A lost city reveals the grandeur of medieval African civilization

The Swahili Coast and its culture in the medieval period (roughly the tenth to fifteenth centuries) is relatively little studied, compared with other cultures of its size and influence, though it represents a key node in the development of global trade before the European Age of Discovery. Its history is known in broad strokes, but less is known about how the medieval Swahili lived and how they incorporated influences—from religion to architecture—from across the Indian Ocean world. Fleisher and his codirector, Stephanie Wynne-Jones of the University of York, looked for a site that would allow them to examine such questions in detail. “We had an inkling Songo Mnara would be that site,” he says, “but it has completely exceeded our expectations.”

The boat pulls up to a small sandy beach occupied by a fishing outpost, one of the island’s two small communities, consisting of small thatched huts, among them a woven-palm mosque. A few Swahili men mend nets and clean fish that will be cooked after sundown, once the day’s Ramadan fast ends. A path leads through the huts and down into an opening in a dense wall of mangroves. From there, one wades into mangrove swamp (ankle- or chest-deep, depending on the tides), and when the path rises again, it emerges on a small tent city for the archaeologists, students, and specialists working on the dig, with the ruins of Songo Mnara beyond.

The island seems a remote backwater today, but the sprawling ruins, though overgrown and studded with coconut palms and the stout, distended trunks of baobabs, tell another story—of a significant, wealthy, well-connected town.

PhilDidge wrote:Some of the world's greatest cities during the Middle Ages were on the eastern coast of Africa. Their ornate stone domes and soaring walls, made with ocean corals and painted a brilliant white, were wonders to the traders that visited them from Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. They were the superpowers of the Swahili Coast, and they've long been misunderstood by archaeologists. It's only recently that researchers outside Africa are beginning to appreciate their importance.

Photos by Samir Patel

Throughout the Middle Ages, great civilizations ringed the Indian Ocean. From Egypt, people could travel the Red Sea to reach the ocean, then sail south to Africa, or continue east to the Arab world and India. Then, of course, one could travel over land on the famous Silk Road from India through central Asia and into China. In reality, few people ever made that journey. But many trade goods did, passed from hand to hand in cosmopolitan cities whose cultural diversity would have made places like New York and Sao Paolo look like monocultures. Among those great medieval cities were places like Songo Mnara, a gorgeous and bustling Swahili city built on an island off the coast of Tanzania in the fourteenth century.

At a time when European cities were getting wiped out by plagues and famines, Songo Mnara was thriving.

http://io9.com/the-great-lost-cities-of-africa-1507656099