Before 1500: Adal, Ajuran and the coast
The Harla: the 'giant builders' of the ruins and the medieval town of Harlaa
The Harla are a people named in sources from the 13th to the early 16th century, among them the chronicle of the Ethiopian king Amda Seyon and the Futuh al-Habasha, as Muslims of the south-east of the Ethiopian highlands. In oral tradition around Harar and the Chercher mountains, the Harla are giants who built the ruined towns, mosques and burial mounds of the region and were destroyed for their pride. A Somali Issa clan near Jijiga and a farming clan of the Afar both carry the name Harla. The excavated town of Harlaa near Dire Dawa, dated from the mid-6th to the 15th century, takes its archaeological name from them.
In short
"Harla" is a name found in three places: in medieval written sources, in the oral traditions of eastern Ethiopia, and in the names of living clans. Archaeologists have also used it for an excavated medieval town, Harlaa, between Dire Dawa and Harar. This page sets out each, with its source. The main sources are a French–Ethiopian survey of "Harla" sites published in 2011 (Chekroun, Fauvelle-Aymar, Hirsch et al., "Les Harla : archéologie et mémoire des géants d'Éthiopie", in Espaces musulmans de la Corne de l'Afrique au Moyen Âge, CFEE, 2011, pp. 75–98, in French, translated here; paragraph numbers below refer to it) and the excavation report on Harlaa (Insoll et al., "Material cosmopolitanism: the entrepot of Harlaa as an Islamic gateway to eastern Ethiopia", Antiquity 95, 2021, pp. 487–507).
The Harla in the written sources
The 2011 authors write that the Harla "appear from the 13th century in a few early written sources from or about Ethiopia" (§1). Their notes list (note 2):
- Ibn Sa'id, 13th century, quoted in Abu l-Fida, names a people called "Xaria", which the authors list among the mentions of the Harla.
- Al-Mufaddal, an Egyptian chronicle, mentions a "country of the Harla".
- The chronicle of the wars of Amda Seyon, the 14th-century Christian king of Ethiopia, mentions the Harla twice.
- The Futuh al-Habasha, the 16th-century account of Imam Ahmad's war, mentions the Harla many times. See Futuh al-Habasha.
- A historical note on the Awsa (Aussa) in the Afar country speaks of "a group of Harla".
From these the authors conclude that the name "was carried by Muslims of the south-eastern part of Ethiopia", though "we are not in the least able to know which group or groups" called themselves by it (§46).
The giants of the oral tradition
Among the Oromo of the Chercher mountains and the Harar area, ruined stone walls, mosques and burial mounds are often called "Harla" work. The traditions say the Harla were giants of great size, wealth and strength, who built these places and then left them or were destroyed "as a divine punishment caused by the arrogance of the giants" (§1). The authors note that such traditions are found only among the Oromo of the Chercher and some neighbouring peoples, not among all Oromo, and think they date from the time these peoples settled the region in the 16th century (§1).
Examples the team recorded (§§6, 12, 25):
- At Genda Harla, east of Harar, villagers said the large stone enclosure was built by Harla about forty metres tall, who hunted wild pigs with their bare hands and could eat a whole sheep for breakfast. An old man told the team that the Harla were "the former inhabitants of the country", and that when the Oromo arrived some joined them and most left.
- At Harlaa, villagers showed a reddish mark on a rock as a Harla footprint; the team identifies it as a growth on the stone.
- At the mosque of Direbelo, villagers said "it is a mosque of the Harla, who were giants".
A version recorded in 1999 at Harlaa says the Harla "were herders who came from the Ogaden", so rich that they poured their cows' milk into the river, refused the fast and even set out to translate the Qur'an into the Harla language, until "they were cursed and disappeared" (note 4, quoting Le Quellec and Poissonnier 1999).
Clans named Harla today
The 2011 authors list living groups that carry the name (note 3 and §47):
- a Harla clan of the Issa Somali, near Jijiga (citing d'Abbadie 1890 and Cerulli 1964);
- small Oromo communities of the Chercher, such as at Genda Harla, that claim descent from the Harla who lived there before them;
- the Harälla of the Awsa among the Afar, a settled farming clan of the inner Awash delta.
In each case, the authors suggest, the present group took the name from an earlier population, which implies "a process of social fusion between an indigenous population and a population of immigrants" (§47).
What the sites are
The team visited sites called "Harla" in 2006, 2007 and 2008 and sorted them into four kinds (§§34, 37–41):
- Stone cist graves ("dolmens"), the oldest; one has been dated to the middle of the 2nd millennium BC.
- Burial mounds (tumuli), many dated to the 8th–11th centuries AD.
- Muslim sites, meaning towns, small isolated mosques and inscribed gravestones. None was excavated at the time, but the authors place them broadly in the 13th to early 16th centuries, the period of the sultanate of Ifat. They note that the mosques resemble the dated mosques of eastern Shewa.
- Small walled enclosures like Genda Harla, which they think are more likely later defensive posts of the Harar sultanate, 16th–19th centuries.
So, they write, local people use "Harla" for ruins of very different ages, from prehistoric graves to late fortifications (§§35, 46).
Who were the Harla? Who says what
- The 2011 authors put forward the hypothesis that the legends were formed in the 16th century by incoming Oromo and Somali groups who saw the end of the medieval Muslim towns of the region, and that the Harla, "transfigured into giant builders, rich and proud", were "precisely the inhabitants of this medieval urban civilisation". They ask, without answering, whether the newcomers destroyed that civilisation or moved into a space it had already left (§§45–46).
- Insoll and colleagues, 2021, who excavated Harlaa, write that its name "relates to the common appellation 'Harla' given to ruined stone-built towns and funerary monuments in the region". They find that "the most probable conclusion is that Harlaa was Hubät/Hobat, the capital of the Hārlā sultanate", a small territory tied to Ifat. They credit Said Shihad Hussein with the suggestion that the name comes from the Somali hoobat and the Arabic hubuut, both meaning a descent from high ground, which fits Harlaa's position between highland and lowland (pp. 504–505).
The excavated town of Harlaa
Harlaa lies about 15 km south-east of Dire Dawa and 40 km north-west of Harar, at 1,700 metres. The excavators found a mosque, workshops, houses, cemeteries and a fortification wall (Insoll et al. 2021, p. 488). The 2011 team had earlier recorded a small mosque, inscribed Arabic gravestones (one dated 1048–1057), 13th-century Ayyubid and Mamluk coins shown by villagers, and stone moulds and crucibles that it takes to be the tools of jewellers (§§8, 14, 18). The excavation dates, imports and inscriptions are summarised on Ruined towns of the Somali interior.
Related pages
Sources
- Chekroun, Fauvelle-Aymar, Hirsch et al., "Les Harla : archéologie et mémoire des géants d'Éthiopie", in Espaces musulmans de la Corne de l'Afrique au Moyen Âge, CFEE, 2011, pp. 75–98 · books.openedition.org
- Insoll et al., "Material cosmopolitanism: the entrepot of Harlaa as an Islamic gateway to eastern Ethiopia", Antiquity 95, 2021, pp. 487–507 · doi.org
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