纪录片《大英博物馆世界简史》 060基尔瓦陶器碎片（5）

（单词翻译）

"We used to see these things, these bit of pottery¹, we used to see them on the beaches. And sometimes older people would say to us, ?That's Chinese pottery', and we'd think, ?Yeah, yeah' - we'd heard lots of stories of this kind of thing - you know, flying carpets, princes lost etc. So we took it as just another one of those stories. It was only later on, when you begin to go into museums or hear these persistent² stories of great Chinese armadas that visited East Africa, that the object then becomes something valuable, something that is a signifier of something important - a connection. And then you see the object itself, and you see its completeness, and its weight, and its beauty, and it makes this inescapable - this presence over centuries of a culture as far away as China."

As well as the Chinese porcelain³, there are other bits of pot here that have clearly travelled a long way to get to Kilwa. I'm looking at the moment at a blue piece with black geometric patterning on it, that obviously comes from the Arab world and, when you look at this fragment under the microscope, you can see that the composition of the clay means that it was made in Iraq or Syria. And there are other pieces here that come from Oman or different parts of the Gulf⁴. These fragments alone would be enough to demonstrate the strength and the extent of Kilwa's links with the Islamic Middle East.