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Sofala Province Mozambique 2009-03-12
Sofala, at present known as Nova Sofala, used to be the chief seaport of the Mwenemutapa Kingdom, whose capital was at Mount Fura. It is located on the Sofala Bank in Sofala Province of Mozambique. It was founded by Somali merchants. This name was given because the area is rich with resources.''The Horizon History of Africa'', vol. 1, p. 143 History One of the oldest harbours documented in Southern Africa, medieval Sofala was erected on the edge of a wide estuary formed by the Buzi River (called ''Rio de Sofala'' in older maps). The Buzi River connected Sofala to the internal market town of Manica, and from there to the gold fields of Great Zimbabwe. Sometime in the in 10th century,sofala emerged as a small trading post and was incorporated into the greater global Somali trade network. Merchants from the Sultanate of Mogadishu had long kept Sofala a secret from their Kilwan rivals, who up until then rarely sailed beyond Cape Delgado. In the 1180s, Sultan Suleiman Hassan of Kil ...
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Mozambique Channel
The Mozambique Channel (french: Canal du Mozambique, mg, Lakandranon'i Mozambika, pt, Canal de Moçambique) is an arm of the Indian Ocean located between the Southeast African countries of Madagascar and Mozambique. The channel is about long and across at its narrowest point, and reaches a depth of about off the coast of Mozambique. A warm current, the Mozambique Current, flows in a southward direction in the channel, leading into the Agulhas Current off the east coast of Southern Africa. Extent The International Hydrographic Organization (IHO) defines the limits of the Mozambique Channel as follows: ::''On the North.'' A line from the estuary of the River Rovuma () to Ras Habu, the northernmost point of Ile Grande Comore, the northernmost of the Comore (Comoro) Islands, to Cap d'Ambre (Cape Amber), the northern extremity of Madagascar (). ::''On the East.'' The west coast of Madagascar. ::''On the South.'' A line from Cap Sainte-Marie, the southern extremity of Mad ...
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Consul (representative)
A consul is an official representative of the government of one state in the territory of another, normally acting to assist and protect the citizens of the consul's own country, as well as to facilitate trade and friendship between the people of the two countries. A consul is distinguished from an ambassador, the latter being a representative from one head of state to another, but both have a form of immunity. There can be only one ambassador from one country to another, representing the first country's head of state to that of the second, and their duties revolve around diplomatic relations between the two countries; however, there may be several consuls, one in each of several major cities, providing assistance with bureaucratic issues to both the citizens of the consul's own country traveling or living abroad and to the citizens of the country in which the consul resides who wish to travel to or trade with the consul's country. A less common usage is an administrative con ...
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Swahili People
The Swahili people ( sw, WaSwahili) comprise mainly Bantu, Afro-Arab and Comorian ethnic groups inhabiting the Swahili coast, an area encompassing the Zanzibar archipelago and mainland Tanzania's seaboard, littoral Kenya, northern Mozambique, the Comoros Islands, southwestern Somalia and Northwest Madagascar. The original Swahili distinguished themselves from other Bantu peoples by self-identifying as Waungwana (the civilised ones). In certain regions (e.g. Lamu Island), this differentiation is even more stratified in terms of societal grouping and dialect, hinting to the historical processes by which the Swahili have coalesced over time. More recently, however, Swahili identity extends to any person of African descent who speaks Swahili as their first language, is Muslim and lives in a town on the main urban centres of most of modern-day Tanzania and coastal Kenya, northern Mozambique and the Comoros, through a process of swahilization. The name ''Swahili'' originated as an e ...
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Madagascar
Madagascar (; mg, Madagasikara, ), officially the Republic of Madagascar ( mg, Repoblikan'i Madagasikara, links=no, ; french: République de Madagascar), is an island country in the Indian Ocean, approximately off the coast of East Africa across the Mozambique Channel. At Madagascar is the world's List of island countries, second-largest island country, after Indonesia. The nation is home to around 30 million inhabitants and consists of the island of Geography of Madagascar, Madagascar (the List of islands by area, fourth-largest island in the world), along with numerous smaller peripheral islands. Following the prehistoric breakup of the supercontinent Gondwana, Madagascar split from the Indian subcontinent around 90 million years ago, allowing native plants and animals to evolve in relative isolation. Consequently, Madagascar is a biodiversity hotspot; over 90% of wildlife of Madagascar, its wildlife is endemic. Human settlement of Madagascar occurred during or befo ...
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Cape Correntes
Cape Correntes (sometimes also called "Cape Corrientes" in English) ( Port.: "Cabo das Correntes") is a cape or headland in the Inhambane Province in Mozambique. It sits at the southern entry of the Mozambique Channel.• Cape Correntes was historically regarded as one of the most terrifying obstacles facing sailing ships in the Indian Ocean. It is named after the exceptionally fast southward current that passes here, part of the Mozambique Current, with a tendency to form eddies at this cape. It is also a confluence point of winds, with the capacity to produce unpredictably violent gusts and whirlwinds. Medieval dhows of the Kilwa Sultanate rarely (if ever) sailed below it, thereby making Cape Correntes the southern boundary of the Swahili Coast and cultural zone. Local legends said the cape was inhabited by mermaids that lured unfortunate sailors to their deaths. In the 16th century, Portuguese ships on the ' India Run' that charted an entry into the Mozambique Channel ...
