A Handful of Swahili Coast Letters, 1500–1520
Written by Sanjay Subrahmanyam & Muzaffar Alam
The central purpose of this essay is to present and translate four letters in Arabic, written in these urban centers in the early decades of the sixteenth century. They are, at least to the best of our knowledge, the earliest extant Arabic documents from the region, and they are currently housed in the Portuguese national archives -Arquivo Nacional
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