one of the abandoned quarters of Mogadishu called Hamar Jabab covered 5km2 , which essentially made it hold around a population of 500.000 people. Thats just 1 quarter, not even El Garweyne was excavated yet crazyy right
Mareeg is often left out of important mention when it was a prominent city , a lot of the old is submerged under sand dunes tho. And it also had villages enjoining it. Local coinages as well.
It really does suck. So much history is buried underneath and hardly any effort is being done. We know for a fact from foreign descriptions that Somali cities were large and developed so its out there.
What kills me is that Bilal ra was half habesha and half arab, yet he is always depicted as a very very dark and west african looking man. He probably looked way more like those arabs than any black person.
Cities throughout history have a tendency to go up and down in population numbers, either be reduced or flourish, be abandoned either completely or in parts. It's no different for Somali cities.
The only aqueduct to speak about is the ancient one near Berbera. Berbera as a town is a unique case because it lacks adequate water , so they had to build a water transportation system that brought water from a resovoir miles away in the interior. As far as i know they never said it was built by a forgotten race at all, when the population and the economy declined it fell into disuse. If you don't have any need to use it, you just don't use it anymore. It is not really complicated.
Just to add to this thread , Zeila and its nearby Island Sa'ad Din have been mentioned by 19th century observers that visited them to have vaulted cisterns and several tanks and a system of cannals/water courses.
It may actually support and explain the early references to water being transported from Zayla to Aden and later Barbars(Somalis) from them settling and building the first cisterns.
I was a bit skeptical first when i first read this: But it could be true.
Somalia was the main supplier of grain and other products to Southern Arabia and Yemen. Which basically dubbed southern-central part of Somalia as the ''Grain Coast supplier of Southern Arabia'' from the mid 1800s
In the medieval times 1500s Northern Somalia used to produce a lot of food of all types, especially various agricultural products and the export of it went to supply Aden and other parts of Arabia to qoute ''A port of much provisions for Aden, and all parts of Arabia'' . So yeah you are right in a way when you say it was the ''breadbasket''
The general region produced so much food that it exported much of it's surplus to regions nearby.
You are wrong, Arabs always look down on black people, even before and after Islam.
You are the definition of confirmation bias.
Do you want more?
