In 2019, during an eye-opening visit to Massawa, the stunning Red Sea port of Eritrea that was built up from the period of Ottoman expansion in the Red Sea in the 16th century to the Italian colonial era (late 19th-first half of the 20th century), I was able to examine in person coral block construction, which I had been studying and admiring in the published work of archaeologist and architectural historians of the Red Sea and the Swahili coast. An important publication on the “Red Sea style” of architecture is by Jean-Pierre Greenlaw, who wrote the first major book about the houses of Suakin/Sawakin in Sudan: The Coral Buildings of Suakin: Islamic Architecture, Planning, Design and Domestic Arrangements in a Red Sea Port, Paul Kegan International, 1994. More recently there have been several scientific archaeological studies of the city, too numerous to list here.  In the previous two posts on corals, we were introduced to the splendid monograph Where Corals Lie: A Natural and Cultural History of Corals by Malcolm Shick, professor Emeritus of Zoology and Oceanography at the University of Maine.  His chapter 6 on “Coral Construction” masterfully paints the two themes of coral as a building organism in its own right and coral blocks and pieces as building construction material used (and in some cases abused) by humans.

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A good bibliographical guide to historic architecture, including coral block construction, in medieval Arabia, East Africa and other parts of the Islamic world is The Oxford Handbook of Islamic Archaeology, edited by Bethany J. Walker, Timothy Insoll, and Corisande Fenwick (2020).

 

In terms of understanding coral stone production and construction, I have mostly relied on the seminal work of Mark Horton on Shanga where buildings and other infrastructure utilized the locally available coral deposits as raw building material:

 

Shanga: The Archaeology of a Muslim Trading Community on the East Coast of Africa.  British Institute in East Africa, 1996.

 

On mangrove in antiquity, see Pierre Schneider, “On the Red Sea the Trees are of a Remarkable
Nature’ (Pliny the Elder): The Red Sea Mangroves from the Greco-Roman Perspective,” in Human Interaction with the Environment in the Red Sea: Select Papers from Red Sea Project VI, (Brill, 2017), pp. 9-29.

 

On medieval Siraf, built in a seemingly forbidding arid environment on the eastern shores of the Persian Gulf, but blessed with connectivity to places rich in building resources, among them East African mangrove poles, see  the site excavator David Whitehouse’s, Siraf: History, Topography, and Environment. Oxbow Books, 2009, as well the preliminary excavation reports by him.

 

On the East African mtepe, see the recent article by Piotr T. Bojakowski, Akshay Sarathi,

Raul Palomino Berrocal, Abdallah Khamis Ali Haji Othman, and Bakari Othman, which discusses the history and boatbuilding details of this type of boat and provides a good sense of the earlier literature: “Mtepe: Documentation and Analysis of a Sewn‑Boat

Reconstruction from Zanzibar, Tanzania,” African Archaeological Review (2024) 41:139–159.

 

On the reuse of ship timbers in building construction at al-Balid and Qalhat in Oman, see Luca Belfioretti and Tom Vosmer, “Al-Balid Ship Timbers: Preliminary Overview and Comparisons,” in Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies 40 (2010) 111-117;and Alessandro Ghidoni, Ship Timbers from the Islamic Sites of al-Balid and Qalhat, Oman: Sewn-plank technology in the Indian Ocean during the 10–16th centuries CE.  Oxford: BAR Series, 2024.  On evidence of shipwrecked timber collection in the Cairo Geniza, see Roxani Margariti, “Wrecks and Texts: a Judeo-Arabic Case Study.”  In Maritime Studies in the Wake of the Byzantine Shipwreck at Yassiada Turkey, edited by Deborah N. Carlson, Justin Leidwanger and Sarah M. Kampbell, 189–201.  College Station, Texas: Texas A&M University Press, 2015.

 

On the Ichthyophagi and the cultures thus described and stereotyped by Greek and Roman authors, see Oscar Nalesini “Ichtyophagoi: History and Use of an Ethnonym,” in Connected Hinterlands: Proceedings of Red Sea Project IV, edited by Lucy Blue, John Cooper, Ross Thomas, and Julian Whitewright (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2009), 9-18.  On the fishing gear and practices going back to the Bronze Age in these same areas, see Mark Beech, In the Land of the Ichthyophagi: Modelling fish exploitation in the Arabian Gulf and Gulf of Oman from the 5th millennium BC to the Late Islamic period (BAR International, 2004).

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Dimitra alerted me to a fascinating book about Greek and Roman display of giant bones, including those of whales, by Adrienne Mayor, The First Fossil Hunters: paleontology in Greek and Roman times.  Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.