zimbabwe: carting off the soapstone birds

The Great Zimbabwe Ruins. Who built them? Some say King Solomon., others the Queen of Sheba. Archaeologists claim they have known the right answer for years…

…The first white man known to have looked upon Zimbabwe was a German trader named Adam Render who had settled in the Transvaal and who ran across the ruins by accident in 1868, while prospecting for gold. The site was deserted and thickly overgrown and what he found there nobody knows, but something about the place must have attracted him strongly, for he returned to it several times over the next three years and died there in 1871. The cause of his death is also a mystery, although other prospectors conjectured that he had found an ancient goldworkings at Zimbabwe and that he had been killed by tribesmen while trying to make off with the loot. If he did not find such a treasure someone must have appropriated it, for nothing of exceptional monetary value has been reported there since.

---THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE Warner Bros., 1948.  Directed by John Huston.  Camera:  Ted McCord.  With Humphrey Bogart, Walter Huston, Tim Holt, Bruce Bennett, Barton MacLane,....click image for source...

—THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE
Warner Bros., 1948. Directed by John Huston. Camera: Ted McCord. With Humphrey Bogart, Walter Huston, Tim Holt, Bruce Bennett, Barton MacLane,….click image for source…

In the year Render died, a German explorer named Karl Mauch was deserted by his carriers near Zimbabwe, and spent the next eight months as a forcibly detained guest f the local Africans. He survived to write a book about his adventures and his life is the first eye-witness description of the ruins. A typical nineteenth-century German, Mauch was both ploddingly methodical and wildly romantic. His methodical side prompted him to measure the thickness, height and circumference of the elliptical walls- inaccurately, as it turned out, because he was hindered by the tangle of undergrowth at their base.

---Visiting Zimbabwe's World Heritage Site, The Great Zimbabwe Ruins ----click image for source...

—Visiting Zimbabwe’s World Heritage Site, The Great Zimbabwe Ruins
—-click image for source…

Mauch shinnied up a creeper to the top of the conical tower, tore off some of its outer stones, and on finding that it was slid, concluded that the entire tower must be solid; he was right. From his careful descritions of the kopje, we know that its walls were adorned with granite monoliths and with birds carved from soapstone. The monoliths have since topled and the soapstone birds have been carted off, some to museums, but most into obscurity….( to be continued)…

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