Table of Contents:
AFRICA BEFORE 0 CE
Part 1: The Earliest People (Africa Before 3500 CE) p. 3-8
Part 2: Ancient Egypt before 0 CE p. 9-20
Part 3: Nubia & the Sudan; Libya and the Phoenicians before 0 CE p. 21-26
Part 4: West Africa and Bantu Africa before 0 CE p. 27-37
Part 5: Ethiopia & the Horn of Africa before 0 CE p. 37- 40
Part 6: The Libyans & Phoenicians p. 39-40
AFRICA AFTER 0 CE
Part 1: The Bantu Expansion into Sub-Saharan/Central Africa after 0 CE p. 42-52
Bantu Expansion & Kingdoms p. 42-46
(Bantu) Swahili City-States of East Africa p. 46-47
Bantu Culture after 0 CE: Matrilinealism and Patrilinealism p. 47-50
Bantu Culture: Woodcarvings, Body Art, Clothing, Furniture, Architecture p. 50-52
Bantu culture: Religion & Proverbs after 0 CE p. 52
Part 2: Egypt & the Sahara & Nubia 0-600s CE (Before Islam) p. 53-58
Part 3: There is no Part 3 I guess I skipped it
Part 4: West Africa p. 59-66
The Savanna/Sahel Kingdoms p. 59-65
Forest Kingdoms (modern day Ghana, Nigeria, Ivory Coast etc.) p. 65-66
African Traditional Religions in West Africa p. 66
Part 5: Ethiopia & the Horn of Africa p. 67-71
Kingdom of Axum in Ethiopia: glory days of 0 CE-600s CE and the feudal period 600s CE-1100 CE p. 67-69
Ethiopia in the Middle Ages (1100 CE on): Zagwe Dynasty and Lalibela, Zara Yaqob, the Solomonids, &c. P. 69-71
Part 6: Islam in Africa p. 71-76
Islamic Expansion p. 71-73
Islam in West Africa p. 73-74
Islam as a Religion & Way of Life p. 74-76
Part 7: Post 1500s: Slave Trade and Colonialism p. 77-89
Part 8: Meroe & the Sudanic Kingdoms p. 89-93
Part 9: Random Primary Source Summaries/Texts p. 94-106
AFRICA BEFORE 0 BC
PART 1: THE EARLIEST PEOPLE (AFRICA BEFORE 3500 BC)
Africa is a huge, diverse, landmass three times the size of the US, the second biggest continent after Asia with rainforests, deserts, grasslands, lakes, and mountains. Most of its land in the tropics; only its extremes are in the temperate zone. Africa’s core is an elevated rock plateau between 3,600 and 500 million years old with rich minerals and poor soils. These rocks have not much been made into mountains, except in the east due to faulting and volcanic activity between 23 million and 5 million years ago which created mountains and also rift valleys, some of which formed lakes. In contrast, Africa’s elevation is lower on the west side and Sahara. Its soils are at present comparatively unproductive due to its tropical position and lack of alluvial plains, since its rivers originate in nutrient poor zones or deposit nutrients in dry inland zones or fall off the steep African plateau carrying nutrients into the sea. There are notable exceptions: the Nile River valley, the slopes of ancient volcanoes.
Rain in humid tropical Africa is about 80 in average annual rainfall. In sub-humid tropical Africa there is a six month rainy season, and 40-80 in of rain per year. In semi-arid tropic Africa there are 8-40 in of rainfall per year. In arid Africa there’s less than 8 in of average annual rainfall.
Human evolution begins 6-8 million years ago when the first hominid that stood upright, Austrolopithecus (mainly vegetarian and smaller brained than us) was discovered by Lake Chad, leaving remains in eastern and southern Africa. 2.6 million years ago, chipped stones were found that were used by the hominid Homo habilis. 1.8 million years ago the hominid Homo ergaster lived in Africa, with a larger brain and upright posture, surviving almost a million years. Homo ergaster may have learned to live in open woodlands, make fire, and use stone hand-axes until about 250,000 years ago as demonstrated by archaeological evidence from lakeside sites in eastern Africa. Similar tools were found throughout the continent during this time period but rarely in tropical forests. Homo ergaster remains were also found in Eurasia, and in Europe the Neanderthals with brains of modern size but different shape evolved. 600,000 years ago slightly more modern people developed in Ethiopia.
The earliest modern human (still with many non-modern features, but a skull like that of a modern human) was found in the Awash valley of Ethiopia, dated at 160,000 years old. We study mitochondrial DNA because it is believed to change slowly and at a fixed rate, and it pinpoints all modern humans to a single female who lived between 250,000 and 150,000 years ago, whose descendants then spread within Africa. The oldest surviving lineages are among the San (‘Bushmen’) of southern Africa and the Biaka Pygmies of the Central African Republic. Early humans moved briefly to the Middle East but these colonists soon died out, and humans stayed in Africa for 100,000 years. Africa today has the greatest genetic diversity of any region on earth.
Early Humans traveled to Asia 60,000-40,000 years ago and from there to Europe, absorbing or replacing other earlier hominids living in these continents. Y-chromosome analysis traces all men to a single ancestor who lived 150,000 to 100,000 years ago. The oldest living strains of the chromosome are San, Ethiopians, and other ancient groups. All men outside Africa have Y-chromosomes sharing a mutation traceable to an African who lived 90,000 to 30,000 years ago.These early people used heavy hand-axes, and they began mounting tiny sharp stones on handles (“microlithics”). In southern Africa 80,000-60,000 years ago people collected fine grained stones from long distances to make these microlithic tools, which were used at the time on the edge of the rainforest, and became common in the east African highlands and in southern Africa 20,000 years ago spreading into western and northern Africa during the next 10,000 years. Arrowheads appeared 20,000 years ago, and the first bone tools were possibly fishing harpoons from the Congo area, and shaped points from the Blombos cave in South Africa, where there is evidence of human activity from 100,000 years ago to the present. The first art may have been from 70,000 years ago in the Blombos cave as well. Marine environments from 100,000 years ago in Eritrea and South Africa were the first to be exploited. Pigments were first deliberately collected 170,000 years ago at a site in modern Zambia, and they were used along with red ochre and eggshell beads. 40,000 years ago men in the Nile Valley undertook difficult mining underground for stone for tools, the earliest known mining. Microlithic tools were used at the time on the edge of the rainforest, and became common in the east African highlands 20,000 years ago and at the same time in Southern Africa, spreading into western and northern Africa during the next 10,000 years. Arrowheads appeared 20,000 years ago. The first sign of care given to burials was about 10,000 years ago in southern Africa. Rock-painting dates back 28,000 years. What were people’s lives like back then? It’s hard to say, but at one cave in modern Morocco, 200 people’s remains are found which showed evidence of interbreeding, high mortality among children and infants, and arthritis, but little violent death.
The continent today has over 2,000 languages (a third of the world’s languages) and the greatest genetic diversity of any region on earth. Many believe language was the key innovation “enabling African people to repopulate the world” and causing the great expansion 60,000 to 40,000 years ago. Africa’s four language families are very distinct, indicating they developed separately over thousands of years. The Khoesan speakers (San forager-hunters and Khokhoe pastoralists of southern Africa) speak a click language, and people also speak the Khoesan language in eastern Africa where the Khoesan may have originated before spreading southwards. People in modern Ethiopia have equally ancient genes going off Y-chromosome evidence, and speak the Afroasiatic language family which includes Cushitic, the Semitic languages of Ethiopia, Arabic, hebrew, the Berber tongue of North Africa, the Hausan language of northern Nigeria, and ancient Egyptian, all of which which probably originated in Ethiopia over 8,000 years ago. The speakers of the Afroasiatic were lightly built, Afro-Mediterranean types. The tall and slender dark-skinned Nilotic people spoke Nilo-Saharan, which evolved in the Sahara. The Niger-Congo languages are spoken by dark-skinned people from West Africa from at least 8,000 years ago, and may be distantly related to the Nilotic language family.
Around 12,700-10,900 BCE, there was a warming period with increased rainfall, during which three ancient language groups began to expand. The Nilo-Saharan language group expanded around and east of the middle Nile River in today’s Sudan, and spread from the Middle Sahara down to Kenya and Tanzania and a bit in Nubia. The Niger-Kordofanian or Niger-Congo language group expanded east-west along the savanna from the eastern Sudan to the west Atlantic coast of Africa, and the Erythraic Afroasiatic group expanded from their origins in the horn of Africa near modern-day Ethiopia to modern-day Egypt. These expansions were halted by the return of colder, drier conditions in the Younger Dryas 10,900-9,500 BC. Some people during the colder, drier period fled to lower Nile Valley; in this areas people exploited tubers and fished near the first cataract, also collecting wild grain in seasonal and later larger settlements. But then temperatures rose, there were floods and high rains, and these developments drove away Nile valley inhabitants.
It was from 9,500 BCE on that independently people in different parts of the world would develop agriculture. It’s hard to say why agriculture developed. Some argue that hunter-gatherers could sometimes get a better diet with less work than they could from raising crops: for example, the Nilotic peoples, according to skeletal analysis, experienced malnutrition due to an imbalanced diet as a result of food production, and disease due to infectious diseases spread by livestock. Others argue that climatic changes stimulated agriculture when it became harder to hunt and gather enough food in certain areas.
In Africa, the Sahara again became wetter from 9,500 BC to 5,500 BC. Evidence from the Wadi Sura cave in the Libyan desert from around 5,000 BC in the Sahara, modern-day Egypt, depicts people swimming, animals grazing, and wildlife thriving in a place now known for its sand dunes. The Sahara used to be a savannah, teeming with herds of large herbivores, hippopotamus, etc. Lake Turkana was 85 m higher than it is today, and even Egypt’s infamous western desert had sparse grazing.
The Northern Sudanian Nilo-Saharans between 8,500 and 7,200 BC began herding cattle during a shift to wetter conditions, which spread Mediterranean climates south and savanna grasslands north, shrinking the Sahara. This was the first cattle herding in world history. The North Sudanians also collected wild grains and ground them into flour in addition to hunting, fishing, and gathering. By 7,200 BC there were substantial permanent homesteads in the area, with cattle pens of brush, round houses, and grain storage pits with sorghum as the notable grain.
These Northern Sudanian and Aquatic civilizations made Africa’s earliest pottery style, characterized by a dotted wavy-line, used from southern Libya to Sudan to modern Mali and maybe even as far as Lake Victoria. They built dugout canoes 8,000 years ago (6,000 BC). They invented a multi-barbed bone harpoon which was used up the Nile all the way to Palestine. They also drew distinctive rock drawings in a round-head style across the Sahara. We have no concrete evidence that they domesticated crops during this high-rainfall period, but they were the first to herd cattle and spread the Nilo-Saharan language throughout the region. The Nilo-Saharan Northern Sudanians and their contemporary “aquatic civilization” (groups which lived along rivers and lakes of the Sahara from the Nile to the Hoggar Mountains and Niger River and became specialist fishers and hippopotamus hunters) also had the second African invention of ceramics.
The Aquatic societies suffered from the drying out of the Sahara and northern Sudanian agripastoralists displaced the aquatic communities, except along the Nile where the tradition persisted and incorporated herding and perhaps cultivation. In ancient Khartoum (now the capital of modern-day Sudan) along the Nile in 5,000 BC cotton textile technology, including spindlewhorls, was invented around the same time as it was independently invented in India. Between 6,500 and 3,500 BC the Sudanic agripastoralists added melons and gourds to their original staple sorghum, and also raised castor beans for oil. They also domesticated pearl millet. Sheep and goats spread from the Middle East to Sudanic and Cushitic agripastoralists, and from there goats and cattle spread west along the savanna and Sahel (the strip of dry savanna just below the Sahara) to the Niger-Congo group of West Africa before 3,000 BC. Melons, gourds, and castor spread North to Egypt before 3,000 BC. Somehow sorghum, pearl millet, and finger millet reached India between 3,000 and 1,000 BC seemingly without passing through the Middle East first, and then spread to Northern China before 1,000 BC.
Wheat and barley, probably from southwestern Asia, was first known to be cultivated in about 5,200 BC in the Fayum depression and only a little later at Merimde, a village of tiny mud huts on the southwestern edge of the Nile Delta. By 5,000 BC, at Nabta Playa and in the Saharan highlands there were settled populations systematically collecting and grinding wild grains. There were settlements around the middle Nile Valley in modern Sudan, where the dominant cereal was sorghum. By 6,000 BC, people on the river atbara northeast of modern-day Khartoum (capital of modern Sudan) were collecting and grinding wild grass seeds, and at Kadera just 20 km north, a 4,000s BC settlement lived mainly from cattle and lots of sorghum, as we ascertain from grain-impressions on pottery and “tens of thousands of worn out grindstones”, although the domesticated variety had not been developed yet so we don’t know if they grew it themselves or collected it.
The Afrasian communities in the Red Sea Hills on the Horn of Africa spoke languages descended from proto-Cushitic language, and in the 6,000s BC they spread sheep herding from the Middle East to Northern Sudan. Between 6,500 and 3,500 BC in the Ethiopian highlands the Cushites (according to linguistic evidence) began to supplement their stock raising with highland grain crops such as finger millet and t’ef, as well as probably varieties of gourds. Between 6,500 and 4,000 BC, Cushitic people domesticated the donkey, native to the Red Sea hills, from whence it spread to Egypt via the Middle East, and became earliest important beast of burden in world history. At some point they also probably domesticated noog (an oil plant) and ensete (a cooking banana) staple thousands of years BC. The indigenous Afrasians of the Egyptian Nile in 6,000 BC were hunter-gatherers—but they eventually adopted barley and wheat as staples along with sheep and goats diffused from the Middle East, and melons and gourds from the Sudanic agripastoralists before 3,000 BC. Sudanic herders also influenced Egyptian cattle-related beliefs & practices.
