IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 227

On a plateau in the south-east of Zimbabwe, roughly three hundred kilometres south of the capital, Harare, stand the ruins of a city built entirely of stone. It is known as Great Zimbabwe, and its walls, raised without mortar, form the largest ancient structure in Africa south of the Sahara.

The city was the capital of a kingdom ruled by the ancestors of the Shona people, who still form the majority of the country's population. Archaeologists believe the site was first occupied in about the eleventh century and that it grew over the following three hundred years from a modest settlement into a powerful political and commercial centre. Radiocarbon dates obtained in the 1950s and 1960s, together with more recent work, support this chronology. How many people lived there at its height is far less certain: estimates have ranged from a few thousand to as many as eighteen thousand, and no excavation has settled the question.

The ruins are usually divided into three areas. The Hill Complex occupies a rocky outcrop about eighty metres high, its walls following the shapes of the granite boulders. Below it lies the Great Enclosure, the most impressive of the structures, whose outer wall runs for some 250 metres in circumference and rises in places to eleven metres, standing five metres thick at its base. Inside is a conical tower, roughly ten metres tall, built of solid granite with no doorway and no internal space. Its purpose is unknown; suggestions range from a granary to a symbol of royal authority. The third area, the Valley Complex, contains the remains of many smaller houses.

The walls were made from granite obtained locally, split from outcrops and dressed by hand. No mortar was used. The blocks were carefully stacked so that their own weight held them in place, and the courses lean slightly inward, a technique that gives the walls stability. Some blocks weigh several tonnes, and moving them without machinery required both organisation and a large workforce. Construction was not a single operation but a process of rebuilding and extension spread over centuries, so that the walls of the Great Enclosure alone show several distinct phases of work.

The city's wealth rested on cattle and on trade. Gold from the plateau to the west and ivory from the surrounding country were carried to the coast and exchanged for goods brought by ship across the Indian Ocean. Excavations have produced fragments of Chinese porcelain, including celadon, together with Persian ceramics, glass beads from India and thousands of cowrie shells. These imports show that Great Zimbabwe was linked, through ports such as Sofala and Kilwa on the Swahili coast, to networks reaching Arabia, India and China. The scale of this exchange is hard to measure, since almost no written records survive from the period before Portuguese ships reached the coast at the end of the fifteenth century.

Among the most celebrated finds are eight carved soapstone birds, each between thirty and thirty-five centimetres tall. They were discovered on the Hill Complex, set on pillars, and they appear to represent birds of prey, though what they meant to those who made them is debated. They have become national emblems: one appears on the flag of Zimbabwe, and the figures are among the country's most treasured objects.

By about 1450 the city was in decline, and by 1500 it had been abandoned. Several explanations have been offered. The gold trade that had enriched it shifted northwards, towards the Zambezi valley, where the state of the Mutapa rose to prominence. There is also evidence of pressure on the land: analysis of pollen suggests that woodland around the city was cleared for fuel and grazing, and the soil may have been exhausted by generations of cattle. Drought has been proposed as a further factor. Historians disagree about which of these mattered most.

European visitors in the nineteenth century found the ruins hard to reconcile with their assumptions about Africa. The German explorer Carl Mauch, who reached the site in 1871, was convinced that it must have been built by outsiders and attributed it to the Queen of Sheba. Others proposed the Phoenicians or one of the lost tribes of Israel. Such ideas were popularised by Rider Haggard's novel King Solomon's Mines, published in 1885, and they were convenient for a colonial government with no interest in acknowledging an African past of this kind. In 1891 an excavation sponsored by Cecil Rhodes removed large quantities of material, with little record kept of what was found.

Scientific work eventually overturned these theories. In 1905 the archaeologist David Randall-MacIver examined the evidence and concluded that the buildings were African in origin and medieval in date. A more systematic excavation led by Gertrude Caton-Thompson in 1929 reached the same conclusion. For decades afterwards, the authorities discouraged the teaching of these findings, and the dispute over the origins of the ruins continued until independence.

