James Theodore Bent

Bent was born in Leeds in the United Kingdom on 30 March 1852. He was educated first at Malvern Wells, then at Repton School in the United Kingdom. He matriculated, 8 June 1871, from Wadham College Oxford, and graduated with a B.A in 1875. On leaving Oxford he enrolled as a student at Lincoln Inn on the 14th November 1874, and was never called to the bar.

James Bent was gifted with a linguistic talent of learning and speaking various languages quickly, and had a huge interest of travel to especially little known places which he shared with his wife Mabel. She would become his consistent travel companion.

Adam Render the German American hunter, prospector and trader in Southern Africa is recorded as the first white man to see the Ancient Great Zimbabwe Monuments, having come across the ancient city while hunting in 1867. He later guided the German explorer and geographer Karl Mauch for what is dubbed as the first archaeological expedition in Zimbabwe at the Great Zimbabwe Ancient City. They arrived at the Great Zimbabwe Monuments on the 3rd of September 1871, and he took record of his arrival at the city in his diary the account of which he would later publish.

In his account of Great Zimbabwe, Mauch believed that the ruins were the remnants of the lost biblical city of Ophir, described as the origin of the gold given by the Queen Sheba to king Solomon. He did not believe that the structures could have been built by a previous local population similar to those which inhabited the area at the time of excavation. There are a lot of conceptions as to who built the Great Zimbabwe Monuments and today it is very much considered that they have been built by the ancestors of the Shona people between the 11th and 15th centuries.

Karl Mauch’s findings stumbled upon Cecil J Rhodes desk and he took a keen interest of the ancient city that he visited the site in 1890. After arriving at the ruins Rhodes felt and argued that the ruins were built by foreigners and reasserted the arguments of K Mauch. Cecil Rhodes assumed the obligation of proving his hypothesis and therefore formed the Ancient Ruins Company, and called for the now popular archaeologist James Bent from the British Association of Science.

Bent arrived in Mashonaland in 1891 and went to work on a Cecil Rhodes sponsored investigation of the origins of the ancient remains. He examined, measured and made excavations at the Great Zimbabwe site and published an account of his findings in the book “Ruined Cities of Mashonaland“. After his investigations Bent concluded in his book that the items found from the excavations of the ruins proved they were not built by local Africans.

James Bent died on the 5th May 1897 in London.