Kilwa Kisiwani

Assembled from 9 blocks · 1 evidence · 11 related

1. Story
2. An island settlement off the southern Tanzanian coast that was among the dominant Swahili trading powers of the Indian Ocean between roughly the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, minting its own coinage from the eleventh to fourteenth centuries. Its Great Mosque, plausibly founded in the tenth century with major construction phases in the eleventh or twelfth and again in the thirteenth, is the oldest standing mosque on the East African coast. Kilwa is the archaeological demonstration that Islam on the Swahili coast arrived and consolidated through commerce and local elite adoption rather than conquest. Inscribed by UNESCO, with Songo Mnara, in 1981.
3. Knowledge
4. Kilwa Kisiwani
5. Connections
6. Indian Ocean maritime trade network
7. Construction phases of the Great Mosque at Kilwa Kisiwani
8. Evidence
9. From the 13th to the 16th century Kilwa Kisiwani and Songo Mnara were central to Indian Ocean trade and coastal Swahili culture and prominent in the Islamisation of East Africa; Kilwa minted its own currency from the 11th to 14th centuries, and its Great Mosque is the oldest standing mosque on the East African coast.