u/Expert_Search5394

they knew a lot about somalia back then but her is the most important part of the book

1 The Macrobians Herodotus's "tallest and most handsome people"

"The earliest Greek reference is remarkable. Herodotus spoke of the Macrobians, an ancient people and kingdom postulated to have been located on the Somali Peninsula during the 1st millennium BC. They are mentioned as a nation of people with extraordinary longevity said to live to 120 and were described as the tallest and most handsome of all men.

When the Persian king Cambyses sent spies to probe them, the Macrobian king reportedly mocked Persian wine, bread, and lifestyle as signs of weakness. It's one of Herodotus's most memorable passages about any foreign people"

It describes multiple Somali ports in detail. Opone (believed to be modern Ras Hafun in northern Somalia) was a major market-town where the greatest quantity of cinnamon was produced, along with tortoiseshell and high-quality slaves exported to Egypt. Ancient Egyptian, Roman, and Persian Gulf pottery has been recovered from the site by archaeologists from the University of Michigan. The port of Malao (modern Berbera) is also described, with the note that "the natives are more peaceable" there — suggesting Greek merchants actually visited and formed impressions of the local people firsthand.

2 A secret trade trick

There's also a delightful detail about Somali commercial shrewdness. The reason for barring Indian ships from entering wealthy Arabian port cities was to protect and hide the exploitative trade practices of Somali and Arab merchants. Indian merchants brought large quantities of cinnamon from Ceylon and the Far East to Somalia and Arabia, and this was the best-kept secret of Arab and Somali merchants the Romans and Greeks believed the source of cinnamon to be the Somali peninsula, when in reality it was brought there by Indian ships. The Somalis were essentially running a successful information monopoly on the Greeks and Romans (we been finessing from day one"

3 where is Erythraean sea

The Erythraean Sea was the ancient Greek name for what we now split into three separate bodies of water:

• The Red Sea
• The Persian Gulf
• The Indian Ocean (at least the northwestern part)

To the Greeks, it was essentially one vast interconnected maritime zone stretching from the Horn of Africa eastward to India. The name comes from the Greek Erythros meaning "red" — possibly from a legendary king Erythras said to have ruled the region, or from the reddish hue of its waters in certain lights.

African cities are growing at a speed the world has never seen before. Lagos, Kinshasa, Dar es Salaam adding thousands of people every single week. By 2050 some of these will be the largest cities on earth.

And right now, in the middle of all that growth, they're quietly choosing to build suburbs and highways.

Yeah.

The insane part is they can see exactly what went wrong elsewhere.

Western cities spent the entire 20th century building car-dependent sprawl and are now spending billions trying to undo it. Removing highways. Retrofitting transit. Desperately rezoning suburbs. It's slow, expensive, and politically brutal.

Africa hasn't built that infrastructure yet. The roads that will define these cities for a century are still being planned. The zoning laws are still being written. This is an almost unique window to just... not make the same mistake.

Instead, a lot of governments are building new car-centric capital cities from scratch, clearing dense walkable neighborhoods to make room for ring roads, and generally copying the American model at the exact moment America is trying to escape it.

The irony is brutal because the good stuff already exists.

The informal dense neighborhoods that planners in Houston would genuinely dream about mixed use, walkable, full of street life are already there. They're being demolished to build roads.

Yes the living conditions in many of them are bad and need investment. But the structure is exactly what good cities are made of. Instead of upgrading them, many governments are flattening them.

The window is closing fast. Infrastructure locks cities in for generations. This isn't really a debate for 2040 by then the concrete will already be poured.

ask yourself do you want you cities to look like copenhagen and tokyo or houston and dallas

I just learned that in Oman every sect prays together, and maybe that’s why there’s so much peace there. It reminds me of Mecca and Medina, why can it be like that everywhere.

in almost all muslim countries even in the west where im from you will never see a sunni praying in a shia mosque and vice versa.

if its true i find it truly beautiful and wish everyone could learn from you guys

It took the Soviet Union for Western countries to realise they needed to work together. I feel like something similar is happening in the MENA region today. no matter how wealthy or powerful Iran, the Gulf states, or North African countries become on their own, they won’t reach the scale of a China or a United States without some form of shared military coordination or an integrated economic bloc. At a certain point, individual strength hits a ceiling. India and China each have over a billion people, and NATO collectively is similar. The whole MENA region combined is still below that, so the only real path to balancing larger powers is regional pact.

kam is believed to be the father of cushitic people Mizraim who are the egyptians and put who are the berbers.

and it kinda makes sense when you look at languages and hablogroups.

but do you guys believe it?