The walls of the sultan’s palace sit silently amid the ruins at Gedi, a historic Swahili site a few miles south of Malindi on the Kenyan coast. Founded in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century, Gedi survived as a thriving trading community until the early seventeenth century. Although it was not a major Swahili town, excavations have uncovered iron lamps from India, scissors from Spain, a Chinese Ming vase, Persian stoneware, and Venetian beads. Some homes had bathrooms with running water and flush toilets, and the streets had drainage gutters. The dated tomb in the cemetery has “1399” incised in its plaster wall. (© Harry Page/Alamy)