Early history

The original settlers of the Somali region were ethnic from the fertile lakes of southern Ethiopia. This group is sub-divided into a number of other ethnicities, which are still readily recognized (and fought over) today. Archeological evidence supports the idea that most of the coastline of present day Somalia had been settled by AD 100. G.W.B. Huntingford has argued in his translation of the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, written about this time, that the "Lesser and Greater Bluffs", the "Lesser and Greater Strands", and the "Seven Courses" of Azania all should be identified with the Somali coastline from Hafun south to Siyu Channel. This indicate that parts of Somalia were familiar to Roman and Indian traders by this time.

The ancient Egyptians knew the region which now includes Somalia as Punt, and the inhabitants were referred to as the Black Berbers. For five centuries (second to seventh century AD) much of the area came under the rule of the Ethiopian kingdom of Aksum.

In the 7th Century AD, Arab tribes set up trading posts along the coastline of the Gulf of Aden, where they found the sultanate of Adel, the main port of which was Zeila.

These early villages put the Somalis in contact with Arab traders travelling along the Red Sea and Indian Ocean. In the ensuing centuries, the Somalis were one of the first peoples to convert to Islam. The Arabs established the city of Zeila (Now Saylac) on the Horn of Africa which became a central trading hub.

In the Middle Ages the formation of the clan-family political structure began to take shape, when extended families of persecuted Muslims elsewhere in Arabia, fled en masse to the frontier in Somalia. Their relative affluence made them powerful, and inter-marriage with the locals produced economically beneficial relationships. During the 1300s, the future capital city of Mogadishu came to prominence as a favorite "party town" for Arab sailors. To the west there was a lot of trading done with the people living where the Omoros (or Gallas), the Afars and the Eritreans now live. The Somali people began to migrate into this region from Yemen in the 13th Century.

Muslim Somalia enjoyed friendly relations with neighboring Christian Ethiopia for centuries. Despite jihad raging everywhere else in the Arab world, Somalia promised never to attack Ethiopia. The fact that Ethiopia has some of the most forbidding natural terrain in the world didn't hurt the peace effort. Unfortunately, in 1414 an aggressive Ethiopian king, Yeshaq I, came to the throne and launched a war against Somalia and Djibouti. His campaign was successful, and the Somali king was executed. King Yeshaq had his minstrels compose a song praising his victory, which contains the first written record of the word "Somali".

The Somalis lived under Ethiopian domination for a century or so. However, starting around 1530 under the charismatic leadership of Imam Ahmed Gragn (Gurey or left-handed in Somali), they retaliated. Regrouped Muslim armies marched into Ethiopia employing scorched earth tactics and slaughtering every Ethiopian they could get their hands on. The complete annihilation of Ethiopia was averted by the timely arrival of a Portuguese expedition led by Pedro da Gama, son of the famed navigator Vasco da Gama. The Portuguese needed help with their activities in the Indian Ocean so they formed an alliance with their fellow Christians, and a joint Portuguese-Ethiopian force defeated the Muslim army on February 21, 1543 at the Battle of Wayna Daga, and Ahmed Gragn was killed in battle.

Ahmed Gragn's widow married Nur ibn Mujahid in return for his promise to avenge Ahmed's death, who succeeded Ahmed Gragn, and continued hostilities against his northern adversaries until his death in 1567; the Ethiopians sacked Zeila in 1660. The Portuguese, meanwhile, established a major economic colony in Somalia, primarily engaged in textile manufacturing. The sultanate disintegrated into small independent states, many of which were ruled by Somali chiefs. Zeila became a dependency of Yemen, and was then incorporated into the Ottoman Empire.

In the 17th century, Somalia fell under the sway of the rapidly expanding Ottoman Empire, who exercised control through hand picked local Somali governors. In 1728 the Ottomans evicted the last Portuguese colony and claimed sovereignty over the whole Horn of Africa. However, their actual exercise of control was fairly modest, as they demanded only a token annual tribute and appointed a Ottoman judge to act as a kind of Supreme Court for interpretations of Islamic law. In all other respects, the local governors ignored the Ottomans. By the 1850s Ottoman power was in decline, and the annual tribute was being paid more out of force of habit, than from fear of possible retribution