{"it":{"id":"AFR-006","kind":"site","sub":"Africa outside Egypt","name":"Kingdom of Mapungubwe","lat":-22.192,"lon":29.239,"date":"From 1000 CE to 1200 CE, the area saw higher rainfall, facilitating growth in…","mat":"clay;sandstone","nfacts":1,"tags":["Africa"],"sum":"By about 1250 CE, some 5,000 people lived around the hilltop of Mapungubwe in southern Africa, and their rulers were buried with gold, including a small golden rhinoceros.","src":[345],"nsrc":2,"why":"A gold-trading kingdom with links to China and India, ended by climate change, and remembered through a small gold rhino.","yt":"What made it fade?","rel":["AFR-003"],"hook":"Mapungubwe's gold rhino weighs only 37.4g. It was gold foil nailed over a wooden carving."},"S":{"345":["Wikipedia: Kingdom of Mapungubwe","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Mapungubwe"]},"rec":{"id":"AFR-006","alias":[],"ms":[{"f":"000 by 1250 and the state likely covered","a":"area","v":"30000","u":"km2","o":"The capital's population was 5,000 by 1250, and the state likely covered 30,000 km2.","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kingdom_of_Mapungubwe&oldid=1381188347","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1381188347 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M0592"}],"lab":[{"k":"Materials","mat":"site material (as stated in article)","m":"documentary mention (Wikipedia, auto-extracted)","v":"It comprises sandstone hills, Kalahari sands, and scrubland.","by":"no inline ref in article","b":"S","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kingdom_of_Mapungubwe&oldid=1381188347"}],"eng":[],"ori":[],"gaps":[],"dat":[],"aa":[],"ac":[],"me":[],"ci":[],"cq":[],"sd":[],"sub":[],"site":{"age":"From 1000 CE to 1200 CE, the area saw higher rainfall, facilitating growth in vegetation which brought with it animals such as warthogs, wildebeests, and buffalo (as well as tsetse flies).","dm":"[see dating_excerpt; method not extracted]","lab":"NO: inference only (style/context/king list/textual)","weak":"no direct lab result on the structure in our records; date from stylistic, contextual or textual inference","unesco":"","dens":"CENSUS"},"co":{"lat":"-22.1925","lon":"29.23888889","src":"UNESCO WHC 1099 (Wikidata P625 is the same value)","agree":"not a valid check","b":"S","note":"wave8: KEPT: disagrees by ~0.17 deg; primary is a \"Kingdom\" region point, OSM is the hill attraction; needs UNESCO 1099 or SANParks point (delta 0.1619 deg) | wave9: UNESCO WHC 1099 gives S22 11 33 E29 14 20.004 = -22.19250, 29.23889 (https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1099/), identical to Wikidata to 5 d.p., so Wikidata is copied from UNESCO (same lineage). Kept SINGLE_SOURCE with UNESCO as primary; OSM point is a separate tourist attraction","osm":"https://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/ui/details.html?osmtype=N&osmid=14041549558"},"src":[{"id":"S0319","t":"no inline ref in article","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kingdom_of_Mapungubwe&oldid=1381188347"},{"id":"S0510","t":"Wikipedia: Kingdom of Mapungubwe","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Mapungubwe"},{"id":"VAFR-006-3","t":"University of Pretoria Museums: the Mapungubwe golden rhino","u":"https://www.up.ac.za/museums-collections/news/international-world-rhino-day-one-and-only-gold-rhino-world-university-of-pretoria"},{"id":"VAFR-006-4","t":"UNESCO World Heritage Centre: Mapungubwe Cultural Landscape","u":"https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1099/"}],"sum":"It is small enough to sit in the palm of your hand. About 145 millimetres long and 55 high, it weighs just 37.4 grams, less than a hen's egg. It is a rhinoceros made of gold. It was found in a royal grave on a sandstone hill in the far north of South Africa, and at a glance it looks solid. It is not. It is a skin of thin gold foil, pressed over a carved wooden rhino and pinned in place with tiny gold nails. The wood inside rotted away centuries ago. What survives is the shell of a vanished animal, made by a vanished kingdom, and nobody knows what it meant.\n\nThe hill is Mapungubwe, and it stands near the meeting of the Limpopo and Shashe rivers, close to the point where South Africa, Zimbabwe and Botswana meet. UNESCO calls the kingdom that ruled from here the first indigenous kingdom in southern Africa. Between about 900 and 1300 AD it grew to be the largest in the subcontinent, and until the end of the thirteenth century it was the most important inland settlement in the region. By about 1250 some 5,000 people lived around the hilltop.\n\nIt did not begin on the hill. The kingdom moved through three capitals, first Schroda, then Leopard's Kopje, and finally the settlement around Mapungubwe Hill itself. Each move took it closer to the centre of something larger than itself. The site sits at a crossroads, where routes running north to south crossed routes running east to west, and that position let its rulers control trade through the ports of East Africa toward India and China. From the interior they took gold and ivory. In return came Chinese porcelain and Persian glass beads, objects that had crossed an ocean to reach a hill in the African bush.\n\nClimate helped. From about 1000 to 1200 the area enjoyed higher rainfall, good years for farming and for feeding a growing town. And wealth, as it always does, changed the shape of society. An elite grew up around a sacred king, who lived secluded on the hilltop, above the commoners in the settlements below. It is an arrangement as old as kingship. Height is distance, and distance is power. A ruler who can be seen only from below, and rarely, becomes something more than a man.