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Archaeological investigations of early Islamic evidence are practically nonexistent. The scarce available evidence suggests that there were Islamic communities along the Red Sea coast, in the western Ethiopian-Sudanese lowlands, and on the southeastern plateau between the eighth and twelfth centuries a.d. The dynamics of peopling on the southern and western plateau before the mid-second millennium b.c. are still practically unknown in terms of any archaeological evidence.
Monumental stelae in the Royal Necropolis of Mai Heja at Aksum, Ethiopia
(© Roger Wood/CORBIS)
Up to now, only the megalithic stelae in central and southern Ethiopia have been investigated in a systematic way (Anfray 1982; Azais and Chambard 1931), and that research shows that the stelae in central Ethiopia might go back to the early second millennium a.d. The age of the monuments in southern Ethiopia is still uncertain.
The origins of the Nilo-Saharan peoples living along the Ethiopian-Sudanese borderland are still obscure, not only from the archaeological point of view. Archaeological investigations carried out along the northwestern Ethiopian-Sudanese lowlands might suggest that at least a few of these people, such as the Kunama in western Eritrea, belong to a very ancient indigenous stock that has occupied the area since the fifth millennium b.c. The origins of the Somali people are still completely unknown archaeologically.
See also
Africa, East, Later; Africa, East, Prehistory; Swahili Coast of Africa