Questions on Benadiri and Barawe culture

[Som]

It's in the link i shared earlier. Somalis have been in Aden at least from year 500s if we take what Ibn Mujawir wrote and there was whole lot of us there in the 12th and 13th century and many formed an upper class aristocracy and was even prominent ministers in the rasulid yemen.

Somali aristocrats in Medieval Yemen

- Mention of the Somali Qadi (jurist) Muhammad bin Omar bin Musa bin Abdullah Al-Jabarti Al-Zayla’i Al-Qurashi. He was one of the prominent figures of Yemen in the 1200s and was considered as a close advisor to the first Rasulid kings of Yemen and a very influential person, basically a noble I...

www.somalispot.com

There was a pretty sizable population of Somalis in other cities like Zabid, Tihama and some us went to Hijaz. Zabid was particularly an Al-Jabarti center.

This is very interesting. Are those jebertis the ancestors of the Somali origin Yemeni and omani tribes who often invite Somali Daroods to gatherings and stuff like that? I believe I've seen several pics of the MJ Darood sultan going to Oman to hang out with these folks

 

[Som]

Majority of Benadiri/Reer Xamar carry Somali-affiliated haplogroups. Arabian comes in second place with Persian and Indian coming in afterwards.

View attachment 344360

So this means they are paternally Somali which is kinda weird. I thought most Arab migrants were males , this means tons of arab females in mixed with Somalis

 

[Idilinaa]

So this means they are paternally Somali which is kinda weird. I thought most Arab migrants were males , this means tons of arab females in mixed with Somalis

Most Benadiris are paternally and maternally Somali. They do not all have a mix.

The migrants were males, we don't have female maternal lineages in the test results as far as i'm aware.

This is very interesting. Are those jebertis the ancestors of the Somali origin Yemeni and omani tribes who often invite Somali Daroods to gatherings and stuff like that? I believe I've seen several pics of the MJ Darood sultan going to Oman to hang out with these folks

Jabarti doesn't mean Darood. It's was a general regional/nationality name for Somalis, it wasn't tied to a clan or a lineage.

They called Northern -Western Somali Al-Jabartiyaah , it was in refrence originally for those who come from the Guban plains according to Maqrizi ''Burning country'' and the invididuals wearing that nisba are explicitly mentioned in the Rasulid sources to be black non-arabs (as-sudan al-ajam).

No it was a name for North-Western Somalia. It meant the burning country aka guban plains.

We know it was Somalis because they specify the region it was applied to, as our land was called Al-Jabartiyyah.
Islam et sociétés au sud du Sahara -
Jabart originally meant a region in Zayla ' and Ifât , but was later extended to refer to Ethiopian Muslims in general.

Somalis wore it as their nationality throughout the middle ages or nisba,

it later transferred to groups we converted to Islam in the late 18th century who took it as a Muslim identity asal ahan camal, not a regional name and as we abandoned it for Al-Somalliyah.
Miniature Empires: A Historical Dictionary of the Newly
A minority, called the Jabarti , are ethnic Tigreans converted to Islam in the eighteenth century .

Even Richard Burton breifly commented on the names usage in the 19th century: Some travellers make Jabarti or Ghiberti ... others “Strong in the Faith” (El Islam). Bruce applies it to the Moslems of Abyssinia: it is still used, though rarely, by the Somal, who in these times generally designate by it the Sawahili or Negro Moslems.

 

[Zak12]

Hey @Idilinaa I founded these very lengthy and detailed Reddit comments years ago regarding Barawe and its history. He claims it was Swahili and a Bantu enclave though. Thoughts?

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/s/mZxfmSVryL

 

[Idilinaa]

Hey @Idilinaa I founded these very lengthy and detailed Reddit comments years ago regarding Barawe and its history. He claims it was Swahili and a Bantu enclave though. Thoughts?

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/s/mZxfmSVryL

It's an outdated belief.
Read this Bantu, Galla and Somali Migrations in the Horn of Africa: A Reassessment of the Juba/Tana Area https://www.jstor.org/stable/180495

Bantu's never reached Somalia at all, they stopped short at the northern kenyan coast, where Somalis also settled and that Somali population acted as a barrier between us and them.