The animals that over time came to be domesticated in Africa are cattle, camels, goats, and sheep. The camels and goats required low trees and shrubs for browsing; the cattle and sheep require grass for grazing. Livestock, however, could not live in Africa’s wetter, more densely forested areas, thanks to the tsetse fly which to carried and still carries a fatal livestock disease. The main crops on Africa’s savannahs were initially millet and sorghum. The highest population densities were in the coastal areas of fishing and trade, and the savannas. There was generally a symbiotic (trading) relationship between herding and agricultural populations, although some groups combined elements of the two. Herding wasn’t really possible south of the savannah (due to sleeping sickness) until new furnace designs and thus iron smelting tech came to west Africa, enabling making iron farming tools and land-clearing tools.
In West Africa, the period from 6,000-5,000 BC was a dried phase when ecological bands were compressed south, and then the period from 4,000-2,500 this was a wetter phase when ecological bands migrated north. Rainfall was the main limiting factor for bioproductivity in these area. Highland areas were the sources of the Senegal and Gambia rivers and Niger and Volta rivers. In West Africa Sleeping sickness and Malaria were common diseases and challenges all the way from the sahel south to the rainforest. Sleeping sickness could be combated by burning the bush habitat of the tsetse fly; one mutation protected against vivax malaria, and sickle-cell allowed some people protection from falciparum malaria. This was one of the most difficult human- and animal-disease environments in the world. Early human communities burned out holes in the rainforest where lightning and natural tree fall had created gaps, to build productive edge environments to enhance their chance to harvest game.
In the West African rainforest areas, the Niger-Congo people (an offset of Niger-Kordofanian) in modern day Mali began to intensively collect wild grains, such as fonio as early as 9,000 BC. The early Ounjougou invented an early ceramic technology and cooked grains whole in pots. This domestication of wild grains happened by 6,000 BC, or possibly thousands of years earlier. We know that lots of pottery was being used by 5,000 BC at Shum Laka in Cameroon grassfields near the forest. Along with grains such as pearl millet, some of the earliest domesticated plants were likely black-eyed peas and African groundnuts, which were domesticated by or before 4,000 years BC, and by that time these crops had also spread to east Africa (early Cush in Northern Kenya). In West Africa around 5,000 BC, Guinea yams and oil palms had also begun to be cultivated thanks to the new technology of polished stone axes which was invented by 4,000 BC. The white and yellow Guinea Crams were two staple crops, thought to be first domesticated around 6000 BC and becoming staples at least by 1000 BC. Rainforest agriculture had its own challenges. The forests couldn’t support large populations like the savannah; infertile rainforest soil needs 30 or 40 years to regenerate between cropping cycles. The Niger River agricultural systems produced very low yields adapted to unpredictable rainfall and flooding, and so population growth was slow.
After 1000 BC, larger communities started to form in the southern rainforests because of iron working technology helping clear land and engage in yam cultivation. Yet the process of clearing land required enormous investments of labor: 2.5 acres being cleared required 500 days of work. The fact that it took so much work, the lack of people to engage in forest clearance, diseases, and nutritional limits of a yam-based diet, all kept the population low. In the northern regions, castes were developed each specializing in specific technologies. In the woodlands and rainforests, communities were organized into clans which directed ownership of agricultural fields. West Africans made beautiful art, and pushed wild animals away from their villages almost driving the elephant, a capstone species, to extinction. Camels replaced horses and oxen as the beast of burden in North Africa by 300-600 CE and by 800 CE regularly traveled in caravans across the Sahara.
Some Saharan crops may have also spread to West Africa; by 3,000 BC Nilo-Saharan pastoralists concentrated in river valleys draining into Lake Chad and the Niger, where drying conditions changed woodlands to savannas and enabled livestock raising. Soon cattle were found on the Niger, by 2,000 BC, and the shores of Lake Chad. In Dhar Tichitt in Mauritania pearl millet was cultivated for a thousand years from 2,000 BC, before the region dried out totally. At Birimi, a settlement in modern Ghana, by 1,500 BC domesticated millet, sheep and goats, small local cattle, and pottery with Saharan affinities were in evidence, part of the Kintampo culture. Some archaeologists have discovered banana mineral particles in southern Cameroon from 1000 BC, implying it had spread by then “despite the lack of evidence of its cultivation farther east”.
The Benue-Kwa Niger-Congo group spread into the rainforest zones of West Africa (from Cote D’Ivoire to Cameroon) between 5000 and 3000 BC with their polished stone axes, clearing the forest to raise sun-needing yams and oil palms, and around this time also inventing broadlooms to weave raffia-cloth. They carried with them West African domesticated groundnuts and black-eyed peas. After 3000 BC, a Benue-Kwa offshoot, the Bantu, carried the yam-based variety of West African agriculture south and east through the central Africa equatorial rainforest. Eventually, 2/3 of Sub-Saharan Africa was populated by the Bantu expansion, and the Swahili and Zulu are descendants of the Bantu.
Copper was first smelted from 4000-3500 BC in Africa (perhaps used to make pins, small articles, or piercing instruments), and not long thereafter was being used as a standard of value in Egypt. Northern Africa (Egypt and the Sudan), had a bronze age, but southern and eastern Africa only had an Iron one, skipping over the bronze phase. Ironworking was not invented in Africa or brought there from elsewhere until after 3,500 BC.
By 4,000 BC, a great transition from villages to tiny local polities to towns and states took place around the world. Egypt and the Sudanic kingdom of Kush (in Nubia) were two early centers. This transition started in the steppe country west of Northern Lower Nubia, 200 km from the Nile River, in the city of Nabta Playa. The people of Nabta Playa had a wealthy pastoral society with complex rituals and burials by 6,000 BC or earlier, and also buried cattle and demonstrated many of the same societal features that later appeared in Upper Egypt. In the 3,000s BC, along the Nile the first states and towns appeared between the Nile-Abbay (Blue Nile/White Nile confluence) and lower Egypt. In Qustul and Shaheinah, middle Nile cultures built conical earthen mounds. Qustul was the capital of wealthy kings from 4,000 BC to the unification of Egypt around 3,000 BC, with cattle burials just as in Playa Nabta earlier. The kings of Qustul at one point conquered Upper Egypt.
Around Abydos, along the Nile about in the middle of present-day Egypt, was the tomb of one of Egypt’s earliest rulers, who consolidated the lands that would become Egypt, and known as the Scorpion King who lived around 3,250 BC and was king of Qustul. In his tomb were 150 ivory tags—with the first hieroglyphic writing on them. The tags were used for property identification, tied to boxes or bags to indicate something—we don’t know what—perhaps where they came from or who they belonged to. There’s a very big debate over whether Mesopotamian or Egyptian writing developed first; they seem to have developed independently, but historians believe Egyptian writing developed a little earlier.
PART 2: ANCIENT EGYPT
In the thousand years after 5,200 BC when agriculturalists had lived in the Fayum depression and edge of the Nile Delta, people were driven from the Sahara to the riverbanks by drying conditions, and people used the floodwaters, copper and flint, the weaving of linen cloth, trade with southwest Asia, had temples dedicated to deities like Horus and Seth (later important in the Egyptian pantheon), and produced elaborate painted tombs for the elite and plain graves for commoners (indicators of social stratification). Several small kingdoms with capitals walled in sun-dried brick rose up. During this “predynastic period”, Nile floods were decreasing, temperature variability was increasing between winter and summer, and the climate was getting more arid.
Around Abydos, along the Nile about in the middle of present-day Egypt, was the tomb of one of Egypt’s earliest rulers, who consolidated the lands that would become Egypt, and known as the Scorpion King who lived around 3,250 BC and was king of Qustul (an early Middle Nile capital of wealthy kings from 4000 BC-3000 BC). In his tomb were 150 ivory tags—with the first hieroglyphic writing on them. The tags were used for property identification, tied to boxes or bags to indicate something—we don’t know what—perhaps where they came from or who they belonged to. There’s a very big debate over whether Mesopotamian or Egyptian writing developed first; they seem to have developed independently, but historians believe Egyptian writing developed a little earlier. Egyptian writing was part of administrative notation and royal display for 500 years before it was used to record complete sentences. Hieroglyphics were invented (“used for formal documents and inscriptions”) with “magical power” using a picture to symbolize both an object and other words with the same consonant sequence, at the same time and the cursive script which was a simplified and shorthand version. Throughout the span of ancient Egyptian civilization, historians estimate no more than 1 in 100 Egyptians was literate.
Early and mid-predynastic sites throughout Egypt at Merimda and Maadi in Lower Egypt and Nagada and Hemamieh in Upper Egypt were composed of circular huts a few meters or less in diameter, separated by animal pens, storage bins, trash pits, and other domestic features. Most settlements around 3,750 BC around the site of Naqada were simple communities with 50-25 people living in compounds of pole-thatch huts, but these later became communities with rectangular mudbrick buildings that share one or more walls, similar to what was seen in the Middle East.
The cultural center of predynastic Ancient Egypt was in Upper Egypt. The city of Hierakonpolis was the first capital of Egypt, a bustling metropolis along 3 miles of the Nile from 4,000 BC that by 3,500 BC had many quarters, industries, and homes. Excavations of Hierakonpolis led to the discovery of the oldest life-sized human statue from 3,000 BC, the earliest painted tomb, the only large-scale metal statue from old Egypt (the huge copper statue of King Pepy of the 6th dynasty cerca 2,200 BC), some of the oldest known stone statues (from 2,700 BC), the oldest preserved houses (3,600 BC), the first breweries at 3,600 BC and the first Mummies at 3,600 BC. Hierakonpolis was settled in 4,000 BC by colonists from northern Upper Egypt, and experienced a population explosion between 3,800 and 3,400 BC, reaching a regional population of 5,000-10,000 people at the center of the site. A major pottery producer for Upper Egypt, Hierakonpolis also produced vases, maceheads, palettes, and other commodities in fine stone. Its economy was based on productive grain agriculture and domesticated cattle, sheep, goats, and pigs. Excavations indicate a differentiated social ranking, as some tombs were quite rich. One 3,200 BC cobblestone foundation may have suggested a fortified palace, temple, or administrative center. Plus, there was a thick mudbrick wall around part of the settlement and some large mudbrick tombs. By 3,200 BC, Hierakonpolis was the capital of a southern Egyptian state.
Naqada or Nagada was also a large and complex community in upper Egypt around the same time that has also been excavated. In Naqada, archaeologists found “state authority devices” i.e. clay sealings used to lock containers and room doors, and concluded Naqada must have been an important center. Some researchers suggest that neither Hierakonpolis nor Naqada were major population centers but were mostly centers of sacred shrines or deities, and estimated that no more than 2% of the residents of any predynastic Upper Egyptian region would have been specialists in any occupation.
There were also settlements in the Nile Delta area (Lower Egypt) built almost exclusively on geziras (rock outcrops of sandstone), though there were very few sites from the period between 4,000 BC and 3,700 BC. There was a low density of settlements between Memphis and Upper Egypt, but by 3600 BC larger communities did exist and population growth expanded in Upper Egypt after 3400 BC. In Maadi in the Nile Delta, there were initial settlements at 3650 BC and several hundred years of occupation, with groups of semi-subterranean pit houses covered by thatch houses supported by poles. Lots of Syrian-Palestinian pots have been found at Maadi, and its stone works tie it to a network connected to the Levant and northern Syria. There is strong evidence of serious trade, and the site had a commercial zone separating stores and weapons from the dwellings: also in evidence are specialization in stoneworking, metalworking, and pottery, as are domesticated horses. Buto, the capital of predynastic lower Egypt, contains deposits all the way back to 4000 BC. These contain clay cones, pottery, and artifacts reflecting contact with Southwest Asian states from northern Syria and beyond. The clay cones are similar to those used at Uruk-Warka and other Mesopotamian sites to decorate temple buildings. The cones were usually painted and embedded in mosaics on mud-brick building walls. Maadi during the same era had some Southwest asian pottery, but it may have been merely a way station on overland routes to the east, while Buto was a port for ships carrying commodities to and from Palestine and the Uruk state. Pottery from Buto, Tell Iswid, and Tell Ibrahim Awad from the predynastic Delta was distinct from that of the Nile Valley before approximately 3100 BC.
Early and mid-predynastic sites throughout Egypt at Merimda and Maadi in Lower Egypt and Nagada and Hemamieh in Upper Egypt were composed of circular huts a few meters or less in diameter, separated by animal pens, storage bins, trash pits, and other domestic features. Most settlements around 3750 BC around Naqada were simply communities with 50-25 people living in compounds of pole-thatch huts, but these later became communities with rectangular mudbrick buildings that share one or more walls, similar to the Middle Eastern style of houses. A pre-Nagada civilization also lived in Upper Egypt in the form of the Tasian and Badarian cultures. Egypt at this time had contacts with Nubia and Sudan to the south: in both places were found vessels with rippled surfaces made by “burnishing a rocker-incised vessel with a pebble” and special “tulip-shaped vessels with incised and white-filled decoration”. Both are considered Sudanese originally, as well as other objects like palettes and harpoons. Upper Egypt had adopted some features from the cultures of northern Egypt and the Libyan desert (which was then not a desert), including coffin burials, animal representations on ivory spoons and pendants. The Upper Egyptians and Libyans had rich grave goods, including female figurines which (Northern) Lower Egypt didn’t. During the Nagada or predynastic period, wealth exploded. Rock drawings saw boats that later were the sacred transport method of Egyptian Pharaohs and gods, hunting scenes drawn on Saharan rock art, art including figures of animal-headed humans common in Sahara, southern pottery types existed and shell hook ornaments were buried in lower Nubian (the area b/w Aswan and the 2nd Cataract) graves.
Why was Upper Egypt the initial center of culture and not Lower Egypt? Perhaps because the levees of upper Egypt were easier for people to farm and the smallness of the upper Egyptian natural flood basins made them easier to control. Archaeologists did find that the narrower the floodplain width, the greater the site density. One theory posits also that population growth in crowded environments leads to resource competition and the development of states as an outgrowth of military organizations, although there wasn’t very strong population pressure in this sense.
