{"it":{"id":"AFR-004","kind":"site","sub":"Africa outside Egypt","name":"Kilwa Kisiwani","place":"Tanzania","lat":-8.96,"lon":39.513,"date":"Many of the island's freshwater wells have been used for over a millennium.","mat":"clay;limestone","nfacts":5,"tags":["Africa"],"sum":"Some of the freshwater wells on Kilwa Kisiwani, a small island off southern Tanzania, have been drawn from for more than a thousand years.","src":[332],"nsrc":2,"why":"A small Tanzanian island that minted its own coins and ruled a rich Indian Ocean trade for centuries.","yt":"Kilwa minted its own coins. What kept it rich for so long?","rel":["AFR-003"],"hook":"Kilwa Kisiwani, a small Tanzanian island, once minted its own coins and dazzled Ibn Battouta."},"S":{"332":["Wikipedia: Kilwa Kisiwani","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilwa_Kisiwani"]},"rec":{"id":"AFR-004","alias":[],"ms":[{"f":"Kilwa Kisiwani Island lies","a":"orientation (deg)","v":"9","u":"degrees","o":"Kilwa Kisiwani Island lies 9 degrees south of the equator.","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kilwa_Kisiwani&oldid=1381968426","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1381968426 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M0585"},{"f":"The island is","a":"circumference","v":"23","u":"km","o":"The island is 23 km in circumference, and the total land area is 12 sqkm.","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kilwa_Kisiwani&oldid=1381968426","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1381968426 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M0586"},{"f":"site chronology","a":"dating (as stated)","v":"Recent excavations and Carbon-14 dating of the site have confirmed its founding at the start","u":"","o":"Recent excavations and Carbon-14 dating of the site have confirmed its founding at the start of the 9th century CE.","unc":"","by":"per cited source","yr":"","m":"documentary: auto-extracted sentence","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kilwa_Kisiwani&oldid=1381968426","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1381968426 (tertiary)","t":"INTERPRETATION","n":"","id":"M0587"},{"f":"site chronology","a":"dating (as stated)","v":"Potentially dating from 1300-1600 (more precise radiocarbon dating techniques were unable to","u":"","o":"Potentially dating from 1300-1600 (more precise radiocarbon dating techniques were unable to be completed in time for these samples), analysis was completed of the individuals' mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), autosomal DNA, Y chromosome DNA, and X chromosome DNA.","unc":"","by":"per cited source","yr":"","m":"documentary: auto-extracted sentence","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kilwa_Kisiwani&oldid=1381968426","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1381968426 (tertiary)","t":"INTERPRETATION","n":"","id":"M0588"},{"f":"The rooms were about","a":"height","v":"3","u":"meters","o":"The rooms were about 3 meters tall.","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kilwa_Kisiwani&oldid=1381968426","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1381968426 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M0589"}],"lab":[{"k":"Materials","mat":"site material (as stated in article)","m":"documentary mention (Wikipedia, auto-extracted)","v":"The topsoil that covers the limestone at Kilwa was of poor quality, and so food sources on land came from the areas of higher ground.","by":"no inline ref in article","b":"S","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kilwa_Kisiwani&oldid=1381968426"}],"eng":[],"ori":[],"gaps":[],"dat":[],"aa":[],"ac":[],"me":[],"ci":[],"cq":[],"sd":[],"sub":[],"site":{"age":"Many of the island's freshwater wells have been used for over a millennium.","dm":"[see dating_excerpt; method not extracted]","lab":"NO: inference only (style/context/king list/textual)","weak":"no direct lab result on the structure in our records; date from stylistic, contextual or textual inference","unesco":"https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/144","dens":"CENSUS"},"co":{"lat":"-8.96","lon":"39.5128","src":"Wikidata P625 + UNESCO WHC list XML (agree ≤0.05°)","agree":"agree (inside OSM feature extent)","b":"V","note":"two independent sources agree; max delta 0.0153 deg (~1.70 km)","osm":"https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/11098282"},"src":[{"id":"S0318","t":"no inline ref in article","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kilwa_Kisiwani&oldid=1381968426"},{"id":"S0509","t":"Wikipedia: