Episode 182 - CLASSIC: View to a Kilwa - The Medieval Swahili Coast

In this re-release of an EARLY classic, take a whirlwind tour of the Swahili coast and the economic and cultural exchanges over land and sea it has enjoyed for more than a thousand years, before zooming in on the very powerful, and very cool, medieval sultanate of Kilwa Kisawani.

Making History: An archaeologist unearths the history of the Swahili States (Bryn Mawr Alumnae Bulletin)

• East Africa: Five Million Years of History (The Public Medievalist)

• Early African History: fire, farming, Egypt, and the Bantu (Quatr.us)

• Collins & Pisarevsky (2004). "Amalgamating eastern Gondwana: The evolution of the Circum-Indian Orogens". Earth-Science Reviews.

• Richard Pankhurst, An Introduction to the Economic History of Ethiopia, (Lalibela House: 1961)

• Recipe for ambergris and eggs

• Early Global Connections: East Africa between Asia, and Mediterranean Europe (Global Middle Ages)

• Kilwa Kisiwani: Medieval Trade Center of Eastern Africa (Thought.Co)

• A lost city reveals the grandeur of medieval African civilization (Gizmodo)

• Chami FA. 2009. Kilwa and the Swahili Towns: Reflections from an archaeological perspective. In: Larsen K, editor. Knowledge, Renewal and Religion: Repositioning and changing ideological and material circumstances among the Swahili on the East African coast. Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitututet.

• Fleisher J, Wynne-Jones S, Steele C, and Welham K. 2012. Geophysical Survey at Kilwa Kisiwani, Tanzania. Journal of African Archaeology 10(2):207-220.

• Pollard E. 2011. Safeguarding Swahili trade in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries: a unique navigational complex in south-east Tanzania. World Archaeology 43(3):458-477.

• Pollard E, Fleisher J, and Wynne-Jones S. 2012. Beyond the Stone Town: Maritime Architecture at Fourteenth–Fifteenth Century Songo Mnara, Tanzania. Journal of Maritime Archaeology 7(1):43-62

• Wynne-Jones S. 2007. Creating urban communities at Kilwa Kisiwani, Tanzania, AD 800-1300. Antiquity 81:368-380.

• Wynne-Jones S. 2013. The public life of the Swahili stonehouse, 14th–15th centuries AD. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 32(4):759-773.

• Wynne-Jones S, and Fleisher J. 2012. Coins in Context: Local Economy, Value and Practice on the East African Swahili Coast. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 22(1):19-36.

• Zhao B. 2012. Global Trade and Swahili Cosmopolitan Material Culture: Chinese-Style Ceramic Shards from Sanje ya Kati and Songo Mnara (Kilwa, Tanzania). Journal of World History 23(1):41-85.

• Stone Towns of the Swahili Coast (Archaeology)

Image: Interior of the Great Mosque on Kilwa Kisawani, Wikimedia Commons