Who were the Harla People and what is their relation to Somalis? Did they contribute to the modern Somali ethnogenesis?

[Zak12]

What do you guys think of these tweets? This guy is pretty adamant about the Harla not being Somali



He even claims Zeila is a Harari word lol


@Step a side sorry for the random twitter stuff but thoughts?

 

[Step a side]

What do you guys think of these tweets? This guy is pretty adamant about the Harla not being Somali



He even claims Zeila is a Harari word lol


@Step a side sorry for the random twitter stuff but thoughts?

He is waisting his time lying on twitter. Harla is still in the phases of discovery but there is reason to believe they are the sedentary Somalis who were native to region.

 

[Zak12]

He is waisting his time lying on twitter. Harla is still in the phases of discovery but there is reason to believe they are the sedentary Somalis who were native to region.

Yeah same. I fully read @Shimbiris thread about Bedouins and this thread too and I'm finally convinced that the Harla were sendentary Somalis. No concensus among academia unfortunately but more research needs to be done

 

[Step a side]

Ahmed Guray qabil was never mentioned your book is from the 19th century, that book is history of Harar and Hararis it's missing so many names , dates are also messed up , I doubt they did any research on Tarikh al muluk

Educated Ciise brother from Djibouti even knows the history in the region.

https://x.com/djbawlah/status/1782448347040592255?s=46

 

[Zak12]

I have a theory about the Harla. Isn't it possible that instead of only being Somali, they were a confederation of ethnicities consisting of Semitic and Cushitic speakers? They lived in a large area stretching from Shewa to Nugaal Valley so its hard to believe they were only Somali.

 

[Khaemwaset]

I have a theory about the Harla. Isn't it possible that instead of only being Somali, they were a confederation of ethnicities consisting of Semitic and Cushitic speakers? They lived in a large area stretching from Shewa to Nugaal Valley so its hard to believe they were only Somali.

Ethnicity back then wasn't like today. Also i can't believe that Harla are an ethnicity we have no proof of it, and how can a supposedly large ethnic group covering large land dissappear completely.


Harla was most likely just a term used for Agricultural Cushitic people in that region which any Somali clans also belonged to.

 

[Three Moons]

I have a theory about the Harla. Isn't it possible that instead of only being Somali, they were a confederation of ethnicities consisting of Semitic and Cushitic speakers? They lived in a large area stretching from Shewa to Nugaal Valley so its hard to believe they were only Somali.

No evidence of this, and is it really hard to believe that one ethnicity could stretch from Shewa to Nugaal, when that same ethnicity still stretches from Djibouti to Wajir, which is a much vaster geographic landmass?

A lot of land was lost post-Futuh.

 

[Zak12]

still stretches from Djibouti to Wajir, which is a much vaster geographic landmass?

That's because no other ethnicity lives in that stretch of land hence why all of it was called Barbaria in the past. Shewa and western Hararghe however were more or less Ethiosemitic speaking strongholds.

 

[Khaemwaset]

That's because no other ethnicity lives in that stretch of land hence why all of it was called Barbaria in the past. Shewa and western Hararghe however were more or less Ethiosemitic speaking strongholds.

Lmao Hararghe was Dominated by Somalis until another cushitic tribe, Oromo took over and pushed into Shewa.

"Ethio semetic" kulaha

 

[Three Moons]

That's because no other ethnicity lives in that stretch of land hence why all of it was called Barbaria in the past. Shewa and western Hararghe however were more or less Ethiosemitic speaking strongholds.

Medieval geographers delineated Bilad al-Barabir’s and Barr as-Sumal’s extent via the coastlines (hence coastal Berbera to coastal Barawa) and the rivers (i.e the Nile of Mogadishu) but how far it stretched inland is not explicitly mentioned. No historic writer mentioned ‘Ethiosemitic’ in any historic chronicle, that is modern secondary interpretations of the texts such as those from al-Maqrizi. This is why we have recent Ethiopianist scholars substituting a reference to ‘they spoke Habash’ as being equal to ‘They spoke an Ethiosemitic language’.

We know Ifat conquered the kingdom of Shewa roughly two hundred years before the Age of the Futuh, that is enough time for a strong Somali influence to have taken root in that area by the time Ifat collapsed a century later and when Adal was born (It took the Oromos less time than that to replace large parts of the Horn).

In the end, however, it doesn’t really matter because any supposed reference to the Harla prior to the Futuh is not concrete, but interestingly enough the so-called ‘Karla’ or ‘Kazla’ are still mentioned as living east of the Abyssinians and north of the Zanj like the modern Somali, while the actual concrete references in the Futuh only link them with the Somali people and no other modern group. If you add to this the fact that all of the ‘remnant’ Harla groups in the Horn spoke a Somali dialect and only traced themselves back ancestrally with a Somali genealogical table, and its pretty much an open and shut case.

At-least if it concerned any other group, but things get political when it comes to a group like the Somali people because they are an existential threat.

 

[Zak12]

any supposed reference to the Harla prior to the Futuh is not concrete

I found this. What do you think of it?

 

[Three Moons]

I found this. What do you think of it?
View attachment 333171

The Futuh does not ‘explicitly’ state that the Harla are of non-Somali origin. It doesn’t state their origins at all, and most definitely doesn’t link them with any modern group outside of the Somali, to whom they were adjacent and ranked alongside on multiple occasions.

View attachment 333172

I already addressed this fallacy before in this thread;

“The Harla that assimilated into the Afar still traced themselves back with a Somali lineage, and mind you the author of this study below then claims that it was as a result of Somali assimilation, in the 16th century, without any corroborating evidence, but this is illogical, as even in a scenario of a ‘double-assimilation’, the Harla would still have a family tree prior to their supposed ‘Somali + Afar assimilation’ that we today could reference but its an uninterrupted Somali lineage, and the same goes for the Harla that were absorbed by another Somali clan like the Isa.

If they were indeed a non-Somali group absorbed by the Somali, they wouldn’t have had an existing Somali lineage prior to joining the Isa clan. In other examples we know that it wasn’t uncommon for Afars to assimilate Somalis in the periphery areas of Greater Somalia. The Afars with Somali heritage in the Islands and on the coast of Eritrea could also trace their lineage in a precise manner back to a Somali clan from the far Northeastern part of Somalia.”

 

[Araabi]

The Harla could have been a proto Somali Semitic admixed group.