Settlers attributed Great Zimbabwe’s ruins to biblical Jews rather than Africans

Evidence

By the end of the nineteenth century the white conquest of what is today South Africa was practically complete and the Ndebele and Shona tribes of what was by then called Rhodesia had also succumbed. As white settlers moved into the fertile lands north of the Limpopo River they were astonished to discover stone buildings, old mine workings, and most of all the remarkable ruins known as the Great Zimbabwe complex. These ruins had first been discovered by a German, Karl Mauch, in 1871. Immediately Mauch declared his conviction that these ruins had been erected by the queen of Sheba and were in fact a copy of Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem and that this entire area was the Ophir of the Bible—Solomon’s gold lands. It stood to reason therefore that Jews had once lived here and within a short time the Karanga-speaking Shona people and specifically the Lemba tribe were being defined in precisely the same way as the Hottentots, Xhosa, and Zulus. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 334

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how did this ‘Solomon’s mines’ attribution become the standard colonial explanation, and when was it finally refuted as indigenous construction?
• XREF: Parallels the standing theme of colonial misattribution of indigenous achievements, like racial-science readings of African ruins — connect to the bias-of-communication material on how frameworks shape perception.