[3][4] If this is correct, then during classical antiquity Azania was mostly inhabited by Southern Cushitic peoples, whose groups would rule the area until the great Bantu Migration.
The use of this name coincides with a reference in which Pliny the Elder mentions an "Azanian Sea" (N.H. 6.34) that began around the emporium of Adulis and stretched around the south coast of Africa.
The 1st century AD Greek travelogue the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea first describes Azania based on its author's intimate knowledge of the area.
According to John Donnelly Fage, these early Greek documents altogether suggest that the original inhabitants of the Azania coast, the "Azanians", were of the same ancestral stock as the Afro-Asiatic populations to the north of them along the Red Sea.
The term was briefly revived in the second half of the 20th century as the appellation given to South Africa by Marxists such as the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania (PAC) party.
[11][12] Mofarite, Hadramite and Omani merchants established various trading posts on the Zanj Coast corresponding to Azania: the South Semitic etymology of A'Zania preceded the later Arabic Al-Zanjia.
[13][14] Anthony Christie argued that the word zanj or zang may not be Arabic in origin: a Chinese form (僧祇 sēngqí) is recorded as early as 607 AD.