Great Zimbabwe gave its name to the country at independence in 1980; the word is generally translated as 'houses of stone'. The site became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1986 and is now a national monument, and it remains the country's most important archaeological site. Conservation work has included repairing collapsed sections of wall and keeping trees away from the stonework, and limiting the number of visitors is a continuing concern.

Every Greek theatre was built to a similar plan. The audience sat in the theatron, literally the 'place for viewing', a bowl of stepped rows cut into a hillside or raised on stone supports. Below it was a circular floor of beaten earth or stone, the orchestra, where the chorus danced and sang. Behind the orchestra stood the skene, at first a simple hut or tent and later a substantial stone building with a decorated facade. It gave the actors somewhere to change, served as a backdrop for the action and, in some theatres, supported a raised platform. The plays of the fifth century BC were written for these spaces, and the shape of the building was part of their meaning: the chorus moved within the orchestra while the actors performed between it and the skene.

The oldest and most celebrated of these buildings was the Theatre of Dionysus, on the southern slope of the Acropolis in Athens, where the festival in honour of the god was held each spring. Here the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides were first performed, each playwright competing for a prize decided by judges chosen from the citizens. In its earliest form the theatre had wooden seating, but in the fourth century BC it was rebuilt in stone, and a permanent stage building replaced the earlier structure. Its capacity is uncertain; modern estimates range between fifteen and seventeen thousand spectators, and almost nothing of the original seating now survives above ground.

The best preserved of all Greek theatres stands at Epidaurus, in a valley in the north-eastern Peloponnese, beside the sanctuary of Asclepius, the god of healing. Pausanias, writing in the second century AD, attributed its design to Polykleitos the Younger, an architect also known for a circular building in the same sanctuary. The theatre was constructed in the fourth century BC, and its fifty-five rows of seats, divided into two tiers, held an audience of about fourteen thousand. It was carved from the limestone of the surrounding hills, and when it was excavated in the nineteenth century most of the stonework was found still in place.

Visitors have admired the sound at Epidaurus for at least two hundred years. A speaker standing at the centre of the orchestra can be heard, it is said, in the highest row, more than twenty metres above. Guides in the nineteenth century encouraged travellers to drop a coin onto the stone to demonstrate the effect, and the practice continues. The theatre is unroofed and the valley is quiet, which inevitably makes any sound easier to detect. Yet the reputation is not merely a traveller's tale: a whisper, the striking of a match or the tearing of paper really does carry to the back of the cavea, as the seating area is called, even if the sound at that distance is faint.

The most obvious explanation is geometric. Because the rows rise steeply from the orchestra, and because each row forms a continuous curved surface, the seating acts as a set of reflectors, sending sound outwards and upwards rather than letting it disperse. Measurements suggest that the slope of the cavea at Epidaurus is close to the angle that best concentrates sound from the orchestra on the audience. The semicircular plan matters too: it places every spectator at roughly the same distance from the centre, and the building wraps sound around the performing area instead of losing it to the sides.

A more surprising suggestion concerns the material of the seats. In 2007 two researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Nico Declercq and Cindy Dekeyser, published an analysis based on mathematical modelling and on laboratory tests with samples of limestone. They concluded that the rows of seats, with their repeated horizontal steps, act as an acoustic filter. Sound at low frequencies — the range of background noise such as wind or the murmur of a crowd — is partly absorbed or scattered, while the higher frequencies that carry the consonants of speech pass through with little loss. On this view the structure does not amplify the actor's voice so much as clear away the sounds that would mask it, and the effect depends on the particular stone of which the theatre is built.

Not all acousticians accept this account. Critics point out that the filtering effect, measured under controlled conditions, is modest, and that the gain it produces may be smaller than the advantage of simply being in a quiet place with no buildings or traffic to compete with. Measurements are also usually taken while the theatre is empty. When an audience of several thousand is present, clothing and bodies absorb a considerable amount of sound, so the conditions of a real performance are quite unlike those of a demonstration with one speaker and no crowd.

The Romans, who took over the Greek world, altered its theatres to suit their own taste for spectacle, building high stage walls and raising the stage so that the orchestra lost much of its importance. At Epidaurus a Roman stage building was added, and later removed. After centuries of neglect the site was excavated from 1881, and since the middle of the twentieth century the theatre has been used again, for performances of ancient drama in modern Greek and other languages, before audiences that fill the cavea.

