Daasbiyo cave: rock paintings and burial mounds

Where is the Daasbiyo cave?

The Daasbiyo cave lies in the Ali-Sabieh region, in south-east Djibouti, on the territory of the village of the same name. The National Tourism Agency presents it as one of the sites to see when passing through Ali-Sabieh, the “train town”.

Daasbiyo occupies a plain at the foot of the Hadla massif. The village is served by a station of the former Djibouti-Ethiopia line: the railway passes through Daasbiyo before heading west towards the Grand Bara desert. The sector lives from herding and a nascent agriculture.

Reference	Published data	Source
Administrative region	Ali-Sabieh	National Tourism Agency; Wikipedia
Coordinates of the village	11.250 N — 42.783 E	Wikipedia
Altitude of the village	581 m	Wikipedia
Position	Plain at the foot of the Hadla massif	Wikipedia
Distance from Ali-Sabieh	about 15 km north-east	Wikipedia
Distance from Djibouti City	about 62 km south-east	Wikipedia
Service	Station of the former Djibouti-Ethiopia line	Wikipedia
Status of the village	Medieval city still inhabited	La Nation, August 2024

Those coordinates are those of the village. No source consulted publishes coordinates specific to the cavity: treat them as an arrival point, not as the entrance to the cave.

What is in the Daasbiyo cave?

It has to be said plainly: what is known about the cave comes down to two sentences, and both deserve to be quoted as they stand rather than embroidered.

The National Tourism Agency writes that the cave served the site’s first occupants to store their equipment: that is the role attributed to it, that of a storage shelter linked to an ancient occupation of the village.

The national press, reporting an official visit in August 2024, mentions the cave’s rock paintings, described as of “ancient times”. That is the only mention of rock art we found.

The published descriptions stop there. Neither the National Tourism Agency nor the national press gives the number of figures, their motifs, their technique or their dating. A visit is therefore prepared without documentary expectation: you will see what a local companion shows you, on a site that is neither equipped nor waymarked.

What do the Daasbiyo tumuli reveal?

It is in fact the funerary context that made Daasbiyo known. The village and its surroundings hold a significant number of tumuli, called locally awellos — aowelo in other transcriptions. The word means in Afar “a heap of stones gathered by the ancestors”.

These monuments are made of black volcanic rocks. Two forms are distinguished:

• flat and circular, with stones set side by side and stelae at the ends, in the plain regions;
• pyramidal, in mountainous areas, where stacking the blocks demands far more material.

The detail that distinguishes them from recent burials is simple: in an ancient tumulus, the whole circle is filled with stones, whereas more recent graves are content to outline it. According to the official source consulted, these complexes go back to about 3000 BCE, more than five millennia ago; construction is said to have obeyed the social status of the deceased, and the sex of the person buried is said to be read from the number of stelae — two for a man, a third at the centre for a woman.

The dating is not a settled consensus: academic work on the aowelos proposes different ranges depending on the author, and the associated material — ceramic sherds, tools, child graves — still feeds the debate about their function, funerary or for observing the territory.

These tumuli appear, with those of the Gobaad basin and the Tadjourah region, on the national tentative list of properties proposed for UNESCO world heritage. They are threatened by looting, and the area’s inhabitants sometimes reuse their blocks to build a shelter or an enclosure: the heritage is alive, fragile, and already reworked.

Why is Daasbiyo a medieval city still inhabited?

Three successive roles explain the importance of the place, and all three are documented.

A trading crossroads. Daasbiyo played an important role in exchanges between the port cities of Zeila and the hinterland. The houses were built of mud and stone, and nomads stopped there for water, on the road to Zeila or Harar. A well, dug in the bed of the wadi crossing the village, supplied the water for those halts.

A religious crossroads. The village was a crossroads between the 10th and 12th centuries. Islam only penetrated the region towards the end of the 13th century, while Zeila was already largely Muslim several centuries earlier. That gap makes Daasbiyo an interesting marker for understanding the spread of the religion along the coast.

A city that survived. This is the most striking point: the national press presents Daasbiyo as one of the country’s medieval cities still alive, whereas its contemporaries are no more than ruins left to archaeologists. The village keeps its station, its century-old well and the remains of a colonial barracks. A camel-back walk leaves there each year towards Ali-Sabieh.

The tumuli, the funerary complexes and the abundance of ceramic sherds on the site attest, according to the National Tourism Agency, to a vanished civilisation. Close by, two Lower Palaeolithic deposits have also been recorded: Armakato, a kilometre and a half north of the village, and the Douré wadi, four kilometres east, where nearly four hundred pieces were collected in 1990.

How do you visit Daasbiyo?

The Dalmar booking catalogue offers no excursion dedicated to Daasbiyo. The visit is therefore arranged from Ali-Sabieh, whose village is about fifteen kilometres away, or fitted into a day devoted to the south of the country.

Departure point	What it involves
Ali-Sabieh	The closest; the natural departure point for the village
Djibouti City	About 62 km south-east; the stage is done within the day
The railway	The village has a station on the former Djibouti-Ethiopia line

The region is crossed by car; for sites away from the main roads, access is by track, and local accompaniment is the rule rather than the exception: the tumuli blend into the ground, and no signage is documented. For rail service in the sector, see the page train to Ethiopia.

What should you know before going?

• Do not expect infrastructure. There is no ticket, no published opening hours, no appointed guide documented by the sources consulted.
• Do not touch the paintings, do not wet them and do not rub anything: on that kind of surface, the gesture is enough to erase.
• Collect neither sherds, nor beads, nor bones, nor stones from the tumuli. The country’s awellos are already looted; a stone taken away is a stone lost to research.
• Bring water and sun protection. The region is inland, without shade, and shops are rare around the sites.
• Ask before photographing inhabitants and dwellings: you are not in a deserted site, but in an inhabited village.
• Set off early. Open-air sites are visited in the morning; the afternoon is crushing for much of the year.

Preparing your trip

Daasbiyo combines naturally with the rest of the Ali-Sabieh region: the protected area of Assamo and its Beira antelope, the plain of Grand Bara and its rock engravings, or a stop at Djibouti City before heading down south. On site, allow half a day. Organise your visit before setting off: accommodation is scarce in the region, and the sources consulted document neither ticket, nor opening hours, nor appointed guide on the site.