Somalia The History

Somalia is situated in the Horn Of Africa in the coast surrounded by from North Djibouti, Ethiopia and then Kenya.

This part from Wikipedia

Long time ago around - we only know because the greeks wrote it - The Horn Of Afrika was known as the Berber Coast and Azania. reeks went there by boat to buy Myrrh and Frankincense, both highly valuable commodities as they were required for many religious ceremonies and in perfumes, in great demand throughout the Roman Empire, Asia, India and China.

Next written accounts of the region comes from two famous Muslim explorers Ibn Battuta and Zheng He, in the 13th and 14th centuries. Ibn Battuta and Zheng He are both travellers and recorded their travels. Zheng He's sea travels can be found in this website. I have read Dr Menzies book called 1421, and it blew my mind and had to wash my memory about the naval history of the world and start a-new. I asdvise you to buy a copy. Ibn Battuta was a walker really but had did go on ships and junks. He describes Mogadishu in 1331 as "a town of enormous size and its merchants possessed vast resources; they owned large numbers of camels, of which they slaughtered hundreds every day for food, and also had large quantities of sheep." Wonder what they did with the sheep!

This is from Somalia: From The Dawn of Civilization To The Modern Times

Somalians as lots of other nations has a tradition of hospitality. So if you visit a Samalian in Somalia they say, "Somalidda" or "Somedida" which, in fact, meant "milk the domestic animal" in order to present fresh milk to the visitors. So the ancient Greeks and Egyptian understood stupidly as the name for the country. And that is how the country started been called Somalia instead of Puntland. Hmmmm nice init the falk-fucking-lore? But I am reserving my judgement on some of the arguments this auther brings out. You see he brings out unprooved arguments to bring out somethings as facts. Check this for a while:

"'The News Week" the International News Magazine of January 11, 1988 carried a very thrilling article "The Search for Adam and Eve" by John Tierney et al.1 It reported that geneticist Rebecca Cann, formerly of the University of California, Berkeley who is now at the University of Hawaii, and her erstwhile colleague Allan Wilson of the University of California, have proved through their startling mitochondrial DNA research that all human beings in the world are descended from a common single woman ancestress Eve who lived two million years ago in Sub-Saharan Africa."

It is not prooved. It is a hypothesis; "Come out of Africa". Anyway he says this in the third chapter.

"As we have seen earlier, the ancient people inhabiting north-eastern Africa or the Horn of Africa (Somalia) about 50,000 years ago were stone-age hunters. Around 35,000 years ago these stone-age hunters specialised in making "finely retouched leaf-shaped points and scraping equipments (of stone"

So we have proof that peeople lived in that are as far as 50,000 years ago. That is long time ago init? But not as long as our brothers down under the Ausie Abos hmmmm....is it?

Now I have a problem with the following statement.

"The closing millennia of the Paleolithic period were marked by a wet phase in the Sahara, and other followed approximately 5500 and 2500 B.C. The well-watered Sahara was afforded attractions to flora and fauna alike and man followed plants, and other animals to establish himself as a skilled hunter and fisherman along the many Saharan water courses.

From the north came the Caucasoids, ancestors to such modern people as the Berbers and Tuaregs of North Africa and the desert, the Galla, Somali and Beja of the East African "Horn", and most Egyptians of the Pharaonic times."

So if we are to beleave in "Out of Africa" theory. The people who lived in Africa went to middle East and the Europe and became white skinned and blue eyed
around 10,000 to 6,000 ago, and came back to this area because it got wetter. Why? because Caucasoids are ......hmmmm......

Caucasoid:- caucasoid [Adjective] (comparative more caucasoid, superlative most caucasoid)

(anthropology) a member of the racial classification of humanity composed of peoples indigenous to Europe, the Northeast Atlantic, North Africa, West Asia, South Asia and parts of Central Asia, as well as their diaspora in other parts of the world.
Retrieved from "http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/caucasoid"

Bind Moggles! No not really I am trying my best to simplify this as I go along. Sorry if you think it is a bit screwed up. That is me, as I am myself a bit screwed up. And that is why I try to simplify the shite init?

So this tiny little scrawny Asian guy walks to a Canadian Forestry compound and was looking for a job. So he goes to the foreman and says "I want to work as a lumber-jack."

The foreman lookes at the man and says,"Ok do that 100 acres and come back when you finish."

In an hours time the little bugger is back without any sweat. So the foreman goes to have a look and sees the whole 100 acres flattened. He says, "Where the hell did you work before to get experience like that?"

Little man says," Sahara forest".

The foreman goes, "You mean the Sahara Desert?".

