Roman Artefacts found in Puntland

[Riftvalley]

He dropped a twitter thread of his findings in Bari

@GuerraenlaUni: Como los mercaderes de Alejand...

@GuerraenlaUni: Como los mercaderes de Alejandría y Barygaza, como los marinos de Persia e Himyar, he visitado el país de los Puertos Lejanos en los confines de África. Y quiero contaros lo que he visto. Hilo:-> ...

threadnavigator.com

Incredible. Can’t wait for him to publish a study on this. Nomads became shepherds for 3 months a year, just one of the many interesting things he mentioned.

 

[Riftvalley]

One thing I forgot to add- he is jumping the gun with Sabaen Stelae and worship stuff. The structures or what is left of them resemble other ancient burials in the area. I am not sure if he observed significant differences with others sites to infer a Sabaen origin. I doubt it:

 

[Midas]

One thing I forgot to add- he is jumping the gun with Sabaen Stelae and worship stuff. The structures or what is left of them resemble other ancient burials in the area. I am not sure if he observed significant differences with others sites to infer a Sabaen origin. I doubt it:

View attachment 355618

In all likleyhood it's the other way around. These steale are found in the horn of africa millenia before the sabeans arose.

 

[Idilinaa]

One thing I forgot to add- he is jumping the gun with Sabaen Stelae and worship stuff. The structures or what is left of them resemble other ancient burials in the area. I am not sure if he observed significant differences with others sites to infer a Sabaen origin. I doubt it:

View attachment 355618

He talked about cemeteries or grave mounds that they erected steale similar to the dead in the Southern Arabia. But this is in reality a common custom in the horn and cushitic speaking populations. Pillar tombs etc

""The largest ones, twenty meters in diameter and four meters high, were erected in front of them, the way the Sabeans and Himyarites of Arabia represented their gods. And perhaps the way the nomads worshipped their ancestors."

But the whole thread reads like misrepresentation, re-urgitating the same nomad schtick even that erases the economic complexity.

They had large stone warehouses where they stored products before shipping it .

"I climb to a hill overlooking the estuary and come across the stone warehouses where they stored high value goods.........before shipping them to Rome, Ctesiphon or Mandagora.->"

This actually underscores the sophistication and importance of the Somali coast in the ancient global trade network. Showing hows it was a central player in the exchange of luxury goods between Africa, Asia, and Europe. The storage facilities likely played a role in regulating trade, including the collection of customs duties or taxes.

They placed it in an elevated area for security, accessibility and visibility. Interesting.

They were pastoralist producers and there are urban towns people that are extensions of them.

Pastoralism doesn't automatically mean nomadic. They need to learn to separate this.

Since he also says nomads used to live in stone houses in Bandar Khor ;

"I walk away from the coast and among the stone plinths of old houses. These are the houses of the nomads who came to trade in Bandar Khor. Dozens of houses. As if they had left yesterday.->"

How does nomads live in stone houses? If they were temporary camps they would have built them out of perishable materials. Stone and brick houses are used for permanent long term dwellings. It actually sounds like a thriving settlement with a permanent population. They likely belonged to local merchants, traders, artisans, and other residents who were directly involved in the trade economy.

Also because they export products, goods and import goods from many different locations, doesn't make it multi-cultural, that's a weird characterization.

It's equally weird how they attempt to draw far reaching conclusions when they didn't even excavate the area, they just observed above ground materials. So much is buried and properly preserve under the sand.

They found both locally produced ceramics and imported ones from Rome or Asia. The rest are just loot by grave robbers that they present. They didn't provide any more information that we already knew about the area that it traded with the ancient world.

 

[Midas]

He talked about cemeteries or grave mounds that they erected steale similar to the dead in the Southern Arabia. But this is in reality a common custom in the horn and cushitic speaking populations. Pillar tombs etc

""The largest ones, twenty meters in diameter and four meters high, were erected in front of them, the way the Sabeans and Himyarites of Arabia represented their gods. And perhaps the way the nomads worshipped their ancestors."

