From Diary of the Right Hon. Sir Mountstuart E. Grant Duff for March 13 1897: “The Breakfast Club met at Herschel’s, Acton, Lyall, Trevelyan, Courtney, Mackenzie Wallace and Frederick Leveson – Gower being present. Acton confirmed a story which I had heard, but not from himself, to the effect that Mr. Rhodes had asked him: ‘Why does not Mr. Theodore Bent say that the Zimbabwe ruins are Phoenician?’ Acton replied: ‘Because he is not quite sure that they are.’ ‘Ah!’ said the other, ‘that is not the way that Empires are founded.’” [Sir Mountstuart E. Grant Duff, ‘Notes from a Diary, 1896 to January 23, 1901’; vol. 1, p.185. London, John Murray, 1905]
Unmissable (if you can access it) – this 1958 episode of the BBC archaeology series ‘Buried Treasure’, in which Sir Mortimer Wheeler scrambles over the site of Great Zimbabwe (then Southern Rhodesia). The 1891 explorer of this still-astonishing monument, Theodore Bent, is unfairly (only for this blog, of course) dismissed in Wheeler’s exposé as a ‘gullible antiquary’: Bent was paid to give some sort of explanation, and he did. ‘No ancient site in the world’, mutters Wheeler lugubriously through his pipe, ‘unless maybe for the Pyramids and Stonehenge, is more clogged than Zimbabwe with sticky romance…’ Wheeler explores the awe-inspiring stone ruins in the controversial company of Roger Summers, then Chairman of the Southern Rhodesia Historical Monuments Commission. The title of the episode is unhelpful – King Solomon’s Mines – but the programme is a delight for the fabulous black and white filming, and the sight of Wheeler in shorts chasing hippopotami. For modern interpretations of the Great Zimbabwe site, you must, of course, look elsewhere, i.e. the recent (2022) work of Innocent Pikirayi et al. on the probable water-storage system employed at Great Zimbabwe (‘Climate-smart harvesting and storing of water: The legacy of dhaka pits at Great Zimbabwe’, in Anthropocene, Volume 40, December 2022).
(Mabel Bent’s Chronicle of the year spent in Southern Africa (1891) is available from Archaeopress, Oxford)
There is another amusing association between Bent and Wheeler in terms of Africa, suggesting, perhaps, that the former might have played a role in Wheeler becoming a famous archaeologist. Wheeler recalls it himself in his Foreword to Peter Garlake’s 1973 book on Great Zimbabwe (opening with a reference to Bent’s questionable credentials): “but I recalled Bent because in spite of his spurious scholarship his travelogue-cum-report, The Ruined Cities of Mashonaland, was for its period (1892) both readable and liberally illustrated, and probably did more than anything else to impress Zimbabwe and its ilk upon the consciousness of the ‘nineties. I recollect how as a small boy, more than sixty years before I saw the site myself, I found constant delight in Bent’s soberly adventurous pages – so much less circus-like and more convincing than the dramas of Rider Haggard which otherwise represented Darkest Africa to one childlike mind!” (Peter Garlake, Great Zimbabwe, London 1973, p.67-8; italics, Bent Archive)
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