Great Zimbabwe and the Ophir myth

Eleven hundred acres of mortarless granite, walls ten metres high, built by the ancestral Shona from the 11th century and grown rich on the gold trade to the Indian Ocean coast. Victorian antiquarians refused to believe Africans had built it and sold it as biblical Ophir, King Solomon’s mines. Treasure hunters and the Rhodesian state then wrecked archaeological context chasing that fantasy, and the colonial government later pressured archaeologists to keep denying African authorship. The evidence was never in doubt. The real story, an African stone city rich from gold, is far better than the invented one. UNESCO World Heritage, open to visitors.