A few centuries after the first hieroglyphics, there was the 1st Egyptian dynasty and the legendary king “Menes”—who we have identified as King Narmer—unified lower and upper Egypt around 3100 BC. The Narmer palette, a large and heavy decorated stone tool from Hierakonpolis, depicts this unification at the turn of the millennium. The King is depicted wearing the white crown of upper Egypt and on the other side wearing the red crown of Lower Egypt. Palettes typically were used for grinding cosmetics, but this was too large and heavy and was probably a ritual object, perhaps used to grind cosmetics to adorn the statues of gods. Eastern Delta excavations revealed two-room mud-brick tombs from the First Dynasty with a ceramic coffin and in a small annex stone and pottery vessels, palettes, jewelry, and other objects with Narmer’s name written on two different pots. Late Predynastic and Early Dynastic sites from the Delta have artifacts similar to those from the Nile Valley, indicating close contacts. Around this time, woodworking became more important, there were parallel developments in making copper tools, and early dynastic stone vessels were in all shapes and sizes. But styles were becoming homogenized.
By 3000 BC the whole of the Nile Delta and Nile Valley was occupied, as well as the oases of the Western Desert, down to the Nubian border. Elephantine down at the Aswan dam, Nubia and southern Nubian Qustul (also known as the kingdom of Ta-Seti with Qustul its capital), Abydos a bit farther north where there were many temples and where early pharaohs were entombed in the royal necropolis Umm el-Qa’ab (which today is littered with shards of pots): all were conquered by the original Naqada and Herakonpolis upper Egypt group. Also up in the Nile Delta, Maadi/Helwan, Memphis (modern-day Cairo) nearby Giza and Saqqara, Fayun, Merimda, and Buto, all were settled and occupied.
In sum, the Delta was densely settled, Narmer’s names were on pots, there was stylistic pottery infirmity indicating that socioeconomic and political unification had happened for a while, Serekhs that indicate the Horus names of kings were found on pots (perhaps rulers of small Delta states), and like other early complex societies Egypt saw a period where labor-intensive very decorated pottery was replaced by mass produced pottery of less aesthetic appeal. Egypt then was using something else besides pottery for artistic expression. This was in the Early Dynastic period culminating in the Old Kingdom period when low-fired wares including “bread molds” were the dominant type of ceramics. Around the beginning of the early dynastic period, craftsmen came under the patronage and control of the royal court of Egypt, enabling the undertaking of such monumental and expensive arts and craft projects.
During the 1st Dynasty, Pharoah Aha said he smited Ta Seti (Nubian kingdom peopled by the ‘A-Group’ at the time) and settlement disappeared in northern Nubia for several centuries. Egypt adopted a policy of not settling the Sinai (the region between Egypt and the middle east), and perhaps also not settling Nubia and southern Palestine, so it was isolated except for contact by sea with Punt (the Horn of Africa) and the Asian coast. The Pharaoh tried to maintain the harmonious natural cycle, related with the gods, controlled animals through mass hunts, defeated enemies and rebels, took captives and tribute, tried to maintain order. Egypt has few records of contacts to the south besides mention of campaigns and raids until the end of the 5th dynasty, though they substantially fortified their southernmost city, on Elephantine Island at the 1st Cataract. At Buhen near Wadi Haifa was a group of fortified factories/ workshops for metalworking. Seal impressions show most objects were imported from Egypt, but there was some local pottery resembling that of Nubian the A-Group. The Egyptian governors of Aswan charged with control of the south recorded in their tomb biographies armed caravans passing through the rising kingdoms to trade with the most southerly countries, such as Punt perhaps. The princes close to the Egyptian frontier was sometimes tributary. But some Nubians who visited Egypt were feared, and 177 of them were cursed in ritual texts, and Nubia continued to have its own kingdoms farther south beyond the area of Egyptian control. People traveled both ways from Nubia to Egypt.
By the end of the Second Dynasty, kings had transitioned from being buried in the royal necropolis at Abydos to being buried at Saqqara, and by the beginning of the third dynasty Djoser built the famous step pyramid in Saqqara in the 2700s. 16 more Egyptian kings would follow his lead. The step-pyramid constructed at Saqqara marked the point where Egypt’s center of culture shifted north to the juncture of the Nile Valley and Delta (though at times later it would shift back to Upper Egypt i.e. Thebes. The settlements in the Delta would increase in number during the 5th and 6th dynasties due to tax incentives as Pharaoh wanted to protect his eastern frontier. Egypt’s primary crops of the Pharoanic or dynastic era were wheat/barley, as well as sheeps and goats, probably introduced from southwest Asia but also possible from the Sudan or Sahara. The period from 4000 to 2000 BC was a period culminating in the mature Old Kingdom state.
By 2700 BC all the marks of civilization had appeared in Egypt: national religious ideology, government controlling the administration of craft production (as evidenced by increase homogeneity of pottery), etc. For a long time Egypt was a powerful centralized state based on thousands of small, largely self-sufficient (in terms of subsistence) communities with only modest centralization of economic production, but during the Old Kingdom phase of Ancient Egyptian history (after 2700 BC) Egypt entered the great “Pyramid Age”, or the Old Kingdom. Hundreds of tombs, temples, and sites have been excavated, though some of the most important such as Old Kingdom Memphis have never been fully excavated. One feature of the Old and Middle Kingdom was divine kingship, with the idea that the pharaoh received his legitimacy through direct descent from the Gods. A religious legitimization of important social functions was a key element of Ancient Egyptian culture , as well as that of basically all other early civilizations. The first Old Kingdom rulers of united Egypt gained power before 3100 BC and were buried at Abydos in upper Egypt.
Old Kingdom Egypt had probably about 1 or 2 million inhabitants, rising to 2-4.5 million between 1500 and 1000 BC, peaking at 4-5 million in the first centuries AD. Some areas heavily occupied in the Old Kingdom period appear to have been only lightly occupied in previous periods. The rate of population growth in the Old Kingdom was high, and the settlements were widely distributed in the rest of Egypt as well even in peripheral areas such as the Dakhla Oasis, although formerly inhabited areas like Fayyum were abandoned. Despite population growth, there were few especially large sites. Egypt, unlike other civilizations, didn’t strongly trend toward the urban. Dissenting historians claim that yearly growth rates were well below 0.1 percent, perhaps held down by high levels of mortality (especially childhood mortality), plus mortality rates of half the population dying each decade thereafter. Fevers (malaria), tuberculosis, cancer, bilharzia, arthritis and probably smallpox took their tolls. Population was most dense where the Nile Valley was narrowest and most easily managed, growth took place especially in the difficult, marshy Nile Delta of marsh and pasture before the Old Kingdom instituted systematic reclamation, which led to private landownership emerging as small private landowners got to slowly acquire much of the land. The Pharaohs personally directed the settlement of Egypt, and did so for a variety of secular motives, including the consolidation of royal power, stimulating economic development, and defending frontiers.
There were five levels of settlements in the Old Kingdom. First was the national capital at Memphis (whose acknowledged status as capital is based mostly on texts since its early levels are unexcavated); large walled towns like Hierakonpolis and Abydos which grew substantially built on local initiative; forts and trading entrepots like Buhen and Elephantine on the periphery of the state and perhaps a few Delta settlements; typically walled and medium-sized communities at strategic points; Pyramid towns like at Abusir, Giza and elsewhere where substantial settlements, some of which later became fortified villages, were associated with pyramid complexes (partly seasonal, although there was a permanent group of administrators/artisans/etc); and lastly small provincial villages and towns. One example of the smaller and medium-sized communities is Kom el-Hisn in the western Delta, a rural agricultural town in a wet, vegetated locale. It comprises a main occupational mound composed of mudbrick buildings mostly small rooms containing hearths, storage features, smoked pottery, burned organic stuff, and domestic activity. Kom el-Hisn was likely a government-sponsored cattle raising settlement or transport station on the routes to Libya, with almost no local craft production, but with artifact styles similar to those at Old Kingdom sites all over Egypt from Giza to the Dakhla Oasis. Inscribed clay sealings indicate direct import or export of commodities to government stores, and the increased cattle-bone frequency compared to the Nile Valley and the use of cattle dung as a main fuel indicates its importance as a cattle town. Though many other delta sites have a high ratio of pig to cattle remains, arguing the predominance of the pig in the Egyptian diet will into New Kingdom times, with little agricultural intensification until well after the Old Kingdom. Excavations at other Delta sites reveal Old Kingdom tombs, sculptures, artifacts, and other materials. One at Mendes reveals a large and diverse Old Kingdom community with gypsum priest tombs, and complexes of mudbrick buildings with lots of different artifacts.
What was life like in ancient Old Kingdom Egypt? One ancient text recommended one should “be a scribe”, “your limbs will be sleek, your hands will grow soft.” The text is from a teacher exhorting his student to write, and in so doing describes the other professions unfavorably comparing them to that of the scribe. “The washerman works cleaning others’ clothes, the potter has his hands full of clay, the cobbler tans leather in vats and stains his hands red, the watchman makes garlands and polishes vases spending a night working and not sleeping, the merchants are busy traveling here and there but the tax collectors carry off their most precious cargo (gold), the ships crews may never see home again. The carpenter must work hard carrying timber, the worker in the field carries tools and works hard tied to his toolbox and pieces of wood, and the peasant is soaked by the flood attending his equipment and cutting his farming tools by day and making rope at night. In the middle of the day the peasant must work, and carries lots of things into the field equipped like a warrior; as he cultivates, he sometimes has to plow with borrowed grain and may go hungry, or his seed may not grow. In which case he gets beaten by Nubians with clubs if he can’t pay taxes, and his wife and children are locked up or abused while he is drowned. The scribe is the only one to record all that the others have done. The scribe holds the palette, and can become trusted by the king, gain entrance to treasury and granary, and walk about inspecting with attendants and receiving slaves, maybe even a mansion, and an office from the king.”
According to another ancient written account, the Old Kingdom official, Harkhuf of the 6th dynasty, served kings Mernere and Pepi II and like his predecessor Weni became governor of Upper Egypt. He led four expeditions to Nubia under the direction in at least one of the boy-king Neferkare Pepi II. Mernere sent Harkhuf to open the way to Yam, which he did in seven months bringing gifts. The second trip he made was to Irtjet and Setju again in Yam. The third time he went and saw that the ruler of Yam had gone off to fight in Tjemeh-land, so he followed the ruler there and “satisfied him, so that he praised all the gods for the sovereign. During this same trip he traveled back south of Irtjet and north of Setju, and found in the ruler of the confederacy of Irtjet, Setju, and Wawat with a troop of 300 donkeys bearing rich gifts from Yam. And the ruler of the confederacy escorted Harkhuf and gave him cattle and goats and led him to the mountain paths of Irtjet. The king Pepi was extremely excited to see the “pygmy of the god’s dances” that Harkhuf was bringing with him. Excavators have discovered all kinds of interesting details from the Old Kingdom, including a 30% decline in Nile discharge during Old Kingdom which was linked to collapse of political order and reduced irrigation productivity after the death of Pepy II in 2167 BC.
In Old Kingdom Egypt there was a thorough taxation system, with revenues assessed on the basis of the canals, lakes, wells, waterbags, and trees of an estate. There was a bureaucracy assessing and managing resources throughout the country for taxation. Tax was collected, sometimes violently, at the rate of 1/10 the harvest. The Old Kingdom’s agricultural resources were of three kinds: estates owned by the crown, estates owned by religious institutions (charitable estates whose revenues support cults or the central government), and estates held by private individuals and subject to taxation. By 1,135 BC, temples owned approximately one-third of Egypt’s cultivable area, the average peasant cultivated about 3 acres and passing it on intact to his descendants. The Old Kingdom was more centralized and authoritarian than same-time states in Mesopotamia. Works were needed to control the flood’s power, remove obstacles to its path, and retain it on the land-- but these works were locally done, directed by local officials and canal diggers. Pharaohs ceremonially began these works and Viziers claimed responsibility for them, but there wasn’t as much of nationwide bureaucracy controlling irrigation as one might think. Why did centralization win out? Some say because the system was very productive (peasants could produce 3x what they needed), enabling support of a ruling class that could preserve order and prevent exploitation, and also because of the presence of the river enabling the transport of surplus.
Pharaohs kept control militarily, administratively, and ideologically (religiously), along with the use of literacy. Pharaohs were “semi-divine, could communicate directly with the gods, and were responsible for the regularity of the natural order”. The afterlife was viewed as the Field of Reeds. There was royal succession by the eldest son inheriting, and the Old Kingdom stayed very stable until it ended in 2160 BC. They kept a royal culture that replaced local traditions, and kept conscripted peasants during the dry season to build the pyramids of the Pharaohs. The largest, the Great Pyramid built by Pharaoh Khufu (Cheops) in 2500 BC was 147 m high and contained 2,300,000 stone blocks averaging 1.5 tons. It remained the tallest man-made structure on earth for 4,000 years. The great pyramid was born of a natural wealth of limestone, advanced Egyptian mathematics and engineering, and a very large labor force. To form this labor force, people were conscripted during the time of the floods, when farmers did very little, and this was also a way to pay your taxes in ancient Egypt. Sudanic and Egyptian kings claimed unparalleled personal sacredness. The second Great Pyramid at Giza was built by Khafra. Archaeologists have discovered that structures west of the Khafra pyramid were storage facilities, not workmen’s barracks as previously thought. As the Pyramids rose, peasant tombs disappeared from cemeteries-- some historians argue this was because peasants instead had to redirect surplus wealth and labor to work on pyramid-building.
During the Old Kingdom also there was an increased trend of concentrating politics and the economy toward lower Egypt and the Delta—thanks to the agricultural potential of the Delta, and connections with foreign relations. However, Abydos remained important as a mortuary center, and Hierakonpolis and other southern towns remained inhabited until the late old Kingdom. Old Kingdom Egypt consumed a lot of lumber from Palestine and probably other commodities as well. Egyptians viewed Western Asia as belonging to the Pharaoh, but colonial administration/empire building wasn’t evident though the Old Kingdom exploited Western Asia for goods and labor through trade, conquest, and intimidation. The old Kingdom was hierarchal, expansionist, and a complex civilization.
