ABSTRACT

But here at the very outset let me utter a note of warning. There is no historical warrant for ascribing any high antiquity to anyone of these eastcoast colonies. Magadoxo, the earliest and the nearest of any importance to its parent Arabia, is known, from the chronicle which the Portuguese conquerors found at Kilwa, to have been founded not earlier than the middle of the tenth century A.D. Kilwa itself, a Persian settlement, is seventy years younger. And whatever the probabilities that Arab traders established themselves in very early days on both sides of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, there is good reason to suppose that they seldom adventured much farther south until at least the later days of the Roman Empire. For the misconceptions of so learned a geographer as Ptolemy suggest that even in the second century after Christ the coast south of Cape Guardafui was still very imperfectly known.