Indian relations with East Africa before the arrival of the Portuguese

Abstract

The Indian Ocean has for at least two thousand years served as a highway for the exchange of goods and ideas, and the cultural links between the lands bordering it are perhaps closer than over any other region of comparable size. The length of voyages undertaken since early times has been very great, as is forcefully demonstrated by the Indonesian colonization of Madagascar in the first centuries A.D. Commerce has been facilitated by the monsoon which in the western part of the ocean blows for roughly half the year from the northeast and for half in the opposite direction. The eastern and western shores of the western part of the basin share much the same climate and are suited to similar ways of life.

The Religiously-Inspired Political Polarization of South Asia the Genesis of the Creation of Pakistan

“…The critical analysis of the historical records of the Sumerian civilization amply ascertains that the Greeks and the Persians acquired their high-technological knowledge based expertise of maritime trading especially the navigation from the Arabs. It is also established through well authenticated historical references that the Persians did not embark upon far-distance voyages until the 5 th century BCE while the Greeks did not undertake long-distance tradeexpeditions until the Hellenistic time (323 BCE -32 BCE) 1 [1]. This historical account proves that the Arab merchant were extensively in contact with their counterparts in the Indian sub-continent during their prime time which existed more than 4000 years ago.…”

Re-Representing African Pasts through Historical Archaeology

“…During the mid-1980s, archaeologists at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania turned their collective attention to the littoral of East Africa (Schmidt et al 1992), where historical interpretations favored a portrait of the immediate hinterland as an economic backwater and the populations along the littoral as recipients of trade materials and other cultural influences from abroad. A fixation on foreign influence and trade valorized by early first millennium trade histories, such as the Periplus Maris Erythraei, gave rise to an interpretative paradigm that reified these early accounts (Chittick 1968(Chittick , 1974Kirkman 1954Kirkman ,1964. Under this historical narrative, scholars were silent about peoples who resided in vast areas of the interior not subject to coastal state authorities.…”