800 AD Chinese explorer, talks of Horn of africa
This is not as ancient as i would have liked but it still shows an interesting discription of life in east africa. With an account of the culture of drinking blood mixed with milk, still present in certain people like the Maasai / masai. it also talks about the dynamic of activity within those early communities. The somali or muslim berbers of some sort were attacking or taking slaves from the nilo-saharan people. supposedly these accounts are taken from a a failed expedition by the Chinese to repel the Muslim armies, a soilder finds his way back to china via this east africa to India route.
Text taken from:- Freeman Grenville: Selected Documents
-Esmond Bradley Martin:History of Malindi
-Duyvendak: China’s discovery of Africa
-Neville Chittick : East Africa and the Orient.
Also called Duan ChengshiN-SOMALIA
Southwest from Fulin (the roman orient), after one traverses the dessert for two thousand miles is a country called Ma-lin. (is not Malindi) Its people are black and their nature is fierce. The land is pestilentious and has no herbs, no trees, and no cereals. They feed the horses on dried fish, the people eat hu-mang (the Persian date). They are not ashamed of debauching the wives of their fathers or chiefs, they are the worst of all barbarians. In the seventh moon they rest completely(Ramadan). They then do not send out nor receive any trade and sit drinking all night long.
BERBERA
The land of Po-pa-li (Bobali) is in the south-western Ocean. The people do not eat any of the five grains but they eat meat: more frequently even they pick a vein of one of their oxen, mix the blood with milk and eat it raw. They have no clothes, but they wrap around their waists a sheep’s skin which hangs down and covers them. Their women are clean and well behaved. The people of the country themselves kidnap them and sell them to strangers at prices many times more then they would fetch at home. The products of the country are ivory and “a-muat”(ambergris)(he is the first Chinese to mention it).
When Possu (Persian) traders wish to enter this country, they gather about them several thousand men and present them with strips of cloth. All, whether old or young, draw blood and swear an oath, and then only do they trade their goods.
From of old this country has not been subject to any foreign power. In fighting they use elephant’s tusks, ribs, and wild buffaloes’ horns as spears, and they have cuirasses and bows and arrows. They have twenty myriads of foot soldiers. The Arabs are continually making raids on them.
Interesting posts, but there are a couple of inaccuracies in them.
First, the quote above that goes “…after one traverses the dessert for two thousand miles is a country called Ma-lin” is not a reference to Northern Somalia. That area, which was then known as Berbera after its Berber inhabitants, is explicitly referred to elsewhere in the Chinese text as Po-pa-li/Bo-ba-li/Pa-po-li. As Robert Collins explains, “Ma-lin” is an altogether separate territory and a reference to “Melinda” (Malindi in modern-day Kenya):
“”The Hsin T’ang-shu; as I said, reproduces part of the notice on Berbera of the Yu-yang-tsa-tsu. It also has a short entry on another African territory, which so far as I am aware has not been noticed in this connection, viz. on Ma-lin, that is Melinda. The text says: “South-west from Fu-lin (that is the country of the Roman Orient of which ‘Ch’ih-san, Alexandria, is indicated as the western border), after one traverses the desert for two thousand miles is a country called Ma-lin. It is the old P’osa. Its people are black and their nature fierce…””
http://books.google.ca/books?id=K6WnsJsaFYYC&pg=PA6#v=onepage&q&f=false
Secondly, the Arabs did make raids on the inhabitants of Berbera, but those raids weren’t particularly successful because the Berbers there had a 200,000 strong army per that ancient Chinese source.
Thirdly, the bleeding of cattle is not a Maasai or Nilotic custom. It is originally a Cushitic custom that, among many others, was later adopted by the Maasai and other neighboring Nilotes who have had a long period of contact with Cushitic peoples (including lots of largely unidirectional genetic exchanges).
“Many of these peoples have intermarried with their Cushitic (Hamitic) neighbors and may have learned pastoralism from them. Some Nilotes have adopted the Cushitic custom of drinking fresh cow’s blood as well as the Cushitic aversion to fish and the custom of extracting the two lower incisor teeth.”
http://books.google.ca/books?id=MMc9AAAAIAAJ&q=%22Some+Nilotes+have+adopted+the+Cushitic+custom+of+drinking+%22&dq=%22Some+Nilotes+have+adopted+the+Cushitic+custom+of+drinking+%22&hl=en&ei=BGV4TvazCsa30AHS1MjxDA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CDAQ6AEwAA
Lastly, neither the Maasai nor any other Nilotes were ever known to have inhabited southern Somalia, let alone the northern Somali coast (Bushmen, on the other hand…). No Nilotes are associated with the Spice trade with Persians, Arabs, etc. Only Cushitic peoples and the their Abyssinian neighbors are.
Aside from that, nice effort.
i took that qoute from a site, https://sites.google.com/site/historyofeastafrica/chao-ju-kua
thanks for the input.
Not a problem; I figured the situation was something similar. The quotes just needed to be put into their proper historical context.
There are a couple of other things that I forgot to mention in my previous post.
Duan Chengshi not only indicates that the Berbers of Berbera had a large army, he also mentions that it was strong enough to withstand the raids of the Tazi Empire (the Arabs):
“[it is] an independent country with an infantry of over 200 thousand men, strong enough to defy the powerful Tazi (the Arab Empire).”
http://books.google.ca/books?id=cMCu0eIcDd0C&pg=PA21#v=onepage&q&f=false
Note that the Arabs also raided Arab, Indian, Chinese, etc. settlements, so few were immune in this respect. The difference is that some were able to withstand the raids whereas others weren’t. The Berbers in question fell into the first camp.
The ancient Chinese in general, including Duan Chengshi, also racially distinguished the Berber inhabitants of Berbera/Po-pa-li (the northern Somali coast) from those of Ma-lin (Malindi) in the Zanj coast to the south:
“For the period from the fourth century until the ninth century no contemporary eye-witness account of any part of the East African coast has come down to us; nor has archaeology as yet yielded any evidence for this period from the islands or the coastal plain. Yet we know form the Kwale-ware sites that this must have been the period when Iron Age peoples, almost certainly Bantu in speech, were spreading through the near hinterland of north-eastern Tanzania and eastern Kenya. We also know from events reported outside East Africa that during this period black people called Zanj or Zenj, thought of as living in eastern Africa to the south of the Ethiopians and the Somali were being exported as slaves to all the countries bordering the Indian Ocean. The Umayyad and Abbasid caliphs recruited large numbers of Zenj slaves as soldiers, and, as early as 696, we hear of revolts by Zenj slave soldiers in Iraq. From the opposite end of the Indian Ocean world, there is a reference in a Chinese history of the seventh century to the fact that in 614 ambassadors from Java had presented the Emperor of China with two Seng Chi slaves. During the eighth and ninth centuries Chinese chronicles provide several more references to Seng Chi slaves reaching China from the Hindu kingdom of Sri Vijaya in Java. And there is a Chinese text of the ninth century which actually describes the geography of East Africa, and makes a clear distinction between the Somali (Barbar) pastoralists of Po-pa-li, situated on the northern part of the East African coast, who ate no cereals but lived on the milk and blood of their cattle, and on the other hand the savage blacks of Ma-lin, which is probably to be identified with Malindi on the coast of Kenya.”
http://books.google.ca/books?id=C5qYNSRjqacC&pg=PA192#v=onepage&q&f=false
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