it seems likely that slaves already formed one of the chief exports of
East Africa, although their importance was to decline some centuries
later before being revived in the nineteenth century. Ivory remained
one of the main attractions of East Africa's trade through the whole
period.

No material relics of this early coastal culture have been dis-
covered. It is only possible to guess at the nature of the people who
evolved it. Ptolemy, writing in the second century A.D., had nothing
further to add to the account contained in the Periplus, although his
geographical knowledge of the coast extended farther south than did
that of the earlier author. A recent writer has hazarded the sugges-
tion that these early coastal people may have been negroid, ¹ although
it is more likely that they were Hottentots or Hamites. He has based
his thesis on the writings of various Arab geographers of the Middle
Ages. Al Masudi, whose book The Meadows of Gold and the Mines
of Gems was finished in A.D. 947, refers to the same area of trade
which was said by the author of the Periplus to have been flourishing
nine hundred years earlier. The inhabitants of this area, which had
become known as the Land of Zinj, were described by Al Masudi as
being black men, with hanging lips, who worshipped trees and feared
the spirits of the dead. They had a king and a capital city, their
armaments were made of iron and they hunted the elephant in order
to export the ivory. None of the sites referred to by Al Masudi has
yet been located, however. A twelfth-century Arab geographer, Al
Idrisi, gave a similar description of the Land of Zinj, and referred
more explicitly to the existence of towns, mentioning Malindi, Man-
risa (probably Mombasa) and Kilwa by name. Again, at the end of
the thirteenth century, yet another geographer, Dimashqui, also
remarked that the East African coast was inhabited by a black people
who were idolaters.

These isolated references can at best only give rise to surmise about
the history of the coast in the first millennium A.D. They do suggest
that further inquiries should be made into the truth of the legend of
a Shirzai state, stemming from Persia and said to have been founded
in the tenth century A.D. with its headquarters at Kilwa. This
legend, which has gained wide acceptance, is based upon three
abbreviated versions of a much larger work, now lost, the Sunna
al-Kilawia, or Tradition of Kilwa. Of the three shorter versions one

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