Taken from: The Indian Ocean and Swahili Coast coins, international networks and local developments. By John Perkins 2015.

 

The towns of the Swahili Coast minted and used their own coins, probably from the mid-9th century and in some places possibly up to the 15th century. When the Swahili Coast started minting its own coinage, the use of coinage was already well established in the Indian Ocean world and there were clear models for people on the Swahili Coast to adopt or adapt.

A special mention of the local coinage of Sindh. These Islamic coins are generally referred to as the coins of the Amirs of Sindh, and their dating is from c. 810 to post-900. They are made of silver and are minute, consistently at around 0.5 grams. The similarities and possible links, to the coinage of the Swahili Coast (Shanga coins) is found in trade between South Asia and East Africa early in this period as shown by finds at Shanga and also a claim found along the Swahili Coast in oral traditions that Wadibuli, people of Daybul, or Debal, or Banbhore in Sindh, founded towns here.

The Swahili Coast coinage bears an Arabic inscription. They are known in: silver, copper, and gold. The silver and copper coins all share common core traits. Three gold coins are known and very different, and all carry the name of al-Hasan ibn Sulaiman, who ruled in the 1330s. They carry a date: 72- or 73- AH (Brown), and cover a range from 1320–1338 AD. (720AH would be 1320AD) They also name the mint as Kilwa. As they are all of one ruler—and an isolated appearance—and with different design from the coinage in silver and copper, they are difficult to interpret. The silver coins are very small, and in comparison, the copper coins are much larger. The silver coins range from 7 to 12 mm in size, while the copper coins range between 19 to 25 mm in size. They carry an Arabic inscription: the name of what is believed to be the ruler, and the reverse carried the reference to Allah. All these traits remained relatively unchanged from the 9th century up until the coinage ended—probably in the late 14th century.

There is no known local East African source of silver so the silver needed to be imported, possibly by melting down foreign coins.

 

(A starting point to dating) is a XRF analysis (= X-ray Fluorescence an analytical technique that uses the interaction of X-rays with a material to determine its elemental composition). The results give two groups, separated by their metal composition, with gradual changes from ruler to ruler within each group. This led me postulate two separate minting periods for the coins of Kilwa, possibly separated by 100 years or more, but with the continued use of the earlier coins until the end of the coinage. Further, the Nasir ad-Dunya-type coins were surprisingly coherent as a group of coins.

 

Shanga Silver:

Two rulers are known from the Shanga coins: Muhammad (left) and Abdallah (right) on the picture. All coins taken together suggest a minting tradition from the second half of the 9th century up until the 12th century. The coins are minute, between 8–9 mm in diameter with weights of 0.11 to 0.27 grams. They bear the legends “Muhammad/trusts in Allah” and “The kingdom is Allah’s/and in Him trusts Abd Allah.”

Zanzibar Copper:

Brown ascribes these coins to the 12th–14th centuries. Coins of three rulers are ascribed to Zanzibar, owing to the prevalence of the finds there. These weigh from 2.5–3.0 grams and have a diameter of 20–23 mm.67

Names known from coins:

-al-Hasan ibn Ali (Coins of al-Hasan b. ‘Ali may have been struck both in Kilwa and Zanzibar. If so, fulus of the two different mints cannot presently be distinguished.)

-Note: The Arabic version of the Kilwa chronicle mentions one more sultan: al - Ḥasan ibn Abi Bakr as Sultan of Zanzibar c . 1450. He did not mint coins.

 

Distribution of Swahili Coast coins and foreign imports:

From the earliest times onward the Swahili coinage, though large, seems to have been very limited in its distribution. The coins are found at various sites on the Swahili Coast: the silver coins are found nearly exclusively on the northern Kenyan coast, Zanzibar, and Pemba, with only a few examples having been found at Kilwa and Mafia; the copper coins are found virtually exclusively on the central Tanzanian coast and on Zanzibar, with only a few examples being found at Shanga and Manda. It is interesting to note that apart from two Chinese coins, no coins were found at the important Kenyan site of Gedi.

