Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden as recently as the dawn of the second millen- nium. An example of these words is the word neter for diverse divinities in Egyptian religion; the Somali equivalent is nidar, the righter of wrongs. So- malis say: Nibar baa ku heli (The Nidar will find and punish you). The Egyptian word of spirit (ba) has the Somali equivalent of bah (soul, courage). Somalis say: bahdii baa lata saaray (His essence and soul have been taken out from him; he has no more courage). There is also an equivalent for the Egyptian moon diety ayah in the Somali dayah (moon). Additionally, the huur bird (the marabou, a large black stork), the herald of death in Somali mythology, is akin to the Egyptian bird, Horus, depicted as the divinity of death. The facts as we know them, either from historico-cultural sources or from the accounts of ancient, classical, or medieval travelers, tell us that the an- cestors of today's Somalis were in fairly stable existence for millennia in their northern homeland, following their herds of sheep and goats back and forth between mountain and coast in a pattern that still continues today. In the end, increasing population and the need to find pasture for their livestock were the initial causes for the southward migration of Cushites; it might be said the direction of the migration was dictated by the sea barrier in the northern direction. Also, in the case of Somalis, their adoption of Islam incited them to propagate the faith. The mode of migration of Somalis was not a hapzard one, in fact Somali nomads sent exploratory expeditions (sahan) before breaking camp so that the maato (women and children) as well as boola (livestock) would not be exposed to danger from lack of water, pasture, or peace. Only when the saban were back and brought news of desirable pastures would the camp be broken. If therefore, Somalis were in northern Kenya any time before the nineteenth century, then they would have headed straight for the verdant lands of Kenya and Tanzania. It is highly improbable that they would have migrated northward in the direction of drier land. Briefly the period from 1000 to 1900 witnessed a continual expansion of Somalis from their original coastal homeland downward to Kenya. In the west, Somali expansion was hindered by the Christian kingdoms, which themselves were expanding east, west, and south and constantly jostling with the Somalis, as the proponents of another missionary religion in the region. As the Somalis advanced from their northern homeland, they clashed with the aromo who had preceded them in that direction. In the riverine areas of southern Somalia, they found diverse populations consisting of Galla pas- toralists and agropastoralists, agricultural Bantu populations who had stayed behind after the Oromo advance, leftovers from still older populations such

with each port city an independent political entity; they were, he wrote, an unruly people. From that description, it is certain that the author was writing about the ancestors of today's Somalis and other coastal Cushites. In fact, the mostly nomadic peoples of northeast Africa have been for most of their history without a king or feudal lord. The Englishman and explorer Richard Burton, arriving some 1,900 years on the same coasts after the Peril/us was written, found, in 1854, the same organizational mode among the Somalis and described them as "a fierce and turbulent race of republicans. "21 However, more ancient glimpses of these "republican" inhabitants of the coasts than those recorded by the Peril/us exist. For example, Herodotus wrote that the Ethiopians, meaning the peoples immediately south of Egypt, , on the Red Sea coasts ate a lot of meat and drank a lot of milk; we learn also that they had little esteem for those who ate the fruits of the soil.22 These cultural traits are still mostly applicable even today to Somalis and their Afar neighbors. In contrast, their cousins, the aromo, have adopted, for the most part, an agriculture-based mode of life after having mixed with non-Cushite agriculturists in the southwest of today's Ethiopia and in the south of today's Somalia. However, we can go further than the Greco-Roman times for information about the early inhabitants of the northern coasts. In the fifreenth century B.C. Egyptian Queen Hatshepsut sent a commercial expedition to Punt to get supplies of the precious myrrh and frankincense, so indispensable to their religion.23 The expedition arrived in what is today's northern coast, where the best frankincense in the world grows not far from the sea. Ancient Egyp- tians knew the difference between true frankincense and the varieties found much nearer their home in certain parts of the Sudan. After the return of the expedition, the queen had engraved the account of the event on murals at Deir el-Bahri near Luxor in the Valley of the Kings. What can be learned from the history of that voyage is that the Egyptians depicted themselves as arriving in the land of another brotherly people and that, during the course of their stay, they lived in the homes of the Puntites. We also learn from the murals that the people depicted, whether they were Egyptians or Puntites, looked alike, as far as physical appearance, clothing styles, pigmentation, and hairstyles were concerned.24 We can say those depicted resemble the Cushites such as Somalis still living on the same coasts. What is more, whether it is by reason of a common linguistic origin or by reason of cultural influence, the Somali language has many terms that have an equivalent term in the religion of ancient Egyptians, which the Lewis-Turton hypotheses would not be able to explain since, according to their theories, Somalis were around Lake Turkana and far away from the

As wr wb ma fellow nomads After thorough research here s background check about the nomads. and I've ome across an article about the nomads :cool: Even if Herbert Lewis presents no other evidence, except Dyen's theory, itself an intuitive postulation incapable of explaining all forms of linguistic diversity, he affirms, "At the moment we have no written evidence nor oral traditions to support this view, but neither, I submit, have we any evidence seriously to question it."17 To the contrary, Somali oral history as well as that of related groups such as those of the Oromo and even of the Bantu groups in Kenya provide abundant material about the general direction of Somali movements. The version of southbound migration sketched by another scholar is more accurate in that it is corroborated by both Somali oral history and accounts from early travelers. IS The Somalis were still migrating southward in search of greener pastures when the British arrived in Kenya and put a stop to the Somali advance on what became British East Mrica. One historian tells us that "the British government in Kenya halted the Somali migrations at the Tana River in 1910, and the point beyond which Somalis could not pass came to be known as the 'Somali line.' "19 Without that edict, Somalis would have been today probably south of Kilimanjaro and in Tanzania. Ancient visitors to the Red Sea areas and to the Gulf of Aden systematically give descriptions of peoples whose modes of livelihood, government, culture, and even physical appearance agree with those of coastal Cushites such as Somalis and Mars. Medieval Arabs knew today's Somalis as the Berbers, a name still borne by the port city of Berbera in the north. Medieval Arabs also traded with peoples farther south than Somalis in what became the Swahili city-states, but they knew the inhabitants of these areas as the Zenj. The word Berber is itself related to the older word Barbaroi, which is used in the document Periplus Maris Erythraie (The Periplus of the Red Sea), a document written in Greek in the middle of the first century A.D?O This document indicates that the Barbaroi, meaning the inhabitants of northern Somali coasts, were trading with the inhabitants of Arabia before Islam; they were also trading with Egypt, then under the Romans. The document then lists some articles of commerce in the land of the Barbaroi such as frankin- cense; it also gives the names of some of the ports of the Barbaroi such as Avalites, doubtless today's Zeilah. Other than the fact that the Barbaroi were able sailors and traversed the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden themselves for commercial purposes, what is more interesting is the comment on their mode of government.