But the whole thread reads like misrepresentation, re-urgitating the same nomad schtick even that erases the economic complexity.

They had large stone warehouses where they stored products before shipping it .

"I climb to a hill overlooking the estuary and come across the stone warehouses where they stored high value goods.........before shipping them to Rome, Ctesiphon or Mandagora.->"

This actually underscores the sophistication and importance of the Somali coast in the ancient global trade network. Showing hows it was a central player in the exchange of luxury goods between Africa, Asia, and Europe. The storage facilities likely played a role in regulating trade, including the collection of customs duties or taxes.

They placed in an elevated area for security, accessibility and visibility. Interesting.

They are pastoralist producers and there are urban towns people that are extensions of them.

Pastoralism doesn't automatically mean nomadic. They need to learn to seperate this.

Since also says nomads used to live in stone houses in Bandar Khor ;

"I walk away from the coast and among the stone plinths of old houses. These are the houses of the nomads who came to trade in Bandar Khor. Dozens of houses. As if they had left yesterday.->"

How does nomads live in stone houses? If they were temporary camps they would have built them out of perishable materials. Stone and brick houses are used for permanent long term dwellings. It actually sounds like a thriving settlement with a permanent population. They likely belonged to local merchants, traders, artisans, and other residents who were directly involved in the trade economy.

Also because they export products, goods and import goods from many different locations, doesn't make it multi-cultural, that's a weird characterization.

It's equally weird how they attempt to draw far reaching conclusions when they didn't even excavate the area, they just observed above ground materials. So much is buried and properly preserve under the sand.

They found both locally produced ceramics and imported ones from Rome or Asia. The rest are just loot by grave robbers that they present. They didn't provide any more information that we already knew about the area that it traded with the ancient world.

Yeah they're on the right track. But it's weird how many big claims they make when they haven't actually excavated that much at all. There's basically been like 2 or 3 serious excavations in somalia from several decades ago.

While somalis were undoubtedly majority nomadic. It seems weird to underestimate the level of urban development especially when we know that a lot of these places used to have more solid tombs but it collapsed. The fact that Mogadishu used to have royal tombs seems to come into their calculations at all. Or the old European maps of walled towns in Bari.

 

[Shimbiris]

In all likleyhood it's the other way around. These steale are found in the horn of africa millenia before the sabeans arose.

We have plain archaeological evidence that stelae culture from the Horn spread to Yemen:

The late prehistoric standing stones of the Tihâma (Yemen): the dom...

Preamble This paper demonstrates the way that human negotiations with the landscape and the domestication of space in the Yemeni late prehistoric Tihâma reflected early expressions of community-bas...

journals.openedition.org

So did our "Ethiopian-Arabian" style rock-art. The whole reason it has "Arabian" in the name is because Cushites seem to have spread it to Southern Arabia and the Tihama coast as well. This goes well with the Cushitic substratum in the MSA languages:

Modern South Arabian languages - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Those early likely oxen riding SPN ninjas were quite expansionist. They covered the whole Horn in no time then expanded into Kenya, Tanzania and seemingly even Yemen and parts of the Hejaz until they were absorbed by expanding Semites coming from the southern Levant and northwest Arabia after the Bronze-Age Collapse.

Yeah they're on the right track. But it's weird how many big claims they make when they haven't actually excavated that much at all. There's basically been like 2 or 3 serious excavations in somalia from several decades ago.

Welcome to academia. I went into this privately with a contact on Discord recently:

Indeed. By the way, one thing I think David is unable to fully grasp as someone who isn't in academia is that these authors mostly publish these types of lackluster papers because of the nature of academia. I've been in the Greater Boston area now since late 2023 and am well familiar with the atmosphere. Just last weekend I had dinner with a Biochemist who was telling me all about the rampant p-hacking and absurd published research in her field.

