Henry Ogg Forbes,
1911 Encyclopædia Britannica
(1911)
“ On the coast the people are modern Arabs mixed with negro, Indian and European blood ; in the mountains live the true Sokotri, supposed to be origin- ally immigrants from Arabia, who have been isolated here from time immemorial. ”
Henry Ogg Forbes,
1911 Encyclopædia Britannica
(1911)
“ The Sokotri appear to have remained Nestorian Christians, with a bishop under the metropolitan of Persia, through the middle ages, though there are indications pointing to a connexion with the Jacobite church. As early as the 10th century Sokotra was a haunt of pirates; in the 13th century Abulfeda describes the inhabitants as “Nestorian Christians and pirates” but the island, was rather a station of the Indian corsairs who harassed the Arab trade with the Far East. The population seems in the middle ages to have been much larger than it is now ”
Henry Ogg Forbes,
1911 Encyclopædia Britannica
(1911)
“ Their manner of life is simple in the extreme. Their dwellings are circular, rubble-built, flat, clay-topped houses, or caves in the limestone rocks. They speak a language allied to the Mahra of the opposite coast of Arabia. Both Mahra and Sokotri are, according to Dr H. Müller, daughter-tongues of the old Sabaean and Minaean, standing in the same relation to the speech of the old inscriptions as Coptic does to that of the hieroglyphics. ”
