Zanj (Arabic: زَنْج; IPA: [zand͡ʒ], adj. زنجي; [zan.d͡ʒijj], Zanjī; from Persian: زنگ, romanized: Zang; [zæɲɡʲ̥]) is a term used by medieval Muslim geographers to refer to both a certain portion of Southeast Africa (primarily the Swahili Coast) and to its Bantu inhabitants. It has also been used to refer to Africans collectively by Arab sources. This word is also the origin of the place-names Zanzibar ("coast of the Zanji") and the Sea of Zanj. The latinization Zingium serves as an archaic name for the coastal area in modern Kenya and Tanzania in southern East Africa. The architecture of these commercial urban settlements is now a subject of study for urban planning. For centuries the coastal settlements were a source of ivory, gold, and slaves, from sections of the conquered hinterland, to the Indian Ocean world.
Etymology From Middle Persian *zang, paraphrased based on attested Middle Persian (zangig /zangigh/, "black one"). Furthermore, it is possibly related to the ancient Greek Ἀζανία (Azania), the name of a region in East Africa in the first century AD, and to the ancient Greek Ζήγγισα (Zengissa), the Greek name for a headland in what is now southern Somalia. It may ultimately be derived from the Arabic Ajami. Anthony Christie argued that the word zanj or zang may not be Arabic in origin: a Chinese form (僧祇 sēngqí) is recorded as early as 607 AD. Christie argued that the word is South East Asian in origin. The Javanese word jenggi means African people, specifically the people of Zanzibar.
Division of East Africa's coast Geographers historically divided the eastern coast of Africa at large into several regions based on each region's respective inhabitants. Arab and Chinese sources referred to the general area that was located to the south of the three regions of Misr (Egypt), Al-Habasha (Abyssinia) and Barbara (Somalia), as Zanj. Zanj was situated in the Southeast Africa vicinity and was inhabited by Bantu-speaking peoples called the Zanj. The core area of Zanj occupation stretched from the territory south of present-day Ras Kamboni to Pemba Island in Tanzania. South of Pemba lay Sofala in modern Mozambique, the northern boundary of which may have been Pangani. Beyond Sofala was the obscure realm of Waq-Waq, also in Mozambique. The 10th-century Arab historian and geographer Abu al-Hasan 'Alī al-Mas'ūdī describes Sofala as the furthest limit of Zanj settlement, and mentions its king's title as Mfalme, a Bantu word.
Zanj territory
History
The Zanj traded with Persians, Arabs, and Indians, but according to some sources, only locally, since they possessed no ocean-going ships. The settlements in Zanzibar identified them as economically part of the cosmopolitan culture of the Indian Ocean Basin with trade links as far as Arabia, Persia, and as far east as India and China. The main source of Zanj slaves was likely the frontier between Eastern Cushitic language speakers and Bantu language speakers, where warlike Somali pastoralists were expanding southwards and subjecting the scattered colonies of Bantu agriculturalists. Since Arab and Persian identity is patrilineal, elite Swahili claimed, often correctly, prestigious Persian genealogy. Modern conceptions of cultural fusion or Persian origins developed from the tendency of wealthy Swahili to claim Persian patrilineal origins (which has been supported by DNA studies) and the disproportionate 19th-century importation of Omani elements to Zanzibari and Swahili society. Standard Swahili is the Zanzibari dialect and thus includes far more Arabic loanwords than the other, older Swahili dialects. Prominent settlements of the Zanj coast included Kilwa, Kunduchi, Mbuamaji, Tongoni, Kimbiji, Kaole, Malindi, Gedi, and Mombasa. By the late medieval period, the area included at least 37 substantial Swahili trading towns, many of them quite wealthy. The urban ruling and commercial classes of these Swahili settlements included male Arab, Persian, and Indian immigrants. However, Islamic culture prized familial origins from Persia or Arabia; consequently claims of Middle Eastern descent may be untrustworthy for modern genealogical research. The richest and most powerful slave trader in all of recorded history is Tippu Tip, a man born in Zanzibar with mixed Bantu and Omani ancestry.
The Zanj were for centuries shipped as slaves by slave and ivory traders to all the countries bordering the Indian Ocean in the Indian Ocean slave trade. The Umayyad and Abbasid caliphs recruited many Zanj slaves as soldiers and, as early as 696 AD, we learn of slave revolts of the Zanj in Iraq (see below). Ancient Chinese texts also mention ambassadors from Java presenting the Chinese emperor with two Seng Chi (Zanji) slaves as gifts, and Seng Chi slaves reaching China from the Hindu kingdom of Sri Vijaya in Java. The sea off the south-eastern coast of Africa was known as the Sea of Zanj, and included the Mascarene islands and Madagascar. During the anti-apartheid struggle it was proposed that South Africa should assume the name Azania, to reflect ancient Zanj. As of 2023, the Lemba people still refer to the populations of neighboring tribes as "Zenj."
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