How did the Old Kingdom come to an end? As time went on, in Upper Egypt control of local affairs by the pharaoh diminished so that governors (nomarchs) acted as local monarchs, with economic growth and increasing complexity and powerful nomarchs in the 6th Dynasty, though the pharaohs still sent expeditions to Nubia and Palestine and exerted considerable internal control as well. Authoritarianism waned, and the court built smaller monuments and its ability to provide famine relief was reduced. A 30% decline in Nile discharge during the Old Kingdom has been linked to the collapse of political order after the death of Pepy II in 2167 BC.
From 2,160 to 1,991 BC was the first Intermediate Period, a time of civil war, brief reigns, famine, and an influx of desert peoples, but also vitality at a local level, greater private wealth, etc.
The Middle Kingdom from 1,991-1,785 BC arose to represent itself as “the embodiment of social order and collective warfare”. Instead of pyramids, the Middle Kingdom constructed huge temples and pyramid-building energy was redirected to other forms of architecture, or may have been slowed due to the cost of maintaining existing cult centers. The pyramids were one expression that declined, but tombs, obelisks, etc. continued on. Some historians argue there was a decline in royal power after the Old Kingdom, others disagree. At this time provincial nobles were rising in power, and trade with Nubia and the Mediterranean was becoming more systemized. By the Middle Kingdom, we found evidence of cone-shaped narrow baking molds for bread. During the Middle Kingdom, there was significant agricultural development of the marshy Fayum depression to the west of the Nile in lower Egypt; extensive irrigation made the marsh very productive, requiring great engineering and organization.
The Middle Kingdom temporarily collapsed during the second Intermediate period (1785-1540 BC), which was followed by the New Kingdom. During the second intermediate period, the charioteering Hyksos invaded from Asia in the 1500s and 1600s BC. The Kushites centered at Kerma in Sudan conquered Lower Nubia as far as Aswan and allied themselves with the Hyksos. Egyptians acknowledged the Kushite ruler as a Pharaoh in their fortress communities, though he did have a tumulus tomb and heavy brick tower-temples with small chambers like artificial caves. Another Nubian group, the Medjay, entered into Egyptian service and their distinctive pottery and burials were found far north, almost to the Nile Delta, commonly among all leftover artifacts of the period.
Around this time (the Second Intermediate period) the horse-drawn chariot is thought to have been introduced. It was light and with four spoked wheels and pulled by two horses, spread from where it was first seen on stelae from “shaft graves at Mycenae” (in Greece). Then, it is mentioned by Kamose and depicted in rock drawing from Lower Nubia with an ax-wielding 17th dynasty figure. Pictures of chariots with horses galloping spread across the Sahara, as it became prevalent and widespread, until finally the Libyans (ancestral Berbers) of the late New Kingdom attacked the Nile Delta using Egyptian chariots. “The chariot remained important in the central Sahara”, especially with the Garamantes of Fezzan until Roman times when their quadrigae (four-horse chariots) were famous.
The New Kingdom (1540-1070 BC) was the most territorially large civilization. The new kingdom Pharaohs were mainly warriors, using bronze weapons and horse-drawn chariots first introduced (along with the wheel) during the Second Intermediate Period. The New Kingdom armies crossed the Euphrates in the middle east, traveled through modern Sudan to the Nile’s 5th Cataract, and made Egypt the greatest power in the known world. Egypt for the first time was militaristic and had a large professional army made mostly of foreign mercenaries, with a small police force. The Old Kingdom pyramids were already tourist attractions. Temple priests became hereditary specialist ascetics, though they needed royal approval to gain their position. Egyptians artists grew more adventurous, Egyptians met foreigners, and they sometimes even doubted the need for elaborate preparation for death at times. The contempt for the poor in earlier elite writings was replaced by social awareness. In the 1400s BC, Vizier Rekhmire proclaimed that he rescued the weak from the strong, subdued the greedy and the evil, helped the husbandless widow, and helped the son get his inheritance, gave to the poor and hungry and clothesless, and never took a bribe.
What was life like in the New Kingdom? Of course, it varied based on your status and profession (ruler, peasant, builder, etc). Notable documents include a New Kingdom source of papyrus documents and notes written on on shards of pottery and stone flakes by sculptors, painters, and plasterers living for a couple hundred years in the village of Deir el-Medine as state employees (an often inherited position) helping build the tombs in the Valley of Kings near Thebes. They earned a food wage and a surplus for other necessities, as Egypt had no currency and trade was by barter. They worked eight hours a day half the days a year, had festivals and private commissions on the side. Near the end of the New Kingdom, they went on strike a couple times and had a sit-in at a royal tomb when the administration didn’t pay their food wages. They were typically a community 40 to 60 workers who kept up to 16 female slaves to do the housework for each family, some even buried the slaves in their family tomb, demonstrating that the Egyptians to some extent tried to assimilate the slaves gotten by New Kingdom conquests. Ramesses III said he gave 81,322 slaves to the temple of Thebes and there was an active market in slaves. In Deir el-Madina, households were on average husband, wife, two or three kids, and maybe the husband’s sister or widowed mother, maintaining ties to families elsewhere, and had one family tomb, but there were no powerful clans/lineages controlling power-- wealth was held by the elementary family. Marriage was mostly monogamous, descent from both father and mother, and “women had full rights to inherit property, preserve the dowry brought to marriage, and receive one third of jointly gotten property in case of divorce which was easy and common”. Married love was a common artistic/literary theme. People married early, formed their own households, but they had to obey their parents while under their roof. Gods were often depicted as human beings with animal heads. Egypt had long been concerned with death and regeneration, even before unification. Each moral quality was personified as a deity, and learning was a catalogue of names and attributes; the law was not codified. The Egyptian religion was based on ritual veneration of different gods rather than scholarly theology with scriptures. Religion remained diverse and tolerant, adding new gods especially when the New Kingdom was conquering and expanding. Ritual was seen in magical terms.
In the Egyptian pantheon, the sun god was seen as chiefly responsible for the maintenance of cosmological order and gradually gained preeminence so that early in the New Kingdom, the sun god was associated with the invisible but everywhere god Amun who became a center of theology for the priests at the great temple of Thebes; the Pharaoh Akhenaten eventually in 1364-1347 BC instituted a state sun-cult worshipping the disc of the sun (Aten), other gods and rituals and priests being erased and banned. His successors quickly did away with this and restored the new order, but afterwards Amun was still sometimes seen as the supreme divinity. Parents at most periods had named most children after major gods. Under the new kingdom, people made more personal offerings to the gods, and also “they sought out oracles from gods when carried in procession”. Animal worship was very popular, and grew more so. Scribes wrote amulets, letters to the dead seeking aid, and from the late New Kingdom letters to the gods themselves. Laymen and especially laywomen were coming up with their own contacts with Gods to replace official conduits; for example at deir el-Medina they “erected monuments recording their humility before the gods and their repentance of sins that they’d been punished for by misfortune”. Houses “contained shrines of lesser, popular divinities”. People consulted wise women when their kids died.
According to the Egyptian Book of the Dead (1240 BC), Osiris is the king of the Gods. In Egypt ddw (djedu) was an important necropolis and center for worship of Osiris. Khem was the capital of the second nome (Egyptian divisions of the country) of Lower Egypt, on modern-day Ausim, where people worshipped Horus and the book of the dead describes the city as ruled over by Osiris. Osiris is also said to rule Elephantine, Memphis, Abydos (a site of ancient temples including the royal necropolis Umm el-Qa’ab where early pharoahs were buried, and also the temple of Seti I which contains a list of pharoahs from Menes/Narmer to Ramesses I), and be the soul of Ra (the sun), and his soul rests in Herakleopolis, an important city during the First Intermediate Period, 2181-2055 BC when Egypt was divided into Upper and Lower and Herakleopolis was capital of Lower Egypt and controlled much of it.
The goddess Nut was goddess of the sky and heavens, and her husband/brother Geb or Keb/Seb was god of the Earth. Ra was the sun-god, and Hathor was the goddess of joy, music, dancing and motherhood and lady of heaven (personification of the milky way), her worship going back to pre-dynastic times where she is associated with many different gods and roles. Hathor was the daughter of Nut and Ra, and also the wife of Horus the elder (an ancient sky god, whose face was considered to be the sun). Horus the elder was the original counterpart/enemy of Set.
Legends say the goddess Nut gave birth to four children: the sons Osiris and (the evil) Set and the daughters Isi and Nephthys. Isis was Osiris’ sister and wife, queen of the gods, and gave birth to Osiris’ son Horus. Set and Nephthys also married. Isis helped make her brother/husband sole ruler of Egypt after learning the Secret Name of Re (the most ancient God and most powerful until then), and she discovered wheat and barley and Osiris taught men to plant them in the Nile and how to make wine and beer. Osiris traveled to spread wisdom to other countries, leaving Isis to rule. Osiris was also a man, a primeval king of Egypt, and was murdered by his brother Set who usurped the throne. Isis cared for Osiris’ son Horus, and found Osiris’ body which she kept. But Set found the body in a chest where she hid it, and tore it into 14 pieces. Isis and her sister Nephthys searched for the 14 pieces and found 13 of them, creating shrines in each place where she found them, and burying him on the island of Philae. She joined the pieces together and laid him to rest. Osiris’ son Horus defeated Seth, and became Pharaoh.
In ancient egypt, the Ka was the divine soul of a person and could reside in a statue, the Ba expressed the mobility of the soul after death and expressed as a bird, and the akh was the spirit of a dead person that could revisit the earth in any form and live as an entity in the next world.
Thoth was an ibis-headed god in the Egyptian pantheon, and his wife was Ma’at (the goddess of truth and justice who helped maintain the cosmic order), and they stood on both sides of Ra’s boat, and Thoth also helped maintain the universe. In later ancient Egypt, he was associated with judgment, science and writing, including judgment of the dead.
The great gods of Egypt were Ra (the sun God), Horus the Elder or Heru (the ancient sky god often represented with the sun as a face), Hathor (the ancient sky goddess), Atum or Temu (god of the earth and close associate of sun god Re representing the setting sun, also the first god to emerge, described as both male and female and able to reproduce with himself); his children Shu (the god of air, dryness, heat, and light) and Tefnut (the goddess of moisture and the moon often depicted with a lion’s head) who were the children of Atum and together gave birth to Nut and Geb, Nut (goddess of the sky/heaven married to Ra but who loved her brother Geb), Geb (god of the earth), the children of Nut and Geb Osiris, Set, Isis, and Nepthys; Horus the child of Isis and Osiris. Also there are the children who sprang from Ra alone Hu (the god of the spoken word), and Saa or Sia (the personification of divine knowledge and perception). Other gods included Thoth (God of Wisdom) and his wife Ma’at and also Ptah (the local god of Memphis).
As the New Kingdom declined, Western nomads from Libya began incursions by the 1200s BC. Under Pharaoh Ramesses III (1184-1153 BC) the Asian part of the New Kingdom empire was lost, and a hundred years later Nubia was lost. Reigns shortened, the offices of officials became more hereditary, and central authority declined. Real grain prices rose in the later 1100s due to reduced agrarian administration. Embezzlement by officials increased.
The commanders of the Nubian and Libyan mercenary armies held great power and were hostile to each other. Rameses XI (1099-1069 BC) asked the Viceroy of Kush and his Nubian troops from modern Sudan to regain control of Upper Egypt, high priest of Amun and vizier and chief general Herihor of Thebes used Libyans to repel them. This led to the Third Intermediate Period (1070-664 BC), when the country was militarized and the people often fled to walled defences. Libyan (ancestral Imazighen/Berber) pastoralists of Cyrenaica and the desert oases had previously interacted with Egyptians as refugees fleeing famine, as mercenaries, and from 945 BC they were rulers of Delta states. By 730 BC, Egypt was divided into eleven regional units, several under Libyan control.
By 750 BC, Egypt was diminished and fragmented by invasions by Libyan tribes. Around 750 BC, a new Cushite King Piye or Piyanke, a devout worshipper of the god Amun (like other Nubians), built a palace at Jebal Barkal and expanded the temple. Piye then invaded in order to re-establish worship of god Amun and reunify Egypt. He ordered his men to purify themselves in the river as they sailed downstream, saying Egypt would “taste his fingers”. He became king of Nubia and Egypt, founder of the 25th dynasty of Egypt’s pharaohs, reuniting fragmented Egypt under their rule. Piye felt tied to Egypt, considering it part of his motherland, and kept Egyptian religious relations, politics, etc. in place, but revitalized temples of Amun. The 25th dynasty ruled an area from Meroe down in the South, all the way up to the Nile delta, the area largest yet. This dynasty lasted for about a century.
The 25th dynasty was expelled during the 660s by forces from Assyria, the main state in western Asia. Assyrians gained power using cavalry (rather than chariots) and smelted iron. Egypt lacked iron and wood fuel and the first evidence of smelting in Egypt didn’t come until 620 BC. Libyan rulers of Sais used Greek mercenaries to eventually defeat the Assyrians, first becoming semi-autonomous vassals of the Assyrians and then independent rulers from 664 to 525 BC. The Saites becoming the last great pharaonic civilization, decorating their temples with Old Kingdom styles. Egypt changed during this time in several ways: the Delta was colonized, foreign mercenaries acquired land, silver was used as a semi-currency, and office and family origin became more important to power than royal authority. Persian conquerors conquered Egypt in 525 BC and held it for two centuries except for one period of independence. Alexander the Great conquered egypt in 332 BC, and one of his generals set up the greek Ptolemy dynasty, which ruled until 30 BC when Rome conquered Egypt.
