Ceramics in Indian Ocean Trade

Matatu ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-45
Author(s):  
Villoo Nowrojee
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Western Indian Ocean ◽  
East African ◽  
East African Coast ◽  
Indian Ocean Trade ◽  
African Coast

Abstract Ceramics have been extensively imported on the East African Coast over many centuries. The principal sources have been Iran and China, the latter trans-shipped through the port of Malacca and the Indian ports of the western Indian Ocean. These ceramics were used to embellish the gates and mihrabs of mosques, and the exteriors of elaborate tombs. They were vessels in homes and decorations on buildings. In the last two centuries, the old ceramics came to be supplanted by imported ware more utilitarian in make and appearance. These came in mainly from Holland, England and Germany. These products of Western Europe were influenced by the Islamic markets they had entered, while in turn these plates became an important part of the East African Coast’s architecture and Swahili traditions and homes.

Burcad Badeed as Grounds and Method in Literary Expressions of Somali Piracy

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-51
Author(s):  
Kelsey McFaul
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Western Indian Ocean ◽  
East African ◽  
East African Coast ◽  
Maritime Piracy ◽  
African Coast ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Indian Ocean World ◽  
The Relationship

The emergence of maritime piracy in the western Indian Ocean captured global attention from 2007 to 2012, resulting in simplistic and racialized representations of piracy in news and other media. In 2011, two diasporic Somali writers published literary works intervening in this representation: Nuruddin Farah’s novel Crossbones and Ubax Cristina Ali Farah’s essay “Un sambuco attraversa il mare” [“A dhow is crossing the sea”]. This essay reads Farah and Ali Farah’s alternative narratives of piracy through the Somali phrase burcad badeed, which both translate as ‘sea bandits’ or ‘pirates.’ As a method burcad badeed first historicizes contemporary piracy within the longue durée of the Indian Ocean world. Second, it draws on the ocean as an analogy and aggregator of dispersed forms of knowledge, thereby inviting comparative reading across conventional boundaries of generation, language, and form, and making visible practices of collective, embodied, and polyvocal knowledge production. Finally, burcad badeed complicates the distinctions between land and sea which undergird legal definitions of piracy to focalize particular landscapes: Namely the beach and the relationship between coast and hinterland. The beach foregrounds the ecological devastation to which piracy is a response, while the relationship between coast and hinterland frames practices of movement, complex racializations, and senses of belonging in Somalia and on the east African coast.

Chinese Porcelain as a Symbol of Power on the East African Coast from the 14th Century Onward

2016 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 74-93
Author(s):  
Andrea Montella
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Social Classes ◽  
Main Section ◽  
East African ◽  
East African Coast ◽  
14Th Century ◽  
African Coast ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Ancient Times

The aim of this paper is to illustrate the role of Chinese ceramics in Swahili society, with particular emphasis on their funerary uses. Although the importance of Chinese ceramics, especially porcelain, is attested throughout the Indian Ocean, scholars have only recently pointed out their role not only as chronological markers, but also as useful tools to better understand the politics and social customs of certain areas, such as the East African Coast. Imported vessels are involved in several ritual activities which have been performed in Swahili houses since ancient times. Ceramics act as protective tools in the innermost and main section of the house, exclusively reserved for women. According to local customs, Chinese ceramics are believed to be able to ward off negative influences. Furthermore, ceramics became part of the constitution of authority and power, not just a reflection of them. In particular, their importance is evident from their use in religious monuments such as mosques and tombs, where they are used as architectural decorative elements in order to display the wealth of the deceased and as symbols of legitimacy bestowed from ancestors to their heirs. Chinese porcelain in funerary contexts thus became a necessary instrument whereby the Swahili elite asserted their prominence during the continuous negotiation of power between them and other social classes.