Kilwa Kisiwani","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilwa_Kisiwani"},{"id":"VAFR-004-3","t":"Ruins of Kilwa Kisiwani and Ruins of Songo Mnara - UNESCO World Heritage Centre","u":"https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/144/"},{"id":null,"t":"Wynne-Jones, Horton, Fleisher and Olsen, “Dating Kilwa Kisiwani: A thousand years of African history in an urban stratigraphy” (White Rose eprint).","u":"https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/id/eprint/167167/1/Wynne_Jones_Horton_Fleisher_and_Olsen_.pdf"},{"id":null,"t":"Wynne-Jones et al., “The Chronology of Kilwa Kisiwani, AD 800–1500,” African Archaeological Review (2022), abstract.","u":"https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10437-022-09476-8"}],"sum":"On a small island off the southern coast of Tanzania, people still draw water from wells that have been in use for more than a thousand years. They belong to Kilwa Kisiwani. Around them lie the coral ruins of a city that once struck its own coins, roofed its mosque with domes set with Chinese porcelain, and so impressed one of the most travelled men of the Middle Ages that he called it one of the most beautiful cities in the world.\n\nThat man was Ibn Battuta, the great traveller, who stopped at Kilwa in 1331 to 1332. To understand why he was impressed, you have to picture the island not as it is now, an island of ruins about 300 kilometres south of Dar es Salaam, but as it was then: a Swahili port city at the hinge of an ocean.\n\nSwahili, in this sense, means the Muslim, African trading culture that grew up along the East African coast. Kilwa and its neighbour Songo Mnara were two of its port cities. UNESCO says Kilwa was lived in from the ninth to the nineteenth century and was richest in the thirteenth and fourteenth. Through its merchants' hands passed a great share of the trade of the Indian Ocean. Out went gold and ivory from the African interior. In came silver, carnelian, a red semi-precious stone, perfumes, Persian faience, which is glazed pottery, and porcelain from China. The gold came from the south, from the lands of Great Zimbabwe on the plateau, which ties this small island to the stone city inland.\n\nIts buildings still show that wealth. They were built of coral and lime mortar, cut from the sea that made the city rich. The Great Mosque, first built in the eleventh century and greatly enlarged in the thirteenth, is roofed entirely with domes and vaults, some of them set with Chinese porcelain. It is the oldest standing mosque on the East African coast, and its thirteenth-century dome was the largest in East Africa until the nineteenth century, a record that stood for roughly six hundred years. Imagine a congregation at prayer under a ceiling studded with bowls that had crossed the ocean from China.\n\nOn the edge of the city stands the palace of Husuni Kubwa, built around 1310 to 1333, with a large octagonal bathing pool. Songo Mnara, nearby, keeps five mosques, a palace complex and some 33 houses. And Kilwa did something few African cities of its time did: it minted its own coins. UNESCO gives the minting period as the eleventh to the fourteenth century. A city that strikes its own money is a city that wants to be recognised as a power in its own right, not just a market for others.\n\nFor a long time, the story of who founded this place was taken from the city's own legend. The Kilwa Chronicle tells of settlers from Shiraz, in modern Iran, who founded seven coastal towns, with a man named Ali buying Kilwa from a local chief for cloth. When the archaeologist Neville Chittick excavated here in the 1960s, he planned his work around that story, and his results were taken to show that the coastal towns descended from Arab and Persian settlers. A tale of foreign founders shaped where the trenches went, and so it shaped what was found.\n\nChittick tried only three radiocarbon dates. Two of them were dismissed as stratigraphically impossible, meaning they did not fit the order of the soil layers. For decades Kilwa's timeline rested on very little.\n\nIn 2016 a team including the archaeologist Wynne-Jones dug a trench 4 metres by 4 metres beside the Great Mosque to fix that. Using Bayesian modelling, a statistical method that combines radiocarbon results with the order of the layers, they worked with 21 calibrated dates. The answer moved the city's rise earlier: the first coral buildings and the first coins now appear at the end of the tenth century, a little before UNESCO's summary. The difference matters because it puts Kilwa's rise ahead of the dynasty stories once used to date it.