existed in this part of south-east Africa from the time the Islamite Arabs settled anew at Sofala in the 10th century A.C. down to the early 19th century, when it was apparently finally extinguished by the invading Zulus from the south. From this region may have come the conquering hordes of the “Ba-zimba” who are thought to have crossed over into west Madagascar, and who passed ravaging and slaying up the east coast of Africa—very much after the style of the later Angoni-Zulu raids—in the late 16th century, temporarily effacing the Portuguese hold over Mombasa. The Rhodesian stone buildings are obviously associated with gold-mining; but they must have been centres of somewhat elaborate agriculture, and of a phallic worship (the _phallus_ being, together with the associated cylinder or _lingam_, a sacred symbol of a religious belief which prevailed once in Egypt, India, and ancient Arabia and Syria). Phallic worship, for example, was carried by the Phoenicians to southern Tunis—no doubt to Carthage and elsewhere; but its symbols happen to have survived in actual use in southern Tunis to the present day. The masonry of the Zimbabwe type of building (the real old kind, not the modern negro imitation) displays remarkable skill in the shaping and placing of stones in courses, all much of the same size. The masonry is without mortar, but the stones fit fairly closely in their horizontal, accurately-laid courses; and in the round buildings the symmetry is remarkable. What race raised such monuments and was gifted with so much civilization at a period which is certainly antecedent (in the really ancient types of building) to the 10th century A.C.? Was it the Arabs from southern Arabia, who were settled on the East African coast before the Christian era? This seems probable. The Zimbabwe ruins yield no ornament, no detail whatever of the Saracenic style, and (so far) no inscription of any kind in any language. There is nothing whatever about them to suggest their having been built by Islamic Arabs; everything to the contrary, as certainly these Arabs would not have carved either birds or phalli. There are suggestions here and there of Indian influence. The buildings of the true Zimbabwe style are certainly pre-Islamic or have been associated with a people which ignored Islam. They resemble most nearly the works of the Phoenicians and the southern Arabians, from any date between 1000 B.C. and the early part of the Christian era. The round conical towers are like those of Sardinia and Ireland and other ancient haunts of the enterprising Phoenicians. Yet there is nowhere any inscription in the Phoenician, Hebrew, Sabaean or Kufic or other ancient eastern alphabets, though according to Portuguese traditions inscriptions in unknown characters did exist at Zimbabwe; and no skull has so far been dug up from beneath the ruins or in close association with them or the ancient gold-workings which is not of the ordinary Bantu negro type.