<P> J. Theodore Bent undertook a season at Zimbabwe with Cecil Rhodes's patronage and funding from the Royal Geographical Society and the British Association for the Advancement of Science . This, and other excavations undertaken for Rhodes, resulted in a book publication that introduced the ruins to English readers . Bent had no formal archaeological training, but had travelled very widely in Arabia, Greece and Asia Minor . He was aided by the expert cartographer and surveyor E.W.M. Swan, who also visited and surveyed a host of related stone ruins nearby . Bent stated in the first edition of his book The Ruined Cities of Mashonaland (1892) that the ruins revealed either the Phoenicians or the Arabs as builders, and he favoured the possibility of great antiquity for the fortress . By the third edition of his book (1902) he was more specific, with his primary theory being "a Semitic race and of Arabian origin" of "strongly commercial" traders living within a client African city . </P> <P> Other theories on the origin of the ruins, among both white settlers and academics, took a common view that the original buildings were probably not made by local Bantu peoples . Bent indulged these theories alongside his Arab theory, to the point where his more tenuous theories had become somewhat discredited by the 1910s . </P> <P> The construction of Great Zimbabwe is also claimed by the Lemba . Members of this ethnic group speak the Bantu languages spoken by their geographic neighbours and resemble them physically, but they have some religious practices and beliefs similar to those in Judaism and Islam, which they claim were transmitted by oral tradition. They have a tradition of ancient Jewish or South Arabian descent through their male line, which is supported by recent DNA studies, and female ancestry derived from the Karanga subgroup of the Shona . </P> <P> The Lemba claim was also reported by a William Bolts (in 1777, to the Austrian Habsburg authorities), and by an A.A. Anderson (writing about his travels north of the Limpopo River in the 19th century). Both explorers were told that the stone edifices and the gold mines were constructed by a people known as the BaLemba . </P>

What did the city of great zimbabwe become known for