Posted on 12/05/2002 2:53:20 PM PST by spetznaz
(CNN) -- Mysterious ruins in Zimbabwe, nearly brushed this week by the shadow of a total solar eclipse, once served as an astronomical observatory to track eclipses, solstices and an elusive exploding star, a South African scientist said.
The Great Enclosure in the archaeological site of Great Zimbabwe, a crumbling ring of stone walls and platforms about 250 meters in circumference, was thought to have been a palace complex for regional rulers some 800 years ago.
But Richard Wade of the Nkwe Ridge Observatory thinks that the enclosure was used in a similar capacity as the much older Stonehenge in Great Britain.
The arrangement of the walls, the complicated symbols on stone monoliths and the position of a tall tower suggest that medieval Zimbabweans used the complex to track the moon, sun, planets and stars for centuries.
"The importance of Great Zimbabwe is that it was the capital of the only known sub-Saharan African Empire that lasted almost 1,000 years. Everyone in southern Africa somehow relates to this nucleus cultural complex," Wade said.
Several of the stone monoliths, for example, line up with certain bright stars in the constellation Orion as they rise on the morning of the shortest day of the year, the winter solstice.
Boosting an ancient legend Another contains markings that coincide with orbital patterns of Earth and Venus, which could be used to forecast eclipses, Wade said.
In his most controversial position, Wade suggests that a tower at the complex, whose purpose has baffled historians, was probably built to observe an exploding star in roughly 1300 AD.
"This large conical tower in the great enclosure stands directly in line with the rising supernova remnant when seen from the observation platform and court area of the time," Wade wrote in a paper to be submitted to the journals Science and Scientific American.
"They requested that I send the work on completion," he said. "I have been peer reviewed now for almost four years and only recently have I received a nod from the South African science community."
Modern telescope observations indicate that a supernova lit up the sky at approximately the same time. Historic records make no mention of it, an omission that does not surprise Wade since the dying star appeared over the Southern Hemisphere, which at the time had virtually no literate cultures.
But oral legends in the region lend credence to the supernova idea, Wade said. The Sena people of Zimbabwe hold that their ancestors migrated from the north by following an unusually bright star in the southern skies.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
Interesting.
Actually as an aside the genesis of the legends of white people in ancient Africa (which gave rise to stories that led to Burroughs writing the Tarzan novels) started when explorers in the 19th century found huge walled cities in central and southern Africa, and in those days they would not believe that 'savage Africans' had the ability to build such cities!
Hence the legend of 'white africans' and ancient lost cities of white people in the middle of Africa popped up.
H Rider Haggard's "She" is inspired by these ruins too I believe (good book by the way).
I think that you are confusing two separate declines. The fall of the ancient, probably Yemenite "Zimbabwe" took place many centuries before Marx, or the earlier egalitarian lunacy in the French Revolution. That the civilization mentioned, here, was probably of a people closely related to the Yemenites is suggested by the peculiar stone architecture, which closely resembles formations found in the Yemenite region of the Arabian Penisula.
There is no real evidence that any of the peoples presently in Southern Africa had much to do with its creation or its fall. (There is the possibility, also, that this had some connection with the legendary "King Solomon's Mines," which is not inconsistent with the Yemenite theory; as we know Solomon had connections with Sheba in that region.)
William Flax Return Of The Gods Web Site
It's greatest feat is to have erased all trace of it's tremendous achievements in art, science, astronomy, medicine, law, government, aeronautics, space travel...
Not a trace!
Of course that doesn't mean it all didn't happen!
Dirt I imagine. It's a natural hill/rock formation. You can climb up on it and get some good views of the Great Zimbabwe and the surroundings.
Thanks for the book tip.
Jared Diamond's book "Guns, Germs and Steel" also touches on the African empires (according to him, the Bantu people conquered and ruled most of Africa), although that is not his main topic.
If our industrial civilization kills itself off in a big nuclear conflagration, what could happen next would be that one group of Africans with greater resistance to radiation damage (there is greater breadth of genetic variation among Africans than in the rest of the human race) starts a new wave of emigration "Out of Africa"... and the whole cycle starts again.
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