Marked Kilwa Kisiwani

SubjectIn outline · lessons being written

The Swahili coast

Along the coast of East Africa, Swahili towns of coral stone traded gold, ivory and enslaved people with Arabia, India and China, shaped by the monsoon winds. Their language and culture are still alive.

Place
Kilwa Kisiwani · Mombasa · Lamu · ZanzibarAfrica
Laid out as
A routeA road, a sea lane or a trade network, followed stop by stop.
Lessons
6 planned, none written yet

The lessons we plan

Titles may change as they are written

  1. Kilwa Kisiwani
  2. Mombasa
  3. Lamu
  4. Zanzibar
  1. IThe monsoon trade
  2. IIStone towns
  3. IIIKilwa and its coins
  4. IVIbn Battuta at Kilwa
  5. VGiraffes for China
  6. VIThe Portuguese arrive

Still to come

The people and objects these lessons will cover

People

  • Ibn Battuta
  • Al-Hasan ibn Sulaiman

Objects

  • The Great Mosque of Kilwa
  • Kilwa coins
  • Chinese porcelain

Where it sits

All of human history, era by era

Early human ancestryOur species and the Old Stone AgeFarming and the New Stone AgeFirst cities and the Bronze AgeThe Iron Age and growing statesThe classical worldAfter the empiresMedieval networks and empiresOceans crossedRevolutions and the first factoriesIndustry, empire and world warThe world since 1945

AD 800 to 1500. Each era is drawn the same width, so the earliest are squeezed: era II alone is over 300,000 years.

Nearby in time and place

This page is an outline. The summary above is a starting point; each lesson, when it is written, will give its sources, its pictures and where historians disagree. Spotted a mistake?