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but it changed it in more than material ways. Because the ocean winds blow north-east for one half of the year and south-west for the other, this was a trade with a distinct annual rhythm, and merchants from the Gulf and India usually had to spend months waiting for the wind home. In these months they inevitably mixed closely with the local African community – and transformed it. In due course, thanks to these Arab traders, the coastal towns were converted to Islam, and Arabic and Persian words were absorbed into the local Bantu language to create a new lingua franca – Swahili. The result was a remarkable cultural community running through the coastal cities from Somalia to Tanzania, from Mogadishu to Kilwa – a kind of Swahili strip, Islamic in faith and cosmopolitan in outlook. But the core of Swahili culture remains unquestionably African, as the historian Professor Bertram Mapunda explains:

We know that when these immigrants came to East Africa they came because one of the attractions was trade: it was because of these local people who had attracted them that the Swahili culture was later born. So it’s not true to say ‘This is something that was brought from outside,’ when we know that there were local people here who had contributed the starting point, and, from there, people from outside came and were interested.

The last piece of pottery makes this point very well. It’s a brown fragment of fired clay with bold raised decoration. It is pottery made for cooking and everyday use; the clay is local and the manufacture is distinctly African. It shows that the African inhabitants of Kilwa, while happily enjoying and collecting foreign pottery, continued, as people always do, to cook in their own traditional way with their own traditional pots. Pots like this one also tell us that the Africans themselves were sailing and trading across the Indian Ocean, because fragments like these have been found in ports across the Middle East. We know from other sources that African merchants traded to India and that cities of the Swahili strip were sending their own envoys to the Chinese court. Seas usually unite more than they separate the peoples who live on their shores. Like the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean has created a huge interconnected world, where local history is always likely to be intercontinental.

PART THIRTEEN

Status Symbols

AD 1100–1500

Despite the Black Death and the chaos caused by the Mongol invasions of Asia and Europe, these four centuries were also a period of great learning and cultural achievement. Technological advances led to the creation of magnificent objects used by the wealthy to reflect their status and to show off their taste and intellect. In Mongol-ruled China iconic ‘blue and white’ porcelain was first developed and went on to be desired across the globe. In Ife, one of the first city-states to arise in West Africa, court artists created lifelike sculptures using sophisticated bronze-working techniques. Within the Islamic world, arts and sciences flourished, and European scholars benefited from Islamic advances in astronomy, maths and even chess, which became a pastime of the elite across all of Europe. In the pre-Columbian Caribbean a ruler’s status was closely tied to their relationship with the ritual thrones that gave access to the world of the spirits.

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The Lewis Chessmen

Walrus ivory and whales’ teeth chessmen, probably made in Norway, found on the Isle of Lewis, Scotland

AD 1150–1200

In 1972 the world was gripped by one of the great battles of the Cold War. It was fought in Iceland and it was a chess match – between the American Bobby Fischer and the Russian Boris Spassky.

At the time, Fischer declared that ‘Chess is war on a board,’ and at that moment in history it certainly seemed like it. But then it always has; if all games are to some degree surrogates for violence and war, no game so closely compares to a set-piece battle as chess. Two opposing armies line up to march across the board, foot-soldier pawns in front, officers behind. Every chess-set