Gone Medieval - Slaves, Gold & Ivory: East African Trade Routes

Episode Date: June 1, 2021

Long before Atlantic trade routes became established East Africa had strong connections with the wider world, trading across the Indian Ocean and into Asia. Professor Mark Horton has been leading research projects in East Africa for over forty years. In this episode he describes the resources traded in East Africa and the cultural transformations that went along with them. Mark is Professor of Archaeology & Cultural Heritage and Director of Research at the Royal Agricultural University. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello and welcome to Gone Medieval from HistoryHit. I'm Dr. Kat Jarman and I'm very happy that you have joined me for this episode. Today we're going to go quite far away from England and Western Europe to talk about some of the extensive trading networks that thrive during the early middle ages. Globalisation is a bit of a buzzword today and often seen as a very recent invention. But you could argue that this was something that really started to emerge in the first millennium.

Because this was the time when goods, people and ideas really started to travel quite rapidly across vast distances, bringing things like silk from Asia to England and silver from the Middle East to Scandinavia while things like furs, amber and slaves travelled south. And in today's episode we're going to focus on some of the areas further south, East Africa and the Indian Ocean to be precise. I'm going to talk about how this part of Africa was actually very well to be. connected with the wider world. And for most of us, the exploitation of Africa, both for the enslavement of its people and its valuable resources in the very sort of modern period is very well

known. But that more recent slave trade was definitely not the start of it. And if we go back to the early medieval period, something really quite similar took place on the East African coast. So my guest today knows a lot about all of this. And I'm very delighted to welcome Mark Horton, who is a professor of archaeology at the newly formed Cultural Heritage Institute, which is part of the Royal Agricultural University. Mark has led research projects in different parts of East Africa for over 40 years, including extensive excavations on the islands off the East African coast, like Zanzibar, Pembah and Madagascar.

And one of his main research interests is precisely these wider global connections that emerge in the early medieval period. And for a bit of disclosure here, I should mention that Mark and I normally collaborate on projects looking at that exact time period, but in much colder and rainier conditions in England. But those two are actually really quite connected as we're going to be talking a bit more about later on. But I thought we could start a little bit, Mark, by talking about these resources. So I just mentioned trade, things coming out of Africa. What sort of things, what sort of objects and resources are we talk about?

about here, what was there in this part of Africa that was so desirable for traders? And where in the world do these goods end up? Well, in East Africa, there's sort of a classic triad of commodities, which is slaves, gold and ivory. And the three commodities, the ones that largely form the basis of most historians' discussions about how the eastern coast of Africa was exploits. rarely over up to 2,000 years ago. The first ivory trade, for example, is mentioned in a classical document known as the peripolis at the Australian Sea. And that describes this elephant ivory

that's coming out. And then later on, we've certainly got gold trade, which is known, for example, associated with great Zimbabwe, but actually is much older. And a slave trade that certainly goes back to the 7th century AD or maybe even. earlier. So the classic triad of commodities, but alongside those is a long list of other things, more exotic things, that also came out of the region. So for example, we have ambergris, which is a sort of waxy substance that gets exhaled out of Wales, which is used as a fixative for perfumes. And because of the current system in East Africa, a lot of this washes up on beaches and was prized all the way through the Middle Ages.

We have a civic musk. We have leopard skins. We have timber. The Middle East, for example, had very little local wood. And so there was a massive trade in not only high-quality teaks, but also mangrove poles, which were used as roofing materials, really up until very recently. The mangrove trade, mangrove pole trade,

continued until 1990s. supplying scaffolding in the Emirates and the Gulf states until steel replaced it. So these trade routes, these trade commodities have a very long history. And I suppose I can say why did it happen? Well, the key factor are the monsoon winds that blow in one direction for six months the year and then reverse direction in the following six months, which enable ships to follow the monsoon winds, soon, re-arriving East Africa, await the change of monsoon, and then sail back with their

dows full of these commodities. So really, geography is a huge part of this then as well, then, isn't it? That coastline. And in terms of East Africa and these countries that you've talked about so far, what is it there about this and the islands that's so important for the trade to really emerge? Well, the islands were often places where, these trade interactions happen. We think partly because islands provided good anchorages. If you can imagine you've got a monsoon wind blowing in, you've got a pringing coastal reef, whereas in islands you can sneak around the back and anchor more safely. But also, they provide a certain safety from the mainland. Mainland Africa was quite a savage place.

