[8] Equal to two Egyptian spans of 9·58 inches. [↑]
[9] Vide illustration, p. [194]. [↑]
[10] Vide illustration, p. [216]. [↑]
CHAPTER VII
THE GEOGRAPHY AND ETHNOLOGY OF THE MASHONALAND RUINS
The ancient geography of the east coast of Africa is a subject fraught with difficulties on all sides. To begin with, our authorities are not only meagre, but they are men who had no practical knowledge of the subject, and who knew next to nothing of the vast extent of commercial operations which were going on outside the limits of the Red Sea. The written accounts come to us from either an Alexandrian or Roman source, whereas the practical knowledge possessed by the Arabs themselves of these outer waters is lost to us for ever. It was probably the monopolising policy of the Semitic nations which induced them to conceal from other countries the whereabouts of their commercial relations, which on the one hand extended outside the pillars of Hercules to the Canaries and Great Britain, and on the other hand outside the Straits of Bab-el-Mandeb to India, China, and the east coast of Africa. Of these two directions the voyage to [[224]]Great Britain was undoubtedly the most adventurous, the navigation of the Indian Ocean with a knowledge of the monsoons, which the Arabian who lived on it must have had from time immemorial, presenting far less difficulty. Hippalus has the credit of introducing the monsoons to Western civilisation, but surely a seafaring race like the Arabians, who lived on the spot, must have known all about them long before his day; and just as they were reticent on the subject of their voyages, so were they reticent on the subject of the localities from which their merchandise came. The knowledge given us by Marinus of Tyre, by the anonymous author of the ‘Periplus of the Red Sea,’ by Ptolemy, by Pliny, and others, was obviously not the knowledge possessed by the traders of the world, for they do not even attempt to elucidate the question of where the precious commodities came from which they enumerate.
Ptolemy’s information is provokingly vague, and he candidly admits in his first chapter that it was obtained from a merchant of Arabia Felix; he gives us such names as Cape Aromata, supposed to be Guardafui, outside the straits, the inland province of Azania and Rhapta. The only thing we gather from him is that they were trade emporia, and therefore places of considerable importance.
The ‘Periplus’ enters into further details, and mentions that the Arab settlement at Rhapta was subject to the sovereign of Maphartes, a dependency of Sabæa or Yemen. Dean Vincent imagines Rhapta [[225]]to have been 10° south of the equator, that is to say, near Quiloa, where again an Arab settlement continued right down into the middle ages. The ‘Periplus’ further tells how Muza, Aden, and other points near the mouth of the Red Sea were emporia for the goods brought from outside by the Arabians and then transferred to Egyptian and Phœnician trading vessels.
Further south the ‘Periplus’ mentions Prasum as the farthest point known to the author; and here he says ‘an ocean curves towards sunset and, stretching along the southern extremities of Ethiopia, Libya, and Africa, amalgamates with the western sea.’ All this probably the author of the ‘Periplus’ got from the Arabs, just as the Portuguese got all their information from the same source thirteen centuries later, and just as Herodotus got his vague story of the circumnavigation of Africa six centuries before, when he tells us how the Phœnicians in the service of Pharaoh Necho, B.C. 600, ‘as they sailed round Africa had the sun on their right hand.’