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The writer is fully convinced that the original west wall of the temple once extended outwards further west, and that the present west wall extending towards the south is of much more recent construction and is built on a shorter curve, also that most of the structures of the central and western portions of the building are also of much later construction, and this for many substantial reasons, some of which are here briefly stated:—

(a) The west wall is considered by all practical builders and architects to be far slighter, much inferior in construction, fuller of defects, and to contain to a greater extent ill-shaped stones than the main wall on the east side, while the foundations are at many points far more irregular, and the batter-back of the interior face of the west wall is less severe than is the case of the east side. Lengths of 25 ft. each of both walls have been examined and compared and photographed, and the number of defects of construction recorded. The number of false and “straight joints,” false and disappearing courses, and stones supported at their corners by granite chips, which the west wall contains, is roughly about forty odd to every one of such defects in the east wall, which is the architectural marvel for symmetry, grand proportion, true courses of most carefully selected and assorted blocks (some of which have been dressed with metal tools) of any other ancient architectural features at Zimbabwe. All this is an ocular demonstration, and is commented upon by the most casual visitor to these ruins. This, too, is very patent when seen from the summit of Zimbabwe Hill, the view looking down upon the temple revealing most obviously the different characters of the walls.

(b) In 1903 the writer cleared the soil away from the gap between the older and later walls, and found that they were widely different in construction; that the later and narrower wall approached the older and well-built and wider wall at an oblique angle; and that the end of the older wall is broken and not finished off as are other ends of ancient walls. In a trench made at a distance of twelve yards west of the gap, and on the curve the older wall, if continued, would have passed, a mass of buried masonry, which might have been a portion of the old wall, was disclosed.

(c) Dr. Hahn, the leading expert in South Africa in chemical metallurgy, analysed the soil underlying the foundation of the west wall, and pronounced it to be composed of disintegrated furnace slag and ashes containing gold and iron. The ground to the west of the west wall has always been the spot at which gold prospectors have washed the soil for gold, and here gold crucibles and scorifiers are to be found. This soil contains 73 per cent. of silica, and would make an excellent foundation for walls, and the west wall is built right along this bed of furnace slag, which is about 2 ft. in depth, many yards wide, and extends from north to south.

(d) At a few feet from the exterior of the west wall, and at a depth of four feet below the level of its foundation, and extending as shown in trenches and cross-cuts for at least thirty yards from north to south, is a floor of granite cement laid on the formation rock, hiding its irregularities and making a perfectly level surface. The full extent of this flooring has not yet been ascertained. For two feet between the level of this cement flooring and the furnace-slag soil under the foundations of the west wall is fine silted soil. Evidently the later wall was erected at a very considerable period subsequently to the laying of the cement flooring and after the siltation of the soil, and also after the gold-smelting operations had been extensively carried on for a long period.

(e) No single relic of any great antiquity has been found by any explorer or prospector in the western portion of the temple, while the eastern portion has yielded at depth great quantities of phalli and of every relic believed to be associated with the earliest occupiers.

The oldest “find” in the western half of the building is pronounced by Dr. Budge to be of a period dating from between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries of this era, and other “finds” relate to the same and later periods.