Great Zimbabwe served as a royal palace for the Zimbabwean monarch and would have been used as the seat of political power. One of its most prominent features were the walls, some of which were over five metres high and which were constructed without mortar. Eventually the city was abandoned and fell into ruin.Zimbabwe is the shona name of the ruins.The name contains dzimba, the Shona term for "houses". There are two theories for the etymology of the name. The first proposes that the word is derived from Dzimba-dza-mabwe, translated from the Karanga dialect of Shona as "large houses of stone".A second suggests that Zimbabwe is a contracted form of dzimba-hwe, which means "venerated houses" in the Zezuru dialect of Shona, as usually applied to the houses or graves of chiefs.