Hardly a year passes without a government, a city council or a museum announcing a programme of events to mark an anniversary. A battle, a birth, a law, the founding of an institution: each is offered as an occasion for exhibitions, ceremonies, school projects and television documentaries and, not least, for a request for public money. The sums involved are rarely enormous by the standards of public spending, but they are not trivial, and they are requested on the understanding that commemoration is a public good. My view is that this is sometimes true, but far less often than the number of anniversaries suggests, and only when the money is spent on certain kinds of activity rather than others.

The strongest argument for public funding is educational. An anniversary is a hook on which to hang a story, and it reaches people who would not willingly open a history book. The centenary of the First World War, marked in many countries between 2014 and 2018, produced exhibitions, local research projects and school work on a scale that no ordinary history programme could have matched. The centenary in Britain of the 1918 law that first gave some women the vote prompted a comparable burst of activity. Such occasions can also repair neglect: a person or an event that the textbooks passed over may receive attention because an anniversary makes it convenient.

Those who make the case in economic terms are on weaker ground. It is often said that a major anniversary will bring visitors, fill hotels and pay for itself many times over. Cultural economists have grown cautious about such claims. Visitors to a commemorative exhibition may simply be local people who would have spent their money elsewhere in the same city, and the calculation is easily distorted by counting every visitor as new money. Where a large sum goes on a single ceremony, the evidence that the public gains more than it spent is usually thin.

There is a deeper objection. A calendar of anniversaries is a machine for remembering some things and forgetting others. Round numbers and dramatic moments lend themselves to commemoration, while slow transformations — changes in diet, in work, in the position of women within families — do not. Wars and revolutions attract funds; the history of agriculture does not. The result is a picture of the past shaped by what happens to end in a zero year, and the impression given is that history consists of a series of decisive events rather than the long, uneven processes that most historians now emphasise.

Monuments raise the difficulty in its sharpest form. A statue placed in a public square is not a neutral record; it is a claim to honour, and the honour usually reflects who held power when the money was raised. In 2020 a crowd in Bristol pulled down a statue of a merchant whose wealth had been bound up with the slave trade. My own view is that public money should be committed to a new monument to an individual only after an open process of decision. Where an existing monument has become contentious, the best response is usually explanation — a plaque, a new display, a school project — rather than either silent defence or removal in the night.

The question of cost is really a question about alternatives. A year's commemorative programme in a medium-sized city may cost as much as a small museum needs to keep its doors open for a decade, or as much as an archive requires to catalogue a collection that nobody can currently consult. Money spent on ephemeral events leaves nothing behind but memories and, if it is not carefully recorded, not even those. A useful test for any proposal is whether something lasting will remain when the banners come down: a digitised collection, a permanent exhibition, a piece of research, a building that continues to be used.

Who decides is as important as what is decided. Anniversary programmes are generally chosen in capitals, by officials whose instincts are national and whose reference points are the events that the state already celebrates. Local, regional and minority histories are easily overlooked, and the communities that hold them rarely have the contacts to make their case. A modest fund, openly advertised and awarded in small grants, would probably produce a better return than a single national spectacle, though it would attract far less attention.

There is also the political temptation. Governments like anniversaries because they offer an opportunity to say what the nation is, and to do so at public expense. A commemoration can become a form of advertising, in which difficult episodes are smoothed away and the past is arranged to point towards the present government's priorities. The remedy is not to abandon public commemoration but to insist that it makes room for disagreement. A programme that includes the arguments as well as the achievements is harder to control, and more useful, than one that celebrates without qualification.

So public money for anniversaries is defensible, but on narrower grounds than its advocates usually offer. It should pay for things that outlast the year in question: research, archives, exhibitions, teaching materials and buildings that will still be open afterwards. It should favour many small projects over a few grand ones, and it should be awarded through procedures that are visible and open to application. Above all, it should be spent on commemoration that invites argument rather than on celebration that forbids it. A society that argues about how to remember its past is in better health than one that has stopped noticing the question — and that, rather than any economic calculation, is the best reason for spending a little public money on it.