# Ona Culture at Sembel (c. 800 BCE)

URL: https://allhistories.com/eritrea/timeline/-800-ona-culture-at-sembel
Location: Sembel, Asmara, Eritrea
Themes: main-event

Wikipedia's History of Eritrea article reports that artefacts of the Ona culture at Sembel, within greater Asmara, date to between 800 and 400 BC, a span of about four centuries. The Eritrea article calls it a pre-Aksumite culture and possibly among the oldest pastoral and agricultural communities in East Africa. The article links the Ona to Punt by pointing to long-necked pots, similar to Ona-made vessels, shown as cargo from Punt in a Theban tomb from the reign of Amenhotep II. The Asmara article gives 800 BC as the settlement date in its infobox and says the area later sat on the trade route to Massawa. The sources do not give excavation years or the full range of sites, so the evidence is summarised here only at the level Wikipedia states. The Ona culture shows that the highlands around today's capital were settled and producing a surplus well before the rise of Aksum, and it sets the deep background to Asmara's growth. At this point in the timeline (c. 800 BCE), no state or ruler governed the territory (c. 10000 BCE – c. 701 BCE); hunter-gatherers and early herders lived in small communities, and the dating is approximate.

## Why it matters
Ona-culture finds at Sembel push the roots of the Asmara plateau's farming communities back nearly three thousand years.

Ruler at the Time: [Prehistory to the first polities: Buya hominin, Dahlak Stone Age, Red Sea coast and Punt-era contacts (no single ruler)](https://allhistories.com/eritrea/rulers/prehistory-to-the-first-polities-buya-hominin-da-bce10000)

## Sources
- [Wikipedia — History of Eritrea](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Eritrea)
- [Wikipedia — Eritrea](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eritrea)
- [Wikipedia — Asmara](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asmara)