Rhapta: the Location and Importance of East Africa's first Port

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Abstract
The first extant document on the East African coast, The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, signifies Rhapta as its only trading port. It subsequently became a “metropolis” in Ptolemy's Geographia. First, the chief topographical clues in the location of Rhapta are reviewed against a background of meteorological conditions in the western Indian Ocean. It is shown that it is not possible to identify a site but merely to delimit a locality, which is deduced to lie between the mouths of the Pangani and Rufiji rivers, and that it is arguable that there is a higher probability of port location in its northern rather than southern section. Second, J. I. Miller's thesis of Rhapta as a key link-port in the cinnamon route which extended from the Far East to the Rea Sea via East Africa is critically examined. It is alternatively hypothesised that Rhapta owed its economic importance to the growth in demand for ivory in the Mediterranean world from the latter part of the first century B.C. That port, however, occupied only a peripheral position in the commercial system of the western Indian Ocean.

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