. And given that for hundreds of years we know the Lemba were the great traders of southern Africa, it seems almost certain that their ancestors would have been involved in this trading nexus between Great Zimbabwe and the Indian Ocean."
"The mystery of Zimbabwe is the mystery which lies in the still pulsating heart of native Africa."
If the Lemba contention is true, does this mean that outsiders—that is, not native Africans—built Great Zimbabwe? After all, the Lemba have Semitic origins (see Tudor Parfitt's Remarkable Quest). The answer is no, because by the time Great Zimbabwe was built in medieval times, the Lemba had become decidedly African, having so thoroughly intermixed with Bantu Africans over many hundreds of years that today, among other African traits, the Lemba have dark skin and speak a Bantu language.
Indeed, the more contentious part of that question "who built it?" has finally been put to rest almost 450 years after João de Barros and others first propounded it. Whites did not build Great Zimbabwe, blacks did, and this fact only deepens the sense of mystery enveloping the site. As archeologist Gertrude Caton-Thompson declared back in 1931:
Examination of all the existing evidence, gathered from every quarter, still can produce not one single item that is not in accordance with the claim of Bantu origin and medieval date. The interest in Zimbabwe and the allied ruins should, on this account, to all educated people be enhanced a hundred-fold; it enriches, not impoverishes, our wonderment at their remarkable achievement ... for the mystery of Zimbabwe is the mystery which lies in the still pulsating heart of native Africa.
This feature originally appeared on the site for the NOVA program Lost Tribes of Israel.
Peter Tyson is online producer of NOVA.
Sources

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ancient/mysteries-of-great-zimbabwe.html

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