Opone and Ras Hafun (Xaafuun): an ancient Somali port, 1st century BC to 5th century AD

In short

Ras Hafun is a sandstone headland on the Indian Ocean coast of Bari region, about 150 km south of Cape Guardafui. It is joined to the mainland by a sand spit, or tombolo, about 25 km long (Chittick 1979, "Early ports in the Horn of Africa", International Journal of Nautical Archaeology 8.4, p. 275). In Somali it is Xaafuun. The town of Hafun lies on the headland.

Two ancient sites were excavated here in 1975 and 1976 by an expedition of the British Institute in Eastern Africa led by Neville Chittick, "in collaboration with Somali colleagues" and with the help of the government of the Somali Democratic Republic (same source, p. 273). Their finds make Hafun one of the earliest dated trading places on the coast of East Africa.

What the Periplus says about Opone

The 1st-century Greek Periplus of the Erythraean Sea describes the last market town of the "far-side" coast before Azania (§13):

"Beyond Tabae, after four hundred stadia, there is the village of Pano. And then, after sailing four hundred stadia along a promontory, toward which place the current also draws you, there is another market-town called Opone, into which the same things are imported as those already mentioned, and in it the greatest quantity of cinnamon is produced (the arebo and moto), and slaves of the better sort, which are brought to Egypt in increasing numbers; and a great quantity of tortoise-shell, better than that found elsewhere." (Schoff translation, 1912, p. 28)

W. H. Schoff identified Opone with "the remarkable headland now known as Ras Hafun" and Pano with Ras Binna. He also recorded the German scholar Eduard Glaser's view that the names Pano and Opone echo the Egyptian "Land of Punt" (Schoff 1912, notes p. 87).

Hafun West: a port of the last centuries BC

Hafun West lies by a shallow lagoon between the headland and the mainland. Chittick's team found the badly eroded remains of a building partly made of cut stone blocks. In the lower layers were fragments of "high-quality painted pottery apparently of Hellenistic origin" and large storage jars (Chittick 1979, p. 275).

• Date. Chittick first took the site to be "a small port establishment of the 2nd or 3rd century BC of which the Roman geographers were ignorant." A later study dates Hafun West from the 1st century BC to the 3rd century AD (Fernández Fernández, González-Ruibal and de Torres 2022, citing Smith and Wright, Azania 23, 1988).
• The hinterland. A wadi from the Darror valley runs into the lagoon. Chittick notes that the valley leads to an area "where it is said good quality myrrh may be obtained."
• Later use. By about the 3rd century AD the stone building was in ruins and people lived among its debris. They left many turtle bones but no turtle shells, which Chittick suggests were sold for export, as the Periplus describes. A large mound of Murex shells nearby may have been used to make purple dye. The lagoon's edges suit salt-making by evaporation, which is still done there (Chittick 1979, p. 276).
• Burials. Small cairns nearby were built with stones taken from the main building. One held a crouched burial, hands to the face, facing west, with no grave goods (same source).

Hafun Main: the market of Opone

Hafun Main lies on the south side of the headland, next to a harbour sheltered from the north-east monsoon. Chittick wrote that it "is probably to be identified with the mart named Opone in the Periplus" (Chittick 1979, p. 276).

• Test pits found up to 2 m of occupation layers, mostly bands of charcoal and sand, with many ovens made from old pots.
• There were no stone houses, only traces of large post-holes, which suggests buildings of wood and matting.
• Low rectangular stone tombs nearby held glazed pottery related to "Parthian" types, and glass.
• The base of a Sasanian-Islamic blue-glazed jar near a cairn, which the excavators read as a sign that people still came here in later centuries.

Chittick provisionally dated Hafun Main to the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD. The later study gives the 2nd to 5th centuries AD and says the imported goods came "from the Roman Empire, the Gulf and South Asia" (Fernández Fernández, González-Ruibal and de Torres 2022). Egyptian red-slipped pottery of the 1st and 2nd centuries AD from Hafun matches finds at Coptos and Myos Hormos, the Roman Red Sea ports in Egypt (same source).

Why Hafun matters to the record

• It is one of the few places on the Horn of Africa where a port named in a Greek text has been matched with excavated remains.
• The excavators read the finds as evidence of the Somali coast trading with Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt, Parthian and Sasanian Persia and South Asia over about 500 years.
• Sada Mire, who headed Somaliland's Department of Archaeology, describes Ras Hafun as "an important site from the third century BCE, serving as a settlement to support Graeco-Roman trade" (Mire 2015, "Mapping the Archaeology of Somaliland", African Archaeological Review 32).

The beden boat

Chittick photographed a beden, a sewn boat built without metal fastenings, afloat in the Hafun lagoon in 1975–76, next to a dugout canoe (huri) with a stone anchor (Chittick 1979, fig. 4). He linked the survival of sewn boats on this coast to its open, surf-beaten landing places.

Related pages

• The Somali ports in the Periplus
• Before 1300: the ancient Somali lands
• Heritage sites in Somalia