Fortunately, oral records are on the whole sufficiently abundant and consistent in their essentials, to enable the broad outlines of the Somali dispersal to be traced with what is probably a considerable degree of accuracy. Certainly the evidence at present available leaves no doubt that the gradual expansion over the last ten centuries of the Hamitic Somali from the shores of the Gulf of Aden to the plains of northern Kenya is one of the most sustained, and in its effects, far-reaching movements of population in the history of North-East Africa.

I.M. Lewis, I. M. Lewis, A Modern History of the Som…, loc. 80