The Shungwayah is just Somalis from Burgabo migrating down

And when the migrated down and started building walled stone settlements and absorbed the bantus that they came in contact with in the process.

There was 2 waves of Migrations, first one is between 9th and 10th century and the second one is between 16th and 17th century.

This is also shown in Linguisitics. ND is Northern Swahili.

Finally there is no Swahili or Bantu population in Barawa. And the republic he is talking about is the council of elder system, which is called Guurti in Somali culture: He mentions the the situation 1800s, we have internal Qadi Record Books from then that shows the cities population:

Most of the people that spoke Chimwini and the ones that adopted the language were the Urban Tunni people. They not only spoke the language inside the city but also composed a lot of the literature within it and the Tunni were the large bulk of the urban inhabitants, were politically, religiously and economically dominant.

Some excerpts from the research book that uses information from the Barawi Qadi town records from the 1800's: Translocal Connections across the Indian Ocean: Swahili Speaking Networks

The towns and It's inhabitants.
In the last decade of the nineteenth century Barava hosted within its walls a mixed population divided into different groups and clans. The Somali presence in town was conspicuous: out of the 5000 inhabitants, over 2000 belonged to the five sub-clans of the Tunni (called the Shan gamas). These lived in Brava togerther with two other main groups of city dwellers, the Hatimi and Bida, both claiming Arab ancestry, who collectively called themselves ''Waantu wa Miini or ''People of Brava'' and formed the waungwana urban class

These Tunnis, who lived permanently in the town, had been fully urbanized for several generations, acquiring in the course of time the typical outlook, garb and pursuits of city dwellers.

By the nineteenth century Brava was governed internally by a council of seven elders (called Toddoba Tol, i.e. “seven lineages” in Somali), five representing the groups of the Tunni and the other two the Hatimi and the Bida. The preponderance of Somali members in the governing council reflected not so much the number of Tunni living in the town


Most important part:

Two factors, in particular, highlight the urbanized Tunni's sense of belonging to Brava: before the Italian authorities ordered the judges to record the clan and sub-clan of the parties of each legal case, in some acts the parties described themselves simply as ''Somalis of Brava''.The second factor was that most urbanized Tunni learnt to speak the local Bantu dialect, so much so that in the early twentieth century Nurbin Haji Abdulqadir bin Abdio Hassan (popularly known as Mallim Nuri) of the Tunni Dafaradhi clan, became one of the most prolific writers of poetry chimiini

This is why the Chimwini language is just riddled with Somali influences, large borrowings from phonetics, grammar and vocabulary because it was mostly spoken by Somalis living inside the city:

More interesting still is the influence of Somali,69 which can be seen at different levels.

 

[Midas]

It's an outdated belief.
Read this Bantu, Galla and Somali Migrations in the Horn of Africa: A Reassessment of the Juba/Tana Area https://www.jstor.org/stable/180495

Bantu's never reached Somalia at all, they stopped short at the northern kenyan coast, where Somalis also settled and that Somali population acted as a barrier between us and them.

The Shungwayah is just Somalis from Burgabo migrating down
View attachment 345322

And when the migrated down and started building walled stone settlements and absorbed the bantus that they came in contact with in the process.
View attachment 345319

There was 2 waves of Migrations, first one is between 9th and 10th century and the second one is between 16th and 17th century.
View attachment 345318


This is also shown in Linguisitics. ND is Northern Swahili.

Finally there is no Swahili or Bantu population in Barawa. And the republic he is talking about is the council of elder system, which is called Guurti in Somali culture: He mentions the the situation 1800s, we have internal Qadi Record Books from then that shows the cities population:

I have been thinking about buying

Ulrich Braukämper: Islamic History and Culture in Southern Ethiopia. Collected Essays​

But just from the Google books preview where he says the futuh explicity gives a non somali orgin to the harla and he later states that the somali were pastoralists who built no towns and attributes all the towns in northnn somali to semetic speaking harla migrants. Has turned me off buying it.

