The mint audits the chronicle

Claim (verbatim)

The Kilwa Chronicle survives twice, and the two survivals are three centuries apart: the Arabic Kitab al-Sulwa in a nineteenth-century manuscript edited by S. A. Strong in 1895, and the Portuguese summary Joao de Barros printed in his first Decada da Asia in 1552 from a version obtained while Portugal held the coast it had sacked (Kilwa fell to Almeida in 1505). Where the recensions disagree about the early sultans, an external auditor exists that no chronicler controlled: the mint. Kilwa's rulers struck coins in their own names — Ali b. al-Hasan in the eleventh century, al-Hasan b. Sulaiman, Ibn Battuta's host, in the fourteenth — a corpus catalogued since John Walker and enlarged by the Mtambwe Mkuu hoard. If de Barros abridged an older and better exemplar than the late copy that reached the British Library, the coin-attested rulers should sit more comfortably in his king-list than in the extant Arabic one. Prediction: among Kilwa sultans attested on coinage, the share matchable by name and dynastic position in de Barros' 1552 list will equal or exceed the share matchable in Strong's Arabic text, and at least one coin-attested ruler will be absent from the Arabic recension altogether (primary clause: the de Barros match-share at least equal to the Arabic match-share; the verdict follows it). Kill: the published Kilwa coin corpus — John Walker's study of the sultans' coinage (Numismatic Chronicle, 1936) with the Mtambwe Mkuu hoard publication (Horton and Brown, Azania) — matched ruler by ruler against Strong's edition of the Kitab al-Sulwa (Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1895) and Barros, Decada I (1552).

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: among Kilwa sultans attested on coinage, the share matchable by name and dynastic position in de Barros' 1552 list will equal or exceed the share matchable in Strong's Arabic text, and at least one coin-attested ruler will be absent from the Arabic recension altogether (primary clause: the de Barros match-share at least equal to the Arabic match-share; the verdict follows it).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the published Kilwa coin corpus — John Walker's study of the sultans' coinage (Numismatic Chronicle, 1936) with the Mtambwe Mkuu hoard publication (Horton and Brown, Azania) — matched ruler by ruler against Strong's edition of the Kitab al-Sulwa (Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1895) and Barros, Decada I (1552).

Novelty / leakage triage

anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run

Matching coin-attested sultans to the chronicle is a mature exercise (Walker onward, refreshed by the Mtambwe Mkuu and Songo Mnara finds), and the two recensions have been critically compared as texts (Saad; Delmas); but a head-to-head coin-match-share comparison of de Barros' 1552 list against Strong's Arabic text has not been published as a result, and scholars have in fact disagreed over which recension is more reliable.

• J. Walker, 'The History and Coinage of the Sultans of Kilwa', Numismatic Chronicle (1936)
• H.N. Chittick, 'The "Shirazi" Colonization of East Africa', Journal of African History 6 (1965)
• E. Saad, 'Kilwa Dynastic Historiography: A Critical Study', History in Africa 6 (1979)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.