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IN TRADITIONAL OPHIR LAND
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which
is a tower twelve bracas (72 feet) high. All these structures the
people of the country call Symbaoe, which with them means a royal
residence. They stand west of Sofala, under latitude 200 and 21° south, one hundred and seventy leagues more or less in a straight line. ... In the opinion of the Moors who saw them, they seemed to be very ancient and were
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built
there to hold possession of those mines, which are very old, from which
for years no gold has been taken owing to the wars." The latitude and
position of the Symbaoe of De Barros correspond closely with the site
of the ruins of Zimbabwe, described three hundred years later by the
explorer Karl Mauch. Both Zimbabwe and its antique form, Symbaoe, are
plainly versions of the local Bantu nzimba-mbuie, a house of the chief.
It is true that the Zimbabwe of Mauch is only two hundred and forty
miles west of Sofala, but the leagues of the old chroniclers were not
laid off with the tape line.
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