 

[Idilinaa]

I have been thinking about buying

Ulrich Braukämper: Islamic History and Culture in Southern Ethiopia. Collected Essays​

But just from the Google books preview where he says the futuh explicity gives a non somali orgin to the harla and he later states that the somali were pastoralists who built no towns and attributes all the towns in northnn somali to semetic speaking harla migrants. Has turned me off buying it.

I Have gone through this another thread: About their ethnic origins

It groups them with other Somali tribes in certain passages, in other passages they are grouped with the agro-pastoral clans and seperated, because the bedouin clans are headed by their own independant leaders while Harla along with the other sedentary ones are led by a one leader from Zarba a different clan.

So the speration is between bedouin and agro-pastoral sedentary clans. Not an ethnic one.
It's consistent with the distinction richard burton gives to Somalis in the area 500 years later.



Somebody asked me the same question a previous thread: Have a read to a more detailed answer i gave:
They make occupational distinctions not ethnic ones since they are written as a connected group

About the town building and attribution to harla has no historical basis.

Written sources are more preferred. Went over it in another thread that there is no merit behind the Harla attributions and it's purely an Oromo invented mythology borrowed back and combined with local ones. The ruins were built by the state and who used local Somali man power. Not by one agro-pastoral clan, who btw didn't even live in some of those areas.

Read through these posts.:

Long form answer that goes through the different sources, but the first source pretty much confirms Somali tradition that they are darood and documents their migration and settlement.

Harla was 1 single Somali darood clan that lived between hawash and at end the of upper shabelle. They didn't even live in Harar. There is zero proof they was a seperate ethnicity as well.

Around the same place futuh places them:

There was multiple Somali agro-pastoral clans living in the hawash river around showa that acted as a border Baqulzar, Gatur, Warjac , Hargayah etc even sections of Geri were sedentary agro-pastoralists with Gedayah Geri in the showa area.

It is Oromo oral mythology that blows them up an makes them something more than they are and ascribes to them stuff they are not even responsible for building. There is no Harla kingdom at all, they were just 1 clan among many.




A recent Oxford academic study says Somalis pretty much dominated Showa and conquered the Amhara province and expanded from the Somali inhabited areas.. They are basing this on cultural and material evidence that connects it to Somali inhabited areas away from the highlands, as it underwent a cultural change.

This is pretty much confirmed by Al-Maqrizi who says the Walashma founders expanded from Jabarta and a local medieval chronicle document who detail them to be by from Awdal.

Al-Maqrizi literally says they came from northern Somalia (Jabarta region connected to Zeila) and gradually moved further inland to occupy Awfat.

Local manuscript on the History of Walashma confirms and details the same thing about them conquering Shoa and incorporating it with Awdal (Zeila province).

And there is no proof they spoke semetic. Ulrich even says so himself that linguistic proof is lacking:

Where as we have linguistic proof from a primary medieval source that the historical sedentary farming populations spoke Somali and not ethio-semetic:

Some information on the medieval farming calendar of Somalis.

Modern revisionists in service of ''Ethiopianist'' interpretation of regional history cannot pull the whole ethio semetic spewel or some unknown other group when in relates to the farming in medieval times(obviously we don't substratum in our language that indicate past ethnic plurality).

But also because we have confirmation by Al-Umari in the 13th cetury about the language being Somali but also their farming tracking conventions being Somali.

Al-Umari says al-Habasha as a region has 100 different languages but Awfat/Awdal and other Muslim provinces/kingdoms spoke one language he calls ''Zayla'i language'' (When Medieval arab authors use al-Habash they are not referring to the modern ethiopian supra-ethnicity, but as a generalized region)


He then describes the language through their use of farming calendar:
AL UMARI's ACCOUNT OF AWFAT/ADAL's LANGUAGE


Not only are those the Somali specific names for seasons that have stayed consistent for 700 years.

They are also different from the seasonal names used in Harari(who are Gurage in reality) and even ethio semetic speakers use. List by Wolf Leslau. ''seasons are Ethiopic''

Aside from that, it's worth reading his book, he goes on to collect a lot of cultural histories in the region.