The only contemporary writing from the coast around 1200. Kilwa struck copper and, early on, silver coins with a ruler's name on one side and a rhyming pious phrase on the other: those of Ali ibn al-Hasan are the earliest and commonest, and the Mtambwe Mkuu hoard on Pemba, dated by its Fatimid gold to about 1066, holds locally struck silver pieces naming rulers who also appear in the Kilwa Chronicle, which bears on when the Chronicle's founder lived; later issues name sultans of the fourteenth century. The Kufic foundation text of the Kizimkazi mosque on Zanzibar (500 of the Hijra, 1107) is the oldest dated inscription on the coast; at Mogadishu the earliest dated texts belong to the thirteenth century (the Friday mosque's minaret, 1238; the mosque of Fakhr al-Din, 1269); and the first phase of the Great Mosque of Kilwa is placed in the twelfth century by excavation. Together they prove Muslim towns with named rulers and mints on the coast in 1200, which no outside writer shows.
About this source
- Title
- The coins of Kilwa and the early Swahili inscriptions
- Author
- Various
- Author's dates
- the sultans of Kilwa and the mosque builders of the coast, eleventh to fourteenth centuries
- Written
- coins struck from about the eleventh century; dated inscriptions from 1107
- Language
- Arabic
- Covers
- about 1050 to 1350
- Kind
- Inscriptions
No free online catalogue of the Kilwa coins was located in this search; the British Museum and Fitzwilliam collections hold examples, and the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney holds the five Kilwa coins found in the Wessel Islands in 1944 (its object page could not be opened). Readings of the pious phrases and the attribution of some early coins are disputed.
Where to read it
Editions
- H. N. Chittick, Kilwa: an Islamic Trading City on the East African Coast, 2 vols (Nairobi, 1974), vol. 2 for the coins (not freely online)
- M. C. Horton, H. M. Brown and W. A. Oddy, The Mtambwe hoard, Azania 21 (1986), pp. 115 to 123 (not freely online)
- J. Walker, The history and coinage of the sultans of Kilwa, Numismatic Chronicle, 5th series, 16 (1936) (not freely online)
- G. S. P. Freeman-Grenville, Coinage in East Africa before Portuguese times, Numismatic Chronicle, 6th series, 17 (1957) (not freely online)
- E. Cerulli, Somalia: scritti vari editi ed inediti, vol. 1 (Rome, 1957), for the Mogadishu inscriptions (not freely online)