The insurrection is believed to have involved enslaved Black Africans ( Zanj ) that had originally been captured from the African Great Lakes region and areas further south in East Africa.

The trade in European slaves reached a peak in the 10th century following the Zanj rebellion which dampened the use of African slaves in the Arab world.

In the 9th and 10th centuries, the black Zanj slaves may have constituted at least a half of the total population in lower Iraq.

Famous historic slave rebellions have been led by the Roman slave Spartacus ; the thrall Tunni who rebelled against the Swedish monarch Ongentheow, a rebellion that needed Danish assistance to be quelled ; the poet-prophet Ali bin Muhammad, who led imported east African slaves in Iraq during the Zanj Rebellion against the Abbasid Caliphate in the ninth century ; Granny Nanny of the Maroons who rebelled against the British in Jamaica ; the Haitian Revolution, the only slave revolt which led to the founding of a country ; Denmark Vesey in South Carolina, USA ; and Madison Washington during the Creole case in 19th century America.

Beginning in the 9th century, Arabs took African slaves from the central and eastern portions of the continent ( where they were known as the Zanj ) and sold them into markets in the Middle East and eastern Asia.

These slaves came largely from Sub-Saharan Africa ( mainly Zanj ), the Caucasus ( mainly Circassians ), Central Asia ( mainly Turks ), and Central and Eastern Europe ( mainly Saqaliba ).

The marshes had for some time been considered a refuge for elements persecuted by the government of Saddam Hussein, as in past centuries they had been a refuge for escaped slaves and serfs, such as during the Zanj Rebellion.

The Zanj were for centuries shipped as slaves by Arab traders to all the countries bordering the Indian Ocean.

The Umayyad and Abbasid caliphs recruited many Zanj slaves as soldiers and, as early as 696 AD, we learn of slave revolts of the Zanj against their Arab masters in Iraq ( see Zanj Rebellion ).

The Zanj who were taken as slaves to the Middle East were often used in hard agriculture-related outdoor work.

In particular, Zanj slaves were used in labor-intensive plantations, harvesting crops like sugarcane in the lower Mesopotamia basin of southern modern-day Iraq, a relatively unusual development in the Islamic world, which generally reserved slave labor for household chores and as soldiers.

It is certain that large numbers of slaves were exported from eastern Africa ; the best evidence for this is the magnitude of the Zanj revolt in Iraq in the 9th century, though not all of the slaves involved were Zanj.

"< Ref name =" Talhami "/> He told the Zanj and other slaves that he was sent by God to liberate them from their bonds.

Since the revolutionaries were more mobile than the heavily armed caliphate army, it was easy for them to wage guerrilla warfare and overcome most of their former oppressors. No sooner had they taken up arms against their exploiters that they became adept at night-raids on enemy territory, liberating weapons, horses, food and fellow slaves burning the rest to cinders to delay retaliation. Over the course of time, the Zanj eventrained expert engineers who blocked the enemy's advance by constructing impenetrable fortresses, cocooned inside layers of water canals or conversely built rapid bridges and communication lines for uninvited courtesy calls to the citadels of the gods .< Ref name =" Shoureshi "/>< sup >

Slaves in the Arab World came from many different regions, including Sub-Saharan Africa ( mainly Zanj ), the Caucasus ( mainly Circassians ), Central Asia ( mainly Tartars ), and Central and Eastern Europe ( mainly Saqaliba ).

Highly possible, a messenger sent by Maharaja Sri Indravarman to deliver his letter for Caliph Umar ibn AbdulAziz of Ummayad in 718, was returned to Srivijaya with Zanji ( black female slave from Zanj ), the Caliph's present for maharaja.

The core area of Zanj occupation stretched from the territory south of present-day Mogadishu, to Pemba Island in Tanzania.

There is little evidence of what part of eastern Africa the Zanj came from, for the name is here evidently used in its general sense, rather than to designate the particular stretch of the coast, from about 3 ° N.