Early Muslim Trading Settlements on the East African Coast: New Evidence from Shanga

1987 ◽  
Vol 67 (2) ◽  
pp. 290-323 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. C. Horton
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Early Period ◽  
East African ◽  
Rock Crystal ◽  
East African Coast ◽  
Trading Systems ◽  
African Coast ◽  
History Of ◽  
First Millennium ◽  
The Indian Ocean

Much archaeological and historical research has recently been devoted to the study of the early Swahili communities inhabiting the East African coast during the late first millennium a.d. The practice of Islam can be shown to date back to perhaps the beginning of the ninth century from when the first mosques have been excavated. The economic importance of East Africa for the Indian Ocean and Mediterranean world is apparent from the wealth of imports and exports found in a large number of these coastal sites. African trading systems brought to medieval society high-value commodities ranging from gold, rock crystal and ivory, to slaves and timber. The items were carried across large distances sea by traders following the seasonal monsoon system around the coasts and across the Indian Ocean. is argued that the trading settlements were African in culture and origin, but then attracted Muslims who were responsible for occasional local converts from a very early period in the history of Islam.

scholarly journals Postmortem transport in fossil and modern shelled cephalopods

PeerJ ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. e5909 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret M. Yacobucci
Keyword(s):  
Western Indian Ocean ◽  
East African ◽  
East African Coast ◽  
Geographic Ranges ◽  
Nautilus Pompilius ◽  
African Coast ◽  
High Inflation ◽  
The Many ◽  
Close Relatives ◽  
Early Late

The chambered shells of cephalopod mollusks, such as modern Nautilus and fossil ammonoids, have the potential to float after death, which could result in significant postmortem transport of shells away from living habitats. Such transport would call into question these clades’ documented biogeographic distributions and therefore the many (paleo)biological interpretations based on them. It is therefore imperative to better constrain the likelihood and extent of postmortem transport in modern and fossil cephalopods. Here, I combine the results of classic experiments on postmortem buoyancy with datasets on cephalopod shell form to determine that only those shells with relatively high inflation are likely to float for a significant interval after death and therefore potentially experience postmortem transport. Most ammonoid cephalopods have shell forms making postmortem transport unlikely. Data on shell forms and geographic ranges of early Late Cretaceous cephalopod genera demonstrate that even genera with shell forms conducive to postmortem buoyancy do not, in fact, show artificially inflated biogeographic ranges relative to genera with non-buoyant morphologies. Finally, georeferenced locality data for living nautilid specimens and dead drift shells indicate that most species have relatively small geographic ranges and experience limited drift. Nautilus pompilius is the exception, with a broad Indo-Pacific range and drift shells found far from known living populations. Given the similarity of N. pompilius to other nautilids in its morphology and ecology, it seems unlikely that this species would have a significantly different postmortem fate than its close relatives. Rather, it is suggested that drift shells along the east African coast may indicate the existence of modern (or recently extirpated) living populations of nautilus in the western Indian Ocean, which has implications for the conservation of these cephalopods.

‘Indian’ metalwork in East Africa: the bronze lion statuette from Shanga

Antiquity ◽  
1988 ◽  
Vol 62 (234) ◽  
pp. 11-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
M.C. Horton ◽  
T.R. Blurton
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
East Africa ◽  
East African ◽  
The West ◽  
East African Coast ◽  
Early Date ◽  
Islamic World ◽  
African Coast ◽  
The Indian Ocean

There are few frontiers from later periods whose archaeology is more beguiling than the east African coast. To the east are the sea-routes of the Indian Ocean, to the Islamic world, to India, to Indonesia, to China. To the west are the distinctive cultures of medieval Africa. And on the coast are the settlements where the east and the west touch. This paper works towards the wider issue of circum-maritime cultures from a single find from the new excavations at Shanga which have revealed mosques of a remarkably early date.

From Marco Polo to Manuel I of Portugal: The Image of the East African Coast in the Early Sixteenth Century

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
JEAN MICHEL MASSING
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Indian Ocean ◽  
East Coast ◽  
East African ◽  
East African Coast ◽  
Marco Polo ◽  
African Coast ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Interesting Development

Less than twenty years after Vasco da Gama joined the commercial perimeter of the Indian Ocean (1497–8), European artists had developed a view of the newly discovered lands, ranging from highly exotic and sometimes quite fanciful renderings based on medieval sources (the ‘Tapestries of the Indies’) to careful ethnographic illustrations based on written and visual sources (Hans Burgkmair's large woodcut frieze, People of Africa and India, of 1508). These few years, in which the monstrance of Belém of 1506 (Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, Lisbon) was produced with the gold of Kilwa, also saw an interesting development in Portuguese gold coinage. All these ventures record a brief moment of European fascination with the east coast of Africa and its multicultural inhabitants, which is the object of this study.

