Fardowsa: the medieval trading town at Sheekh, about 1300–1600

In short

Fardowsa lies on the edge of the modern town of Sheekh, about 60 km south of Berbera, where the Ogo mountains drop to the coastal plain. Its place at the top of the main pass between Berbera and the interior made it a caravan stop. This page follows the full report of the Spanish excavations (de Torres Rodríguez, González-Ruibal et al., "City of Traders: Urbanization, Social Change, and Territorial Control in Medieval Fardowsa (Central Somaliland)", Journal of African Archaeology 22, 2024, pp. 86–114, open access). Section numbers below refer to that report. For the other towns of the region, see Ruined towns of the Somali interior.

Discovery

• Travellers, about 1900. Writers who used the pass described the tomb of Sheikh Guldu Hamed and a village around it, and two of them mentioned the ruins of a large town nearby with a cemetery of thousands of graves. British maps of the 1930s mark ruins north-east of the village (§2.1).
• 2001. François-Xavier Fauvelle-Aymar and Bertrand Hirsch visited and recorded the name "Ferdussa", which local people gave as the town's medieval name. They collected finds, including an Arab coin, dated broadly to the 13th–17th centuries (§2.1).
• 2015. Sada Mire listed it as "Fardowsa" in the first inventory of Somaliland's archaeological sites (§2.1).
• 2016 and 2020. The Incipit-CSIC team dug two test pits, then in 2020 opened about 700 square metres, which the authors call "the largest archaeological intervention in Somaliland" (§§2.2–2.3).

The authors measure the town at about 18 hectares, with two cemeteries, one of which has almost disappeared under modern Sheekh. About a third of the site has been damaged by building (§2.1). An earlier paper by the same team gave a larger figure of about 35 hectares (see Ruined towns).

Dates

The radiocarbon dates the report gives (§§2.2–2.3, 5):

• Earliest floor: calibrated AD 1305–1365 (75% probability) or 1383–1405.
• The large compound: built at the end of the 14th or start of the 15th century (dates of 1327–1430 and 1421–1455).
• An ordinary house on the edge of town: 1441–1506 (86% probability).
• Last, occasional use: 1499–1600 (76% probability) or 1615–1644.

The authors conclude that Fardowsa was founded "at some point during the first decade of the 14th century", grew fast in the 15th, declined in the 16th, and was used only now and then in the early 17th. No finds date from then until the 19th century, when part of the ruins was reused as a fortified camp (§5).

The houses

The town had no wall and no clear street plan, and no mosque has been found yet. Houses stood apart with open spaces between them, some of which were fenced pens or yards (§2.4).

The 2020 dig uncovered a walled compound with two houses of identical plan: three roofed rooms on the west and a long, probably open, space on the east. The authors write that they are "significantly larger than any house documented so far in Somaliland", and that the matching plan "suggests a preconceived design". A refuse heap beside them yielded about 60 kg of animal bones from an area of just 1.35 square metres (§§2.3–2.4).

What was traded

About 10% of the pottery from the 2020 dig was imported. The authors call this high for an inland site, where imports "rarely surpass 1%", but low compared with coastal fairs, where imports are over 90% (§3.1). The imports include (§3.1):

• From East and South-East Asia: Ming blue-and-white porcelain, mostly of the mid-15th to mid-16th centuries, and celadon from southern China, Thailand or Myanmar.
• From India: a few pieces of Black and Red Ware, among the earliest imports.
• From Iran, the Gulf and Arabia: "speckled" glazed ware, which the authors call characteristic of late medieval Somaliland; green-glazed wares; Yemeni yellow ware of the 13th–14th centuries; Tihama green-on-green ware, one piece with writing; and Yemeni white cream ware, the commonest import.
• Other goods: glass vessels and bangles, softstone, cowries (most of them pierced), a bronze buckle and a metal amulet case of the kind used to hold verses of the Qur'an (§§2.3, 3.2).

No Qing porcelain was found, which the authors take to mean that "by the mid-17th century, Fardowsa was not acting as a trade center anymore" (§3.1).

Rich and ordinary households

In the ordinary houses, goats and sheep make up 80–90% of the animals eaten. In one of the large houses they fall to about 56%, with cattle at about 23% and camels at about 20%, many of them young. The authors note that camels are kept mainly for transport and milk, so eating them suggests wealth (§4). They conclude that "social and economic inequality had come in parallel with the expansion of permanent settlements", shown in the size of the houses, their prestige goods and the "consumption of expensive animals such as camels", and that this wealth was "mostly related to trade". They add that they have no information on whether this rank was inherited (§5).

How the authors explain its rise and end

• Rise. They link the town's growth to the expansion of Indian Ocean trade in the 15th century, when, at trading sites near Berbera, imports from Yemen fell from 57% to 33% and East Asian imports rose to 40%. They suggest that Fardowsa lay at the edge of the sultanate of Barr Sa'd al-Din (Adal), "under its influence or limited control", and that the sultanate's interest in safe trade routes is seen in the fortified caravan station of Qalcadda (§5).
• Peace. They note that Fardowsa, like most settlements in Somaliland, was unwalled, and they see no sign that the new inequality led to conflict (§§5–6).
• End. They point to China's export bans from 1521, Portuguese attacks in the Red Sea, including on Zeila in 1517 and Berbera in 1518, and the wars and defeat of the sultanate later in the century. They describe a gradual abandonment and "a progressive return to a nomadic lifestyle", with the pass later used by nomads until a religious community settled at Sheekh in the 18th century (§5).

Related pages

• Ruined towns of the Somali interior
• Early Berbera before 1300
• From cairns to cemeteries: medieval Muslim graves
• Medieval mosques of Somaliland