Dynastic History|Songo Mnara — The Town Beneath the Sultans

South of Kilwa Kisiwani, on its own island, a town was laid out and lived in during the fifteenth century, within a longer span of use that survey and excavation put between the fourteenth and sixteenth. Songo Mnara was planned. Surveys record something like two dozen blocks of stone houses, six mosques, four cemeteries and three walled open spaces, built in the same coral-and-lime technique as Kilwa's mosque. It is one of the few Swahili sites where the archaeology is mostly about residents rather than rulers.

Excavations directed by Jeffrey Fleisher and Stephanie Wynne-Jones, with field schools in 2009 and 2011, worked the middens and the open ground as well as the buildings. Coins turned up in refuse heaps, and burials were found in the back rooms of one house, which the excavators read as evidence that the building was not a private residence but somewhere business was done. Plant remains, iron and both imported and locally made ceramics fill in what households ate, made and bought.

In 2023 a study led by Esther Brielle, with Fleisher and Wynne-Jones among its authors, published ancient DNA from medieval burials here and at six other coastal sites. It reported that African and Asian ancestries began mixing on this coast around 1000 CE, with maternal lines overwhelmingly African and paternal lines largely Southwest Asian. Results were returned to communities at Songo Mnara, Kilwa Kisiwani and Lamu in meetings held under Muslim protocols for ancestral remains. The authors wrote that claims of foreign origin had themselves been a way coastal elites asserted rank, and cautioned against reading the origin traditions as straightforward history.

The site is reached by boat and stands largely uncleared, its doorways framing coconut palms.

📸 Cover: A doorway in one of the stone houses at Songo Mnara, Ron Van Oers, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO via Wikimedia Commons