 

The above suggests that coinage on the Swahili Coast was first minted on the northern Kenyan coast at sites such as Shanga and Manda from the second half of the 9th century. A silver coinage clearly inspired by, or related to, the original coinage was then minted further south, perhaps on Pemba and/or Zanzibar, probably in the 10th and 11th centuries, while at the same time it appears that the coinage at Shanga became cruder and probably stopped being minted in the 12th century. The second silver coinage was in turn replaced by a copper coinage around the end of the 11th or in the early 12th century at Kilwa and/or Mafia, which in turn inspired a minor copper coinage of Zanzibar from around the 12th century. The evidence from Songo Mnara would suggest that all known copper coins believed to come from Kilwa, including the Nasir ad-Dunya coins, were already in circulation towards the end of the 14th century.

 

Outside the Swahili Coast, some examples come from Mogadishu and one from Great Zimbabwe. There is one Kilwa-type coin, which was found along with some Nasir ad-Dunya coins (found so numerously at Kilwa and Mafia) at al-Balid, ancient al-Mansura, in Dhufar province in Oman.

 

Foreign coins found on the Swahili Coast: just over 300 foreign coins were found in Kenya and Tanzania compared with the at least 20,000 local Swahili Coast coins. These foreign coins consist of seven Indian Chola coins, approximately 70 non-East African Islamic copper, silver, and gold coins, and about 250 Chinese coins.

 

Kilwa Copper:

About 13,000 coins known as ascribed to the sultans of Kilwa. They were likely minted between the late 11th or early 12th century up until the 14th century, probably with a break of about 100 years without the minting of new coins. They probably stayed in use after that. Kilwa coins did not aim for a precise weight, but this might be due to the far from perfect condition of the coins.

Well-preserved coins range from 19–22 mm in diameter, up to 24 or even 25 mm.

 

Note on Gedi as the place without coins: other things must have taken the place of coins. As lots of cowries were found in storage at Gedi they are often given as alternative. Beads of all sorts are another form of currency. (Beads were found together with a hoard of coins in Songo Mnara). And Ibn Battuta writes that in Kilwa ivory was used for big presents.

 

Taken from: Kilwa type coins from Songo Mnara, Tanzania: New Finds and Chronological Implications by Jeffrey Fleisher, Stephanie Wynne Jones 2010

 

Ali b al Hasan late 11^th century AD

Da’ud b al Hasan late 11^th -early 12^th century AD

Al Hasan b Talut 1285-1302AD

Sulaiman b al Hasan 1302-1316AD

Da’ud b Sulaiman 1316-1318AD+1341-1364AD

Al Hasan b Sulaiman 1320-1334AD

Sulaiman b al Husain 1372-1374AD

Muhammad b Sulaiman 1421-1430AD

Examples of all these coins are found on my webpage on the Kilwa Chronicle.

 

Taken from: Coins in Context: Local Economy, Value and Practice on the East African Swahili Coast by:

Stephanie Wynne-Jones & Jefrey Fleisher.

 

Thousands of Kilwa-type coins, mostly of copper, have been found at the main site of Kilwa Kisiwani, but also on the nearby island of Mafia — where towns related to the Kilwa dynasties existed — and now at Songo Mnara. Despite the large numbers of coins produced at Kilwa, only a few have been found at more distant coastal towns. Excavations over many years at Shanga on the northern Kenya coast, for example, produced 64 coins in total, two of which were of Kilwa types (Horton 1996, 368).

