BREAKING: 2,000 Year old 'lost' city found off Tanzania coast!

[Absalom's Thought]

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[Misreeya]

You guys in Sudan are still vastly behind when compared to Egypt. Some of the cities I see still have not been excavated. Or am I wrong?

But yeah I agree most of these countries need a archaeological division.

I think we had this conversation before from the last thread, i guess i must reply to this inquiry once again. LOL. It really depends on the time period. Some archaeologist from over seas, may focus on particular periods of the region, from the New Kingdom, Meriotic or Christian time period. As far as cities are you talking about ancient "Dangeil", which is a huge city that is well preserved, and many archaeological teams are working on that. I hope the links i provide is not a waste Kidstranglehold, because it will answer your own question. LOL

http://www.britishmuseum.org/resear...nt_projects/sudan/berber-abidiya_project.aspx

http://www.britishmuseum.org/resear...amara_west_research_project.aspx?fromShortUrl


Although i don't agree with their intrepretations, but they are at the desert.

But yeah I agree most of these countries need a archaeological division

Yeah, they need to do that, because we have been doing this for some time now. Why they have not is anyone guess, but good find.

 

[SouljaVoy]

Hidden Colors 1-4

 

[Bawon Samedi]

I think we had this conversation before from the last thread, i guess i must reply to this inquiry once again. LOL. It really depends on the time period. Some archaeologist from over seas, may focus on particular periods of the region, from the New Kingdom, Meriotic or Christian time period. As far as cities are you talking about ancient "Dangeil", which is a huge city that is well preserved, and many archaeological teams are working on that. I hope the links i provide is not a waste Kidstranglehold, because it will answer your own question. LOL

Berber-Abidiya Archaeological Project

Amara West research project


Although i don't agree with their intrepretations, but they are at the desert.

I don't think your grasping where I'm coming from. Yes the city is well "presured", but has it been completely dug up? More importantly does Sudan have the same financial funding and hell ambition like the Egyptologist in Egypt?

I clicked the links(good links btw) and the city of Dangeil still has not been fully excavated. More importantly as far as I know the city of Kerma which is important to early Sudan history has still not been fully excavated where you can see the whole city and they have been working on it since 2000 according to your links.

If what I am saying is not the case then we shouldn't just be seeing this.

^^^Egypt was just like that when archaeologist first entered Egypt, but they dug it all up. But most of the cities now are dug up where you can fully SEE them. If this is the case for Sudan, than give me an example where a city is buried and it has been completely dug up.

My point is that archological work in the rest of Africa does not have the same financial fundings and ambition as Egypt. This is a fact.

Yeah, they need to do that, because we have been doing this for some time now. Why they have not is anyone guess, but good find.

Thanks.

 

[Bawon Samedi]

Right... when I saw your post I immediately remembered reading about this ancient Azania some months ago.
And specifically how there are experts who contend that in ancient times these settlements consisted of afro-asiatic folks...
Actually that appears to be the consensus...

You should read this.

The Origin of The Swahili Towns
Scholars had, up to the end of the twentieth century, debated the origin of the Swahili people and their stone town culture. Such debates revolved on the question of who the Swahili people were (Allen 1974, 1983; Nurse and Spear 1985; Pouwels 1987; Horton 1987; and Chami 1994, 1998). The original popular conception was that the Swahili people and their culture originated from the Middle East. These were alleged to have arrived in waves of immigration. Individuals in these waves founded settlements, which later grew into larger Swahili stone towns. Chittick (1974, 1975) used chronicles, particularly that of Kilwa, and archaeology to argue that the earliest immigrants could have arrived on the East African coast not earlier that the ninth century. This view suggested, therefore, that the Swahili people were originally Persians or Arabs who would later have mixed with Africans. Due to their alleged origin in the Muslim world the Swahili people were necessarily Muslims and people of towns.

