I don't need to further elaborate how stelae, tumuli/mounds/cairn is a Cushitic practice from the olden days as mentioned here and by me in other threads so I will elaborate how the other aspects are also very much endemic to Somalis.
Incense burning is within Somali history going back to 5000 plus years. The Arabians would have gotten that influence from northeast Africa, not vice versa. On top of this, incense burning was a Nubian practice that Egyptians adopted. This is proven by archeology.
Here are the A-Group, our ancestors and the first chief agro-pastoral-trader complex using incense first and attested in the pre-Kerma as well:
"Stone incense burners were probably placed outside the burial, as indicated by their fragments being found on the surface near the shaft; an occurrence that has parallel in the cemetery of Tunqala West, in the Korosko Bend"
"As for the incense burners, they are, like the painted wares, a new item associated with rich graves, which apparently has a counterpart neither in the Egyptian world, nor in previous and following Nubian cultures, except graves in the Pre-Kerma Culture (Honegger, this volume). Usually they consist of circular-shaped soft stone vessels with only a shallow depression on the top where burning incense was placed."
We turned our incense practices into Islamic form (might be thought of as a Sufi introduction, when it is not). I was going to post a lengthy answer to
@Journey. about this matter a while back, I even wrote it but never posted it.
The Bejas buried their dead similar to the first century AD Somalis:
View attachment 355806
Incense jars:
View attachment 355807
Also used an altar at the cemetery:
View attachment 355809
One of the biggest sabotage (not even blunders) of the Spanish team that I do admit have given a lot of value from the strict material and systematic accounts of shapes and forms, is their limited, lazy knowledge about northeast African history, archeology (meaning for the broader region that shows greater time-depth and are causes of later Somali history), anthropology, economy to the point where they define the peoples there -- always chiefly Somalis -- in an incorrect manner, contorting their role in their own history by largely relying on orientalist racists accounts. I will delve more into this sometime later.
Look at the example, these people strictly define Somalis as nomads while the others as "merchants":
View attachment 355810
The way one interprets this is that foreign merchants set shop rather than Somali traders facilitating the trade for which merchants docked in the first place. These people show no respect to the point of ridiculousness when they romanticize this strict perpetual animal walker nonsense that is allergic to anything formational. It's insulting but it makes those guys who do some good in their work in attesting descriptive material knowledge look like fools when it comes to all else. Their strict measuring and typology work is good, the rest where they do interpretations of the involvement of people and their ways is terrible.
This is what Orientalism, and, dare I say, racism look like. It's that perpetual bias that corrosively tries to define history by robbing people of their due historical place because the people that the civilization is owed to, are embellished with the impossible, illusive, simple life.
There is nothing wrong with being a nomad for the few that are, it's just that we're defined by what we're not, so we can be pigeonholed outside our own history. It's bizarre. Our pastoralism is not strict nomadism. The people who herded animals, operated the caravan trade, farmed, and created urban hotspots around the coasts and later inland, were all the same people. The political and structural history of the Islamic period was also done by Somalis. I'm not saying part, I mean entire.
To set an example of how much the Spaniards lack imagination when they could have easily read more
My own great-grandfather had a lot of camels that were operated by his family in his hometown while he was a well-off merchant in Berbera. My grandfather did not own herds from what I gather (or it was never mentioned so I assumed it so), but he was a very wealthy taajir. My mother comes from the Arabsiyo region and her family were regular farmers and pastoralists. The herds were kept by some other family members in the Hawd while her immediate family was farming in Somaliland. My mother was born and raised in Djibouti without herds or farming. You see, these people don't understand that the Somali economic system is probably the most unique as it gives flexibility beyond what you have in agrarian Europe. One family, let alone one clan, can occupy all the ranges of an economy that these Spaniards can't fathom.
We have new work done by Polish team that actually have started to look into how these economic systems and aknowledged that they knew little of how things were and point in the direction I say, that people adapted in complex ways depending on need, availability, geography, broader relations, etc:
Between the sixth and fifteenth c. CE, a vast expanse of central and southern Sudan belonged to the kingdom of Alwa, ruled from the urban metropolis of Soba. Renewed investigation of the city unearthed a small cemetery in the northern part of the site. The heterogeneity of burial practices raised some questions as to the cultural and religious affinities of the deceased and suggested potential multiculturalism of the local urban population. We applied isotopic analyses to investigate the origins of the people buried at Cemetery OS and their concomitant ways of life. Non-concordance of 87Sr/86Sr and δ18O values with local hydro-geological background speaks to the mixing of water sources as a result of residential mobility. The concordance of human and faunal strontium and oxygen results, combined with elevated δ13C values corresponding to almost exclusive reliance on C4 produce, points to the possibility of seasonal movement of people with their herds between the Nile valley and the adjacent grasslands.
Despite the turn of the medieval Nubian economy towards settled agriculture, by revealing the granular specificities of human adaptation in challenging ecosystems, our results produce the first insight into the enduring diversification of economic production, even in urbanized settings, and persisting participation of local peoples in agro-pastoral symbiosis.
The archaeological site of Ghazali (northern Sudan) provides a rare opportunity to investigate the dynamics of mixed economies and mobility on the fringes on the Nile valley at the time of Christian expansion in Nubia. Thanks to its particular hydrological conditions, Sudan has a long history of diverse groups pursuing different economic activities, with agricultural communities settled along the fertile Nile valley and various mobile pastoralists groups occupying vast areas of the adjacent deserts. Ghazali represents an early medieval Nubian rural site with an extensive funerary zone. Somewhat removed from the Nile valley, Ghazali extends along the western bank of a large
wadi, Wadi Abu Dom, running across the Bayuda desert, dated ca. 7th–13th century CE. Multi-isotopic analysis of human tooth enamel from Cemeteries 1, 3, and 4 was used to explore patterns of mobility among these communities. Ten enamel samples were subjected to 87Sr/86Sr analysis, while 24 individuals were studied for their δ18O values. 87Sr/86Sr and δ18O values were very heterogeneous, suggesting that the Ghazali community, as a whole, benefited from a variety of water sources, perhaps including significant contributions from groundwater wells.
We suggest that this adds further support for the reconstruction of a mixed practice of agriculture and animal herding in the neighbouring Bayuda desert. These data add to growing evidence for diverse and flexible mixed economies in eastern Africa that provided food security even under the most challenging of conditions.
Sudan went through similar yet unique systems. This is a constraint-oriented analysis, and these living ways are flexible in terms of that, but it is very important to emphasize, that under good conditions, these economic systems can create a lot of wealth (which happened), new forms of structural power, and economic participatory congruence. This is what happened to Somalis basically in their own way.
There is nothing Sabaic by any other than what was brought from Southern Arabia via trade. Unless we see evidence of Sabaean artifacts, such as what is clearly in the Habash, we can dismiss these misdirections. I have seen some evidence somewhere else which is understandable. They did come to our land and probably did the early Arabian graffiti thing.
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pastoralismjournal.springeropen.com