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Tarshish
Tarshish ( Phoenician: ''TRŠŠ'', he, תַּרְשִׁישׁ ''Taršīš'', , ''Tharseis'') occurs in the Hebrew Bible with several uncertain meanings, most frequently as a place (probably a large city or region) far across the sea from Phoenicia (modern Lebanon) and the Land of Israel. Tarshish was said to have exported vast quantities of important metals to Phoenicia and Israel. The same place-name occurs in the Akkadian inscriptions of Esarhaddon (the Assyrian king, d. 669 BC) and also on the Phoenician inscription of the Nora Stone in Sardinia; its precise location was never commonly known, and was eventually lost in antiquity. Legends grew up around it over time so that its identity has been the subject of scholarly research and commentary for more than two thousand years. Its importance stems in part from the fact that Hebrew biblical passages tend to understand Tarshish as a source of King Solomon's great wealth in metals – especially silver, but also gold, ...
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Augustus Henry Keane
Augustus Henry Keane (1833–1912) was an Irish Roman Catholic journalist and linguist, known for his ethnological writings. Early life He was born in Cork, Ireland.George Grant MacCurdy, James Mooney and A. B. Legía - Antonio Flores, ''Anthropologic Miscellanea'' p. 198, in American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 14, No. 1 (Jan. - Mar., 1912), pp. 192-209. Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the American Anthropological Association He was educated in Cork, Dublin and Jersey, and graduated at the Roman Catholic College, Dublin. In Glasgow Keane was editor of the ''Glasgow Free Press'' from 1862. He and his deputy Peter McCorry turned the first Scottish Catholic newspaper into a campaigning sheet, setting the Irish priests against the Scottish priests, and in particular the vicars-apostolic. The paper supported the nationalist Patrick Lavelle, who used its pages to attack Paul Cullen. John Murdoch, the Vicar Apostolic of the Western District was another particu ...
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Google Books
Google Books (previously known as Google Book Search, Google Print, and by its code-name Project Ocean) is a service from Google Inc. that searches the full text of books and magazines that Google has scanned, converted to text using optical character recognition (OCR), and stored in its digital database.The basic Google book link is found at: https://books.google.com/ . The "advanced" interface allowing more specific searches is found at: https://books.google.com/advanced_book_search Books are provided either by publishers and authors through the Google Books Partner Program, or by Google's library partners through the Library Project. Additionally, Google has partnered with a number of magazine publishers to digitize their archives. The Publisher Program was first known as Google Print when it was introduced at the Frankfurt Book Fair in October 2004. The Google Books Library Project, which scans works in the collections of library partners and adds them to the digital invent ...
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Queen Of Sheba
The Queen of Sheba ( he, מַלְכַּת שְׁבָא‎, Malkaṯ Šəḇāʾ; ar, ملكة سبأ, Malikat Sabaʾ; gez, ንግሥተ ሳባ, Nəgśətä Saba) is a figure first mentioned in the Hebrew Bible. In the original story, she brings a caravan of valuable gifts for the Israelite King Solomon. This account has undergone extensive Jewish, Islamic, Yemenite and Ethiopian elaborations, and it has become the subject of one of the most widespread and fertile cycles of legends in the Middle East. Modern historians identify Sheba with both the South Arabian kingdom of Saba in present-day Yemen and Ethiopia. The queen's existence is disputed among historians. Narratives Biblical The Queen of Sheba ( he, מַלְכַּת שְׁבָא, Malkaṯ Šəḇāʾ, in the Hebrew Bible; grc-koi, βασίλισσα Σαβά, basílissa Sabá, in the Septuagint; syr, ܡܠܟܬ ܫܒܐ; gez, ንግሥተ ሳባ, Nəgśətä Saba), whose name is not stated, came to Jerusalem " ...
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Ophir
Ophir (; ) is a port or region mentioned in the Bible, famous for its wealth. King Solomon received a shipment from Ophir every three years (1 Kings 10:22) which consisted of gold, silver, sandalwood, pearls, ivory, apes, and peacocks. Biblical references Ophir in Genesis 10 (the Table of Nations) is said to be the name of one of the sons of Joktan. The Books of Kings and Chronicles tell of a joint expedition to Ophir by King Solomon and the Tyrian king Hiram I from Ezion-Geber, a port on the Red Sea, that brought back large amounts of gold, precious stones and ' algum wood' and of a later failed expedition by king Jehoshaphat of Judah. The famous 'gold of Ophir' is referenced in several other books of the Hebrew Bible. In the Septuagint, other variants of the name are mentioned: ''Ōpheír'', ''Sōphír'', ''Sōpheír'' and ''Souphír''. The New Testament apocrypha book ''Cave of Treasures'' contains a passage: "And the children of Ophir, that is, Send, appointed to be the ...
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Thomé Lopes
Thomé Lopes (sometimes modernized as Tomé Lopes) was a Portuguese scrivener, writer of an eyewitness account of the second journey of Vasco da Gama to India (1502–1503). Thomé Lopes's background is obscure. All that is known is that he was a native of Porto, Portugal. In early 1502, Thomé Lopes was hired as a ''escrivão'' (captain's clerk) aboard an unnamed ship owned and outfitted by Ruy Mendes de Brito (a gentleman of the royal chamber of King Manuel I of Portugal) and captained by an Italian, Giovanni Buonagratia (João de Buonagracia) of Florence. This ship was part of a Portuguese squadron of five ships, under the overall command of Estêvão da Gama (cousin of Vasco da Gama). This squadron set out from Lisbon on 1 April 1502, intending to catch up and join the 4th Portuguese India Armada of admiral Vasco da Gama, which had left a few months earlier (February 1502). According to Lopes, their squadron caught up with the main armada on 21 August 1502 at Anjediva ...
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