Archaeologists such as Horton (1987), influenced by Allen (1983), suggested that the Swahili were people of Cushytic origin, from the northeast of Africa, who were originally pastoralists. The pastoralists, who are alleged to have ruled the Bantu speakers in a mythical land called Shunguaya, mixed with Bantu speakers, adopted Islam and spread to the rest of the coast and islands of East Africa. In this theory the Swahili people are seen as Africans who also mixed with the people of the Middle East in the process of adopting Islam and trade. This position was made more prominent in the 1990s (Horton 1990; Abungu 1994–1995; Sutton 1994–1995) in an attempt to quash the discovery that the Swahili people were Africans of Bantu origin, people of the general region of Eastern and Southern Africa who were agriculturalists and fishermen.

That the Swahili people did speak a Bantu language was a point recognised by linguists from the 1980s (Nurse and Spear 1985). Archaeologists had also established settlements of Early Iron Working people near the coast; scholars recognised that they were early Bantu speakers (Soper 1971; Phillipson 1977). Historians also recognised that the people reported by the Romans in the first centuries AD to have inhabited East Africa, then known as Azania, were agriculturalists and probably Bantu speaking (Casson 1989). In the early 1990s this author suggested that the cultural tradition found in the earliest Swahili settlements was culturally related to that of the Early Iron Working tradition (Chami 1994). In some cases settlements of the Early Iron Working people and those of the so‐called early Swahili, termed by this author as Triangular Incised Ware tradition, were found in the same location. In some cases the later was found superimposed over the former in the offshore islands and on the coastal littoral of the central coast of Tanzania (Chami 1998, 1999a).

The evidence of cultural continuity from the time of Christ, through the mid‐first millennium AD, to the time of the foundation of the Swahili towns in the early centuries of the second millennium AD, has now been recognised by many scholars (Kusimba 1999; Sinclair and Hakansson 2000; Spear 2000). Those who disagreed with the the first set of evidence for this continuity have now revised their ideas (Horton 1996; Horton and Middleton 2000; Sutton 1998). Archaeological findings now prove that the Swahili coast had been settled by an agricultural and trading population from the time of Pharaonic Egypt, 3000 BCE, through the Greaco‐Roman period (Chami 2006). Whereas the former was of Neolithic tradition, the latter was an Early Iron Working culture. Throughout these periods the Indian Ocean, just like it was during the time of Islam, had brisk trade with communities of Asia, the Middle East and the Red Sea/Mediterranean worlds. Ceramics and beads as evidence of trade of all these pre‐Islamic trading periods have now been recovered from the islands of Zanzibar, Mafia, Kilwa and Rufiji River (for conspectus see Chami 1999b, 2004, 2006).

The most recent thinking that the early Swahili people, or Zanj of the Arab documents, were Indonesians/Austronesians (dikk‐Read 2005) is an attempt to disregard the archaeological, linguistic and historical data already established. For this recent thinking to be regarded as scientific at least a discussion of the previous thinking on the subject matter and its flaws should have be debated.

Some Cultural Aspects of the Swahili Towns

General Culture
The culture of the Swahili towns, as already suggested, is African with an infusion of Islamic traits. It is these infused Islamic traits such as religion, law, language, writing and costume which have made many students of the Swahili culture identify the people as Arabs. The people who had adopted this culture themselves wanted to be identified as Arabs or Persians. However, Ibn Baṭṭūṭa identified the people as ‘Sawahil’ and the earliest European visitors to the Swahili world, the Portuguese, identified the people as ‘Moors’ or ‘Suaili’ as opposed to Arabs.

De Barros, as Ibn Baṭṭūṭa did, also identified the Sultans of Kilwa as black people (Chittick 1975: 39). Barbosa, writing in about 1518, wrote, “Of the Moors there are some fair and some black, they are finely clad in many rich garments of gold and silk and cotton.” To show that the Swahilis were different from Arabs, the Queen of Kilwa in the mid‐eighteenth century wrote a letter calling home her people who had run away from the Arab/Omani domination of Kilwa to Mozambique. This was written in Kiswahili and not in Arabic; a Swahili letter suggesting that it was only the Europeans/Christians who were in conflict with the Arabs, but not the African/Swahili people (Omar and Frankl 1994).

Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures
Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg New York 2008
10.1007/978-1-4020-4425-0_8504
Helaine Selin

Cities and Towns in East Africa
Felix Chami

Cushytic/Afro-Asiatic people during this time were not agriculturalist like the ancestors of Bantu people. Hard evidence shows that migrating metal working farming Bantu's brought agricultural to Southeast and Southern Africa. Also the fact that the source states that the people of Azania were most likely farmers, this among with many other things show they were Bantus.

 

[Absalom's Thought]

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[thaKEAF]

I don't think your grasping where I'm coming from. Yes the city is well "presured", but has it been completely dug up? More importantly does Sudan have the same financial funding and hell ambition like the Egyptologist in Egypt?

I clicked the links(good links btw) and the city of Dangeil still has not been fully excavated. More importantly as far as I know the city of Kerma which is important to early Sudan history has still not been fully excavated where you can see the whole city and they have been working on it since 2000 according to your links.

If what I am saying is not the case then we shouldn't just be seeing this.

^^^Egypt was just like that when archaeologist first entered Egypt, but they dug it all up. But most of the cities now are dug up where you can fully SEE them. If this is the case for Sudan, than give me an example where a city is buried and it has been completely dug up.

My point is that archological work in the rest of Africa does not have the same financial fundings and ambition as Egypt. This is a fact.




Thanks.

I never knew that about Egypt..so could they even see the pyramids fully?

 

[Misreeya]

I don't think your grasping where I'm coming from. Yes the city is well "presured", but has it been completely dug up? More importantly does Sudan have the same financial funding and hell ambition like the Egyptologist in Egypt?

I clicked the links(good links btw) and the city of Dangeil still has not been fully excavated. More importantly as far as I know the city of Kerma which is important to early Sudan history has still not been fully excavated where you can see the whole city and they have been working on it since 2000 according to your links.

If what I am saying is not the case then we shouldn't just be seeing this.

^^^Egypt was just like that when archaeologist first entered Egypt, but they dug it all up. But most of the cities now are dug up where you can fully SEE them. If this is the case for Sudan, than give me an example where a city is buried and it has been completely dug up.

My point is that archological work in the rest of Africa does not have the same financial fundings and ambition as Egypt. This is a fact.




Thanks.

but they dug it all up

The city of Dangeil which they just found in the 1990's so it is going to take many years for it to be excavated but they are concentrated on the temple now, but other groups are also concentrated of the general ancient city, which is huge over 24 football fields size and many of the building well preserve, but i don't think you really have a understanding of the terrain further north which is desert, in other words the access is not very easy in some parts. Even in Egypt Kidstranglehold, not everything is fully excavated and they still finding important objects till this day. Now Kidstranglehold it also depends on which university or organization doing the excavation for example the temple of Soleb is fully excavated along with the pyramids especially during the early part of century, unlike you i follow this all the time especially from blogs from Archaeologist both local and international. Again Kidstrangleshold, Kerma is one monument, among the many different monuments in Sudan, which means each archaeologist may be a specialist or focus on a particular time period of the country. In other words, some Archaeologist may focus on Kerma, others Jebel Barkal, others Amara West, others pyramids, other Christian period etc. There is alot to cover, and each organization are in charge of a particular monument.


Just to let you know kidstranglehold there is not many ancient cities found in Egypt. I thinking you are getting the monuments such as temples confused for actual cities. I agree Egypt do get a great deal of funding than us, but there is not accuse for other African countries to not have similar discipline even with limited funding.


It is obvious you are not as well verse in the monuments in Sudan, and which institutions stewardship of the different monuments of the country.

financial fundings

In honesty who Sudan get most of our funding and who some of you guys love to demonize "Arabs" from Qatar and Saudi Arabia. LOL

Ironic

 

[Oceanicpuppy]

The more the they unearth Africa the more its gonna upset a lot of people.

