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People have lived in Zanzibar for 20,000 years. History proper starts when the islands became a base for traders voyaging between the African Great Lakes, the Arabian peninsula, and the Indian subcontinent. Unguja offered a protected and defensible harbor, so although the archipelago had few products of value, Omanis and Yemenis settled in what became Zanzibar City (Stone Town) as a convenient point from which to trade with towns on the Swahili Coast. They established garrisons on the islands and built the first mosques in the African Great Lakes. During the Age of Exploration, the Portuguese Empire was the first European power to gain control of Zanzibar, and kept it for nearly 200 years. In 1698, Zanzibar fell under the control of the Sultanate of Oman, which developed an economy of trade and cash crops, with a ruling Arab elite and a Bantu general population. Plantations were developed to grow spices; hence, the moniker of the Spice Islands (a name also used of Dutch colony the Moluccas, now part of Indonesia). Another major trade good was ivory, the tusks of elephants that were killed on the Tanganyika mainland - a practice that is still in place to this day. The third pillar of the economy was slaves, which gave Zanzibar an important place in the Arab slave trade, the Indian Ocean equivalent of the better-known Triangular Trade. The Omani Sultan of Zanzibar controlled a substantial portion of the African Great Lakes coast, known as Zanj, as well as extensive inland trading routes. Sometimes gradually, sometimes by fits and starts, control of Zanzibar came into the hands of the British Empire. Part of the political impetus for this was the movement for the abolition of the slave trade. In 1890, Zanzibar became a British protectorate. The death of one sultan and the succession of another of whom the British did not approve later led to the Anglo-Zanzibar War, also known as the shortest war in history. The islands gained independence from Britain in December 1963 as a constitutional monarchy. A month later, the bloody Zanzibar Revolution, in which several thousand Arabs and Indians were killed and thousands more expelled and expropriated, led to the Republic of Zanzibar and Pemba. That April, the republic merged with the mainland Tanganyika, or more accurately, was subsumed into Tanzania, of which Zanzibar remains a semi-autonomous region. Zanzibar was most recently in the international news with a January 2001 massacre, following contested elections. == Prehistory == Zanzibar has been inhabited, perhaps not continuously, since the Paleolithic. A 2005 excavation at Kuumbi Cave in southeastern Zanzibar found heavy duty stone tools that showed occupation of the site at least 22,000 years ago.〔("Excavations at Kuumbi Cave on Zanzibar 2005", ''The African Archaeology Network: Research in Progress'', Paul Sinclair (Uppsala University), Abdurahman Juma, Felix Chami, 2006 )〕 Archaeological discoveries of a limestone cave used radiocarbon techniques to prove more recent occupation, from around 2800 BC to the year 0 (Chami 2006). Traces of the communities include objects such as glass beads from around the Indian Ocean. It is a suggestion of early trans-oceanic trade networks, although some writers have expressed pessimism about this possibility. No cave sites on Zanzibar have revealed pottery fragments used by early and later Bantu farming and iron-working communities who lived on the islands (Zanzibar, Mafia) during the first millennium AD. On Zanzibar, the evidence for the later farming and iron-working communities dating from the mid-first millennium AD is much stronger and indicates the beginning of urbanism there when settlements were built with mud-timber structures (Juma 2004). This is somewhat earlier than the existing evidence for towns in other parts of the Swahili Coast, given as the 9th century AD. The first permanent residents of Zanzibar seem to have been the ancestors of the Hadimu and Tumbatu, who began arriving from the African Great Lakes mainland around 1000 AD. They had belonged to various Bantu ethnic groups from the mainland, and on Zanzibar they lived in small villages and failed to coalesce to form larger political units. Because they lacked central organization, they were easily subjugated by outsiders. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「History of Zanzibar」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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