The Somali clans

Who rules

Name

Not applicable. No Somali ruler of 1200 is named in any source.

Title

No single ruler: clan elders and their councils (shir), holy men (wadaad) and the heads of lineages

Since

Not applicable

Born

Not applicable

Family

Patrilineal clans and clan families. Tradition makes the great clan families descend from Arab holy men who married local women: Sheikh Darod (Abdirahman bin Isma'il al-Jabarti, said to have come in the tenth or eleventh century, buried at Haylaan in Sanaag) and Sheikh Isaaq (said to have come in the twelfth or thirteenth century, buried at Maydh), both married to women of the Dir, the oldest clan family; the Hawiye in the centre and south. Scholars treat these Arab genealogies as later Islamic framing of Cushitic peoples.

Confidence

medium

Lewis (Modern History of the Somali, ch. 1); Wikipedia (Isaaq, Darod, Hawiye, Bilad al-Barbar). Al-Idrisi (1154) places the Hawiye (Hawiya) on the coast between Ras Hafun and Merca: the first written mention of a Somali clan. The name Somali itself is first recorded in an Ethiopian victory song of the early fifteenth century; in 1200 the Arab writers call the people of this coast the Barbar.

Overlord

None. The coast towns trade with Aden and the Arabian ports; no outside power takes tribute from the clans.

The realm that morning

No war between the clans or with their neighbours is recorded for that winter; feuds over wells and grazing were endemic but are not documented. To the west lie Zeila's district, the Afar of the Gulf of Tadjoura and the Harla towns of the Harar plateau; to the south-west the Muslim lands of Bale and the Ethiopian south (eth sheet); south of about 3 N the Benadir towns of Merca and Mogadishu and the Shabelle valley (eaf sheet).

Wealth

Camels, sheep, goats and their butter, hides and skins; myrrh and frankincense from the northern mountains; ambergris and tortoiseshell from the coast; ostrich feathers and ivory from the interior; the coast towns' trade with Aden.

Military

No figures. Every clan's men are its army, armed with spear, shield, bow and dagger; there is no standing force.

Threats

• Drought and the pasture feuds it brings
• Later: the rise of Ifat and Adal in the west and of the Ajuran in the south (thirteenth century and after)

How it decides

By lineage: the elders of each clan and sub-clan meet in open council (shir) under a tree or at a well, any adult man may speak, and they agree on grazing, wells, war, peace and the payment of blood-money according to customary law (xeer); the holy men (wadaad) mediate, teach and bless; there is no permanent chief over a whole clan family. (The terms are those of later ethnography, applied here as customary practice of long standing.)

Tribute

No one takes tribute from the clans as a whole. The coast towns pay their way with trade, and the herders take dues and gifts for passage, water and protection from caravans.

Where the sources disagree

• The dates of Sheikh Darod (tenth or eleventh century in tradition; others say later) and Sheikh Isaaq (twelfth or thirteenth century) are genealogical reckonings, not records.
• Lewis's account of a Somali expansion from the north-west to the south and south-west (to the Ogaden and the Juba) is debated: H. S. Lewis and others argued for an origin in the south. This sheet places the clan families only where the earliest evidence puts them and says how thin it is.
• The Hawiye article says the Ajuran held the Hawiye from the thirteenth century and founded Hobyo then; on 1 January 1200 the Ajuran state is not founded.

Evidence: Al-Idrisi (1154) and Ibn Sa'id (mid-thirteenth century) give a few names; everything else rests on genealogical tradition written down centuries later and on scattered archaeology.

On the map: The Somali ground is drawn through its provinces (Dir, Isaaq, Darod, Hawiye, the Ogaden) and the anchors; the lines between them are guesses for 1200.

Primary sources for this realm

Chronicles, registers, sagas and inscriptions written in or near 1200 that cover this entry. Each has its own page with editions, translations and where to read it.