Little man surprised, "Is that what they call it now."

Seriously now:

This is very complcated business ...the history is... as everyone looks at it in different ways. Astonished I am; that there is no unique system of recording history all these years of historian boffinhood eh eh eh huh?

Now we go back to the 1 BC, and find this.

"Robin Hallett in "Africa to 1975", however, states that:

"Many centuries later other Caucasoid groups, arriving in East Africa around 1000 B.C., introduced domestic cattle and possibly also cereal cultivation. By the first millennium A.D. these "Ancient Azanians", as some historians have termed them (Azania was the name give by Greek writers to the coast of East Africa), had come to populate most of the Kenyan highlands and adjoining areas in northern Tanzania.""

So we can see that there were people there before but "the pastoral tribes of Galla and Somali did not exist in the area now called Somalia till the end of the first millennium B.C."

Now I am gettig some sense outa this huh! There were tribe of people called Sabeans who comes from Yemen. They migrated to the Horn Of Africa in the 1st century BC or so, due to the lush mountain range of Ethiopia. But most of them lived along the coast trading goods to the Greeks etc. Greeks called them Barberi, to confuse everyone. At the same time there were aboriginal people in the area like the Midgans, Hawaltarits, Azhurans etc.

"Midgan

It is likely that the Midgan, who number about 50,000 people in Somalia today, have perhaps for more than 7000 years, been a very serious and ferocious hunting and catching nomadic tribe. They have been great experts in archery, spear-throwing, and catching all kinds of animals even big animals like leopards, geopards, wild elephants, giraffe, ostrich, and snakes etc. by using traps made of ropes, nets and by making holes or pits in the earth. They have since ancient times not only been catching but killing animals, cleaning and selling their skins and drying their meat. Perhaps, their ancestors used to provide goods to the Puntite merchants of the coasts to be sold to the Egyptians of the Pharaonic period and other trading countries all through the last four thousand years."

"Hawaltiryat

They are builders of graves. (hawal: cemetery and Tiriyat: builders) These were the first Somali people who made concrete development in the land in the hoary past. They used to build small conical pyramids of stone on graves. The graves made by the Hawaltiryats thousand of years ago are still found at many places in Somalia.

Ajhuran

These ancient people were pure specimens of the Somali people. They were very intelligent and skilled in engineering works. They could build wells even in hard rocks, make caves and also draw figures in the caves in the mountains in ancient times. They were very beautiful and good people. Some of their descendents are still living in the central region of Somalia and in the Galla Sadame region of Ethiopia. They have a sense of nobility and beauty. Their ancient techniques of boring wells in the rocks is not lost; we do not know anything about them now. Whenever any archeological place is discovered, the Somali believe that the Ajhurans may have built it. The first President of independent Somalia, Ahmed Abdulla Osman, was an Ajhuran; his sub-tribe was Ogaden.

Galla

In ancient times they lived in southern Somalia and some also lived in north Somalia, but they gradually moved to western and south-western Somalia. They have been pastoralists for the last 3,000 years, and they have inhabited Somali since approximately 2,500 years ago. They have been driven away by the Somali tribes during the last ten centuries to Ethiopia and Kenya. Now they are mostly concentrated in Addis Ababa, Chima and Neghelee regions of Ethiopia and Kenya. The Gallas did not have an advanced civilization. A part of Galla population might have amalgamated with Azuran and Hawaltiryat."

There is a problem here, the people this auther refers to as Gallas is also known as Oromo. And to make life difficult for everyone the wikipedia says this:

"Galla can refer to:

The Ethiopian ethnic group known as the Oromo. (The name Galla is now often considered derogatory.)"

If any of the Oromo people read this please don't kill me!

Now we know simply that the Somalia was known as Puntland by the Egyptians from about 2350 BC to 600 BC. There is recorded history to that effect.

So the Puntites were quite sophisticated society by the end of Egyptian Pharoah rule. The Egypt went down to the Persian empire in 525 BC and 200 years later got taken over by the great Greek king Alexander of Macedonia. Hmmm... now I can see.

""Egypt, occupied by him in 332 B.C., was entrusted to Ptolemy, one of the generals of the victorious army. When the empire of Alexander broke after its founder's death, Ptolemy made himself ruler of an independent kingdom and founded a dynasty that lasted for nearly three hundred years... Gradually, the Red Sea became a regular highway of maritime commerce, by the end of first century B.C., Greek merchants from Egypt had developed a regular trade with India and were beginning to feel their way down the East African coast."1

This shows that they reached the ports of Puntland in the first century B.C."


If you cannot find the links in this blog, I have majority of them filed, Email me!