PLAYED IN DAILY #3
Great Zimbabwe
Ancient site · Masvingo, Zimbabwe
THE STORY
Stone capital of a medieval African kingdom
The ruined capital of the Kingdom of Great Zimbabwe and the largest stone structure in precolonial Southern Africa. Much of its wealth came from controlling trade routes from the goldfields to the coast, and through Swahili ports such as Sofala it sent gold and ivory into the Indian Ocean trade. The modern country of Zimbabwe is named after it, and it is a World Heritage Site.
Source: Wikipedia ↗Built by Shona ancestors, 11th–15th centuries
Settled from around 1000 AD, the city was built by ancestors of the Shona people, with major construction from the 11th to the 15th century, and was abandoned in the 16th or 17th century. Europeans looted it from the 1890s, and Rhodesia's white government pressured archaeologists to deny its African origin, which only became scholarly consensus in the 1950s.
Source: Wikipedia ↗