THE KINGDOM OF ZIMBABWE
"House of Rock" is a rough translation of the word "Zimbabwe." It sounds very different from the Shona words dzimba dza mabwe and dzimba woye, which mean "great stone houses" and "esteemed houses," respectively.
The first people to live on the Zimbabwe plateau were the Shona. People from this group moved to this area and slowly built a society with strict rules and order. These societies changed slowly over hundreds of years, and in the end, they led to the Kingdom of Zimbabwe. The city of Great Zimbabwe was its capital. They were good at trading, mostly ivory and gold, which kept the kingdom's economy going. They were also skilled stonemasons, and some of the buildings they built and the stone things they made are still standing today.
The ruins of this complex of huge stone walls are spread out over almost 1,800 acres of southeastern Zimbabwe in the present day. Great Zimbabwe was started by the Bantu-speaking ancestors of the Shona in the eleventh century A.D. It was built and grew for more than 300 years in a style that avoided straight lines in favor of flowing curves.
Great Zimbabwe is not the first or last of about 300 similar complexes on the Zimbabwean plateau. What makes it stand out is how big it is. Its largest building, called the Great Enclosure, has walls that are as high as 36 feet and stretch for about 820 feet. This makes it the largest ancient building south of the Sahara Desert.
In the 1800s, European travelers and English colonists were so amazed by the size and craftsmanship of Great Zimbabwe that they thought it was built by a foreign power. Such ideas were thrown out when archaeological digs in the first decades of the 20th century proved that the site was very old and that it came from Africa.