A Long-Distance Nexus in the Indian Ocean: Gujarati Banias, Brokers, and Middlemen in Eighteenth-Century Portuguese East Africa

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 234-254
Author(s):  
Luís Frederico Dias Antunes
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Indian Ocean ◽  
East Africa ◽  
Small Island ◽  
East African ◽  
Commercial Activity ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
East African Coast ◽  
African Coast ◽  
The Indian Ocean

Abstract Historiography has long recognized the strategic importance of Diu as a commercial hub in the Indian Ocean, despite the decline it experienced in the last quarter of the seventeenth century. A great deal of Diuese commerce, along with the island’s privileged connections with East Africa (especially Mozambique), was sustained by the activity of the Banias—Hindus and Jain—who had long used this small island as a platform for trade. This article analyzes the forms of organization, commercial and financial techniques, and main roles of the Banias of Gujarat, one of the largest and most important urban merchant communities in India and in other Asian and African markets along the Indian Ocean. In the case of Diu, we seek to understand the extent to which the financial capacity and commercial experience of the local Banias allowed them to dominate most commercial activity in Mozambique from the late seventeenth century onwards. We examine the internal structure of the Banias’ merchant communities, the hierarchical dependencies and trade links between the Banias of Diu and of Mozambique, and, lastly, the adaptation of their experience and commercial techniques to the East African coast.

scholarly journals Deep-water Photinae (Gastropoda: Nassariidae) from eastern Africa, with descriptions of five new species

2020 ◽  
Vol 720 ◽  
pp. 144-169
Author(s):  
Koen Fraussen ◽  
Lee Ann Galindo ◽  
José Rosado
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Deep Water ◽  
Western Indian Ocean ◽  
Eastern Africa ◽  
East African ◽  
East African Coast ◽  
West Pacific ◽  
Deep Water Species ◽  
Pacific Species ◽  
Water Species

Deep-water species from the western Indian Ocean off the East African coast and Madagascar, belonging to the subfamily Photinae, are discussed and compared with species from the West Pacific. Phos elegantissimus Hayashi & Habe, 1965, P. hirasei Sowerby, 1913 and P. laevis Kuroda & Habe in Habe, 1961 are recorded from Mozambique and/or from Madagascar, hereby extending their known range considerably into the western Indian Ocean. The East African specimens formerly assigned to Phos roseatus Hinds, 1844 are found to differ from this West Pacific species. In total, five species are described as new: Phos ganii sp. nov., P. geminus sp. nov., P. ladoboides sp. nov., P. pulchritudus sp. nov. and P. testaceus sp. nov.

Asiatic colonization of the East African coast: the Manda evidence

1986 ◽  
Vol 118 (2) ◽  
pp. 201-213 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Horton
Keyword(s):  
Raw Materials ◽  
Western Indian Ocean ◽  
Building Stone ◽  
African Women ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
East African ◽  
East African Coast ◽  
Early Settlement ◽  
African Coast ◽  
History Of

The history of early settlement of the East African coast is currently interpreted in widely differing ways. One view takes as its premise the idea that the coast was first colonized from Asia. This hypothesis, which has its roots in the work of XlXth century historians suggests that there was substantial settlement by non-Africans who established trading and religious communities. These colonies formed the basis of what has come to be known as the Swahili Culture. At first defensible peninsulas and offshore islands were chosen as safe refuges from the African tribes of the interior. Eventually contact was established between these new communities and the African coastal peoples, to the benefit of both parties. Raw materials were obtained from the hinterland of these trading outposts, which were traded and taken across the Western Indian Ocean on the seasonal monsoons. The foreign merchants married local African women and an Afro-Arab culture developed, building stone towns, mosques, and tombs, that still remain today along the coastline from Somalia to Mozambique.

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