Heis (Xiis): the ancient port and its 300 cairns, 1st to 3rd centuries AD

In short

Heis (Somali Xiis) is on the coast of Sanaag, in eastern Somaliland. It is the best-studied ancient trading site on the Somali shore of the Gulf of Aden. Almost everything found there is imported, and almost all of it comes from graves. This page draws mainly on the report of the Spanish team that worked there in 2018 and 2019 (Fernández Fernández, González-Ruibal and de Torres, "New evidence of long-distance trade in Somaliland in Antiquity: imported materials from the 2018–2019 field seasons at Xiis (Heis), first to third centuries AD", in Networked Spaces, MOM Éditions, 2022). Paragraph numbers below refer to that report.

Who has worked there

• Georges Révoil, late 19th century. The French explorer collected Roman glass and pottery from the cairns. His glass was studied in 1986, and the whole collection was published as a monograph in 1993 (§1).
• Neville Chittick, 1976. He found Roman glass "of about the 4th century AD" in a small robbed cairn and pottery he dated to the 2nd–5th centuries (§1).
• 2017–2018 surveys. Carl Phillips surveyed the site for a construction company planning a road to a future harbour; the Spanish team, from the Institute of Heritage Sciences (Incipit) of the Spanish National Research Council, surveyed it separately (§1).
• 2019 excavation. The Spanish team dug four cairns. Work stopped in 2020 after tropical storm Pawan destroyed the road to Xiis (§1).

The site

There are three areas (§§2–3):

• The cemetery. More than 300 cairns of different shapes and sizes run for 1,800 metres along the shore, between a rocky island and the mouth of a seasonal river. Most lie in an area of about 800 by 250 metres below a plateau called Ma'ajilayn, 145 metres above sea level.
• Ma'ajilayn plateau. Roman amphorae, South Arabian storage jars and cooking pots, but no buildings.
• The island, less than 200 metres offshore, with a 15-metre platform of coral stone and terraces. It is the only part of the site with pottery from the medieval and later periods.

What the graves held

The team mapped every cairn by drone. Imported goods were found with 80 of them: Parthian glazed pottery from southern Iraq at 46, glass at 25, amphorae at 19, plain wheel-made wares at 15 and stone or glass beads at 7 (§4). Of the four excavated graves (§4):

• two held a single skeleton each and no goods;
• one, intact, held a young person with "a large Roman glass bottle dated to the 3rd century AD, iron anklets and a necklace with glass and bronze beads";
• one, looted, still held "a rich assemblage of artefacts from the 1st century AD", among them millefiori glass, a Roman ribbed glass bowl, Parthian glazed pottery, Italian terra sigillata and decorated glass inlays from a box.

Where the goods came from

The report identifies (§§6–22):

• Wine jars (amphorae) from Campania in Italy, the Aegean (Rhodes or Kos), Cilicia in Turkey, southern Gaul and Egypt. One amphora sherd carries a Greek graffito with the letters A, Y, N (§8).
• Fine tableware: Italian terra sigillata, probably from Arezzo; Eastern Sigillata from the area of Antioch; and red-slipped bowls from workshops on the Nile.
• Glazed jars from the Basra region of southern Iraq, "over a hundred sherds" (§12).
• Storage jars from South Arabia.
• Beads of carnelian and agate, most likely from South Asia (§25).

Local pottery is almost absent: "less than 1% of the entire documented assemblage" (§5). One handmade local cooking pot has a type the team also finds "in indigenous contexts from the 1st millennium AD to the 13th century in the Berbera region" (§11).

Dates

The team dates the goods from the early 1st century to the 3rd century AD, with the 1st century as "the apex in long-distance trade at the site". It records "a total absence of materials dated from the 4th century onwards" and concludes that "long-distance trade in Xiis came to an end at some point around the 3rd century AD" (§§23–24). It suggests two reasons: Somali coast ports had no fixed buildings and "shifted easily", and Aksum's role in the Red Sea grew from the 3rd century (§24).

Who was buried there

The team writes that the dead "were nomads, as they were buried in the same kind of graves that appear along the routes leading to the interior of Somaliland and that are still used today by transhumant pastoralists". It notes the absence of local pottery, since herders "were probably using baskets and gourds", and that no permanent settlement of this period has been found on the coast or inland (§27). It reads the hilltop as the place "where the indigenous people awaited the arrival of the foreign merchants", and the foot of the hill as a possible meeting place or ritual space, noting that "banquets, pilgrimages and other rituals related to funerary spaces are historically known among the pastoralists of the Horn" (§26).

The same team later described trade between nomads and foreign merchants on this coast as seasonal, following the monsoon, and called medieval coastal fairs "later examples of a centuries-old tradition of commerce between nomads and foreign traders" (de Torres Rodríguez et al., "Towns in a sea of nomads", 2022, p. 269).

Heis and the Periplus

Heis "has been traditionally identified with one of the 'far-side ports'" of the Periplus, Mundus or Mosylon. The team writes that "most authors tend to agree that the best match would be Mundu", because the Periplus describes ships anchoring "at the island that lies very near the shore", like the island at Xiis (§2). The Periplus says of Mundus that the traders there "are rather hard bargainers" (quoted §2). See the Somali ports in the Periplus.

Chittick's reading, 1979. Neville Chittick described the cairns as "extending for some 4 km along the coast", found "no dwelling site", and noted among the surface sherds "a vessel of Nubian ware, evidence of trade with upper Egypt". He compared the local name of the cape, Ma'ajilayn, with Mosyllon, but wrote that the Periplus' description of Mundus, "where an island close to the shore is mentioned, fits the site better. Perhaps the places have been confused." He too concluded that "the trade was conducted by nomads who presumably would have come and pitched temporary dwellings (perhaps like the modern Somali aqal, easily dismantled for travel) during the trading season", and suggested that the fine Roman glass "would be ill-adapted to nomadic life… Perhaps these objects were destined only for the dead" (Chittick, "Early ports in the Horn of Africa", International Journal of Nautical Archaeology 8.4, 1979, pp. 273–274).

Boats. Chittick linked the open, exposed landing places of this coast to "the survival in this region of sewn boats (beden), built without any metal fastenings, which are said to endure striking the foreshore as they ride in through the surf better than other vessels" (same source, p. 273).

Ras Hafun, the other excavated ancient site on the Somali coast, has a similar mix of goods but also Indian pottery, which has not been found at Heis (§25). See Opone and Ras Hafun.

Related pages

• Before 1300: the ancient Somali lands
• Ancient burials, standing stones and towns
• Frankincense and myrrh
• The Xiis cairns and Somali star lore
• The Sabaean inscriptions of the Somali coast