Azania
Azania was a region in ancient Arcadia, which was according to Pausanias named after the mythical king Azan.
History
According to Herodotus, the region contained the ancient town of Paus. The use of this name coincides with a reference in which Pliny the Elder mentions an "Azanian Sea" (N.H. 6.34) that began around the emporium of Adulis and stretched around the south coast of Africa. It may well be that the Greek usage resonated with a term already in use around the Horn of Africa especially in the light of the fact that the term with a different meaning to the Greek Arcadian meaning, was in use in South Asia, Southeast Asia and China. The Greek Travelogue is unlikely to reflect navigation of the African East Coast.
The 1st century AD Greek travelogue the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea first describes Azania based on its author's intimate knowledge of the area. Chapter 15 of the Periplus suggests that Azania could be the littoral area south of present-day Somalia (the "Lesser and Greater Bluffs", the "Lesser and Greater Strands", and the "Seven Courses").[1] Chapter sixteen describes the emporium of Rhapta, located south of the Puralean Islands at the end of the Seven Courses of Azania, as the "southernmost market of Azania". The Periplus does not mention any dark-skinned "Ethiopians" among the area's inhabitants. They only later appear in Ptolemy's Geographia, but in a region far south, around the "Bantu nucleus" of northern Mozambique. According to John Donnelly Fage, these early Greek documents altogether suggest that the original inhabitants of the Azania coast, the "Azanians", were of the same ancestral stock as the Afro-Asiatic populations to the north of them along the Red Sea. Subsequently, by the 10th century AD, these original "Azanians" had been replaced by early waves of Bantu settlers.[2]
Later Western writers who mention Azania include Claudius Ptolemy (c. 100 – c. 170 CE) and Cosmas Indicopleustes (6th century CE).
Azania was known to the Chinese as 澤散 (Middle Chinese: /ɖˠæk̚.sɑnX/, Pinyin: zésàn) by the 3rd century AD.[3]
- ↑ George Wynn Brereton Huntingford, The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, (Hakluyt Society: 1980), p.29
- ↑ Fage, John (23 October 2013). A History of Africa. Routledge. pp. 25–26. ISBN 978-1317797272.
- ↑ "Weilue: The Peoples of the West. Draft translation by John Hill". Depts.washington.edu. 23 May 2004.