Great Zimbabwe's Missing Monarchs

Great Zimbabwe: The Lost African Kingdom of Stone — Fexingo History · Sep 27, 2026 · 10m · transcript

For centuries, the towering stone walls of Great Zimbabwe stood as a testament to the power and sophistication of the Shona people, yet the specific names of the rulers who built them were largely erased from the historical record. In this episode, we explore how early European explorers like Richard Francis Burton and Carl Mauch dismissed the site as the biblical Ophir or Solomon’s Mines, refusing to believe an African civilization could have constructed such engineering marvels on their own. We trace the work of archaeologists like Gertrude Caton-Thompson and David Randall-MacIver, who…