Greek kings adopted Pharaonic styles, identified Egyptian gods with Greek ones, patronised the temples, and were “depicted in Pharaonic poses”; however, they made Greek the language of government and appointed Greek officiators. The Romans did much the same, though they favored local over bureaucratic government. Greeks and Romans pushed the colonization of the Delta which by Ptolemaic times supported as many people as Upper Egypt, with the new capital at Alexandria. The animal-driven irrigation wheel reached Egypt from the Middle East, leading to summer grains and lots of multicropping. Egyptian grains were exported to keep Ptolemaic coffers plush, providing one third of Rome’s wheat supply. Coinage, the dominance of Greek-speaking cities, and Romans encouraging large tenant estates where people paid half their crop in rent, which led to the decline of the peasants, creating a growing class of poor peasants and laborers and urban paupers along with the 10 percent of the population who were slaves. There were rural revolts in AD 152 and 172-3, and people wrote about a desire for future justice and their desire that Egypt’s capital return to Memphis, Alexandria become merely a “fishing town”, and Egyptian greatness returning.
Egypt didn’t export its culture very far in Africa beyond its Nubian and Egyptian sphere of influence. Saharan rock paintings show slight Egyptian influence, mostly strong interest in chariots. In some Saharan oases, irrigation techniques, small pyramid tombs, and an Amun cult appeared. Egyptian metalworking skills and ideas of kingship stayed mostly in the Nile Valley and the floodplain below (Lower Nubia) and the narrow valley of Upper Nubia from the second cataract toward modern day Khartoum in modern Sudan. In the eastern desert, the Nubian Medjay or Bedja separated Egypt from inland Punt, while on the Red Sea the Puntites connected Egypt and the horn of Africa and the coast beyond the Red Sea Strait of Hormuz. Egypt didn’t reach central Africa until the 1820s, though Phoenicians did sail around for the Pharaoh in the 600s BC. We generally believe not a lot of Egyptian culture was adopted by the rest of Africa that was farther away, except maybe some trade goods, although some items are similar enough that we believe they either originated in Egypt or Subsaharan Africa and spread to other, such as musical instruments, weapons, and ritualized contests.
A note on Egyptian metalworking: Egypt had begun using copper in 4,000 BC, 2000 years before it would be commonly used elsewhere in Africa, and they began using Bronze by 2000 BC after its invention in the middle east. Greeks and Assyrians brought iron-smelting to Egypt by the 500s BC and likely earlier. Around the same time iron had been in use at Meroe, and the Phoenicians might even have spread iron technology.
PART 3: NUBIA & THE SUDAN; LIBYA AND THE PHOENICIANS BEFORE 0 CE
The floodplain below the Nile Valley comprised Lower Nubia, and the narrow valley of from the second cataract toward modern day Khartoum in modern Sudan comprised Upper Nubia. Nubian society lasted a long time, and its people retained the Nilotic culture of fishing, pottery-making, grain-collecting, and early herding of the high-rainfall period though the region was often quite dry.
Egypt and Nubia influenced each other: the oldest Egyptian tombs of the 3,000s BC contained ivory and ebony objects from the South. Egyptian kings and Nubian kings both were divine in nature, but Sudanic/Nubian kings were ‘rain kings’ while for the Egyptians it was all about the flood. Lower Nubian graves contained pottery, copper tools, and other Egyptian objects. These graves belonged to the “A-Group” people who cultivated wheat and barley, but who came under Egyptian rule when the 1st dynasty Egyptian Pharaoh Aha said he “smited” Ta Seti (Nubia) and settlement in northern Nubia there stopped for several centuries. Egypt campaigned and raided until the end of the 5th dynasty, though they substantially fortified their southernmost city, on Elephantine Island at the 1st Cataract. By Egypt’s third dynasty in 2695 BC, this region (Lower/Northern Nubia) was only sparsely populated and there was an Egyptian town known for smelting copper at Buhen near the second cataract, with many Nubian slaves and soldiers, which may have been the fate of these A-group people. Seal impressions show most objects were imported from Egypt, but there was some local pottery resembling that of the Nubian A-Group. The Egyptian governors of Aswan charged with control of the south recorded in their tomb biographies armed caravans passing through the rising kingdoms to trade with the most southerly countries, such as Punt perhaps. The princes close to the Egyptian frontier was sometimes tributary. But some Nubians who visited Egypt were feared, and 177 of them were cursed in ritual texts, as Nubia continued to have its own kingdoms farther south beyond the area of Egyptian control. People traveled both ways from Nubia to Egypt.
It’s hard to tell what was really happening in Nubia and deeper in Sudan below the area of Egyptian control during and just before the Old Kingdom, but this may be because much archaeological record relies on pottery which may have been abandoned by the mobile peoples living there who instead may have favored gourds, baskets, and leather containers.
By the beginning of the 6th dynasty, there was a big change. Nubia was intensively resettled down to the Dongola reach and Khartoum (capital of modern Sudan) from the south and west. Nubians began fighting as Egyptian soldiers, and then founded several kingdoms or princedoms south of Aswan on the Nile, with a pastoral cattle culture and honoring cattle. These people were known as the ‘C-group’. Their tombs often had cowhide clothes and wrappings, and cattle horns. At Kerma in the Dongola Reach, important persons sometimes had hundreds of skulls of cattle surrounding their tumuli (mound-type graves). The culture also had tumulus burials surrounded by stone rings, leather clothing with geometric beading, and black polished pottery with incised designs-- all of these characteristic of more interior Africa. A-group traditions were continued, and Egypt and Nubia continued to influence each other.
During the first Intermediate period, Nubians got involved in Egyptian life as soldiers but also administrators. One Nubian cemetery exists north of Aswan, at Wadi Kubbaniya. Some Nubian women rose high in the court of Thebes in the 11th Dynasty, and their ruler Mentuhotep I, may have been part Nubian too. Women with Nubian-style tattoos were buried in tombs of good quality and prominently at Thebes. Chapel paintings show men wrestling which may be akin to the wrestling customs of the modern Nuba peoples. One probably Nubian thin man with woolly hair is shown leading cattle to the owners of tombs at Beni Hasan or Meir. It’s hard to tell though, as the cultures were quite related, and iften merged.
Egyptian products were also found further south in Nubia. Egyptian beads appear in large numbers of C-group tombs in Lower Nubia, along with precious metal beads made into perfect rings more common in Egypt. These may have been rewards for a military career in the North. Some richer Nubian cemeteries contain jewelry, stelae (carved inscribed stone slabs for comemmorating), always associated with C-group tumuli. Some inscriptions carved on rocks record 2 pharoahs with names characteristic of the period, while a third Pharaoh known as Son of Re had a Nubian personal name; he recorded a battle fought in the north of his kingdom; so he fought some Egyptians, but used Egyptian titles and had an Egyptian court.
The founder of the 12th Egyptian dynasty, Amenemhat, had a Nubian or Aswan-area mother. He became vizier under the last 11th Dynasty Pharoah, and replaced him, but moved the government from Thebes back to Memphis and didn’t focus much on the south. His successors engaged in expansion in Nubia, building fortresses to keep northern Nubians under control, and restricting migration into Egypt because Egypt wanted ready access to northern resources, and also because of the rise of the southern power of Kush or Cush. Egyptian powers did encourage their subjects to seek fortune in less centrally administrated and free but more dangerous areas, and these immigrants were generally farmers but some were professionals like the soldier Sinuhe who fled to Asia, and ship captains who worked at Kerma, the capital of Kush in the Sudan.
To the south of ancient Egypt in modern-day Sudan was the capital of ancient Kush or Nubia (at the time called Ta Seti or Ta Nehesi), the great city of Kerma. Kerma’s first settlements existed in 4,000 BC, and Kerma had grown to a wealthy city with population of 10,000 by 2,500 BC, and continued to be a great civilization until its annexation by Egypt around 1,500 BC. Egyptian built fortifications at Buhen in lower Nubia in the Middle Kingdom to defend against Ta Seti, and the capital at Kerma was placed at the north of its territory closer to Egypt, likely for trade or defense purposes. At Kerma, metalworkers made a big box-shaped oven with subterranean fire boxes and flues, as part of a metal factory located in front of the main city temple. This provided Kerma with some of its coolest objects, some being weaponry.
For over 2,000 years Kush and Egypt coexisted and prospered. Egypt controlled trade with the Middle East and Mediterranean, and Kush controlled Egypt’s access to the interior of Africa. By 1500 BC, Egypt had become the world’s greatest power. Kush provided Egypt’s 18th dynasty access to luxury goods like gold to Egypt. Different Egyptian rulers were all very desirous of exotic goods (Tutankhamen’s face mask, Hatshepsut’s trading expeditions, the wealth amassed by Queen Nefertiti). Leopard skins, ivory, ostrich feathers, and gold were all carried into the afterlife in burials. Gold never corrodes, and royals were adorned with it. Egypt and Nubia were thus forced to continue to interact thanks to trade. Egyptians did feel threatened by Nubia and there was a rivalry, at least on the Egyptian side, as the Egyptians wanted to control the gold trade. The Egyptians built forts on the southern border near the second cataract and mined eastern desert gold-- they described Upper Nubia in documents as “vile Kush”.
The ancient city of Kerma had many royal funerary sites. Royal tombs of Kush/Kerma had attached chapels, with “piles of ceramics, jewels, arms, toilet objects, chests and beds of ivory inlaid wood”, and remains of dozens or hundreds of retainers buried alive. One of the last tombs from Kerma was an elite burial found to contain 322 individuals—it’s unknown whether this was a human sacrifice, war captives killed at once, or retainers meant to serve their lord in death, soldiers who all died in war at the same time, or they were all killed at once and buried together for some other reason. The city’s archaeology centered around the vast Deffusa, an ancient temple (we think) built around 2,000 BC, and the largest and earliest example of mud brick architecture in Africa, and the largest and oldest structure in sub-Saharan Africa. The Nubian kingdom had its own distinct culture, and was renowned for its deadly archers. The city of Kerma had a defensive wall surrounding it, and it as well as the houses were built of mud brick. People today still use the same techniques. The town was divided into several parts; each part had a big hut for the prince, and he controlled his area; the central part was for the king.
The First Intermediate Period was a respite for the Lower Nubians during which C-Group people colonized the area. The Middle Kingdom re-invaded Lower Nubia in 1991 BC. But the Middle Kingdom too ended, giving way to the Second Intermediate Period from 1785-1540 BC. During this time, Kush was located south of the third cataract in Nubia’s richest agricultural region, and was a pastoral and military nation with great commercial wealth, reaching a peak until the end of the second intermediate period. Its huge walled capital, Kerma, had been built around 2,500 BC, with its people settling away from the riverbank. During the Second Intermediate period, Egyptian troops left lower Nubia and the charioteering Hyksos invaded from Asia in the 1500s and 1600s BC. The Kushites centered at Kerma in Sudan conquered Lower Nubia as far as Aswan and allied themselves with the Hyksos and Egypt’s warring dynasties. Egyptians acknowledged the Kushite ruler as a Pharaoh in their fortress communities, though he did have a tumulus tomb and heavy brick tower-temples with small chambers like artificial caves. Another Nubian group, the Medjay, entered into Egyptian service and their distinctive pottery and burials were found far north, almost to the Nile Delta, commonly among all leftover artifacts of the period.
In the early New Kingdom, Egypt under Pharoah Thutmose I (not born of royal blood, but a general to the previous pharaoh and a formidable military strategist) threw off the yoke of the Asiatic invaders and reconquered nothern Nubia by the beginning of the 18th dynasty at the end of the second Intermediate Period, ending 1500 years of independent Kushite civilization based at Kerma. The rulers of Kush were attacked by Egypt after being urged by the Hyksos to fight with them, and the Egyptians sacked Kerma in 1450 BC, traveled as far south as the 5th cataract, and thousands of prisoners of war were executed, eventually conquering Kush down to the 4th Cataract. Thutmose strapped the body of the fallen Nubian King to his ship. Kushite royal tradition survived, but south of the area of Nubia incorporated into Egypt (below the 4th Cataract). The Egyptians imposed their temple-based economy, though they did use subordinate local rulers along with their administrators, and Kushites traveled north to bring tribute to the Egyptian court, and Egyptian culture was imposed in Nubia. Nubia did have some influence, including the imagery of Amun-Re, who became prominent again after hundreds of years of obscurity. They also may have imported some Nubian scientists, and the New Kingdom blue crown is similar to the beaded miter crown once used in Cameroon. Also, they imported the golden fly amulet from Nubia to “become an Egyptian military decoration”.
A viceregent from Egypt ruled Kush, and over the next 400 years, the northern Nubian C-group people became tenants or labourers as Egyptian temples and noblemen acquired lands, and became fully assimilated into Egypt. New Kingdom Egypt ruled Kerma too, but needed great temples built there to be fortified to stay secure. The center of independent Cushite culture had to shift much farther south.
A special note on the horse-drawn chariot, which was introduced into Egypt during the Intermediate period. It was light and with four spoked wheels and pulled by two horses, was first seen on stelae from “shaft graves at Mycenae” (in Greece). Then, it is mentioned by Kamose and depicted in rock drawing from Lower Nubia with an ax-wielding 17th dynasty figure. Pictures of chariots with horses galloping spread across the Sahara, as it became prevalent and widespread, until finally the Libyans (ancestral Berbers) of the late New Kingdom attacked the Nile Delta using Egyptian chariots. “The chariot remained important in the central Sahara”, specially with the Garamantes of Fezzan until roman times when their quadrigae (four-horse chariots) were famous.
Egyptians brought along their gods and temples into Nubia. Amun had been god of Gods in Egypt for 400 years; the Kushites brought Amun into their pantheon along with their lion-headed warrior god Apedemak. At the southern tip of their Nubian empire, at the holy site of Jebal Barkal, the Egyptians built a great temple to Amun, which also became holy to the Kushites. A specific pinnacle at the mountain of Jebal Barkal symbolized a serpent, a protective deity, at the head of the pharaoh’s headdress that spit venom at the pharaoh’s enemies.
