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The Swahili people (Swahili: Waswahili, وَسوَحِيلِ) comprise mainly Bantu, Afro-Arab, and Comorian ethnic groups inhabiting the Swahili coast, an area encompassing the East African coast across southern Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania, and northern Mozambique, and various archipelagos off the coast, such as Zanzibar, Lamu, and the Comoro Islands.
They were written in old Swahili script (Swahili-Arabic alphabet) based on Arabic letters. This is the script found on the earliest gravestones. [46] One of the most travelled people of the ancient world, Moroccan explorer Ibn Battuta, visited Mombasa on his way to Kilwa in 1331. He describes Mombasa as a large island with banana, lemon and ...
Swahili people speak Swahili as their native language, which belongs to the Bantu language family. Graham Connah described Swahili culture as at least partially urban, mercantile, and literate. [1] Swahili culture is the product of the history of the coastal part of the African Great Lakes region.
The Swahili city-states were independent, self-governing urban centres that were located on the Swahili coast of East Africa between the 8th and 16th centuries. These were primarily coastal hubs, including Kilwa, Mombasa and Zanzibar, which prospered due to their advantageous locations along Indian Ocean trade networks, enabling interactions between Africa, the Middle East and Asia.
The "Shirazi era" refers to a mythic origin in the history of Southeast Africa (and especially Tanzania), between the 13th century and 15th century, as recorded in the 15th century Kilwa Chronicle. [1] Many Swahili in the central coastal region claim that their towns were founded by Persians from the Shiraz region in the 13th century. [citation ...
The Kilwa Chronicle is a text, believed to be based on oral tradition, that describes the origins of the Swahili city-state of Kilwa, located on an Indian Ocean island near the East African coast. It recounts the genealogy of the rulers of the Kilwa Sultanate , following the foundation of the city by Persians from Shiraz and Hormuz in the tenth ...
Zanzibaris speak Swahili (Kiswahili), a Bantu language that is extensively spoken in the African Great Lakes region. Swahili is the de facto national and official language of Tanzania. Many local residents also speak Arabic, English, Italian and French. [57] The dialect of Swahili spoken in Zanzibar is called Kiunguja. Kiunguja, which has a ...
The term Nyamwezi is of Swahili origin, and translates as "people of the moon" or "people of the west", the latter being more meaningful to the context. Historically, there have been five ethnic groups, all of which referring to themselves as Wanyamwezi to outsiders: Kimbu , Konongo , Nyamwezi, Sukuma , and Sumbwa , who were never united.