Home › Timeline › The Capture › Great Zimbabwe, and who was allowed to have built it
Great Zimbabwe, a stone city built by ancestors of the Shona between the 11th and 15th centuries, was the centre of a trading state based on cattle, farming and gold; its Great Enclosure is the largest ancient structure in sub-Saharan Africa. European visitors in the late 1800s took it for Ophir and King Solomon's mines and credited it to Phoenicians or others; archaeologists showed it was African in 1905 and 1929, yet in 1970 the Rhodesian government barred official publications from stating so, and its leading archaeologist, Peter Garlake, left the country.
The mechanism
CUSTODY OF THE WORD
How it was checked
- EvidenceT5 INDEPENDENT SECULAR; Status: ADDED 2026-09-19
- Letter eraTHE CAPTURE 313 to 1302
- SourcesRECORD — Britannica, 'Great Zimbabwe'; EBSCO Research Starters, 'History of Censorship in Zimbabwe' · checked 19 September: Britannica (read in a browser; WebFetch is refused by the site), 'Great Zimbabwe'; EBSCO Research Starters, 'History of Censorship in Zimbabwe' (the row's source); Wikipedia, 'Peter Garlake' (citing Pikirayi 2012 and De Baets, Censorship of Historical Thought); Wikipedia, 'Great Zimbabwe' (Frederikse 1990 quoting Paul Sinclair on censorship)