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Wives were viewed as a route to success and status, and as such the king had many, with the senior wife in charge. Some wives lived outside of the capital, to help maintain the network of alliances. [1]: 44–46 Mapungubwe followed a settlement pattern common across Southern Africa called the Central Cattle Pattern.
Mapungubwe was the center of a kingdom with about 5,000 people living at its center. Mapungubwe as a trade center lasted between 1220 and 1300 AD. The people of Mapungubwe mined and smelted copper, iron and gold, spun cotton, made glass and ceramics, grew millet and sorghum, and tended cattle, goats and sheep. [8]
By the mid-13th century, Mapungubwe was abandoned. [71] After the decline of Mapungubwe, Great Zimbabwe rose on the Zimbabwe Plateau. Zimbabwe means stone building. Great Zimbabwe was the first city in Southern Africa and was the center of an empire, consolidating lesser Shona polities. Stone building was inherited from Mapungubwe.
The Kingdom of Mapungubwe was the first in a series of sophisticated trade states developed in Zimbabwe by the time of the first European explorers from Portugal. They traded in gold, ivory and copper for cloth and glass. From about 1250 until 1450, Mapungubwe was eclipsed by the Kingdom of Zimbabwe.
The Kingdom of Mapungubwe lasted about 80 years, and at its height its population was about 5,000 people. [14] [15] The first European historical records about these people begin in the late 15th century, with the beginning of European exploration. The first historical record of South Africa dates to 1488, by Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias.
The Mapungubwe National Park was declared in 1998. [2] The Mapungubwe Cultural Landscape was declared as a National Heritage Site in 2001 and it was inscribed on the World Heritage List in 2003. [3] The Museum and Interpretive Centre houses artefacts from Mapungubwe. In 2009, the building won the World Architecture Festival's World Building of ...
It flourished from the 11th to 13th centuries, being a predecessor to the Kingdom of Mapungubwe. The ruins have survived because much of the complex was built in stone. The site contains a large mound, some 180 metres in diameter, and covers an area of about 5 hectares. It is surrounded on three sides by sandstone cliffs (Wood 2005:86).
The Mapungubwe people, a Bantu-speaking group of migrants from present-day South Africa, inhabited the Great Zimbabwe site from about AD 1000 - 1550, intermarrying with san bushmen people the native shona talk of this as the story of the tavara being the bantu and shava being the bushmen . From about 1100, the fortress took shape, reaching its ...