Egyptian rule waned from 1200-1000 BC. After 1100 BC, parts of Kush started to regained independence. Egyptian forces left around the end of the New Kingdom in 1070 BC, but they left the population in the northern Nubian region depleted and poor, especially since lower Nile water heights reduced agricultural productivity. Nubia escaped Egyptian rule after its last viceroy (who was Nubian) interfered with the government of the high priest of Amun-Re in Upper Egypt.
After Nubia struggled from 1100 BC-900 BC, from 900-600 BC a kingdom rose up in Kush called Napata, because it had a capital on the Dongola Reach called Napata City. This state was based further up the Nile at Napata where the desert road from Kerma met the river, rather than at Kerma due to the drying of the climate. Kerma was located at the third cataract just above the bend in the Nile at the bottom of which Meroe was located. The Kingdom of Kush was well-developed before it conquered Egypt in the 700s BC.
By 750 BC, Egypt was diminished and fragmented by invasions by Libyan tribes. Around 750 BC, a new Cushite King Piye or Piyanke, a devout worshipper of the god Amun (like other Nubians), built a palace at Jebal Barkal and expanded the temple. Piye then invaded in order to re-establish worship of god Amun and reunify Egypt. He ordered his men to purify themselves in the river as they sailed downstream, saying Egypt would “taste his fingers”. He became king of Nubia and Egypt, founder of the 25th dynasty of Egypt’s pharaohs, reuniting fragmented Egypt under their rule. Piye was preceded by four generations of rulers who were buried under Nubian tumuli, but he was buried under a pyramid although Egyptians were no longer buried this way at the time. Piye and his successors acted Egyptian in dress and religion, wrote in Egyptian but kept Kushite names and form of succession and some of their formal regalia. Piye felt tied to Egypt, considering it part of his motherland, and kept Egyptian religious relations, politics, etc. in place, but revitalized temples of Amun. Piye and his successors greatly respected horses and saw them as sacred to the sun god Re in Kush. They built temples and nomes (the administrative regions Egypt used to be divided into, much like the U.S.’ states), and most of the country supported them as they fought against Assyria although the Libyan-dominated north often revolted. The 25th dynasty ruled an area from Meroe down in the South, all the way up to the Nile delta, the largest yet. This dynasty lasted for about a century, until the Assyrians and soon thereafter the Libyan Saite rulers reconquered Egypt and drove out Piye’s descendent Taharqo the great builder and his successor Tanutamani. It can be said, then, that Napata ruled egypt until 656 BC, and its kings became used to elite Egyptian-style temples, tombs, crafts, and written language. The 25th dynasty used iron, as demonstrated by a spearhead wrapped in gold foil and found in the tomb of King Taharqa (690-664 BC). The Saites attacked Napata in 593, and sometime after, the capital moved farther south to Meroe, the farthest south junction between the desert road and the Nile, a bit above the 5th cataract.
The land between the first cataract at Aswan on the Nile and the Blue Nile-White Nile confluence remained the empire of Kush (Napata-Meroe) from 800 BC to 400 CE, a period of more than one thousand years. The empire became a major manufacturer of cotton textiles; Meroe was a major-iron producing city by 400 or 300 BC. Kings built dams, encouraged irrigation techniques for herding and agriculture, and kept written records in the Meroitic script. By 500 BC, the rulers of Meroe had created a powerful center for the kingdom of Kush. There were many great burials in the archaeological record. Kush’s wealth had been built on gold, but Meroe’s wealth also came from its ironworking. The Nubian state was located on the fringe of tropical summer rains where sorghum could be grown without irrigation and cattle grazed the plains. Meroitic symbols emphasized pastoralism and cattle as wealth. The economy, in short, was based on sorghum, cattle, and cotton south to modern Khartoum.
Meroe especially thrived in the last few centuries before the common era, building monumental cities far from the Nile and spreading Egyptian/Nubian influence to Sub-Saharan Africa. Meroe had a royal walled compound, temples, pyramid cemeteries, a nymphaeum (public fountain and pool), and observatory. It had a thriving iron industry, which could maybe have even helped spread iron elsewhere in Africa. The Meroites developed a system of reservoirs gathering water for irrigation still used in modern Sudan today. The Meroitic culture had Pharaonic heritage and imported some fashions from Egypt, but had its own styles in art, deities, and written language. Its power was along the Nile near the Dongola Reach (the giant bend upwards in the Nile), and near the Isle of Meroe (an island in the sense that it’s a large area of land surrounded by rivers) near modern Khartoum. Meroitic goods traveled all the way to Senaar in Sudan, and east to Aksum, also south to Gebel Moya in south-central Sudan.
Meroe’s religious system combined worship of the Egyptian sun god Amun and other Egyptian deities with Apedemak, the “Lion of the South”, and other Nubian deities. Men used pottery wheels to make pottery that changed based on foreign fashions, but women made handmade local pottery that stayed the same, and a Meroitic script was developed using Egyptian symbols for its early alphabet. Rulers of Meroe were high priests, called themselves kings of Upper and Lower Egypt, and were buried under pyramids (which over time decreased in size) until 300 AD. The queen mother and powerful men chose the royal successor from among those with royal blood. Meroe traded gold, slaves, and produce to the Mediterranean and Middle East, and its armies rivalled Ptolemies and Romans for control of Lower Nubia.
Meroe/Kush was also interesting because there were a surprising number of queens that ruled known as Kondakes, about 4 of whom ruled in 100 years. One was Amanirenas, a one-eyed warrior, said to have the figure of a man, who ruled from 40-10 BC and risked her life in battle for her people. She led attacks into Roman Egypt (remember, Rome arose in 750 BC, started conquering outside of Italy in 250 BC with its wars against Carthage, and invaded Egypt in 30 BC), successfully preventing the Romans from invading Kush/Meroe. The Roman-biased Greek source Strabo says the Romans didn’t invade further only because of the poor condition of the roads, and that the Roman general in fact successfully defeated the army of the queen and razed Napata. The account from Queen Amanirenas’ perspective of the war with Rome was recorded in the Meroitic script. We have decoded the script, but we don’t yet know the language so we cannot read this and other accounts. Possibly we would hear a different account if we could read it, one in which Queen Amanirenas defeated the Romans. What we do know is that Amanirenas captured a bronze bust of Caesar Augustus and placed it under the temple entrance to be trodden under by all who entered. Amanirenas successfully brokered a peace treaty with Caesar Augustus; Strabo confirms this, saying the queen’s ambassadors met with Caesar to broker a peace and release Meroe from the demands for tribute Rome had tried to impose. This ensured the independence and greatness of Kush for another 400 years.
The end of the Meroitic period was the 300s AD, when the Isle of Meroe and Nile Valley north of it fell under the control of the Noba-Noubadians, whose nearest relatives are in modern Darfur. They were less Egyptian/Cushitic culturally but used Meroitic items and elements and adapted crowns and weapons in a new style, using the Meroitic great swordlike spear which became the spear of southern Sudan and the lion spear of the Maasai.
PART 4: WEST AFRICA AND BANTU AFRICA BEFORE 0 CE
Iron had been first discovered and ironworking began around 1500 BC both in Turkey and also in the very heart of Africa, spreading from the very center of the continent around the present day Central African Republic. Iron was used as currency, for agricultural production.
In the Air mountains of modern day Niger in the southern Sahara, copper metallurgy was independently invented sometime between 2,500 BC and 1500 BC. Five large stone burial sites existed in the regions in the mid-1000s. There were 5 small kingdoms/chiefdoms each associated with copper production, and pastoral in other aspects of economy. In the Air mountains of modern day Niger in the southern Sahara, copper metallurgy was independently invented from 2500 BC to 1500 BC. Five large stone burial sites existed in the regions in the mid-1000s. There were 5 small kingdoms/chiefdoms each associated with copper production and pastoral in other aspects of economy. Iron smelting may have been invented separately in the 1100s at sites like Rwanda or Lake Chad. Or did it diffuse there in 500 years from Anatolia, but not reach Carthage or Egypt or Meroe until later? This, of course, is in addition to its invention earlier in the Central African Republic.
A third great transition in in world history was the rise of merchant-managed commerce in the 1000s BC. This took place in Africa starting with the towns/manufacturing villages of Tichit in Mauritania and grew all across eastern and central Sudan over the 1,000s BC. By 1000 BC, regular trans-Saharan trade began. In Tichit in west Africa, located near reliable water a series of villages and one town existed during the middle/second half of the 1,000s BC. Each settlement specialized in a specific trade product (grindstones, arrowheads, beads, etc.). One town larger than the rest was in the center, the capital.
Around 1,100 BC, cities and commerce in West Africa shifted south to the less dry Sahel. They were centered around the inland delta of the Niger River in modern Mali. Before 1,000 BC, people in the Niger delta region specialized in food production for trade, including African rice domesticated as early as 4,000-3,000 BC, while other groups traded fish. Savanna farmers traded sorghum and domestic animals and savanna crops to the Delta communities. By 1,000 BC, manufacturing grew and boats and donkeys were used to carry much trade. Diversity of production—textiles in one village, potting in another, leather working in another, ironworking too, and copper from the Air mountains and new mines in the western Sahara expanded long distance trade. Gold coming from upper Niger and Senegal River goldfields enhanced these trends between 1,000 BC and 0 CE.
The earliest significant state of West Africa emerged between 900 and 400 BC. This was the Nok culture, in modern-day Nigeria, which produced beautiful sculptures found from 900 BC, the earliest found sculptural art found in Africa outside Egypt. The sculptures have heavy jewelry, with elaborate hairstyles. One theory is that traveling artists were moving around creating this. Archaeologists have found, in the graves of high-ranked people, huge terracotta sculptures broken and buried. We know that around this time, iron-working was reaching the area. Iron was a major product, and Nok was probably a center for tin mining. It was a major civilization.
In the equatorial rainforests of west-Central Africa, long-distance commerce developed on the rivers of the Congo basin from 1000-0 BC out of trade in fish, agricultural products, products of the hunt, and stone tools among and between the Bantu societies who had spread agriculture across the region from 3000-1000 BC during the Bantu expansion and the Batwa (“Pygmies”)—the ancient foraging peoples of equatorial Africa.
As already mentioned, the Bantu expansion began when the Benue-Kwa Niger-Congo group spread into the rainforest zones of West Africa (from Cote D’Ivoire to Cameroon) between 5000 and 3000 BC with their polished stone axes, clearing the forest to raise sun-needing yams and oil palms, and around this time also inventing broadlooms to weave raffia-cloth. They carried with them West African domesticated groundnuts and black-eyed peas. After 3000 BC, a Benue-Kwa offshoot, the Bantu, spread south and east through the central Africa equatorial rainforest. The period from 3500 to 3000 BC was known as the First Bantu Expansion; the period from 3000 to 2000 BC was the Second Bantu Expansion, and the period from 2000-1000 BC was the Third Bantu Expansion.
Around 3,500 years ago, the Bantu people spread out from an area in western Africa encompassing the eastern part of modern day southern Cameroon. They traveled downward into the rainforest, where they set colonies up primarily along riverbanks or in scattered patches of savannah in the forest, expanding into the Congo and surrounding areas and bringing with them their Bantu language and technology including dugout canoes, the growing of yams and oil palms, fishing, the raising of goats and guinea fowl, and pottery and stone axes. The Bantu by 3000 BC traded with the forest-dwelling Batwa (“Pygmies”), and they received honey and wax in return for their products. The men built canoes and fished with hook and line. Women with baskets in shallow water, which was especially important as a source of protein in the dry season. Fishing in the shallows of streams was crucial to providing protein during the dry season. A tradition was for women to rhythmically move through the water while singing, moving in such as way as to direct small fish into their baskets and protect themselves from crocodiles.
Bantu liked to live and farm along riverbanks, and by 3,000 BC (second phase) met the Batwa and were trading with them for Batwa honey, wax, and hides. Bantu men built wooden canoes and boats to use in the Sanaga and Nyong rivers, used shell and bone fish-hooks. Women used fish baskets to catch fish in shallow water, crucial to providing protein during the dry season for the Puna community of Gabon.
Bantu had different words to signify different types of land. -titu was rainforest, -subi was savanna patches inside the rainforest (which were the best areas for growing food)., -saka meant forest growing on previously domesticated land, -kanga meant as yet undomesticated land that had the potential to be domesticated. They had words for two types of yams, and two types of cowpeas. Bantu cleared forests before planting yam cuttings using polished stone axes, and these axes might have been used to help in planting. The bantu left cut-up vegetation on top of soil after clearing fields, using a blade to slice into the ground and plant rather than tilling soil and causing loss of nutrients. The word for axe -soka comes from a previous word, -sok, meaning “to poke” not “to chop”.
After hundreds of years, they expanded into the deeper rainforest, encountering many groups. Their language came to dominate a vast area and eventually at least two thirds of sub-Saharan Africa, and they adopted many techniques from groups they came across. Experts say the Bantu expansion was not one of forcible military conquest, which makes these results even more interesting and mysterious. The area of central Africa into which the Bantu expanded was still comparatively underpopulated—which raises the question of why exactly this was? Was it due to low soil fertility?—and the Bantu were able to fill in further niches throughout SubSaharan Africa seemingly without needing to engage in military conquest or needing to replace the inhabitants who already lived there, who were knowledgeable about the native flora and fauna and medicinal and edible plants in the area and about surviving the wide range of environments the Bantu encountered. Cymone C. Fourshey offers the possibility that the Bantu’s technology brought from West Africa and absorbed from meetings with other groups such as the Khoisan and Nilotic peoples enabled them to survive in varied niches from riverbanks to drier southern savannas to mountainous regions. By the fifth and final Bantu expansion, the Bantu language dominated nearly all of Subsaharan Africa below the equator (and a little above the equator), which the exception of the area above Lake Taganyaki, and the Kalahari desert and area occupied today by South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, and parts of Angola. In other words, the languages of the indigenous people they called the Batwa survive but are not dominant, but the Nilotic language and the Khoisan language areas continued to be dominated by their original languages despite the arrival of the Bantu.
