Roman Artefacts found in Puntland

[Riftvalley]

Its what @TheLand said he's just an amateur who knows nothing about the area.

I would not call him an amateur. He has carried out some decent studies on the medieval sites in north west and on ancient trades in xiis etc.

He has an interesting take as to why he refuses to call those ancient people Somalis. Somalis need to debate him without crying racist or acting like obsessed stalkers.

 

[Rayaale]

He should have referred to the Indians visiting Somalia as Asians rather than Indians lol just to be consistent. The name Somali most likely predates Islam by btw and refers to one of the earliest Somali ancestors. Somalia has not also had large scale invasions or migration from outsiders. His own research shows Somali nomads were following the same movement patterns 2000 years ago as they do now. Very strange to stick to this “African” label when there was also no group called Africans 2000 years ago.

He’s projecting after being called out

 

[Rayaale]

That is obviously a reason, however, Somalis have also made it incredibly easy for all of this to happen. Ethiopian history and archaeology face almost none of this type of discourse, despite their population being more admixed than ours.

Somalis are an autochthonous ethnic group, but because so many Somalis have historically screamed "Ana Arab," people assume that we've been "Sudanized", meaning a migration of Arab males came into the Horn and were darkened through heavy intermarriage with the local female population. I would argue that this view is still something I've seen some FOBs spout and was probably popular decades ago.

The truth is, Somalis are autochthonous and have had no significant admixture since we migrated from what is now northern Eritrea/Ethiopia/Sudan into the Horn. It's obvious that our clan system underwent changes once our ancestors embraced Islam.

I was reading up on some Merovingian/Carolingian history, the people of Charlemagne. These people were deeply Germanic, but once they established their empires and took on the mantle of successors of Rome, they started claiming descent from Greco-Roman deities to strengthen their legitimacy. The same phenomenon has occurred within Somali history: the claim of Arab ancestry, and more specifically Quraysh heritage, was made to tie us closer to Islam.

Because of this, all our historical achievements are usurped either by ethnic minorities within our own countries or hostile outside groups that try to diminish our achievements. We are part of a group of people who have had the longest unbroken connection to the horn but now bantus, who themselves only migrated outside of west africa in the 16th century claim us to be some outside force and our land to be occupied on one side, and arabs claiming all that we've achieved is because we supposedly came from their loins. Both are FALSE.

Many Africans really believe that we are invaders and not true Africans

 

[Midas]

While I don't think this has anything done with racism the dude from what I've seen seems like a decent guy. But there is this persistent among non somalis who research the horn to always reduce somali historical claims. I mean he literally bases his opinion on the endnoym "somali" not bring traceable . He points to the 11/12th century since that's when the first mention of haiwye dates back to. It's nonsensical.

 

[Chapter]

Wish some of the people replying to him approached this more maturely. His intentions seem good but some of the stuff he said in his clarification seem odd and contradictory.

The coast may have had non-somali (or non-proto somali?) merchants that traded there, same way modern somalis were in aden/yemen and the swahili coast as traders/merchants does that mean the native population contribution/identity should be obfuscated for small groups of merchants that didn’t leave any linguistic or genetic or cultural evidence?

what he saying may be true for 3000 years ago or so, but the trading from the coast continued to exist even after the population started identifying as somali, I mean the somali nomads had a lunar calendar to help them track their movements who could’ve been but them lol. I hope they stick with the African term not ethio-Semites or southern Ethiopians, at least that would imply somalis given the location of the city

 

[Riftvalley]

Wish some of the people replying to him approached this more maturely. His intentions seem good but some of the stuff he said in his clarification seem odd and contradictory.

The coast may have had non-somali (or non-proto somali?) merchants that traded there, same way modern somalis were in aden/yemen and the swahili coast as traders/merchants does that mean the native population contribution/identity should be obfuscated for small groups of merchants that didn’t leave any linguistic or genetic or cultural evidence?

what he saying may be true for 3000 years ago or so, but the trading from the coast continued to exist even after the population started identifying as somali, I mean the somali nomads had a lunar calendar to help them track their movements who could’ve been but them lol. I hope they stick with the African term not ethio-Semites or southern Ethiopians, at least that would imply somalis given the location of the city

There are countless qabilist pages run by Somali guys posting ceeb stuff which happened during colonialism or recently. Some go as far as boasting about sexual crimes the Italians did to Somali women in Southern Somalia. Some report other Somali and accuse them to employers over qabil disputes. You have people supporting Israel because the think it advances their clans. Then you have the whole genders and racist Somali Incels on twitter.

All of these groups are far worse human beings and scums than these Spanish with his bizarre “Africans” lefty woke nonsense. I would rather Somalis combat the wackos on twitter from all different backgrounds and ideologies who bring daily shame to the Somali community.

 

[The alchemist]

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:

Incense jars:

Also used an altar at the cemetery:

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":

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.