Soqotri

The Soqotrans are the indigenous people of the Socotra archipelago in the Indian Ocean off the Horn of Africa. They speak Soqotri, a South Arabian language of the Afroasiatic family.

Greek sailors knew the island as Dioskouridou, and the inscriptions in Hoq Cave record merchants from Arabia, Ethiopia, India and the Mediterranean anchoring there between the first century BC and the sixth century AD. From the Christianization of the fourth to sixth centuries the Soqotrans were Nestorian Christians, until the Mahra Sultanate seized the archipelago in 1480 and began a slow Islamization.

A Portuguese fleet captured the port of Suq in 1507 but abandoned the island in 1511; the Mahra returned and the islanders became Sunni Muslims. In 1834 the East India Company stationed a garrison on Socotra, withdrew it the next year, and the Mahra sultan kept his rule.