THE ORIGIN OF THE ZIMBABWEAN CIVILISATION -- Gayre, R.

Book condition - very good ; Hardcover ; no d/w ; (please refer to images which are images of the actual book on offer); Text block clean with no inscriptions ; binding sound ;  Illustrated with black & white and coloured photographs.

248 pp.   Size 26 cm x 21.7 cm.  

Published - Galaxie Press, 1972. 

 A study on the origins of Zimbabwe, specifically the aspects of megalithic ruins in areas such as Great Zimbabwe, Khami, Naletale, Dhlo-Dhlo, and the terraces of Inyanga, as well as the ethnicity, religious practices, and influences of Egyptian and Zingian cultures on the area.

Dr. Gayre directly refutes the works of scholars such as David Randall-MacIver, Gertrude Caton-Thompson and Roger Summers, who favoured the idea that Zimbabwe was built by Bantu during the second millenium AD. 

The Zimbabwe Ruins were discovered by Adam Renders in 1868 and explored by Karl Mauch in 1871. Early writers such as Mauch, Bent and Hall believed them to be non-Bantu and equated these ruins with those of south-eastern Himyaritic and Sabaean or pre-Koranic Arabia.

Gayre of Gayre returns to the Sabaean theory, maintaining that the Lemba tribe in the extreme north of South Africa are partly Semitic, having descended (through their male line) from the judaized Sabaeans of southern Arabia. His interpretation of the known facts is convincing. In his account he builds up evidence from the geography of the region, through the history of East Africa and its trade and mineral resources. The ruins, of course, are associated with widely distributed mining activity in gold and, at Inyanga, with an enormous area planned for terraced irrigation, which was never a Bantu system. In various parts of Rhodesia, plants such as cotton, rice, fig trees, jasmine, yam, sugar cane and lemons, all of them not indigenous to Southern Africa, have been found growing in a wild state. 

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