\n\nHe took that status with him into the grave. The rhino came from a burial on Mapungubwe Hill known as the \"original gold grave,\" catalogued as M 1 A620, and is dated to about 1250 to 1290 AD. That date comes from the grave's place in the site's later phase rather than from any test on the gold. The University of Pretoria, which holds it, calls it the only artwork of its kind in the world, and South Africa has declared it a national treasure.\n\nLook closely and the craft is remarkable. Sian Tiley-Nel of the University of Pretoria explains that the body is a single folded sheet of gold, shaped by creasing and light hammering, a technique called repoussé. The matt inner surface suggests it was beaten out on a stone anvil. The head and the horn are separate pieces. The eyes are capped gold nails. The upright tail was hammered from a solid nugget. The British Museum reconstructed and restored it in 1999.\n\nAnd here is the first oddity. The rhino matches neither of the two species that live in Africa, the white rhino or the black. The form its maker chose is neither one. Was it a style, a symbol, an animal of myth, or a creature remembered from somewhere else? The record does not say what the rhino meant.\n\nThe mainstream account of how the kingdom ended is clear, and rooted in the land. Over two thousand years the valley swung between warm, wet spells that were good for farming and cooler, drier pulses that were not. When rainfall fell after 1300 AD, traditional farming could no longer feed a large population, and the people dispersed. Power moved north to Great Zimbabwe, and later to Khami. A kingdom that had drawn porcelain from China was undone, in the end, by the sky over its own fields.\n\nIt is a convincing story, and it may be most of the truth. But it has a weak point, and UNESCO names it: poor excavations in the 1930s probably destroyed valuable information. Much of what might have told us how Mapungubwe lived, ruled and fell was dug out carelessly and lost. Climate explains why the farming failed. It does not, on its own, show whether trade, politics or the rise of a rival also played a part. That remains open.\n\nEven the basic measurements are unsettled. The official sources give no figure for the size of the state at its height. UNESCO gives the protected property as 28,168 hectares in one place and nearly 30,000 in another on the same page. A kingdom that was the greatest of its region for centuries is still, in many ways, a sketch.\n\nWhy is it so much less known than the kingdoms it traded with? Part of the answer is that the people of Mapungubwe left no writing, and part is that the earliest excavators did not take care to read what they left instead. Part of it, perhaps, is simply that the world has been slow to look for a great kingdom here.\n\nSo we are left with a few hard facts and a small golden shell. A king lived apart on a hill and was buried with gold. His people traded with the far side of the Indian Ocean. Their craftsmen beat gold on stone anvils into an animal that is not quite any animal they could have seen. Then the rains failed, and they walked away. If a kingdom that ruled the subcontinent could be undone by a run of dry years, how much of its story was written by the rain, and how much is still sealed in the hill, waiting for someone to dig more carefully?","qs":["Why is it still so much less known than the kingdoms it traded with?","What does a gold rhino say about the people who buried it?","Could climate change end a kingdom so quickly?"],"gal":[{"src":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/de/MapungubweHill.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:MapungubweHill.jpg","title":"MapungubweHill.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 3.0","licurl":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/","by":"JJ van Zyl","cap":"Mapungubwe Hill"},{"src":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/92/Bateleur_Eagle_with_Kill.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bateleur_Eagle_with_Kill.jpg","title":"Bateleur Eagle with Kill.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 3.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0","by":"Sumeet Moghe","cap":"At Maasai Mara National Reserve with a Coqui Francolin kill"},{"src":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bb/Excavations.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Excavations.jpg","title":"Excavations.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 3.0","licurl":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/","by":"JJ van Zyl","cap":"Mapungubwe Excavation site"},{"src":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/af/LSConfluence.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:LSConfluence.jpg","title":"LSConfluence.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 3.0","licurl":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/","by":"JJ van Zyl","cap":"Limpopo/Shashe Confluence"},{"src":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b5/MNPSandstone.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:MNPSandstone.jpg","title":"MNPSandstone.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 3.0","licurl":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/","by":"JJ van Zyl","cap":"Sandstone rock formations"}]},"img":null,"md":null,"hh":[{"v":"1000 CE","h":"From 1000 CE to 1200 CE","s":[93]},{"v":"Clay, sandstone","h":"Made of","s":[93]}],"hs":{"93":["Wikipedia: Kingdom of Mapungubwe (and sources cited there)","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Mapungubwe"]},"lh":{"s":"img/h/AFR-006.webp","w":800,"h":532,"o":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/de/MapungubweHill.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled"}}