The simple Arabian stories of Sindbad the sailor and Aladdin are quite as credible as some of the stories which the first Portuguese travellers who visited the east coast of Africa tell us about the great Emperor Monomatapa and the wealth of gold in his dominions. When they first appeared on the scenes the Monomatapa was a big Kaffir chief, like Cetewayo or Lobengulu, who ruled over the gold district in which the Zimbabwe ruins are situated; nevertheless they burden their accounts with stories of the gilded halls in which he lived, of nuggets of the precious metal as big as a man’s head, and which with their force raised the roots of trees. Needless to say these are the fabrications of their own brains, written to attract attention to the country they had discovered. That this big Kaffir chief, Monomatapa, lived at his Zimbabwe or head kraal is, however, pretty clear, not necessarily at the place where the ruins are, because the whole of this country is scattered with Zimbabwes. Each petty chief now calls his head kraal by this name, and this fact, not thoroughly recognised, has brought about endless confusion in topography. The derivation for this name which to my mind appears the most satisfactory is of Abantu origin, and came from the north, where it is generally used to denote the head kraal of any chief. Zi is the Abantu root for a village, umzi being in Zulu the term for a collection of kraals. Zimbab would signify somewhat the same, or rather ‘the great kraal,’ and we is the terminal denoting an exclamation, so that Zimbabwe would mean, ‘here is the great kraal.’ Again, another source of confusion arises from the fact that Monomatapa—or, as it ought to be written, Muene, or lord of Matapa—is a dynastic name, just as every petty chief in Mashonaland to-day has his dynastic name, which he takes on succeeding to the chiefdom. So did the lords of Matapa. In various Portuguese treaties we have the names of different Monomatapa’s: one is called Manuza, another Lucere, and so forth, right down to the days of Livingstone, when the Monomatapa he mentions was a petty chief near the Zambesi. When the Portuguese arrived at Sofala they got a lot of information from the Arab traders they found there concerning the wonders of the country, the great chief and the great ruins; and as Zimbabwe was the name of the chief’s residence and the name given by the inhabitants to the ruins, it is not to be wondered at that some confusion arose.