The Bantu Expansion consisted of five distinct phases. The first phase was 3500-3000 BC, as the original Benue-Congo subgroup living in the mountain border of Nigeria and Cameroon migrated south to rivers at the edge of dense rainforest, moving into Gabon, the Congo region, and into the Nyong River region of Southern Cameroon and to the confluence of the Congo and Lomami rivers. During the second phase of their expansion, from 3000 BC to 2000 BC, one offshoot moves south along the lower Congo region into the Sangha-Nzadi (Nzadi means lower Congo in the local language)-- this offshoot comprised the forebears of the Bantu communities who expanded into Central and Eastern and Southern Africa. The Sangha-Nzadi group nearing 2,000 BC expanded from along the riverbanks, which offered poor soil but good potting clay and iron sources, out to savannahs and west into the forested areas between the Congo and the Atlantic, and reached into the heart of the Congo Basin by 1,000 BC. This period from 2,000-1,000 BC was the third phase of the Bantu Expansion. As they reached the savannah, they began to hunt large game, using bows and arrows (typically poison arrows) and tracked animals for hours once they were hit; since this hunting was difficult and chancy, meat was not a primary food source. During the third expansion, these Savannah-Bantu reached as far east as Lake Tanganyika. They encountered and traded with numerous communities, and experienced population growth, expansion of technology. They gave rise to five notable sub-branches of the Bantu (the western Njila; the Central Savanna Lubans; the Botatwe including the Ila, Tonga, and Lenje; the Sabi (Bemba and others); and the Mashariki (eastern Bantu). The Mashariki Bantu are divided into two groups: the northern Kaskazi along Lake Victoria and southern Kusi. The fourth phase was from 1000 BC- 500 CE; it involved the Mashariki Bantu expanding southward and eastward into much of southern Africa. Between 500 and 100 BC, Kaskazi and Kusi branches moved out from the lake regions and expanding into new lands. They also assimilated other groups as the Kusi expanded into modern-day Malawi, Mozambique, and South Africa between 300 BC and 200 CE. The Kaskazi expanded into the eastern coastal plains and the highlands of Kenya and Tanzania, encountering the southern Cushitic people. Kusi further south encountered the hunter-gatherer Khoesan by the 700s BC (and some societies adopted Khoesan click consonants and words), and the sheep raising KhoeKhoe.
Expanding into the Savannah of northern Namibia and the Nile Valley, the Bantu met Nile Valley and central Sudanic peoples who taught them cattle raising and the growing of millet and sorghum, and in Namibia the Khoikhoi who taught them sheep-raising. Researchers are using evidence of when words such as “cattle” entered the language to track how technology was acquired and passed along through Bantu areas. In the Great Lakes region of East Africa, iron-using Mashariki Bantu settlers set off a chain of developments from 1,000 BC on. They incorporated sorghum and pearl millet from the Sudanic tradition of the area, and finger millet from the Cushites, along with the yam-based farming they already practiced. The new crops required less rainfall than yams, and allowed the Mashariki (Eastern) Bantu to scatter all around between 300 BC and 300 CE across most of eastern and southern Africa. Iron technology spread with them, and the demand for iron helped stimulate new kinds of regional trade wherever they settled. The Mashariki Bantu learned ironworking from the Central Sudanic culture, as well as technology of the smelting and forging of iron, as demonstrated by adoption of words for smelting, forging, smith’s hammer, and iron tools from central Sudanic languages. Some historians indicate an independent invention of iron technology in the Congo region, however.
Between 1000 BC and 0 CE, two western Savanna Mashariki Bantu societies were the Sabi and Botatwe speakers. They inhabited what is today a province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. To their west, the Luban people settled the middle Kasai and upper Lomami rivers. There was cross-cultural interaction between Bantu groups, who migrated in all directions including back where they came from and into areas already inhabited by other Bantu. The Njila subgroup spread into modern-day Angola and western Zambia.
Because of the lack of written historical records, historians tried to determine all the abovementioned using studies of language, trying to create a chronology and determine the timing of change in language by looking at vocabulary and assuming a static rate of replacement by new words of old words within the core of the language. It was also based on the idea that lack of communication over time between groups leads to divergence in language. A third approach involves looking at changes in pronunciation, which typically affect all words in the vocabulary and enable linguists to trace modern languages back to a proto-language. Etymologists, studiers of word history, were able to view the change in the Bantu word for God as a shift in the view of God as a distant creator to a still-present nurturer of the world. The Bantu now speak hundreds of different languages. Genetic evidence provides another perspective, indicating that the Batwa people were sparse, which is why they were not genetically assimilated into the Bantu, whereas the KhoiSan and Nilotic peoples intermixed with the Bantu in Bantu-dominated areas, perhaps because they were more numerous. Of course, then the question becomes why the Batwa were so much more sparse. The genetics of central and western Savannah Bantu haven’t been as studied much, unfortunately. Material evidence such as pottery shows the expansion of Bantu people.
Historians also used oral history passed on by griots (storytellers), such as the Kikuyu’s (a group in modern Kenya) legend of why last names are matrilineal in a patriarchal society. Themes in oral history show that early Bantu women held some social authority; ancestors were very important, individuals led migrations; chiefs, ambassadors, and dependents could be of either gender; there was economic development, and gender roles changed over time. In addition, historians use ethnographies (studies of societies’ practices, beliefs, and culture generally). Ethnographies reveal the belief in ancestors as important spirits, who matter in and can influence the lives of the living. An example of a Bantu cultural practice that is now global is capoeira, a martial art.
Bantu culture and innovation in the face of adversity was quite interesting. As they moved into the drier soils of east-central Africa, they practiced cutting down and burning vegetable material to improve fertility. Then they tilled the ash into the soil. They supplemented with cattle raising. Pottery was already invented in the Niger-Congo region by Bantu ancestors 10,000 years before Christ. The earliest known African ironworking was nearly 2,000 years BC in the Central African Republic. Women used to be the major Bantu potters, finding clay from termite hills, deep clay shafts on the savannah, lakebeds, and riverbanks. They mixed sand, gravel herbs, and ground old ceramics to form the temper to bind the clay. The pots were shaped by hand, and while the clay was moist, designs were imprinted; the pots were dried, then fired at just the right temperature, on open fires rotating the pot with long sticks. One Bantu group even named their version of the Creator “honored female potter (molder of clay)”. The act of pottery was also sacred and spiritual. Niger-Congo linguistic ancestors of the Bantu had invented ceramic technology (pottery) before 9400 BC. Ethnographies of modern Zambia, for example, indicate clay sources were viewed as sacred places only old honored potters (moms and grandmas) could access. Women couldn’t have sex the day before making a pot, or make one while menstruating. The earliest word for making a pot was -mat, and then a new verb -bumb came into being to replace it about 2,500 BC (during the Second Phase), while -mat continued to be used to refer to activities involving clay like plastering a house. -bumb came to mean the creator god’s action of creating humans. Among the Asu people in the Paru mountains of northern Tanzania’s word for God, Mumbi, is based off the verb -bumb. The term -nakabumba from 500 CE by the early Sabi of east-central Africa means both God and respected female potter (na is woman, ka is respected).The Bantu also before long had different words, like -biga (water holding pot), and -fungu/-ungu (cooking pot), indicating both the spiritual and day-to-day significance of pottery. The Babessi Bantu of Africa do not let stranger see how they closed the bottom of their pots.
By contrast, iron production was a male-centered process. Ironworking was first used in Africa around 1,800 BC in the modern Central African Republic. Iron-working was found at Nsukka in southern Nigeria and sites in Gabon and Congo. It spread to the Great Lakes region around 1,000 BC, where smelting also took place also in modern Rwanda and Burundi before 400 BC. The first ironworkers in the Great Lakes region may have been central Africans, but other historians argue they spoke Nilo-Saharan languages, and their skills were adopted from the Nilo-Saharans by Bantu Speakers who reached this point from 1000 BC on. These smelting sites are associated with the Urewe ware pottery style that then spread with the Bantu, From 1000 BC-0 CE, there was deforestation of the Lake Victoria region perhaps for agriculture and iron smelting, and between 500 BC and 500 AD farmers colonized the entire region around lake victoria.
By 500 BC they made hoes, axes, and then soon after the tech spread to the rest of Bantu-speaking Africa, from the Zambezi river valley to the coasts. The technique for smelting was heating ore to 1,200 degrees Celsius in an atmosphere of 75% carbon monoxide to separate out oxygen, reducing iron oxide to iron metal. Inside the smelter or furnace, a charcoal fire burned, and men and boys worked bellows to blow in oxygen to get the fire hot enough, or used a system of tubes with plugs. They sometimes even got the temp so high they “could transform iron ore to carbon steel centuries before it was done in Europe”. Women commonly gathered ore, and among the Fipa and Taya of Tanzania made the furnace. The furnace was analogized to a woman giving birth, so some builders molded breasts on the outside of the furnace or mimicked a woman giving birth in the furnace’s positioning, or ritually sung songs used for a woman during child labor. Iron may have been valuable and used more for personal adornment originally than tools, as it was relatively rare from 1,000 BC-0 CE. The word for iron among the Kaskazi Mashariki Bantu in 1,000-800 BC meant “valuable belonging”, and the Kusi called it a word that originally meant “beads”. By 500 BC, it was more common, the iron hoe was invented, and the iron axe was used especially for chopping up dry wood, clearing forested land, and gathering building wood (stone axes were just as good for chopping down green trees). Women now depended on male-produced tools to farm. Iron smelting spread to the equatorial and southern Atlantic coasts by 300 BC, and to southern Africa by the Fourth Phase of the Bantu expansion only a little after 300 BC.
Bantu speakers also produced a great deal of beautiful artwork and furniture before 0 CE. They were woodcarvers, specializing in creating human forms, animals, and spirits. Bantu from 1000 BC-0 CE developed three-legged stools carved out of a single block of woods, and their design came from Nilo-Saharan peoples encountered at the Great lakes region, from whence it spread west to the rainforest and then to the southern savannas. Early Bantu speakers used woven mats for sleeping. The Mashariki built the first raised beds, copied from southern Cushitic neighbors, from whence it spread west. Many Africans used headrests, sculpted by carvers from blocks of woods, as sleep aids to be put under the ear and chin to support the head, numbing the nerves by the pressure and tranquilizing the person to help them sleep deeply. Bantu speakers developed headrests from Nilo-Saharan peoples, adding their own designs and woodcarvings, sometimes of animals or ancestors. By 500 CE, headrests were used by the Bantu from the great lakes to the southern savannas and rainforest. Bantu carved from wood their boats, masks, religious objects, musical instruments, building materials, cooking implements, agricultural and medicinal tools, etc. Symbolic stylized carvings for ancestors were important, and seen as containing spiritual energy positively helping people. Men primarily produced wood-carved art.
Bantu speakers created detailed body art, and designed clothing and jewelry-- clothes were made from animal skins among cattle or goat-keeping people, or from bark cloth in the woodlands, or from woven raffia palm fibers, decorated with geometric forms. Beads and shells were sewed on. White clay was often used in body painting, and it had connotations of a “transformative state”. Body paint was used during dances and masquerade celebrations. Muslim Bantu along the east African coast would much later (after 0 CE) decorate their body with henna acquired from Indian ocean traders, especially at weddings. Raised marks and scarification were used by many Bantu, layering these “beauty marks” to “create personal, generational, and community” identity.
Bark cloth was very old, developed by the ancient Niger-Congo bantu ancestors before 6,000 BC. They produced -kando bark cloth by peeling the inner bark off Ficus trees, chemically treating and pounding the bark, then dyeing pieces of the cloth that was sewed together to make designs. Bark cloth even reached the status of currency in some areas.
Women produced rock art associated with female initiation, using geometric figures/symbols to represent ideas. Much imagery was adopted from the Batwa, but unlike the Batwa Mashariki Bantu women almost entirely used white clay, which was the ritual color/material of the spiritual world throughout Bantu history. Female initiates were “covered in white clay”. But rock or wall art older women drew for initiation ceremonies did sometimes include batwa designs in red and black.
What type of houses did the Bantu have before 0 CE? In the earlier era they had rectangular homes with gabled roofs made of woven palm. The Mashariki Bantu still built these, but by 500 BC, many communities shifted to building round houses with cone roofs as they had learned from Nilo-Saharan neighbors, and thatching their roofs with grasses (evidence: the new word -bimb meaning to thatch which previously had just meant “to cover up”). Mashariki Bantu in modern northern Tanzania adopted a rectangular house with a flat thatched roof plastered over with clay.
The Bantu as they began their expansion lived in small close-knit communities, with their community identities tied up in the concept of lineage—a unit comprised of the descendants of a common ancestor who lived at least several generations back in the past. The values of heterarchy and belonging were key: heterarchy is a power model focused more on horizontal relations than on hierarchy, relying on networks for support, and with a diffuse power structure reaffirming responsibility and belonging. The main role of lineages was to guide individuals through life from birth to puberty initiation to parenting to becoming an ancestor. The souls of deceased ancestors guided newer generations. Birth and the raising of children was emphasized as essential for lineages, and may have been because of the low population density of the African continent until modernity. Early Bantu were matrilineal, with property and identity following the maternal line. Authority was largely based on seniority: male and female elders held the greatest authority & influence.
Bantu peoples all tended to use ceremonies to mark life stages, educating youth through initiation process marking their transitions from childhood into adulthood and parenthood. As you aged you increased in status, and age and knowledge and the idea of networks/collective were given primacy over gender/individual wealth/the individual. Among the Bantu, under different contexts political leaders, or spiritual or medicinal practitioners, held power. Elders both women and men, held power. Bantu speakers refer to siblings marking older and younger with specific terms and modifiers. A person who married into a community could mark their seniority not so much by birth age, but by when they were adopted into the community. You could also attain seniority with respect to your age group for special achievements.
Bantu religion was based on the importance of the family or lineage intertwined with the importance of the spiritual. The spiritual realm encompassed a Creator, and dimu (spirits) of which there were two types: ancestor spirits, and territorial spirits.
