From 13th to 17th centuries Gedi was a thriving but oddly secretive community hidden away in a jungly setting in what was then a remote nowhere between Malindi and Mombasa of Kenya. The inhabitants, who were Muslim, traded with people from all over the world (beads from Venice, coins from China, iron lamp from India, scissors from Spain were found in the excavations). But nowhere in any written records in any language does Gedi or its people appear. Somehow Gedi interacted with the world without being noticed, no one knows how it managed to escape attention or why it chose to.
Gedi was founded in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century, reached its apogee in the middle of the fifteenth century, and was finally abandoned in the early seventeenth century.
It is possible that Gedi was destroyed by the Mombasa punitive expedition, which was sent against Malindi after the destruction of Mombasa by Nuno da Cunha in April 1529, in which the people of Malindi had cooperated.
If Gedi had been in ruins during the second and the third quarters of the fifteenth century, the period of the Portuguese headquarters at Malindi, it is unlikely to have been mentioned by them.
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