Dynastic History | Great Zimbabwe, the Hill Complex — The Platform the Birds Were Cut From

The hill is a granite whaleback above the valley, and the walling on it runs between the boulders rather than around them: enclosures reached by stepped passages, the oldest built part of the site. In the eastern enclosure, excavators found a platform cut with slots for upright stone posts. Eight soapstone birds are known from Great Zimbabwe, each carved as one piece with its shaft and standing about four and a half feet tall by the early descriptions. Not one was recorded still in its slot, so which post carried which bird, and what the arrangement meant, cannot now be reconstructed.

In 1889 Willi Posselt, a hunter and trader, climbed to the enclosure, judged the whole monolith too heavy to carry away, and cut the bird off its pedestal, leaving the shaft behind. He handed blankets and other goods to the people at the site and sold the carving to Cecil Rhodes, then prime minister of the Cape Colony, who kept it at his house at Groote Schuur. Zimbabwe's museums authority dates the taking of four more to 1891, during Theodore Bent's excavation. The abandoned pedestal was sold around 1907 to a Berlin missionary museum for a few hundred marks and passed from there to the Museum für Völkerkunde.

What the birds were for is not settled. The excavation reports and the site's present custodians read them as royal or ancestral emblems; the reading rests on the slotted platform and on Shona oral tradition recorded long after, not on any text from the people who set them up. One of them is on the national flag.

The eastern enclosure is on the visitor route up the hill. The platform is still there. The birds are in a museum at the bottom of the path.

📸 Cover: The hill complex seen from the valley floor, Graph Geo, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons — area view