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Sheep magazine Archive 2: issues 10-17

Lefty online magazine: issue 10, May 2016 to issue 17, November 2016

Lefty online magazine: issue 10, May 2016 to issue 17, November 2016

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suggested it was built by Portuguese travellers, Arabs, Chinese or<br />

Persians. Another theory was that the site could have been the work of a<br />

southern African tribe of ancient Jewish heritage, the Lemba.<br />

<br />

Adding to the mystery, the indigenous people living around the site were<br />

said to believe it was the work of demons, or aliens, on account of its<br />

impressive size and the perfection of its workmanship.<br />

In 1905, however, the British archaeologist David Randall-MacIver concluded<br />

the ruins were medieval, and built by one or more of the local African Bantu<br />

peoples. His findings were confirmed by another British archaeologist,<br />

Gertrude Caton-Thompson, in 1929, and this remains the consensus today. In<br />

the language of the builders’ descendents, the Shona people who live in the<br />

region today, Zimbabwe means “big stone houses” or “venerated houses”.<br />

11<br />

The city’s buildings were made of impressive granite walls, embellished<br />

with turrets, towers, decorations and elegantly sculpted stairways. The<br />

most notable of the buildings, an enclosure 250 metres in circumference<br />

and 9.75 metres high, was crafted with 900,000 pieces of professionally<br />

sliced granite blocks, laid on each other without any binders. Its perimeter<br />

columns were decorated with soapstone sculptures of a silhouetted bird<br />

with human lips and five-fingered feet.<br />

More than 4,000 gold and 500 copper mines were found around the<br />

site, and it was suggested that for three centuries, 40% of the world’s<br />

total mined gold came from the area, compounding to an estimated 600<br />

tonnes of gold. Thousands of necklaces made of gold lamé have been<br />

discovered among the ruins.<br />

SEPTEMBER 2016

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