\n\nThe current scholarly view follows from that. The \"Shirazi myths,\" as Wynne-Jones and her colleagues call them, are now recognised as \"figurative rather than literal.\" They do not mean Persians actually settled here. The towns became Islamic through the conversion of local people, and trade links with the Gulf are as old as settlement on the coast itself. The new dates reveal an episodic local sequence, a city that rose, faltered and rose again on its own ground.\n\nThe decline began in the sixteenth century, when the Portuguese arrived and built a fort on the island. A prison, the Gereza, now stands on its ruins. Between 2004 and 2014 the site was on UNESCO's List of World Heritage in Danger, threatened by the sea, by vegetation and by building.\n\nSo here is a city whose founding legend sent its first excavators looking in the wrong direction for decades. Here is a tiny island that handled the gold trade of the interior and struck its own money. And here is a site that is still mostly unexplored. Much of the old city remains unexcavated, and the newer study points to periods of possible urban decline whose causes are not yet clear. What made Kilwa rise, what made it falter, and what made it rise again are all still partly hidden beneath the coral and the sand.\n\nThere is something unsettling in that. The people of Kilwa told a story about where they came from, and the story was taken literally, and the evidence was read to fit it. When the story was finally set aside, the ground told a different, older tale. If a single founding legend could steer the archaeology of a whole city for so long, how many other origin stories are still deciding where we dig, and what we think we will find there?","qs":["Kilwa minted its own coins. What kept it rich for so long?","The Portuguese built a fort there in the 16th century. How can one outside power end a trading city?","Much of the city is unexcavated. What would you dig first?"],"gal":[{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b0/Great_Mosque_Kilwa_Interior.jpg/1280px-Great_Mosque_Kilwa_Interior.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Great_Mosque_Kilwa_Interior.jpg","title":"Great Mosque Kilwa Interior.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0","by":"Khalidsalewa","cap":"Great Mosque of Kilwa interior arches. Taken July 2021"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ef/Boat_Kilwa_Kisiwani.jpg/1280px-Boat_Kilwa_Kisiwani.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Boat_Kilwa_Kisiwani.jpg","title":"Boat Kilwa Kisiwani.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0","by":"Halidtz","cap":"Boat on Kilwa Kisiwani in Kilwa Masoko Ward, Kilwa District, Lindi Region, UNESCO WHS"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5e/British_Museum_Kilwa_pot_sherds.jpg/1280px-British_Museum_Kilwa_pot_sherds.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:British_Museum_Kilwa_pot_sherds.jpg","title":"British Museum Kilwa pot sherds.jpg","lic":"CC0","licurl":"http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/deed.en","by":"Unknown","cap":"Kilwa pot sherds, Kilwa Kisiwani, Tanzania, about AD 1000 to 1500."},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/51/Gerezani%2C_Kilwa_Kisiwani.jpg/1280px-Gerezani%2C_Kilwa_Kisiwani.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gerezani,_Kilwa_Kisiwani.jpg","title":"Gerezani, Kilwa Kisiwani.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0","by":"Halidtz","cap":"Gerezani, Kilwa Kisiwani, Kilwa Masoko Ward, Kilwa District, Lindi Region. UNESCO WHS"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d3/Great_Mosque_Kilwa_Kisiwani.jpg/1280px-Great_Mosque_Kilwa_Kisiwani.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Great_Mosque_Kilwa_Kisiwani.jpg","title":"Great Mosque Kilwa Kisiwani.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0","by":"Halidtz","cap":"Great Mosque of Kilwa in Kilwa Masoko Ward, Kilwa District, Lindi Region, UNESCO WHS"}]},"img":null,"md":null,"hh":[{"v":"Clay, limestone","h":"Made of","s":[83]}],"hs":{"83":["Wikipedia: Kilwa Kisiwani (and sources cited there)","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilwa_Kisiwani"]},"lh":{"s":"img/h/AFR-004.webp","w":1280,"h":1707,"o":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b0/Great_Mosque_Kilwa_Interior.jpg/1280px-Great_Mosque_Kilwa_Interior.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail"}}