I wouldn't be shocked if people like Pontus Skoglund are fully aware their assertions are nonsensical but, unfortunately, as the saying goes; publish or perish. They're incentivized to just publish at all costs and to push new and sensational developments rather than boring incremental papers and maybe just replicating another study's findings (ironically one of the cornerstones of the scientific method).

As you say, these are smart guys in reality. Many of them have advanced biology, mathematics and computational qualifications. Now, that's not an automatic in terms of intelligence (Awale looks over at Mr. Razib Khan) but it's hard to believe such people are consistently publishing nonsense.

Name of the game, sadly.

 

[Riftvalley]

@idin, thanks for pointing out. He doesn’t infer a Sabaen origin, only says they’re similar. My misunderstanding.,……He could have still pointed out the similarity to other Cushitic/somali burials before mentioning Sabaens.

the settlement stuff is interesting. I believe his previous research in SL leads him to believe they were temporary settlements. However, I have a feeling these guys are basing some of these claims of temporary settlements on Somali nomadic tradition of retreating from the coastal areas in the summer. This does not mean the trading families were also retreating to look after livestock. All the things you mentioned and the fact they are actually buried (children, men and women, and what he thinks is a king. Doesn’t sound like some temporary visitors) in the same vicinity are good indicators of settled populations. The material wealth presented does not look like some guys who even needed to go back and herd cows for the rest of the year.

We also see fish consumption in these settlements according to him. Wasn’t there always a strong aversion to fish amongst Cushitic nomads in the interior?

 

[Midas]

We have plain archaeological evidence that stelae culture from the Horn spread to Yemen:

The late prehistoric standing stones of the Tihâma (Yemen): the dom...

Preamble This paper demonstrates the way that human negotiations with the landscape and the domestication of space in the Yemeni late prehistoric Tihâma reflected early expressions of community-bas...

journals.openedition.org

So did our "Ethiopian-Arabian" style rock-art. The whole reason it has "Arabian" in the name is because Cushites seem to have spread it to Southern Arabia and the Tihama coast as well. This goes well with the Cushitic substratum in the MSA languages:

Modern South Arabian languages - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Those early likely oxen riding SPN ninjas were quite expansionist. They covered the whole Horn in no time then expanded into Kenya, Tanzania and seemingly even Yemen and parts of the Hejaz until they were absorbed by expanding Semites coming from the southern Levant and northwest Arabia after the Bronze-Age Collapse.



Welcome to academia. I went into this privately with a contact on Discord recently:



Name of the game, sadly.

Yeah it's honestly diassapoinng . But I'm also somewhat hopeful for the somali side of things

I've been over the last several weeks exploring the somali side of Facebook and watching YouTube videos on suugan. It's made me realize how quickly somali academia is developing with all these conferences and book fairs. And local somali organizations intrested in all aspects of our culture.

We can even see this with how dramatically intrested in somalia literature,history, culture have all grown over the last 5 years both in the diaspora and at home. Somalis everywhere seem to be engaged in rapid institution building. One day soon we'll probably have diaspora conferences on new discoveries in genetics and archeology.

 

[TheLand]

Disrespectful of him to be standing on a burial mound imo if that is indeed what it is

 

[Idilinaa]

Yeah they're on the right track. But it's weird how many big claims they make when they haven't actually excavated that much at all. There's basically been like 2 or 3 serious excavations in somalia from several decades ago.

While somalis were undoubtedly majority nomadic. It seems weird to underestimate the level of urban development especially when we know that a lot of these places used to have more solid tombs but it collapsed. The fact that Mogadishu used to have royal tombs seems to come into their calculations at all. Or the old European maps of walled towns in Bari.

We saw with the excavations at Hafun and Mogadishu that there are structure, artifacts, monuments and buildings perserved under the sand. All they managed to do was dig 1 trench before quiting. So there is more to be discovered before we can make any rushed judgements.