 

[Bawon Samedi]

The city of Dangeil which they just found in the 1990's so it is going to take many years for it to be excavated but they are concentrated on the temple now, but other groups are also concentrated of the general ancient city, which is huge over 24 football fields size and many of the building well preserve, but i don't think you really have a understanding of the terrain further north which is desert, in other words the access is not very easy in some parts. Even in Egypt Kidstranglehold, not everything is fully excavated and they still finding important objects till this day. Now Kidstranglehold it also depends on which university or organization doing the excavation for example the temple of Soleb is fully excavated along with the pyramids especially during the early part of century, unlike you i follow this all the time especially from blogs from Archaeologist both local and international. Again Kidstrangleshold, Kerma is one monument, among the many different monuments in Sudan, which means each archaeologist may be a specialist or focus on a particular time period of the country. In other words, some Archaeologist may focus on Kerma, others Jebel Barkal, others Amara West, others pyramids, other Christian period etc. There is alot to cover, and each organization are in charge of a particular monument.


Just to let you know kidstranglehold there is not many ancient cities found in Egypt. I thinking you are getting the monuments such as temples confused for actual cities. I agree Egypt do get a great deal of funding than us, but there is not accuse for other African countries to not have similar discipline even with limited funding.

Which is the main point I was making, so I don't understand why you made this more complex than it really is...

As for the rest of the post we can agree-disagree as this is not even the main topic of this thread.

In honesty who Sudan get most of our funding and who some of you guys love to demonize "Arabs" from Qatar and Saudi Arabia. LOL

Ironic

Who said I demonize Arabs??? Hell I give those Eurocentric Egyptologist like Zahi Hawass for preserving and protecting most the Egyptian monuments.

 

[cornercommission2k12]

Also to Felix Chami who is not only African, but Swahili himself who has been putting in a lot of work for Swahili archaeology for a very long time. We need more Africans like him around the continent who are not only vested in their history, but actually walk the walk and are in the "field" getting their hands dirty.

yea anthony browder is over in the nile valley doing excavations keeping them "other" thieves in check

i wonder will he find that extravagant underground maze/labyrinth that herodotus and other greeks wrote about

 

[Misreeya]

Which is the main point I was making, so I don't understand why you made this more complex than it really is...

As for the rest of the post we can agree-disagree as this is not even the main topic of this thread.








Who said I demonize Arabs??? Hell I give those Eurocentric Egyptologist like Zahi Hawass for preserving and protecting most the Egyptian monuments.

Yeah we have to agree to disagree, because when i was in Sudan i met many different archaeologist, since many stay in a hotel what my mother relatives own in Khartoum before heading further north, so i have a little insight in comparison to most people. .


I did not say you specially demonize "Arabs", but many people within this forum does.
I am not talking about Zahi Hawass who is Egyptian, whether you consider him Arab that is another question. I am talking about Arabs specifically from the Gulf states, Gulf Arabs has money Whereas Egypt is basically still a third world country in comparison to the Gulf states

 

[Sauanaffe Tustunnagee]

Now look what we have here....

A 2,000-year-old 'lost' city found off the Coast of Africa

Now would you look at that, we can not throwaway the age old myth that Africans from the interior or Africans deep in "Sub Sahara Africa" were isolated from the world. They were not only having established urban areas since antiquity, but were actually trading with the Greece, Persian, Romans and Indians. And were connected to the Indian Ocean trade one of the most important in history.

We already knew this, because of this...
BBC News | AFRICA | Tanzanian dig unearths ancient secret

But we never knew whether or not the city of Rhapta which was talked about by the Greeks themselves EVER existed!

We can also kiss goodbye the myth of the Swahili coast being founded by non-Africans like Arabs or Persians...

This is why I always state that more archaeological work NEEDS to be done in Africa and that Ancient Egypt gets too much archaeological attention. We already know much about Ancient Egypt, meanwhile the rest of the continent is barely touched. I would say only 2% archaeological work is done.

But yeah this changes everything good for us, but bad for the Euronuts.

but whitey told me all the African in Tanzanian were simple hunters and gatherers whom dwelled dirt huts until Islam/sand cacs civilized them and built the Swahilli kingdom

 

[Kings County]

atlantis ?

 

[Amestafuu (Emeritus)]

Now we just need a movie with British cacs about this african society