Since this rock naturally splits into even slabs and can be broken into portable sizes, it provided a convenient and readily available building resource.

These walls were constructed from granite blocks gathered from the exposed rock of the surrounding hills. Great Zimbabwe’s most enduring and impressive remains are its stone walls. Such attributions were dismissed when archaeological investigations conducted during the first decades of the twentieth century confirmed both the antiquity of the site and its African origins. In the 1800s, European travelers and English colonizers, stunned by Great Zimbabwe’s grandeur and its cunning workmanship, attributed the architecture to foreign powers. Its most formidable edifice, commonly referred to as the Great Enclosure, has walls as high as 36 feet extending approximately 820 feet, making it the largest ancient structure south of the Sahara Desert. Neither the first nor the last of some 300 similar complexes located on the Zimbabwean plateau, Great Zimbabwe is set apart by the terrific scale of its structure. by Bantu-speaking ancestors of the Shona, Great Zimbabwe was constructed and expanded for more than 300 years in a local style that eschewed rectilinearity for flowing curves. The ruins of this complex of massive stone walls undulate across almost 1,800 acres of present-day southeastern Zimbabwe.

Essy stone