Place · ancient cinnamon-trade port · Somalia
Mosylon / Bosaso
Also known as Mosyllon, Bosaso, Bossaso, Bender Qassim
Ancient Mosylon, on the Gulf of Aden coast of the Horn of Africa, was the single most important Red Sea entrepot of the classical cinnamon trade. The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea (c.40-70 CE) describes it in detail: it exported large cassia, mocrotu, mosyllitic cinnamon, slaves, incense and tortoise-shell, and received cheap cloth, grain, wine and copper from Egypt. The settlement is identified by modern archaeologists with the mouth of the Nugaal river, close to the modern Puntland port city of Bosaso in northern Somalia. Mosylon's historical role was to conceal rather than reveal its sources: the Somali and Arab merchants who ran the port sold Mediterranean buyers a cinnamon whose true origin was the forests of central Sri Lanka and the Malabar hills, and sustained the fiction that the spice was native to the Horn for several centuries by inventing the giant cinnamologus-bird story Herodotus repeats in the 5th century BCE. The deception kept the Greco-Roman market paying Mosylon prices for Lankan bark and preserved the triangular Sri Lanka to Mosylon to Alexandria-Rome trade intact until the eighth-century Arab navigational advances and the sixteenth-century Portuguese arrival in Ceylon finally exposed the origin.
- Function
- Trade & production
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 11.280, 49.180
Connections (2)
- Trade routeGalle
The two ends of the classical cinnamon trade. Cinnamon grew only in Sri Lanka’s central-hill forests and the Malabar coast; Lankan sailors loaded it at Galle and shipped it west on the monsoon to Mosylon on the Horn of Africa, where Somali and Arab merchants resold it to Alexandria and Rome as a Horn-of-Africa product (the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, c.40-70 CE, calls it “Mosylitic cinnamon”). To stop Mediterranean captains from sailing past and finding the real source, the middlemen circulated the giant cinnamologus-bird myth Herodotus had already repeated in the 5th century BCE — the birds built nests of cinnamon sticks on inaccessible cliffs, lured down only by chunks of ox-carcass. The fiction held for centuries and was broken only by the Portuguese arrival in Ceylon in 1505.
- Trade routeLankā / Sri Lanka
Mosylon on the Horn of Africa was the classical re-export port for the cinnamon of Sri Lanka — grown only in the central-hill forests of the island and shipped west on the monsoon by Lankan sailors. See the Mosylon ↔ Galle edge for the full deception story and the Periplus route map.
Sources
Standard reference (Periplus; Casson 1989).
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