section_path: History/Swahili trade period
section_name: Swahili trade period
paragraph_text: Swahili trade period
  
  The Kenyan coast had served as host to communities of ironworkers and Bantu subsistence farmers, hunters, and fishers who supported the economy with agriculture, fishing, metal production, and trade with foreign countries. These communities formed the earliest city-states in the region, which were collectively known as Azania.
  
  By the 1st century CE, many of the city-states such as Mombasa, Malindi, and Zanzibar began to establish trading relations with Arabs. This led to the increased economic growth of the Swahili states, the introduction of Islam, Arabic influences on the Swahili Bantu language, cultural diffusion, as well as the Swahili city-states becoming members of a larger trade network. Many historians had long believed that the city-states were established by Arab or Persian traders, but archaeological evidence has led scholars to recognise the city-states as an indigenous development which, though subjected to foreign influence due to trade, retained a Bantu cultural core.
  
  DNA evidence has found that the Swahili people were of mixed African and Asian (particularly Persian) ancestry. The Kilwa Sultanate was a medieval sultanate centred at Kilwa, in modern-day Tanzania. At its height, its authority stretched over the entire length of the Swahili Coast, including Kenya. Since the 10th century, rulers of Kilwa would go on to build elaborate coral mosques and introduce copper coinage.
  
  Swahili, a Bantu language with Arabic, Persian, and other Middle-Eastern and South Asian loanwords, later developed as a lingua franca for trade between the different peoples. Since the turn of the 20th century, Swahili has adopted numerous loanwords and calques from English, many of them originating during English colonial rule.