Zimbabwe: From about 1300 to about 1450, Zimbabwe was the wealthiest and most powerful state in the region. It prospered from the gold trade with the Swahili trading communities on the eastern coast of Africa. Indeed, Zimbabwe’s gold ended up in the court of Kublai Khan, emperor of China. The ruins of Zimbabwe’s capital, known as Great Zimbabwe, illustrate the kingdom’s power and influence. The town sits on a hill overlooking the Zambezi River and is surrounded by stone walls. Ten thousand residents would have been able to live in the area enclosed by the walls. Artifacts found by at the site include household implements, ornaments made of gold and copper, and porcelain imported from China. The Great Enclosure, whose exact purpose is not known, dominated the site. It was an oval space surrounded by a wall 800 feet long, 17 feet thick, and 32 feet high (about 244 m long, 5 m thick, and 10 m high). Near the Great Enclosure were smaller walled enclosures that contained round houses built of a mudlike cement on stone foundations. In the valley below was the royal palace, surrounded by a high stone wall. The massive walls of Great Zimbabwe are unusual. The local people stacked granite blocks together without mortar to build the walls. By the middle of the 15th century, however, the city was abandoned, possibly because of damage to the land through over-grazing or natural disasters such as droughts and crop failures.…