Great Zimbabwe

The ancestors of the Shona built a city of great curving walls of stone, without mortar, in what is now Zimbabwe. For decades, white colonial writers refused to believe Africans had built it.

Date: About 1100 to 1450VIII · Medieval networks and empiresIX · Oceans crossed
Place: Great Zimbabwe · Mapungubwe · KhamiAfrica
Laid out as: A cityOne city, district by district, from its centre outwards.
Lessons: 5 planned, none written yet
Themes: Transport, towns and building works
Economics, trade and money
Politics, government and law
Education, knowledge and museums

The lessons we plan

Titles may change as they are written

IThe Great Enclosure
IIThe hill complex
IIIGold and the coast
IVThe soapstone birds
VWho built Great Zimbabwe: a lie and its end

Still to come

The people and objects these lessons will cover

People

Gertrude Caton-Thompson
David Randall-MacIver

Objects

The soapstone Zimbabwe birds
Chinese and Persian ceramics

Where it sits

All of human history, era by era

Early human ancestry Our species and the Old Stone Age Farming and the New Stone Age First cities and the Bronze Age The Iron Age and growing states The classical world After the empires Medieval networks and empires Oceans crossed Revolutions and the first factories Industry, empire and world war The world since 1945

1100 to 1450. Each era is drawn the same width, so the earliest are squeezed: era II alone is over 300,000 years.

Nearby in time and place

This page is an outline. The summary above is a starting point; each lesson, when it is written, will give its sources, its pictures and where historians disagree. Spotted a mistake?