BENT, JAMES THEODORE

born March 30, 1852, Leeds, Yorkshire, Eng. died May 5, 1897, London British explorer and archaeologist who excavated the ruined Zimbabwe (dzimbahwe; i.e., stone houses, or chiefs' graves) in the land of the Shona people of eastern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe Rhodesia). Bent first travelled to islands of the Aegean and, in 1890, to southern Turkey before he began in 1891 to examine the great Zimbabwe remains that he described in The Ruined Cities of Mashonaland (1892). Later archaeological searches took him to Ethiopia, the Nilotic Sudan, and the southern Arabian peninsula.