 

The distribution of Kilwa coins of diferent metals suggests three possible spheres of distribution and use: copper in the Kilwa region, silver along the coastal corridor and gold used in international exchanges. Copper coins are known generally from Kilwa itself with only a few examples found outside the immediate Kilwa region, suggesting that these were a regional product used within the sphere dominated by the Kilwa dynasties. A few silver issues of Kilwa type are known primarily through finds on the southern Tanzanian coast at Kilwa and Kisimani Mafia (Chitick 1966, 11) and at

Mtambwe Mkuu on Pemba Island of the northern Tanzanian coast (Horton et al. 1986). The large assemblage of silver coins (2060) from Mtambwe Mkuu is unique but the coins are ‘part of the local Kilwa-type tradition’ (Horton et al. 1986, 118); this find, in particular, suggests a possible coastal distribution that exceeds that of the copper coins. Gold Kilwa-type coins have been identified among chance finds acquired in Zanzibar but of uncertain biography (Brown 1991) and are unique in character, associated with a particularly wealthy and beneficent sultan, al-Hasan ibn Sulaiman, and decorated with his nickname — ‘The Father of Gits’ — that does not exist on the copper coinage.

Taken from: Coins and other Currencies on the Swahili Coast by Stephanie Wynne-Jones and Jeffrey Fleisher. 2016

 

Coins:

-A medium of exchange.

The first important point is that coins were clearly used within Songo Mnara – and by extension Kilwa – as a medium of everyday exchange. The finds are scattered across the spaces of the settlement in every area excavated. Particular concentrations have been found within the Houses. These associations confirm the common use and probable small value of the coins, as well as their circulation among the general populace.

 

-A symbol of authority.

The Songo Mnara coins must all have been deposited during the period of the town’s existence: a maximum of 200 years from the mid-fourteenth to the sixteenth century. The proportions of sultans, however, mirror those retrieved from hoards and from excavations at Kilwa Kisiwani, with the most numerous relating to the eleventh-century sultan Ali ibn al-Hasan, and the fourteenth-century al-Hasan ibn Sulaiman. This can not be because of the continued minting of coins associated with certain rulers because X-ray fluorescence analysis of Kilwa-type coins shows that the alloys associated with certain issues are quite consistent, suggesting a limited period of manufacture (Perkins 2013). It seems more likely, then, that these coins were simply produced in great quantity and continued to circulate for centuries after their initial production.

It can be no coincidence that the most common coin types are linked to the most famous sultans of the Kilwa Chronicle, associated with the founding of the town and the Shirazi dynasty (Ali bin al-Hasan) and with the Mahdali dynasty and the peak of Kilwa’s prosperity (al-Hasan ibn Sulaiman). This suggests that these coins may have derived some of their continuing authority from that of the sultanate, constantly reaffirmed by the circulation of coins belonging to their illustrious ancestors.

 

-An index of symbolic capital

As tokens of the sultan’s authority, coins might also have referenced the skills of craftsmanship and literacy involved in their manufacture and subject to centralised control. Rather than understanding the production of coins as purely a functional requirement for international or local commerce, we need also to recognise them as a demonstration of the ability of the sultan of Kilwa to control particular types of knowledge (Killick 2009) and in the light of the self-image and deliberate reputation-building of the town (Sutton 1993). These knowledge systems include the technologies of manufacture, as well as the public control over and mastery of Arabic text.

 

Note: the last paragraph given above makes it possible to understand why the oldest coins; the silver ones are:

- The coins from the Mtambwe Mkuu hoard are from 7–12 mm in diameter and 0.02–0.20 grams in weight.

- There is no known local East African source of silver so the silver needed to be imported, possibly by melting down foreign coins.

 

Hoards Zanzibar

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No place in East Africa has so many places with medieval and very diverse hoards of coins as Zanzibar. (Chinese, Abbasid, Zanzibar copper). It does show the important place of the island in the intercontinental trade.

 

Taken from: THE ZANZIBAR ARCHAEOLOGICAL SURVEY 1984-5 by Mark Horton; Catherine Clark.

