Zingium

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Zingium is a Latinization of the Arabic word زنج zanj, which can be roughly translated as "Land of the Blacks". This is an archaic name for the band of East African coast in modern-day Kenya and Tanzania, including Zanzibar (whose name includes a form of the word zanj). The inhabitants of this portion of East Africa, referred to as the Zanj were the source of architectural and commercial civilizations that developed along the East African Coast.[1] In the modern day, these African architectural urban settlements are a subject of study for urban planning.[2] However, some foreign i.e. Arab and Chinese travellers regarded the lands to be culturally primitive. The Coastal settlements were for centuries a source of slaves from sections of the conquered hinterland, ivory and gold to the Indian Ocean world.[3]

See also

References

  1. ↑ Nezar AlSayyad,Hybrid Urbanism: On the Identity Discourse and the Built Environment, (Greenwood Publishing Group:2001), p.39
  2. ↑ Pollard, E., Fleisher, J., & Wynne-Jones, S., Beyond the Stone Town: Maritime Architecture at Fourteenth–Fifteenth Century Songo Mnara, Tanzania., (Journal of Maritime Archaeology:2012), p.1-20.
  3. ↑ Roland Oliver, Africa in the Iron Age: c.500 BC-1400 AD, (Cambridge University Press: 1975), p.192


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