We know we have a lot of pastoral groups along certain sections of the coastline who tended to be quite warlike in their activities. And I think the traders found it much more convenient to come to these island locations where they could find peace and security. So this was a sort of safe place to wait out the right time of year to continue trading. And is that where you also start seeing trading settlements, bringing up. Yeah, so there's a very interesting, well, historiography behind all this, because in the past, earlier colonial historians would see these places as Arab settlements. They would see

these as places where the Arabs came from the Gulf region, or maybe Indians from the subcontinent, and they would come here, and, you know, while they're awaiting the change of monsoon, would take local wives and produce kind of a miscegenated sort of half Arab half African population. Our recent archaeological work over the last 40 years has shown that this is actually not the case. These communities that develop on the islands are essentially Bantu speaking, farming, fishing communities that move out onto the islands and happen to be in the right place to interact with these long-distance trade networks. and themselves they had boats that themselves traded with and there's some evidence that actually they themselves

are also sailing to Arabians and at least with their commodities. So we're talking about now the early medieval period. You've mentioned that these objects have been traded for a very long time so things like the ivory, for example. But what is it really that changes? I think a lot of these changes take place around 700 or so, don't they, in terms of the types of sites that you've worked on an excavator on the scale. what is it that happens and why at that particular point in time?

Well, we begin to see trade redeveloping from, as you rightly say, about 700. We can begin to see small quantities of imports turning up in these local indigenous settlements. But really the big takeoff is around 750. And this is really interesting because this is the point at which the Abbasid dynasty comes into power. displaces the Uyads and the Abbasids move the headquarters of the focus of the dynasty away from the Mediterranean and Damascus to the Middle East with their capital in Baghdad and so suddenly this is a world power out there facing out towards the Indian nation and in this period around 750 there's an

explosion in Indian Ocean trade as this massive consuming Islamic power requires all these commodities, requires slaves to build up its buildings and its agricultural systems, it needs gold, in its ivory. So there's a huge boom time in the Indonesian for around 750 to around the thousands. And it's probably driven by the Abbasids

and the satellite states that surround it. So in terms of sources for all of this, now obviously you've been working on the Archaeological, material, but we don't actually have a lot of knowledge from written sources from the West until the first European contact, which I believe is right about the 15th century or so, but the islands and the coast and the people were well described in literature from elsewhere. So can you tell us a little bit about those sources, those other written sources that we have for what's happening in East Africa? The written sources are slightly beguiling. They are quite extensive.

They're written mostly in Arabic. We've got Persian sources. And ironically, we've also got quite a lot of Chinese sources as well. They all have their difficulties in interpretation and they're somewhat fragmentary. Actually, we only have one eyewitness account in this period who actually comes to East Africa. All the rest are secondhand and slightly salacious. They quite like to dwell on the cannibalistic habits of the East Africans and all. this kind of stuff. The one person who is actually accurate is a man called Al-Mazudi, who wrote this massive encyclopedia of world history, of world geography. And he comes to East Africa. His last voyage is in 9-16. And he describes from first hand what the places look like, who the rulers are, the fact that they're Muslims and so forth. And so, so his account is by far the most reliable for this period. And does he talk about the slave trade or does he talk about the goods or what sort of things does he describe in the account? So rather curiously, Mazudi makes only the slightest reference to gold. He makes virtually no reference to a slave trade, but he spends his

time dwelling extensively on the ivory trade. And he goes to an island called Kambaloo, which we think is Pemba Island. But then he also records. where the ivory is coming from, not on the coast of East Africa, immediately opposite Pemba Island, but way down south in the Mozambique Channel, where there is apparently a massive network of ivory trading going into the far South African interior. So that's a really great way of showing those wider connections. And interestingly, for those who might be interested in the Viking Age

and the Vikings way have come across. cross al-Masudi before because he also travels extensively into the parts of Eastern Europe where the Vikings settled and travelled right in about the same time. So we get these incredible connections between north and south, which we'll get back to a bit again in a moment. But let's get back to the slave trade then. So what other sources of knowledge do we have them? Is there anything in the archaeology that can tell us about it or anything about the scale of the slave trade? Well, the slave trade is interesting because we know that East African slaves are known as Zanj slaves. Zanj is the Arabic name for this region.

And there was a massive revolt of the Zanj slaves in the early part of the 9th century, which practically brought the Abbasic Caliphate to an end, actually. Now, there's a lot of argument about whether the Zan slaves really came from East Africa or not. But the archaeological evidence suggests that they must have done. We have enormous sites which are full of exotic and expensive trade items, not complex architecture, no stone buildings, but on the other hand, extensive areas of occupation and middens, timber buildings. And to me, the only justification for these enormous sites

is that they were massive slave trading, corrals and settlements where the Zan slaves were then taken and shipped to them at least. We don't see anything like burials or anything like that in the places where they were destined. Is there any evidence from any new scientific results or anything like that? Well, not yet. I mean, what we do know is that the population of the mainland opposite seems to have a massive decline at this period, which is quite good evidence for some form of slave trading to me. But also really interesting observation that these island settlements are Islamic, they're Muslims.

