BOOK PROBLEMS ON RHODESIA

Dominion, Volume 23, Issue 75, 21 December 1929, Page 33

BOOK PROBLEMS ON RHODESIA

PRE-EGYPTIAN CIVILISATIONS

Professor Cipriani, of the Florence University, whose discovery of the footprint of a gigantic type of prehistoric man on the banks of the LimpopO River has been reported, has been exploring Rhodesia for the last eight months. He has sent back to Italy a most interesting account of his discoveries and of his deductions as to the primitive inhabitants of South Africa, based upon the rock carvings and paintings, and the ruins of tombs and temples which he has found on the high table-lands watered by the Zambesi, the Limpopo, the Vaal, and the Orange rivers. These remains reveal traces of civilisation dating back’some seven or eight thousand years and anterior, therefore, to the Egyptians of the first dynasties and to the most ancient Asiatic civilisations. “The Bushmen tell us their own story,” he says. “War scenes are continually reproduced, and strange figures of gigantic men-surrounded by small men who are trying to overcome them. These are most probably the original invaders, possibly : from the Indian Ocean, who decimated the original inhabitants of a small and more delicate build, seized their women and became the forefathers of the Bantu race which dominated the country for a

long period and erected the massive fortresses of Zimbabye and Kamal.” It will be seen that Professor Cipriani is not in agreement with Miss Caton Thompson, who attributes the Zimbabye ruins to a period not earlier than the tenth or twelfth century of our era. He looks upon this view as “entirely erroneous,” and is firm in his opinion that these mysterious fortresses _were built by the Bantu to defend the gold and diamond districts from an incessant stream of Asiatic invaders.

The antiquity of the rock pictures is fully proved by the fact that the animals—depicted with extraordinary intensity and freedom of movement—are many of them antediluvian, and the plants include species such as palms, which are no longer native to South Africa.

Professor Cipriani found one remarkable little effigy depicted with great care and accuracy on a rock halfburied in the ground. It represents a man in Babylonian robes. “What was the Emir”— a§ his discoverer has christened him—“doing among the Bushmen ?”

Rhodesia, says Professor Cipriani, offers an unlimited field for researches into the orig’., of man and investigations into the history of a civilisation totally unknown to us.