Swahili Origins

Swahili ethnogenesis is quite recent and was a Persian Muslim and African hybrid civilization that was roughly contemporaneous with the Norman Conquest of England, the Gypsy migration from India, Leif Erikson's establishment of Viking outposts in eastern Canada, the Viking era in Europe, the Icelandic Commonwealth, the linguistic conversion of Hungary to the current Hungarian language, a major Native American city near where Saint Louis is today, and other notable historical events around Y1K. 

A long history of mercantile trade along the eastern shores of Africa left its mark on the DNA of ancient Swahili people.

A new analysis of centuries-old bones and teeth collected from six burial sites across coastal Kenya and Tanzania has found that, around 1,000 years ago, local African women began having children with Persian traders — and that the descendants of these unions gained power and status in the highest levels of pre-colonial Swahili society.

The findings help elucidate the foundations of Swahili civilization, and suggest that long-told origin stories, passed down through generations of Swahili families, may be more truthful than many outsiders have presumed.

“The genetics corroborate the Swahili people’s own history that they tell about themselves, not what others were saying about them,” said Esther Brielle, a geneticist and postdoctoral fellow at Harvard who led the DNA analysis with her adviser, David Reich.

The researchers published their findings on Wednesday in the journal Nature.

The Swahili Coast is a narrow strip of land that stretches some 2,000 miles along the Eastern African seaboard — from modern-day Mozambique, Comoros and Madagascar in the south, to Somalia in the north. In its medieval heyday, the region was home to hundreds of port towns, each ruled independently, but with a common religion (Islam), language (Kiswahili) and culture.

Many towns grew immensely wealthy thanks to a vibrant trading network with merchants who sailed across the Indian Ocean on the monsoon winds. Middle Eastern pottery, Asian cloths‌‌ and other luxury goods came in. African gold, ivory and timber‌‌ went out — along with a steady flow of enslaved people, who were shipped off and sold across the Arabian Peninsula and Persian Gulf. (Slave trading later took place between the Swahili coast and Europe as well.)

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At first, most scholars thought that the civilization, with its lavish mosques and ornate housewares, must have been the achievement of a foreign ruling class that established outposts in East Africa. But over the past 40 years, archaeologists, linguists and historians have come to see Swahili society as predominantly homegrown — with outside elements adopted over time that had only a marginal impact.

That African-centric version of Swahili roots never sat well with the Swahili people themselves, though.

They generally preferred their own origin story, one in which princes from present-day Iran (then known as Persia) sailed across the Indian Ocean, married local women and enmeshed themselves into East African society. Depending on the narrative source, that story dates to around 850 or 1000 — the same period during which genetic mixing was underway, according to the DNA analysis.

“It’s remarkably spot on,” said Mark Horton, an archaeologist at the Royal Agricultural University of England who has worked on the Swahili coast for decades.

“This oral tradition was always maligned,” added George Abungu, an archaeologist and former director-general of the National Museums of Kenya (who, like Dr. Horton, was not involved in the genetic analysis). “Now, with this DNA study, we see there was some truth to it.”

The ancient DNA study is the largest of its kind from Africa, involving 135 skeletons dating to late-medieval and early-modern times, 80 of which have yielded analyzable DNA.

From the New York Times.