Although they're indigenous Africans, they are converted into Islam. However, on the mainland, there is no trace of Islam, apart from the settlements that are right on the beach. There's not a single mosque before the 19th century, which is more than 100 yards from a beach or estuary. Islam didn't penetrate inland, and one reason for that, is because you can't enslave Muslims. And so maybe Islam was being kept very much to the coast and the indigenous populations in the interior were to be exploited for slavery.

So actually, if you were living in these places, they would have been a benefit to you to convert to Islam because you would be safer, essentially. Is that what the point of that is? Absolutely. And that's why essentially people become Muslim, are very keen to become Muslim, very early on. It's not because the Arab traders marrying local women, but it's the locals

becoming converted to Islam. And that I think is a really important point, which you don't necessarily think about, because we see the slave trade coming out of the Middle East and out of the caliphate going north and looking for slaves from northern territories and interacting with the Vikings, presumably for precisely the same reasons, that they need to go outside their own territory to find people that they can legitimately enslave. Yes, so the indigenous, these Muslim communities have to reinforce their Muslim identity. One thing they do, very interesting,

is their own silver coins. These are minuscule little silver coins that are probably from melted dirhams. Those are the silver coins that you find up in the Viking North. But in this case, they're melted down and turned into these tiny coins that weigh half a gram, if that. But on there, they strike their name on the one side

and a Quranic epithet on the other. So that they're saying that these people, they are converted to Muslims, and these coins are the symbol of it. And that's a local East African invention. Because that's something that we don't really see so much elsewhere at that time, is there? That's right. And the right of coinage of making,

coins was heavily controlled in the caliphate. You couldn't go off minting your own coins. And so the fact that they are minting their own coins is a massive statement of their political independence, but their adherence to Islam. Catastrophic warfare, bloody revolutions and violent ideological battles. I'm James Rogers and over on the warfare podcast, we're exploring the vast history of ferocious global conflict. We've got the classics. Understand when we see it from hindsight, the great revelation in Potsdam was really Stalin saying, yeah, tell me something I don't know. The unexpected.

And it was at that moment that he just handed her, all these documents that he'd discovered sewn into the cushion of the armchair. And the never ending. So arguably, every state that has tested nuclear weapons has created some sort of effect to local communities. Subscribe to warfare, from history hit, wherever you get your possible. Join us on the front line of military history. Okay, so this is a lot about the slaves that are going out of East Africa.

What about some of these other resources? We talked about ivory, for example, earlier on. What else can you say about those commodities? So ivory is really interesting because Al-Mazudi suggests it's coming from the South. And in fact, this is remarkably confirmed by the archaeological evidence. because increasingly, what's called Iron Age archaeology, this is the Bantu archaeology of Southern Africa, these sites have significant numbers of glass beads. Now these glass beads and also some stone beads as well, you get a few carnelian beads,

but principally glass beads, which are being made, we think, either in the Middle East or in India. and we've done extensive science on the beads to work out its elemental content so we can work exactly where the glass from these beads comes from and it's quite clear that there's an extensive bead trade from the coast and in fact we've found the site where much of this must be coming from a place then as Shibuwen which was the main entrepo out of which these commodities from South Africa were coming and these bees extended all the way across South Africa Zimbabwe and even into Botswana, 7, 800 kilometres in land.

And must be being exchanged both amongst the agricultural communities, but also amongst the hunter-gatherers, because it's the hunter-gatherers, as well what we now call the koi-koil bushman, the hunter-gatherers who are probably hunting the elephants. Right, so you have this direct connection really, really far inland. So the networks essentially allow these goods to come out and it's the beads that are coming in in return. Because obviously for that trade to function, there's got to be something pretty valuable for the hunters. Well, it may well be that it's not exclusive.

Beads might just be what we see archaeologically. And of course, they're very light and they can trade and move over huge distances. So they're kind of, if you like, the smoking gun of this trade. My guess is that that's most likely to have been textiles. Textiles are extremely valuable in African societies. The technology at that point wasn't present. And so you can see how valuable those textiles must have been. And of course, they decay.

So there's a constant demand for textiles as they break down, they get rotten and so forth. I mean, textile probably last five years or whatever in an African climate. So there's a continuous demand for this material. And I'm sure that's what's fueling this long-distance trade. That's really interesting because that's something archaeologically that we just wouldn't find any traces of in that sort of climate. And of course, it may be part of quite a complex network because textiles are probably being made in India, well, in the Middle East.

