Ancient Mariners 61 



The discovery of a piece of late mediaeval (l4th century) Nankin 

 china in the cement at the bottom of a stone building, seems 

 to have obscured all the other evidence in his eyes ; for he came 

 to the remarkable conclusion that the other stone structures 

 were devised and built by untutored negroes, such as the modern 

 Kaffirs, not earlier than the 14th or 15th century A.D. Even 

 Schoff, who accepts this extraordinary speculation, adds however, 

 that "the service done by Dr. Maclver in disproving the antiquity 

 of this Kaffir kraal did not, however, need to be supplemented 

 by his denial of the probability of Arabian trade far down this 

 coast at a very early age" {Op. cit. sup7^a, p. 97). Mr. Schoif 

 then cites evidence from the "Periplus" and from Ptolemy in 

 demonstration of the fact that at the begiiming of the Christian 

 era trafficking was being carried on by Arab sailors far south 

 along the East African coast. 



But even if the bit of Nankin china of the lith century had 

 been built into the foundations of the Zimbabwe rain and the 

 building itself erected at so recent a time, this Avould not 

 prove that local negroes planned and built this impressive 

 monument without any prompting from others. We know 

 sufficient of the negro's habits to realize that nothing is so alien 

 to his nature as hard work, whether mental or manual, and 

 especially his disinclination, except under the lash of the slave- 

 driver, to engage in such, to him useless and meaningless, efforts 

 as the erection of stone buildings. 



But the vast terraced slopes found in the Inyanga territory, 

 as well as in the Lydenburg district of the Transvaal, an account 

 of which is given in Hall's book (Op. cit., pp. XXXIV and 

 XXXV), representing the organised labour of tens of thousands 

 of workmen, serve to bring us back to a truer perspective. Such 

 methods of cultivation originated in Babylonia or Southern Arabia 

 at least as early as the second millennium B.C., and they form 

 one of the most distinctive elements of an unmistakable type of 

 civilization, which, in the earlier centuries of the first millennium, 

 spread throughout a great part of the world, wherever there was 



