Asia In The Horn: The Indian Ocean Trade In Somaliland

2. Discussion

The Berbera area became involved in Indian Ocean trading networks from around the eleventh century onwards. During the first period (twelfth-fourteenth centuries), commerce came mainly from nearby Yemen, which represents perhaps as much as 60% of all traded non-perishable goods. The presence of Yemeni people in Somaliland is attested by an abundance of storage and cooking wares from South Arabia. Indian kitchenware is also very common, as in Yemen itself, evincing the strong relations between Yemeni and Indian communities from the early second millennium onwards. Asia in general got the lion’s share, as virtually all traded ceramics came from the continent (Fig. 28 and Table 1), along with other artifacts, such as beads and stone vessels. Only glass bottles arrived in important numbers from outside Asia, most likely Egypt.

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Table 1. Percentage and MNI of trade ceramics from different regions documented in the sites understudy during the pre-Adalite (twelfth-fourteenth centuries) and Adalite period (fifteenth-sixteenth centuries).

During the period of the Adal Sultanate (fifteenth-sixteenth centuries) trade from Yemen diminished (from 57% to 33% of the assemblage), while the presence of ceramics from faraway regions increased, except India, whose wares disappeared (but not its glass items and beads). Asia retained its predominance, with as much as 92% of all trade in ceramics and perhaps as much as 85% of all non-perishable trade goods, but Egypt increased its share, by adding ceramics to the commerce in glass. The most remarkable growth is of pottery from East Asia: it only represented 17% of the trade during the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, whereas it amounts to 40% of all the pottery imported during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.⁴ If commercial patterns coincide with the Western Indian Ocean, it is quite likely that the heyday of the Asian trade wares was brief and focused on the period between the mid-fifteenth century and the first quarter of the sixteenth. The porcelains from Jingdezhen were not exported in large numbers before the 1480s (Zhao, 2011: 96) and, in East Africa, the import of Chinese porcelain diminished from ca. 1521 (Qin, 2016: 251). The decline of imports may have to do with the reinforcement of the Ming ban to exports from that date onwards (Tai et al., 2020) and the Portuguese intervention in the Indian Ocean (d’Alòs-Moner, A. M., 2012). The massive arrival of Chinese porcelains would coincide with that of Thai celadons, which were traded abroad mostly from the second quarter of the fifteenth century (Zhao, 2011: 26), whereas celadons from Myanmar started arriving from the mid-fifteenth century onwards.

The sixteenth century was of crisis along the East African coast due to Portuguese intervention: some coastal cities vanished, while others declined, but still others survived and even grew. In the case of the Horn, the situation was further complicated by Ottoman expansion, nomadic invasions and a war between Christian Ethiopia and the Adal Sultanate that ruined both polities and led to the collapse of the latter. The end of urban life across much of the Horn probably explains the disappearance of imported goods from the archaeological record during the subsequent centuries (González-Ruibal, 2020: 662–663).

But who were the consumers of the commodities that were making their way into the Horn of Africa? In the case of Somaliland, during the earlier period (eleventh to thirteenth centuries), the landscape was still dominated by nomads, and sanctuaries and graves, rather than towns, were the symbolic anchors in the landscape, as they had been from the Neolithic. In these sites, imports during the pre-Adalite period are very few: in the funerary sanctuary of Iskudar, for instance, radiocarbon-dated to the twelfth-fourteenth centuries, the rituals are still pagan and only four sherds of imported pottery and glass were found (González-Ruibal et al., 2017: 162–166). By this time, Asian wares were common instead in the Muslim towns of Ethiopia (Insoll et al., 2016; Insoll, 2017: 208–209; Gaastra and Insoll, 2020: 3).

That the Indian Ocean trade went through Somaliland, then, does not mean that commodities remained in Somaliland. This is also true for the settlements that developed during between 1286 and 1577. We documented fairs, towns, and secondary settlements in the interior part of Somaliland, all of which yielded a certain amount of imported materials. The variety and volume, however, have nothing to do with the coastal sites. Local pottery represents around 99% of the ceramic assemblage inland (de Torres Rodríguez et al., 2018: 33), as opposed to an average 7% in coastal sites. The most popular imports in the interior are cowries. In terms of pottery, the most common are speckled wares, Chinese porcelain and white creamware. The only exception so far is the town of Fardowsa, on the edge of the Gollis Mountains, 60 km in a straight line from Berbera and overlooking the coastal plain. Here the quantity—and, to some extent, the variety—of imports approaches those of the coastal sites: in two of the houses that we excavated in Fardowsa, dated to the fifteenth-sixteenth centuries, we found 60 glass bangles, many perfume bottles and a ceramic assemblage that is very similar to the coastal sites, including Chinese porcelain, SE Asian celadons, Martaban, Speckled Ware, Blue Tihama, Dark Glaze, etc. (de Torres Rodríguez et al., 2021). The two houses were larger than average and probably belonged to well-to-do families, perhaps associated with long-distance trade. The abundance of finds in Fardowsa can be probably explained because it acted at the same time as a transit market and a gateway community, as it is situated in a “natural breaking point” (Curtin, 1984: 29) and along one of the main routes—and in a crossroads—between coast and interior (Hirth, 1978). This, rather than its large size, would explain the quality and quantity of imports.

Generally speaking, however, if we compare the towns of Somaliland with those of Ethiopia (e.g. Fauvelle-Aymar et al., 2006; Insoll, 2017; Pradines, 2017; Wagaw Bogale, 2020; Khalaf and Insoll, 2019) the smaller size, lesser monumentality, lack of inscriptions and fewer imports of the former becomes obvious. This is in tune with the character of Somaliland, and particularly the Berbera area, which was more a transition zone that conveyed goods to the interior than a destination in and of itself. Indeed, written chronicles of the medieval period refer to numerous Muslim cities in what is today Ethiopia (Pankhurst, 1997: 39–60), but there are very few mentions to large settlements in the territory of present-day Somaliland.

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