So somehow the textiles are coming via the Middle East or coming directly to East Africa. There's a really complicated, almost triangular trade route, criss-crossing the Indian Ocean, producing these commodities. So that's quite interesting. So we're talking about India and thinking more about the further east of that network. I wonder if we can just move in that direction a little bit. So we've talked a lot about the connections to the Middle East. But what about Asia and what about, you know,

places like China. Is there any evidence that there's contact between China and India and then down to East Africa at the time? Well, one of the big mysteries still largely unresolved in Indian Asian history is Madagascar. So Madagascar is still populated by people who speak a language, which is very closely akin to languages spoken in Borneo, which is in Southeast Asia, part of what's called the Bariti group of languages. And so both linguistic and now the DNA evidence strongly suggests that Madagascar was settled partly from East Africa, but also largely from Southeast Asia. So the one of the great mysteries is how did this happen?

And the suggestion is that actually this is part of a long-distance trade network that follows the sort of more equatorial route or sub-equitorial route from southeast Asia directly to Madagascar. And so when you're into that network, you're then rapidly into the South China Sea and into China. So we know from our sites, dating from 800 or thereabouts, significant quantities of Chinese ceramics mixed in with the Islamic ceramics, mixed in with the local ceramics. So clearly were these connections. The traditional interpretation is that Arab ships were sailing to China and bringing back these Chinese ceramics or then being traded to East Africa. But it's equally possible that these trade links were directly with Southeast Asia and there onwards to China.

That was really interesting. And are there any shipwrecks or anything like that that can tell us a bit more about that? Well, extraordinary, there is. Near the Sunda Straits, which is the way in which you would pass between Jarjahs, in Samatra. There was a very famous shipwreck dating to around 8.30 called the Belatung shipwreck. This was excavated by commercial treasure hunters a few years ago, but the collection has all been kept together and there were quite good investigations of the HALS structure itself. The Belatun ship was full of 40,000 vessels of Chinese what's called Changsha Stoneware, which is exactly the type of painted stone where we find in the commores, for example,

and all along the trading towns of the East African coast at this period, the Belatum ship was actually made from timber from East Africa. So was it a ship built in East Africa? Was it a ship built in the Middle East out of African timber that have been traded up there? Was it making for the East African coast, or was it off course during a... much more traditional route directly to the Middle East. But the Belatung is a really interesting example of a ship that's clearly connected into this trade network. That's a fantastic example that really is like a manifestation of all those connections. How about other ships? Are there any

any others about specific commodities? Well actually only a few hundred miles away from the Belatung ship, there's another ship called the Syrobon ship. So this is an Indonesian ship made out of what's called Lash Lug construction, so it's definitely not a sown boat like the Bellatung shipwreck is. And the Surabon ship was twice the size, twice the length, four times the size of the Belaton. It was probably 35 metres length. So this is longer than, for example, Columbus's ships, if you put it into perspective. And this was filled with 400,000 Chinese vessels, believe it or not, but also, vast quantities of rock crystal. Now rock crystal is really interesting because this is coming out of Madagascar and we've been excavating sites on the Khmerz that are essentially processing this rock crystal trade in the 8th century

and is then being sent both to the Abbasid world of the Middle East and then later on into the fatimid world of the Mediterranean. Huge lumps of completely pure rock crystal. But this Thirabon, ship had these lungs. One of them was half a tonne in size of rock crystal that was coming from Madagascar. And some quite staggering quantities you're talking about. Half a ton of rock crystal and what is it, 400,000 vessels. That's, yeah, that's madness. But it shows that this isn't a sort of small scale little cottage industry. This is this is trade on a massive scale. And when you talk about rock crystal, I have to, of course, make their connections back up to the north again because we know that exactly the same time, so many of these commodities make their way very far up north,

up to northern Europe, and are especially prized by the Vikings. And we see a lot of rock crystal, which may well be, we don't know yet, but we think that that may come from the same sources. So you're sort of seeing two different parts of the network here. Can you say a little bit more about how this extends back up to Europe at that time? Well, yes, absolutely, because all this East Africa material is being funneled into the Gulf and is being funneled into Baghdad and all the great Abbasid cities, which of course are the trading points for the Vikings coming from the north. And so it's no, it's not a difficult jump to see we've got the ships, we've got the historical records, we have the archaeology that clearly shows how these high value precious items are coming from

