Xamar’s Indian Ocean port outlived many empires
Mogadishu—locally Xamar or Hamar—is Somalia’s capital and chief city, a Banaadir coast port that linked Indian Ocean traders for centuries. It ruled as a sultanate from the ninth to thirteenth centuries before Italian treaties, independence in 1960, Siad Barre’s republic, and a long civil war.
Its likely forerunner was Sarapion, listed in the first-century Greek Periplus of the Erythraean Sea among trading ports on the Somali coast. Ancient Somali city-states traded with Phoenicia, Ptolemaic Egypt, Greece, Parthian Persia, Nabataea and Rome, carrying cargo in a native vessel called the beden. Archaeology and texts suggest an indigenous network linking coast and hinterland roughly four thousand years ago, well before significant Arab migration.
The older theory by Ioan Lewis and Enrico Cerulli, that Arab and Persian families founded the city, rested on the 19th-century Kitab al-Zunuj, which modern scholars dismiss as unreliable; the current view holds that Somali leaders already governed and newcomers asked permission to settle, then assimilated. Ibn Battuta described the 14th-century sultan as of Barbara origin, an old term for ancestors of the Somalis, and Yaqut al-Hamawi called it the leading town on the coast in 1220.
The sultanate long dominated the Indian Ocean gold trade, then passed to the Ajuran, peaking in the 14th and 15th centuries as the richest city on the East African coast, famed for its textiles. The Hiraab Imamate and later the Geledi Sultanate followed, then Italian rule after 1906, British military administration and an Italian trusteeship in the 1950s.
Name theories include sight killer or blinder, perhaps for its dazzling beauty, and a place where sheep are slaughtered; Leo Africanus called it Magadazo and praised its wealth. Xamar may mean red, for the reddish sand and hills, and the word also names tamarind and a chestnut horse. Abyssinians knew it as Machidas, with a royal palace and frescoed stone houses. After decades of civil war, major rebuilding began in the late 2010s, and some 4.1 million people now live there.
Source: Mogadishu
