Dahlak Archipelago

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The Dahlak Archipelago is an island group located in the Red Sea near Massawa, Eritrea. It consists of two large and 124 small islands. The pearl fisheries as they were known to the Romans, still produce a few pearls. Only four of the islands are permanently inhabited, of which Dahlak Kebir is the largest and most populated. The islands are a home for diverse marine life and sea-birds, and attract some tourists.

The people of the archipelago speak Dahlik. Some of the islands can be reached by boat from Massawa.

Other inhabited islands of this archipelago, besides Dahlak Kebir are: Dhuladhiya, Dissei, Dohul, Erwa, Harat, Hermil, Isra-Tu, Nahaleg (Nahleg), Norah and Shumma, although not all are permanently inhabited.

G.W.B. Huntingford has identified a group of islands near Adulis called "Alalaiou" in the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, which were a source of tortoise shell, with the Dahlak archipelago. According to Edward Ullendorff, the Dahlak islanders were amongst the first in East Africa to convert to Islam, and a number of tombstones in Kufic writing attest to this early connection. In the 7th century an independent Muslim state emerged in the archipleago, but it was subsequently conquered by Yemen, then intermittently by the Emperor of Ethiopia and subsequent petty kingdoms of Abyssinia and about 1559 by the Ottoman Turks, who placed the islands under the rule of their Pasha at Suakin.

In the late 19th century, the islands became part of the Italian colony of Eritrea, which was formed in 1890. The Islands were home to little else except a prison operated by the Italian Colonial forces.

After Ethiopia allied itself with the Soviet Union during the Cold War after the rise of the Derg, the Dahlak Archipelago was the location of a Soviet Navy base^[1]. In 1990, Ethiopia lost control of the Dahlak Archipelago and the northern Eritrean coast to the Eritrean independence movement EPLF and by 1991 Ethiopia had lost control of all of Eritrea. Following the international recognition of Eritrean independence in 1993, the Dahlak islands became a part of Eritrea.