• The History of the Observant Traveller: the pages on Zeila, Berbera, Mogadishu and Dahlak, Ibn al-Mujawir (Yusuf ibn Yaqub ibn al-Mujawir) (about 1221 to 1230). The closest description of the Horn's ports to 1200, written about twenty-five years later by a trader and official who worked the Aden trade: Zeila and its traffic in slaves, ivory and the goods of the Ethiopian interior; the Barbar (Somali) coast with Berbera and Mogadishu, and the sea route from Aden to Mogadishu and on to Kilwa with its sailing seasons; the Dahlak islands with their own sultan and his dues; Socotra; and the customs and prices of Aden under the Ayyubids of Yemen. Read online
• Dictionary of Countries: the entries on Africa, Yaqut al-Hamawi (1224 to 1228, at Mosul and Aleppo). Entries written within a generation of 1200 from earlier books and from informants: Maqdishu (Mogadishu), described as a town of the Barbar (Somali) on the edge of the Zanj country with no single ruler but elders for each group, the earliest notice of the town; Manbasa (Mombasa), Lanjuya (Zanzibar) and the Zanj coast; Zayla, Barbara and the Dahlak islands; Dunqula (Dongola) and the Nubians; the Beja; Kanem, Zaghawa, Ghana, Kawkaw and the Sudan, mostly from al-Bakri and al-Idrisi; and the towns of Ifriqiya and the Maghreb. Read online
• Records of Foreign Peoples: the entries on the African coast and Egypt, Zhao Rugua (1225, at Quanzhou). A Song customs inspector's handbook, written from merchants' reports, that reaches the African coast within a generation of 1200: Bipaluo (Berbera) with its ostriches and giraffes, Zhongli (the Somali coast), Cengba (Zanzibar and the Zanj coast) with its ivory and ambergris and its trade with the Arabs, Kunlun Cengqi (perhaps Madagascar or Pemba), and Wusili (Egypt) with Alexandria's lighthouse. Read online
• The Book of Geography, Ibn Said al-Maghribi (Ali ibn Musa ibn Said) (about 1250 to 1275). Written two generations after 1200 but drawing on the travels of Ibn Fatima, a merchant who had been in the Sudan, Ibn Said gives the first clear picture of Kanem as an empire: the mai Dunama Dibalemi (reigned about 1210 to 1248), his capital Njimi, his Muslim subjects and his reach to the Fezzan, Tajuwa and the Zaghawa, with the Sao and other peoples on his borders. Read online
• The Pleasure of One who Longs to Cross the Horizons (the Book of Roger), al-Idrisi (Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Sharif al-Idrisi) (completed in 1154 at Palermo, for Roger II of Sicily). The fullest geography of Africa a generation before 1200: the Maghreb and Ifriqiya town by town with distances and products; the Sahara routes through Sijilmasa, Awdaghust, Ghadames and Zawila; the Sudan with Ghana, Takrur, Sila, Barisa, Kawkaw (Gao) and Kugha, and Kanem with its towns Manan and Njimi; Nubia and Dongola, the Beja and the Red Sea ports; Zeila and Berbera; and the Zanj coast with Malindi, Mombasa, Qanbalu and Sofala with its gold, the earliest systematic notice of the Swahili towns. Read online
• The Travels of Ibn Battuta: Egypt, the Horn, the Swahili coast and Mali, Ibn Battuta (dictated to Ibn Juzayy) (1355, at Fez). A century and a half late, but the first eyewitness of places that in 1200 are known only from hearsay: Zeila and its stench, Mogadishu with its sultan, qadi and merchant hosts, Mombasa, and Kilwa under the Mahdali sultan Abu'l-Muzaffar al-Hasan, raiding the Zanj of the mainland; and the Sahara road from Sijilmasa through Taghaza and Walata to the court of Mali under Mansa Sulayman, then Timbuktu, Gao and Takedda among the veiled Berbers. Read online
• The East African Coast: Select Documents, Various (edited and translated by G. S. P. Freeman-Grenville) (the collection published 1962; second edition 1975). The standard English collection for the coast, and the one place to read together everything written about the Swahili towns near 1200: al-Masudi and Buzurg ibn Shahriyar (tenth century), al-Idrisi (1154), Yaqut (1220s), Ibn al-Mujawir (1220s), Ibn Said, the Chinese notices of Duan Chengshi and Zhao Rugua (1225), Ibn Battuta's visit of 1331, the Kilwa Chronicle in both versions, and the Portuguese.