tens of thousands of miles away are coming up into the gulping, funneled into the Abbasid cities, and then you can tell me how that material is then connected equally well through the Russian rivers up into the Baltic world and beyond. Yeah, precisely. So this is where it sort of comes into this whole idea of globalisation, isn't it? They're similar to modern concepts, because we have the networks, and some of those are pre-existing and some of them are being developed at the world. precisely this time, starting in about the 8th century. And it does seem to me very much like

what's happening in the Middle East is a really key and crucial connector between north and south and east and west. Yeah, and the problem that scholars we've always had in this is that we have the people working in the Viking world and they just about understand a bit about what's going on in Islam, but certainly not anywhere beyond. Then we then have the scholars working in the Islamic world who have vague recollection of the Viking world and the Africa world. And then we have people working down in Africa who have a sort of understanding, but actually connecting these enormous mind-boggling trade routes and connections is kind of, you know, beyond the sort of scholarly mind set at the moment.

Absolutely. So I think we need more ambitious projects, wouldn't you say? That's right. Indeed we do. And, you know, it's science. It's, ultimately it's science that's going to help us tell these things. So, for example, you mentioned rock crystal. We need to find a method to be able to provenance rock crystal. I mean, at present, there isn't one because by definition it's very pure silicate, a silicate crystal. So to actually find trace elements and things, it is very, very difficult. So we need to find ways to characterize and to provenance this material to do the ancient DNA on the human remains and to really bring the science to bear to understand these global connections.

Okay, so to summarise a little bit then, let's talk a little bit about just who the people were that were involved in this and it's easy to see it as a very much an external thing that is just happening and the locals are very passive in that. Is that an accurate reflection or what's really, what's sort of happening internally and who is? involved in everything in this trade. It's quite clear that the coastal communities in East Africa are actually the people who are in control of the trade. I mean, think of it, you know, you're a ship coming in from the Middle East. And in fact, we've got a contemporary illustration that shows that there's a ship captain

and we've got a whole series of merchants who are on board this ship, who are basically undertaking the trade. So the ship arrives into these ports. And the merchants are kind of left on their own. They go shore and ultimately they have to trade with their partners in these ports. And literally the merchants are kind of dumped on the beach. Powerless have no military support. They have nothing. They're out there with a trunk load of textiles and precious items and they want to buy ivory or whatever. And so essentially they're completely at the mercy of the local inhabitants. So they have to strike up trade links with the local merchants. We're obviously quite keen to do so because they want all these goodies that are coming

for the Middle East. And we know traditionally that there's a hospitality that ultimately the locals sponsor these merchants. So an individual merchant would move into a particular merchant's house, local merchant's house, who would be fed and watered and looked after during the change a monsoon, but that merchant could only trade with the local person. So there's a monopoly going on. And in exchange, the locals acquired commodities, but themselves became more more urbanised, more more Islamacised. They started building stone houses rather than mud and wattle houses. They became much more sophisticated and essentially assimilating a lot of the ideas of their traders in very much the same way is going on the Viking world,

that it wasn't, I believe, a set of rape and pillage, but there was a second phase of connections between the Vikings, the Irish, or the Vikings, and the Anglo-Saxons, that was a much more two-way process. Yes, it's sort of connecting, taking advantage of the conditions that they come across and actually using that very much to people's advantage. That's right, exploiting to making the best of the situation,

because on these voyages, millions could be made in modern terms. They were very dangerous voyages, but if you undertook a successful half dozen or so, you would be a multi-millionaire in modern terms. So the rewards were enormous, but they had to be done very much in private, free enterprise. So we're talking about entrepreneurs, really, if you're going to use another modern term in many ways. That's right, global entrepreneurs. That's exactly who these merchants are. Fantastic.

So I think we can see quite clearly how this early medieval period had just a tremendous impact on shaping what East Africa was to become and what we see if we travel there today. So, I mean, what would you say would be the most crucial part or the sort of crucial legacy, I guess, from that period? Well, you know, the 300 ruined cities. example, most of which are covered in bush. You know, there's massive quantities of ruins. And if you're going to visit, then some of this culture still very much survives today. Places like Lama, for example, in the Lama archipelago in Kenya, or Zanzibar, or down in the Khmer's or in Madagascar, elements of this entrepreneurial culture, this Huali culture, as we call it, and still survives to this day.

wonderful Mark thank you so much for joining me today it was a real pleasure talking about the other ends of these networks that we normally investigate when we work together I'm wondering if I sort of drew the short straw in terms of a climate when choosing my research location so I'll have to come along next time so this brings us to the end of this episode thank you all for listening please do remember to subscribe to gone medieval if you haven't already and if you enjoyed this episode please do leave us a review online and tell all your friends of family about I'm Dr Kat Jarman and this has been Gone Medieval from History Hit. Do join us again next week.