As a regional commercial power in the 19th century, Oman held territories on the island of Zanzibar off the coast of East Africa, the area along the coast of East Africa known as Zanj including Mombasa and Dar es Salaam, and until 1958 in Gwadar ( in present-day Pakistan ) on the coast of the Arabian Sea.

The Sultan of Zanzibar controlled a substantial portion of the East African coast, known as Zanj ; this included Mombasa, Dar es Salaam, and trading routes that extended much further inland, such as the route leading to Kindu on the Congo River.

* The Zanj of East Africa are crushed.

The expedition, searching for deposits of valuable diamonds, discovered the legendary lost city of Zinj ( in Arabic Zinj or Zanj refers to the southern part of the East African coast ).

The Siddi have partial East Indian and Zanj ancestry.

* Zinj, alternate spelling of Zanj, a medieval area of the East African coast

Zanj (, " Land of the Blacks " or " Land of the Negroes ") was a name used by medieval Arab geographers to refer to both a certain portion of the coast of East Africa and its inhabitants, Bantu-speaking peoples called the Zanj.

Others have taken a different interpretation of the Zanj rebellion believing that it was not a slave rebellion but that the revolt was mostly Arabs supported by East African immigrants in Iraq.

Mary and her husband Louis Leakey classified the find as Zinjanthropus boisei: " Zinj " for the medieval East African region of Zanj, " anthropus " ( Gr. ανθρωπος ) meaning ' man ' ( human ); and " boisei " for Charles Boise ( the anthropologists team ’ s funder at the time ).

The sea off the south-eastern coast of Africa was known as the " Sea of Zanj " and included the Mascarene islands and Madagascar.

During the anti-apartheid struggle it was proposed that South Africa should assume the name ' Azania ' to reflect ancient Zanj.

Prominent settlements of the Zanj coast included Shungwaya ( Bur Gao ), as well as Malindi, Gedi, and Mombasa.

Battuta continued by ship south to the Swahili Coast, a region then known in Arabic as the Bilad al-Zanj (" Land of the Zanj "), with an overnight stop at the island town of Mombasa.

* The Zanj Empire is founded by Ali ibn Hasan, succeeding the Kilwa Empire.

Also transliterated as Zenj or Zinj, it was inhabited by Bantu-speaking peoples called the Zanj.

However, after 1861, when the area controlled by the Arab Sultan of Zanzibar was forced by the British to split with the parent country of Oman, it was often referred to as Zanj.

In 1331, the Arabic-speaking Berber explorer Ibn Battuta visited the Kilwa Sultanate in the Land of Zanj, which was ruled by Sultan Hasan bin Sulayman's Yemeni dynasty.

He frequently makes raids into the Zanj country mainland, attacks them and carries off booty, of which he reserves a fifth, using it in the manner prescribed by the Koran.

The Zanj were needed to take care of: the Tigris-Euphrates delta, which had become abandoned marshland as a result of peasant migration and repeated flooding, could be reclaimed through intensive labor.

Zanj also worked the salt mines of Mesopotamia, especially around Basra.

Everybody agrees that there is no people on earth in whom generosity is as universally well developed as the Zanj.

Modern identifications of Rhapta place it on the coasts of modern-day Tanzania — indicating that Azania referred to an area perhaps identical to the later Arab Zanj.

He describes its inhabitants as " Zanj, jet-black in colour, and with tattoo marks on their faces ", and notes that " Kilwa is a very fine and substantially built town, and all its buildings are of wood " ( his description of Mombasa was essentially the same ).

Battuta described the kingdom's Arab ruler as often making slave and booty raids on the local Zanj inhabitants, the latter of whom Battuta characterized as " jet-black in color, and with tattoo marks on their faces.

mired in a period of financial weakness, both internally and externally … The financial strain imposed on the accession of each new caliph contributed to the ability of the Zanj revolt, which began in 868 AD, to sustain itself for as long as it did.

"< Ref name =" Talhami "/> ʻAlī also took on the title Sāhib az-Zanj, which loosely translates to mean " Friend of the Zanj ".