Kilwa Kisiwani

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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.