Whats your take on this? Do you think its possible?

Bilad al-Barbar (Barbara) was the term that medieval Arab geographers and scholars reserved for the northern half of the Horn of Africa. The Arabs had the habit of naming a particular geographical area according to whatever the inhabitants of that landmass happened to be. Due to its core Hamitic inhabitants, this part of Northeastern Africa was thus referred to as the "Land of the Berbers".
"Generally speaking, Arab authors seem to have regarded Barbara as synonymous with the Hamitic tribes of the Horn. Cf. Ibn Khaldun: 'To the south of Zeila on the western coast of the Indian Ocean are the villages of Berbera, which extend one after the other all along the southern coast [of the Indian Ocean] to the end of the sixth section. There, to the east, the country of the Zanj adjoins them'"
Although the Arabs were the most prolific foreign explorers and describers of the Northeastern Africa region, they were not the first. Ancient Chinese documents from centuries earlier also profile the area's inhabitants, customs, lifestyle and commodities. For example, in his book Miscellaneous Notes in Chronicle Years ("you yang za zu"), the 9th century merchant Duan Chengshi wrote the following about the northern Horn coast, a region he referred to as "Bo-ba-li":
"[it is] an independent country with an infantry of over 200 thousand men, strong enough to defy the powerful Tazi (the Arab Empire)."
"The beginnings of Arab navigation in the Indian Ocean are lost in antiquity. The Omanis and other inhabitants of South Arabia were the most adventuresome sailors. To them the coast of Africa was known as Sawahil as-Sudan, the "Shore of the Blacks," which is the origin of the name of the language which is now the lingua franca of East Africa, Swahili. The interior of the Horn region was called Bilad al-Barbar, the "Land of the Berbers" and recent scholarly opinion holds that it was already inhabited by people who were at least in part the ancestors of the Somalis."






