Great Zimbabwe - entire civilization (?)

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Here something about other similar archaeological sites with ruins of stone buildings similar to those in Great Zimbabwe:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bambandyanalo

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mapungubwe

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khami

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naletale

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ziwa

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danamombe

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bumbusi_National_Monument

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toutswemogala_Hill

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingombe_Ilede

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chibuene

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manyikeni

So it seems that the Great Zimbabwe was indeed just one part of a larger whole:

http://whc.unesco.org/en/tentativelists/919/

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At least this area seems to be the extent of Zimbabwe-style stone architecture:

 
Whyever would that be THE question?
 
The only reason why we know so much about ancient Egypt and Sumer was because of cuneiform and hieroglyphs. If Zimbabwe had a writing system, then we would know more about them, that is, if archeologists start digging.
 
Assuming we can translate it.
 
IIRC my African History class, they were a polity heavily involved in the gold trade with the coast. I don't think we have any examples of their languages, and if they did leave some around, I would assume they would have been looted with the rest of the artifacts when the Europeans stumbled upon their ruins.
 
If it looked valuable, which it very well could have, I don't see why they wouldn't have.

Exotics, and all that.
 
IIRC my African History class, they were a polity heavily involved in the gold trade with the coast. I don't think we have any examples of their languages, and if they did leave some around, I would assume they would have been looted with the rest of the artifacts when the Europeans stumbled upon their ruins.
Wouldn't they presumably speak a Bantu variant given their geographic location, or did Great Zimbabwe collapse before the Bantu migrations?
 
Wouldn't they presumably speak a Bantu variant given their geographic location, or did Great Zimbabwe collapse before the Bantu migrations?

Well, there's a couple things to consider. First, Bantu is an extremely broad category for a language group. It consolidates a very large amount of separate and distinct languages under a single umbrella due to possible similar origins. Secondly, the exact nature of the spread of Bantu languages is very much debated. The old hypothesis involving large scale movements of people from Central Africa (I believe historical linguists put the origin of the Bantu language group somewhere near Gabon) is more or less just conjecture. According to my professor, most scholars now paint a more complicated picture, most likely involving the slow transmission of languages across sedentary populations, rather than a full blown migration southwards.

It seems there is some basic evidence to the fact that languages within the Bantu group made it to East Africa by 200 A.D., being spoken by sailors and developing into Swahili. And by 400 A.D. (also a very rough date, these are languages mind you), it had reached Southern Africa.

Great Zimbabwe, or the ruins we recognize of the polity today, existed from roughly 1130 A.D. to 1450. Considering its location, and when it arose (involving the siphoning of trade from a kingdom further south, Mapungubwe), it most likely spoke a Bantu related language.

But, as I hinted at above, that really doesn't tell us anything other than that they lived in the southern half of the continent sometime after antiquity. They could have spoken Swahili, they could have written in Swahili, they could have spoken something entirely different.

That's where my knowledge ends :)
 
It seems that it was Shona (which is one of Bantu family languages), or some ancestor language of Shona:

It also seems, that my map posted above is still far from complete (read below):

http://archaeology.about.com/od/gterms/qt/Great-Zimbabwe.htm

Great Zimbabwe is an African Iron Age settlement and dry-stone monument located near the town of Masvingo in central Zimbabwe. Great Zimbabwe is the largest of about 250 [!] similarly dated mortarless stone structures in Africa, called collectively Zimbabwe Culture sites. In the Shona language "Zimbabwe" means "stone houses" or "venerated houses"; the residents of Great Zimbabwe are considered the ancestors of the Shona people.

As for the Great Zimbabwe (the largest of all 250 settlements of such type) - it is estimated, that its population was up to 18,000 people:

The site of Great Zimbabwe covers an area of some 78 acres, with an estimated population of some 18,000 people at its heyday

I have seen other estimates which say between 5,000 and 18,000 - probably in its heyday it was 18,000, while in other periods a smaller number.
 
I wouldn't say we know enough about their politics to call them city states or not. We don't even know if the Great Zimbabwe was a city, religious structure, palace, etc. We don't know enough about it, we can only guess.

We do know that the rise of the most famous ruin Great Zimbabwe involved some sort of shift in trade patterns northward from southern kingdoms. Those sites could have all been part of a single kingdom, multiple kingdoms, or multiple city states.

But then again, I'm no expert nor caught up on the scholarship of the area. I'm just relaying what I got from my professor.
 
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