Lack of great monuments in SSA

[Idilinaa]

Africa was very rich and they still didn’t have anything to compete with other great nations of the world.

There are monumental buildings but a lot of it is in ruined or abandoned.

Outside of Somalia/East African coast and North Africa, the rest of Africa didn't have complex long distance trade networks that would draw in this level wealth to finance it and thats owed to their geography that made them more isolated and prevented movement.

They had resource wealth in terms of gold but not trade wealth. they also didn't have the building materials that would be durable enough. Why do you think they used adobe and clay in some of those buildings in your first post?
It's much more preferable to use solid stone if it was avaliable, because clay, rammed earth/tatch work has to be constantly reinforced which is extremely labour intensive.

Yeah these are nice but they are not on the same tier as the ones i have displayed.

Those you showed are just built on top of mountains where as the forts i've shown were built on flat landscapes.

 

[Internet Nomad]

Where are these monuments? If you look through somali history we hear so much about amazing structures but we have very little now.

 

[Idilinaa]

Where are these monuments? If you look through somali history we hear so much about amazing structures but we have very little now.

Is it unfathomable that things can be built and disappear? Either through decay after being abandoned for some time or through destruction.

Plus i am almost sure that some of those monuments and buildings described there about Mogadishu is buried under sand dunes.

It also collaborated by archeology with many abandoned ruins, even a whole city in Mareeg with villages surounding it and 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

It would be cool to see if some could be reconstructed, if we manage to find them.

Do we have anything to show for it?

What does this even mean? They have the ruins and building foundations and then descriptions that paint the picture.

It's not uncommon for most historic buildings and monuments around the world to not survive fully intact, especially depending on the materials used to build them. It's not a Somali history theme.

I mentioned the towers of Berbera in the other post that was still standing in the 1800s, because they didn't survive intact does that mean they never existed?

 

[berberaboy66]

Lack of respect for architecture definitely has something to do with it. Whenever a city gets taken over they raze everything to the ground

 

[SixthAbdi]

There are monumental buildings but a lot of it is in ruined or abandoned.

Outside of Somalia/East African coast and North Africa, the rest of Africa didn't have complex long distance trade networks that would draw in this level wealth to finance it and thats owed to their geography that made them more isolated and prevented movement.

They had resource wealth in terms of gold but not trade wealth. they also didn't have the building materials that would be durable enough. Why do you think they used adobe and clay in some of those buildings in your first post?
It's much more preferable to use solid stone if it was avaliable, because clay, rammed earth/tatch work has to be constantly reinforced which is extremely labour intensive.



Those you showed are just built on top of mountains where as the forts i've shown were built on flat landscapes.

Where is that last image from?

 

[Idilinaa]

Where is that last image from?

Southern Somalia, it was one of the abandoned medieval buildings on the coast. Picture was taken by Neville Chittick in 1969

An Archaeological Reconnaissance of the Southern Somali Coast​

https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/An-Archaeological-Reconnaissance-of-the-Southern-Chittick/24c35294cb017ea95dcb23f80cca1855f1ee8976

Somalia, and especially the southern part of the country, has been sadly neglected from an archaeological point of view. This article describes the results of a preliminary survey of the southern Somali coast, from Mogadishu to near the Kenya border.

 

[Idilinaa]

Lack of respect for architecture definitely has something to do with it. Whenever a city gets taken over they raze everything to the ground

It was the same for Europe. Cities were routinely sacked. Cities were destroyed or abandoned and revived all the time throughout history.

Spoke about this bit with an example in another thread

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.

Constantinople for example was a big city with a population of 500.00 but if you visited it before its fall to the Ottomans in 1453 you would have seen it had become an agglomeration of villages, it being abandoned and large parts of it turned into grassland and cow pasture

Most of the the structures, monuments and buildings crumbled or decayed, abandoned or destroyed.


Rather than it falling, the Ottomans did more to revive it when it was dying over centuries.