 

MKOKOTONI

Running from the present hospital north east wards to a mangrove creek along the beach is a spread of pottery and beads eroding from the cliff. The deepest stratigraphy lies either side of a modern well 700m from the Hospital. Here there is 2.5m of deposits. Fragments of coral walls are visible in section, and on the plateau above there has been recent stone robbing. At this point we received a report of a recent find of a hoard of copper coins. (Mostly Chinese)

From after 1265AD: Hoard of 29+ bronze coins found in remains of old building, during construction work. The hoard contained at least one bronze coin of the Kilwa Sultanate, 15th century issue.

Tang 2; N. Song 22; S. Song 5 (latest issue 1265). (CRIBB AND D. POTTS 1996)

 

SHUNGI

In December 1945 a hoard of Chinese coins were found at Shungi on the south east tip of the island, about half a mile Inland (Freeman-Grenville 1962:184). 176 coins were recorded by him in the Zanzibar museum, although this hoard now appears to have been lost. Some coins never reached the museum, and at least one has recently been seen in private possession at Kajengwa where the person who found the coins lived. The hoard itself contains coins from 13 emperors dating from Kao Tsung (618 -627 A.D.)to Tu Tsung(1265-75 A.D.).

From after 1265: Kajengwa, Zanzibar. Hoard of about 250 bronze coins, found during agricultural work, buried in hole in coral bank of which 176 coins recorded. Tang 4; N. Song 108; S. song 56 (latest issue 1265-75) (CRIBB AND D. POTTS 1996).

 

UNGUJA UKUU

This site has long been recognised as one of the earliest sites on the East African Coast. In 1865 a hoard of Abbasid gold coins were discovered in a mound in the centre of the site (Chittick 1966). The site was turned over at the time in the hope of finding further treasure, but nothing came to light. The only recorded coin from this hoard was dated 797 A.D. Various historians and archaeologists have visited the site, and unreported excavations have taken place.

 

UROA

The modern village lies along an exposed beach on the east coast of the island. In 1943 a hoard of over 3000 copper alloy coins was made here, about 50m from the modern school. These coins were from the Kilwa type but also recorded what have been presumed to be several Zanzibar rulers. Other coins were of Nasir al-Dunya, dating to the fourteenth century.

Of a local Zanzibar coinage in the fifteenth century. The Uroa hoard, of 3,204 pieces, and a number of smaller hoards showed that in the fifteenth century three rulers unrecorded in dynastic lists made local issues: Ahmad ibn al-Husain, Ishaq ibn Hasan and al-Hasan ibn 'Ali. While they can be dated from the presence of a small proportion of fifteenth-century Kilwa coins they are not found outside the island. (Freeman-Grenville 1958).

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Mogadishu Coins and Sultans.

 

1 Abu Bakr b. Fakhr ad Din fl 1250 Founder of the Mogadishu Sultanate's first ruling house, the Fakr ad-Din dynasty.

2 Abu Bakr b. Muhammad fl 1322-1323.

3 Sheikh Abu Bakr bin Omar bin Othman bin Al-Hajj Ismail (d1327AD) was visited by Ibn Battuta.

4 Al-Rahman b. al-Musa'id probably 14th century. Has the Holy War on his coins inscribed.

5 Yusuf b. Sa'id fl 14th century

6 Sultan Muhammad (al-Mujahid) fl somewhere in the two last decades of the 14th century. Has the Holy War on his coins inscribed.

7 Rasul b. 'Ali fl 14th century

8 Yusuf b. Abi Bakr fl 14th century

9 Malik b. Sa'd unknown dates, style of 14th century

10 Zubayr b. 'Umar fl 15th century "

11 'Ali b. Yusuf, d1432 AD, (0.70g), with title al-muqtafi billah: The best-known Sultan; mentioned by 4 authors.

12 Muhammad al-'Adil al-Zaffir, (end 15^th century?)

13 Sultan 'Umar fl end 15th century (?)

14 Anonymous, inscribed al-sultaniya al-mujahidiya, 15th century or later. Has an inscription: The Sultanate which wages the Holy War.