Shoa Ancient Islamic Kingdom Discovered
French archaeologists with The National Centre for Scientific Research announced this week that they had uncovered the remains of three large towns -Asbari, Masal, and Nora- that may have been the heart of a legendary Islamic kingdom in Ethiopia.
Ancient manuscripts have told of the legendary kingdom of Shoa, which between the 10th and 16th centuries straddled key trade routes between the Christian highlands and Muslim ports on the Red Sea. But Shoa's precise place on the map has never been clear.
In Asbari, the team found the remarkably well-preserved remains of a mosque that they believe to be one of the biggest in Ethiopia, whose walls are adorned with inscriptions in Arabic. They also found a cemetery covering several hectares (acres) that contained hundreds of graves.
In Masal, they found a necropolis with a tomb emblazoned with stars and Arabic inscriptions that may have been a royal sepulchre.
Nora was clearly once a "dense urban centre," with a network of streets and the remains of roads, and whose main mosque has remains of walls up to five metres high. The archaeologists found large numbers of tools made of obsidian, a rock that is a kind of naturally occurring glass.
Comments