I think its more accurate to say Somali were majority like mobile pastoralists , agro-pastoralist(combined herding with farming) like most rural populations around the world that acted as producers and had a urban and coastal fishing, trading segment.

But the way they employ the term ''nomad'" erases this economic structural complexity, also adaptability and divorces mobile & sedentary populations from eachother, and frames it as if foreign merchants come to settle and trade. We know from textual records that is not the case, the natives had their own vessels and sailed to bring their own goods. The same as in the medieval and early modern period.

You have to deeply committed to a stereotype to believe a nomadic group lived in permanent stone houses and used stone storage facilities to house their own goods before shipping.

I kinda went through this in a different thread:

It comes from false lazy colonial discursive framing. The term "nomadic" implies a lack of fixed settlements, random movement, and absence of territorial or economic structure, which does not accurately describe Somali society. Instead, Somalis had organized, seasonal mobility within defined territories and a diverse economic system beyond herding.

Somalis were never nomads in the strict sense of the word. They were more accurately mobile-pastoralists, agro-pastoralists, town dwellers, sailors and small groups of them were fishermen on the coast

Mobile pastoralists could seasonally pick up other modes of life during different seasons and engaged in caravan trade or seasonal labour work. Would even participate in seafaring.

Somali mobile pastoralists were not "nomadic" in the classic sense, as they moved seasonally within defined territories and could shift occupations when necessary. Maintained permanent clan settlements and did not wander aimlessly. Would practice transhumance and shift occupations (e.g., engaging in trade, fishing, or farming when necessary). You had the same tribes that simultaneously lived in settled areas, did seasonal transhumance, traded, did seafaring, farmed and interacted with every part of this complex economic chain and they were not only Somalis but often the same tribes.

We have a culture of mobility & trade not nomadism. This seperation into Mobile Pastoralists, Agro-Pastoralists (Sedentary), Fishing & Coastal Trading Communities and Urban & Merchant Classes meant that Somalia was not a purely pastoralist society but a complex, adaptable economy with sedentary and mobile populations coexisting.

 

[Idilinaa]

@idin, thanks for pointing out. He doesn’t infer a Sabaen origin, only says they’re similar. My misunderstanding.,……He could have still pointed out the similarity to other Cushitic/somali burials before mentioning Sabaens.

the settlement stuff is interesting. I believe his previous research in SL leads him to believe they were temporary settlements. However, I have a feeling these guys are basing some of these claims of temporary settlements on Somali nomadic tradition of retreating from the coastal areas in the summer. This does not mean the trading families were also retreating to look after livestock. All the things you mentioned and the fact they are actually buried (children, men and women, and what he thinks is a king. Doesn’t sound like some temporary visitors) in the same vicinity are good indicators of settled populations. The material wealth presented does not looking some guys who even needed to go back and herd cows of the rest of the year.

We also see fish consumption in these settlements according to him. Wasn’t there always a strong aversion to fish amongst Cushitic nomads in the interior?

During the 1800s on the majerteen coast there was 19-20 coastal villages and 8/5 port towns (Hafun, Bandar Siyada. Bandar Qasim, Bandar Maryah and Alula etc) , so they weren't temporary, a segment of the population remained while a portion left for the summer seasons into interior

So there was always a permanent population and a floating population, it was the same in the south , Zayla and even in interior towns which i noticed in Harar.

But when they researched the burial mounds and collected above ground materials in 2 small sites in Somaliland, i remember seeing the same thing that they didn't all appear to be temporary settlements either by nomads but more like fishing villages and trading posts (Trading posts typically have storage facilities, marketplaces, and docking areas for ships or rafts), because they found abundance of fish bones and evidence of fishing is provided by stone net sinkers and they said they practiced "mixed economic activities" and '' diversity of subsistence activities" and the interior which they didn't investigate they probably could have been farming alongside herding.