Awfat, capital of the Ifat sultanate, and the tombs of the Walashma

In short

The sultanate of Ifat (Awfat in Arabic) was the strongest Muslim state of the Horn in the 14th century, and the Arab writer al-ʿUmari says its king ruled Zeila. Its capital was lost for centuries. Between 2007 and 2010 a French team found it on the Awadi river, on the eastern edge of the Ethiopian highlands, guided by an 1893 report by the Italian doctor Leopoldo Traversi. This page follows François-Xavier Fauvelle, Bertrand Hirsch and Amélie Chekroun, "Le sultanat de l'Awfāt, sa capitale et la nécropole des Walasmaʿ", Annales islamologiques 51 (2017): 239–295 (OpenEdition), cited by paragraph (§).

Where was Ifat?

• Al-ʿUmari's puzzle. Writing in the 1330s, al-ʿUmari called Awfat the largest of the seven Muslim kingdoms of Abyssinia, "entirely cultivated and peopled", with a running river, and nearest to the coasts facing Yemen: "its king rules over Zaylaʿ" (§6). The authors write that the farmland and river point inland, while Zeila points to the dry coast of today's Somaliland. They suggest the kingdom may have held both the hinterland of Zeila and the far inland escarpment (§7).
• Work in Somaliland. In 2001 the team surveyed ruined towns in the Somaliland highlands first described by Alexander Curle in 1937 and dug at Zeila. They report a group of ruined medieval towns in Zeila's hinterland that left no trace in written sources, and a new dating of Zeila, which they write seems to have become important only from the late 13th century, at the same time as the rise of Ifat (§16). For Zeila, see Early Zeila before 1300.
• Farmers, not only nomads. The authors write that the written sources and the ruins both point to settled farming and town-dwelling Muslim societies on the highland slopes, and that the common picture of an Islam carried by nomad traders across the Afar desert should be "suspended" (§24–25). They describe an urban phase in the 14th and 15th centuries, then a "de-urbanisation" probably linked to the upheavals of the 16th century (§25).

Nora and the towns of Rassa Hill

On the Rassa hills in today's Ifat district the team recorded Asbari, Masal, Rassa Guba, Hajji Mansur and Nora (§27–28). All stand on spurs above the Afar plain, some closed by thick walls, at about 1,300 metres (§31). The mosques have the mihrab in the north wall and stone-slab roofs on wooden beams; the houses are square with wall niches, like those of Harar (§33).

Nora was dug in April–May 2008, the first excavation of a medieval Muslim town in Ethiopia (§34–35). It has streets, square stone houses up to 2–3 metres high, a great mosque, four smaller mosques and a large cemetery (§38–39). The pottery is unglazed and imports are rare: cowries, a few beads, and bundles of iron rods that the authors compare to the ḥakuna iron money named by al-ʿUmari. Radiocarbon dates place the town in the 14th and 15th centuries, with one post under the great mosque dated to the 12th–13th centuries (§39). A layer of ash-like sediment 40–60 cm thick covers it, and later circular stone enclosures stand on top (§40). Nearby Faqi Dabbis has a mosque dated to the first half of the 15th century, built over an older one of the 14th (§12).

The capital found

• Traversi's report. In 1893 Traversi was shown "Ali Gemb" ("Ali's wall") on the Awadi, said by a local scholar to be the town of "Sharif Ali, son of Saʿd ad-Din of Zeila", with houses that "resemble those of Harar", a well-built mosque, and a tomb said to be dated 771 AH (§43–44).
• Three parts. After several missions, the team found the tomb in a whole cemetery (sector A), a flat-topped hill called Beri of about 13 hectares with a wall, a small mosque, massive building ruins and one inscribed tomb (sector B, the "citadel"), and the town proper in the Ferewanda valley, with a great mosque, hundreds of graves and a mould for casting rings (sector C). The authors identify the three together as "the capital of the Walashma sultans of the old sultanate of Awfat in the 14th century" (§55–59).
• Abu al-Fida. The geographer Abu al-Fida (1273–1331), citing travellers, wrote that Wafat, also called Jabara, was among the largest towns of Abyssinia, about twenty stages west of Zeila; that "the residence of the king is on a hill and the citadel on another hill"; that it grew bananas and sugarcane; and that it lay on high ground by a valley with a small river, with heavy rain at night. The authors note a "remarkable agreement" with the site, where sugarcane and bananas still grow by the Awadi (§61–63). They also argue that this passage is by Abu al-Fida, not by the earlier Ibn Saʿid as long thought (§61).

The inscribed tombs

Nine inscribed tombs were found. Each is a box of four volcanic stone slabs with Arabic text running around it, ending on the north side with the Qur'anic verses 3:18–19 (§74–76).

• Dates. Four are dated: 1 March 1370 (T1), after 28 July 1367 (T3), 6 August 1373 (T8) and late April–early May 1364 (T9) (§75).
• The family of Sultan Ali. All the cemetery tombs that can be read belong to relatives of Sultan "ʿAli Nasr, son of Sultan Sabr ad-Din, son of Walasmaʿ". T1 is the tomb of a malika (queen), T3 of a daughter of Ali, T4 of an unnamed sultan, and T5 of a woman of the family (§80–81). The authors note that these give rare information on royal women, whom the chronicles ignore (§84).
• The citadel tomb (T8, 1373) is probably that of a sultan, a son of Ali with the epithet al-Naṣri. The chronicles name only one son of Ali who ruled, Ahmad (Harb Arʿad), and the authors leave open whether this is the same man (§78–79).
• The town tomb (T9, 1364) is that of a sheikh, "sheikh of the Walasmaʿ", of the Shafiʿi school, who died of fever (§77).
• A hasty cemetery? The cemetery lies on the river's flood plain, cut off from the town at high water, and its tombs look made in a single short programme. The authors suggest that graves may have been moved and gathered there by Sultan Ali near the end of his reign, a time of crisis (§85).

The end of the capital

Al-Maqrizi says Haqq ad-Din besieged his grandfather Ali in Awfat, then left and built a new capital, Wahal, in Shewa, after which Awfat "shrank and fell into ruin". Ibn Khaldun, writing soon after, says the Walashma took Awfat and "ruined it completely". The authors trust Ibn Khaldun's version more, and place the end of the capital after 1376. Al-Maqrizi adds that after Saʿd ad-Din's defeat the Christians settled in Awfat and "turned the mosques into churches" (§69–72). The authors conclude that the site was the seat of the Walashma between 1285 and 1376, only about two days' walk from Christian territory (§87). For what came next, see Dakar, the lost capital of Adal.

Open questions

The authors ask where the earlier sultanate of Shewa left its remains, where the Walashma came from before they appeared in the late 13th century, and whether an origin in the eastern lands can be traced (§88).

Related pages

• The Sultanate of Shewa and the founding of Ifat
• Nomads, towns and the state in Ifat and Adal
• Zeila, Berbera and Mogadishu in the records of Rasulid Yemen
• Ruined towns of the Somali interior
• Medieval Muslim graves: from cairns to cemeteries
• The seven Muslim kingdoms of the Horn: tribute, trade and money