Zanj

Zanj (Arabic: زَنْج, adj. زنجي, Zanjī; from Persian: زنگ, romanized: Zang) is a term used by medieval Muslim geographers to refer to both a certain portion of Southeast Africa (primarily the Swahili Coast) and to its Bantu inhabitants. It has also been used to refer to Africans collectively by Arab sources. This word is also the origin of the place-names Zanzibar ("coast of the Zanji") and the Sea of Zanj.

The latinization Zingium serves as an archaic name for the coastal area in modern Kenya and Tanzania in southern East Africa. The architecture of these commercial urban settlements is now a subject of study for urban planning. For centuries the coastal settlements were a source of ivory, gold, and slaves, from sections of the conquered hinterland, to the Indian Ocean world.

From Middle Persian *zang, paraphrased based on attested Middle Persian (zangig /zangigh/, "black one"). Furthermore, it is possibly related to the ancient Greek Ἀζανία (Azania), the name of a region in East Africa in the first century AD, and to the ancient Greek Ζήγγισα (Zengissa), the Greek name for a headland in what is now southern Somalia. It may ultimately be derived from the Arabic Ajami. Anthony Christie argued that the word zanj or zang may not be Arabic in origin: a Chinese form (僧祇 sēngqí) is recorded as early as 607 AD. Christie argued that the word is South East Asian in origin. The Javanese word jenggi means African people, specifically the people of Zanzibar..

It is known that the Indonesian Austronesian peoples reached Madagascar by ca. 50–500 CE. As for their route, one possibility is that the Indonesian Austronesians came directly across the Indian Ocean from Java to Madagascar. It is likely that they went through the Maldives, where evidence of old Indonesian boat design and fishing technology persists until the present.

Geographers historically divided the eastern coast of Africa at large into several regions based on each region's respective inhabitants. Arab and Chinese sources referred to the general area that was located to the south of the three regions of Misr (Egypt), Al-Habasha (Abyssinia) and Barbara (Somalia), as Zanj.

Zanj was situated in the Southeast Africa vicinity and was inhabited by Bantu-speaking peoples called the Zanj. The core area of Zanj occupation stretched from the territory south of present-day Ras Kamboni to Pemba Island in Tanzania. South of Pemba lay Sofala in modern Mozambique, the northern boundary of which may have been Pangani. Beyond Sofala was the obscure realm of Waq-Waq, also in Mozambique. The 10th-century Arab historian and geographer Abu al-Hasan 'Alī al-Mas'ūdī describes Sofala as the furthest limit of Zanj settlement, and mentions its king's title as Mfalme, a Bantu word.

The Zanj traded with Persians, Arabs, and Indians, but according to some sources, only locally, since they possessed no ocean-going ships.

The settlements in Zanzibar identified them as economically part of the cosmopolitan culture of the Indian Ocean Basin with trade links as far as Arabia, Persia, and as far east as India and China.