Ancestor spirits tended to have transitioned from life to ancesterhood relatively recently in order to still be in the collective memory of the living. They often had a reputations for things they accomplished in life causing them to be enshrined; and they made demands, expected communication and offerings (including song, dance, and food offerings), and could influence the lives of descendants either positively or negatively. The ancestor spirits emphasized how Bantu consider lineage (typically matrilineage) to be the central unit of organizing and belonging.
Local territorial spirits also impacted living people and were associated with specific sites; in some societies they were responsible for controlling weather, for technological innovations, and for the reproductive capacities of women. The Bantu adopted territorial spirits from the people already living in the lands (‘firstcomers’, Batwa, etc.) Recognizing territorial spirits may have legitimized their right to settle in areas their ancestors previously hadn’t lived. Territorial spirits were memorialized at or associated with particular locations; had personalities or qualities; and people paid their respects through seasonal pilgrimages to shrines, making offerings and praying for guidance and security. Among southwest Bantu people, local spirits (simbi) were responsible for controlling weather, for technological innovations, and for the reproductive capacities of women.
Bantu adapted and used Batwa rock art, produced in concealed spaces of caves, overhangs, and crevices. Third phase (1000 BC) Bantu encountered reddish rock paintings facing south and southwest, and chose to include the ancient symbols they found into their own tradition. In recent centuries, Bantu speakers in Uganda and Tanzania communicated with ancestor and territorial spirits for assistance with weather, agricultural productivity, and human fertility at sites decorated with Batwa rock art; they established large shrines near red rock art images viewed as active sites for spirits. Crawling into painted crevices is thought to increase fertility. Oral traditions recount stories of ancestral rain experts, buried near these shrines where recent local Bantu held rain control ceremonies. Bantu speakers also used Batwa symbols in female initiation as mnemonic devices to educate young Sabi women in Zambia and Malawi. Concentric ring drawings are done to symbolize fertility. The young women must move gracefully over the floor drawing during initiation, and shoot an arrow at the end through a spiraled circle on the wall. One tradition tells how Bantu accidentally killed all but two Batwa on an island with a fire, and the Batwa in recompense required them to maintain all Batwa customs and rituals including rain prayers; another story says they were from the same clan as the Batwa. Bantu throughout West Central Africa considered the Batwa to be originators of ancestors and fertility ceremonies. Batwa people presence was required to bring power to Bantu spiritual ceremonies.
The Creator was the origin of the universe. The creator was called Nyambe, a root going back to the first phase of 3500 BC, deriving from a Niger-Congo root meaning ‘to begin’. Originally the creator did not require human attention or supplication; people began to reconceive the creator during the fourth and fifth phases of the Bantu expansion. Around 500 BC, some called the creator Mu-lungu, meaning one who arranges or puts in order the cosmos. By 300 BC, some were using a word for the sun for the creator as influence from Nile people. Others around 500 CE used a word implying to bear and take care of a child, implying a new conception of a personal and nurturing relationship with God.
According to the Bantu tradition, malevolence of spirits or malicious living people explained disaster. People could not neglect the ancestral/territorial spirits if they wanted to remain safe. Bantu speakers’ word for human malice/evil is bu-logi, often translated as witchcraft. The religio-medicinal healer treated and diagnosed individuals to save them from falling under harmful spells. People thought greediness was antisocial, and valued generosity—greed attracted jealousy and evil. This belief impelled people to redistribute goods and supported the heterarchy.
Belonging was the norm, and the extended family comprised blood relatives and affines. Matrilineal descent, not patrilineal, was most important. You could be born into a lineage or be adopted, married, or initiated into it. Being kinless was dangerous. Through most of Bantu history, descent was marked through the female line to judge inheritance and identity, although individuals retained relations with members of both maternal and paternal lineage. Language analysis shows the original ancestor was metaphorically a mother.
Interestingly, during the second phase, 3000-2000 BC, the term –cuka was used for matrilineages. –Cuka also means termite hill. Termite hills were stores of various powers related to fertility, ancestors, and iron. They became locations where Bantu communities went to honor territorial spirits: the Bantu recognized the need to honor the ancestors of communities they moved into. Termite hills were also a trope in origin myths and oral traditions; one oral tradition says the original female progenitor emerged from a termite hill. Termite hills were both landscape outcrops but also sources of edible protein for people; women often used the abandoned termite hills like a hearth to cook food. The large structures were also models for iron and pottery kilns. Iron smelting was a male activity, and the termite hills were sites for the building of iron kilns, which (the iron kilns) commonly were metaphorically likened to a woman giving birth. So termite hills were associated with matrilineage ancestors who constructed hearths on termite hills, or associated with territorial spirits who were honored so to gain protection for the matrilineage.
By 2000 BC, Bantu people were using a root word (-ganda) that had previously meant “community” to refer to the new settlement where their matrilineages would reside. The same word was used by Saba speakers to refer the space within the home where women cooked and maintained the household altar where ancestors were worshipped. Additionally, genetic studies indicate long-standing matrilineality of the Bantu-- female chromosome diversity was low, while the male line had a lot of diversity, indicating that men moved away and married outside the community. Recurrently in social history, matrilineage-based societies have tended to be politically decentralized, and even when organized into kingdoms social structures give women place; members redistribute resources rather than accumulating individually. Specialized language evolves to distinguish a woman before motherhood, during motherhood, and as a mother-in-law. Adult women have rules regulating the reproduction of new lineage members, and women often stay with their lineage for the first part of the marriage, giving them a support base and opportunities to develop their authority.
Bantu society also carefully marked female life stages. By the 2nd phase of Bantu expansion, the period from a young woman’s first menstruation to first childbirth was a distinct period, called –yadi. Female initiation was a social institution through which female elders guided young members into adulthood. Even more specific terms were soon developed, like the term –gole (originally a synonym for –yadi, which came into use around 1000 BC during the 4th phase in east Africa), which meant “a girl in the physical process of developing breasts”, and also meant the life stage before a woman’s becoming a –yadi.
Additionally, societies often had sororal attributes. Originally –bumba met a woman who had born children. But by 1000 BC (3rd phase) in the Savannah -bumba began to refer to closely related adult women within a matrilineage living in the same village: adult sisters, half-sisters, maternal female cousins, maternal grandmothers, etc. who took authority over the initiation that readied the mwali (noun version of yadi) for motherhood and also in deciding who their daughters could marry. It was important to the -bumba to build and extend the matrilineage. A sororal group gave a woman the privilege to thresh her own grain and have her own cooking fire to prepare food as a recognition of her having attained maturity. Only after she completed her initiation assignments and went through her ceremonies, as a recognition of her having attained maturity. These sororal groups expected productive contribution from a man looking for a wife (known as brideservice). The brideservice comprised providing several years’ labor to the matrilineage of his future bride, and needed to father children to demonstrate his ability to reproduce, then fully accepted. In east-central Africa among the Sami, a man had to observe mother-in-law avoidance during brideservice. When he was deemed suitable, the elders performed mako, a ceremony to reduce avoidance rules. First lessening of prohibitions, then he could openly greet and eat a meal with his mother-in-law. When his service was complete, the nuclear family unit could move wherever—including the man’s maternal village. Women often remained with their matrilineage, however.
Among the Chewa of Malawi and Eastern Zambia, young men could be initiated into the Nyau male secret society. Members wore elaborate masks and danced at religious ceremonies, when they had masks on they were considered spirits and could lash out at his mother-in-law or members of the sororal group—thus providing an outlet for tensions and counterbalance against any extreme authority wielded by the sororal group.
By the Bantu first phase, circumcision was the ritual of male initiation. Among the Mashariki Bantu 1000 BC, third phase, men entering puberty were taken to camps in the bush for an extended period of seclusion, taken through rituals and taught about social and ritual responsibilities. Terms that were new referring to this seclusion period came into being.
During the third phase Savannah Bantu period after 1000 BC, a new term connoting patrilineage emerged. The emergence of patrilineage might have had something to do with contact with patrilineal neighbors, development of more hierarchal power structures led by men, movement into new lands where men were the primary leaders of resettlement, and the rise of importance of economic sectors like cattle raising where men’s activities were more important. Though with time, some Bantu speakers became patrilineal, they often maintained some of their old matrilineal traditions. In the Chewa (Kusi/Mashariki) Bantu, there were primarily male rulers, but nomination and selection of a new ruler was in the hands of a group of female elders. Even among patrilineages, it was still important to access the maternal-lineal power of ancestral and territorial spirits. Or, matrilineal legacies continued to control kin relations and belonging within patrilineal societies.
Some West African people remained in West Africa, some Bantu and some not, and built their own civilizations. Copper was smelted in Akjoujt in Mauritania roughly around 500 BCE and took place around the same time in Niger and the northern Cameroon. Around this time the great Nok culture used groundstone axes, exploited oil palms, and produced the oldest known sculptures of humans and other objects in terracotta (pottery).
PART 5: ETHIOPIA & THE HORN OF AFRICA BEFORE 0 CE
After Kerma’s destruction in Kush, a new trading kingdom rose up on the northern edge of the Ethiopian plateau in modern Eritrea and Tigray. It was influenced by Egypt and Kerma via the Gash Delta, a chiefdom existing between 2500 and 1500 BC in southeast Nubia near the border between Sudan and Ethiopia, on a trade route to the Red sea. The Gash Delta actually brought Kerma style pottery to the western shore of Arabia.
Here in the 1000s-400 BC emerged the kingdom of Da’amat or D’mt. This kingdom dominated the lands to the west, trading ivory, tortoiseshell, rhinoceros horn, gold, silver, and slaves to merchants from southern Arabia. Its peoples lived on the plains, its pottery was partly local Tigrayan and partly influenced by Egypt and Kerma through the Gash Delta. Its culture was highly influenced by South Arabians.
At Yeha in modern Tigray, Daamat’s ancient capital, lies a temple to the astronomical gods of South Arabia, along with a palace, smaller temples, and more. The Great Temple of the Moon was built in the 400s BC, around the same time as the Parthenon in ancient Greece. The temple was dedicated to the god Almaqah, also the chief god of the kingdom of Saba in Yemen. It was decorated with crescent moons, the symbol of Almaqah. Almaqah is represented on monuments by a cluster of lightning bolts surrounding a curved, sickle-like weapon. Bulls were sacred to him. Almaqah also was the main god of the successor state to D’mt and Saba’, Aksum. The insides of the walls of the temple of Yeha, were believed to have been paved with gold. This beautiful temple was destroyed by fire, but archaeologists found in it treasures like gold rings, golden lions, stone-engraved inscriptions written in Sabean, stone-carved animals like the Walya ibex (one of Ethiopia’s endemic mammals), pottery works, inscriptions in the Sabean language of South Arabia, and sickles and other objects in bronze from South Arabia were uncovered.
A palace built in Yeha in 800 BC was a 27 m high skyscraper of a building, with six pillars at the entrance. The palace has a secret room, whose main door was closed soon after the erection of the room—archaeologists speculate that it might have been used to store valuables like gold or incense.
Yeha may have shared a culture with the kingdom of Saba, peopled by the Sabeans who spoke the Semitic language of Ge’ez. Saba was just across the sea in southern Arabia. Yeha’s palace was built in a Sabaean/south Arabian style: they erected the walls on a huge 6 meter high podium. The walls were made of rubble stones and wood. They added the wood because they wanted to be able to erect a very high building, so the walls couldn’t be too heavy. Saba was also known as Sheba in English. While some scholars see Yeha as arising from the kingdom of Saba or Sheba, like a colony or offshoot, others argue that the kings of D’mt or Da’amat actually hired Sabaean architects and ruled the kingdom of Saba. The two kingdoms shared religious beliefs and culture.
The Queen of Sheba (Saba) was supposed to have visited Jerusalem with a retinue of camels bearing spices, gold, and gems to ask King Solomon questions: they exchanged gifts, and she returned home. She was also said to have brought the first specimens of Balsam to Israel. Solomon was the king of Israel from 970-931 BC, and he built the first temple in Jerusalem dedicated to Yahweh. The son of king David and Bathsheba, Solomon was considered to be very wise and also fabulously wealthy. He was supposed to have gotten cargoes of gold, sandalwood, and ivory from the port of Ophir—which could easily have been Sheba or Yeha, since Egyptian pharaohs also sent expeditions to Punt (Somaliland) for the same types of goods. (What was Punt? Back in the 1,000s BC sea-faring peoples from Arabia set up urban centers on the horn of Africa amidst the pastoral and farming Cushitic people of the northern Ethiopian highlands. These sea-farers sought luxury goods such as frankincense and myrrh, and later tortoise shell and ivory. As far back as 1,500 BC, Queen Hatshepsut of Egypt sent a trip to this rich land of Punt.) Further myths relate that the Queen Sheda wed King Solomon and bore his son. Finally, Sheba’s son Menelik was said to be the first king of Aksum, an unbroken line of succession except a 133 year usurpation period (the Zagwe dynasty) until 1974 and Haile Selassie’s overthrow, marking 2,900 years of the Solomonid dynasty.
They traded with the Nile, and Daamat’s queens wore Napatan garments and ornaments, but had only mild Meroitic influence. D’mt went into decline after 300 BC because trade routes had shifted eastward. The kingdom broke up between 500-200 BC, leaving its culture to Ethiopia.
PART 6: THE LIBYANS & PHOENICIANS BEFORE 0 CE
Libyan (ancestral Berber or Imazighen) pastoralists of Cyrenaica and the desert oases interacted with Egyptians as refugees fleeing famine, mercenaries, and from 945 BC as rulers of Delta states. West in the Maghrib the dominant peoples were ancestral Berbers. There were multiple groups of Berbers: the Berbers of the northern plains and the mountain areas who used ploughs, irrigated, practice agriculture and kept livestock, called Mauri in Morocco and Numidians in modern Algeria and Tunisia. The second group was the Berber semi-pastoralists in the arid pastures and deserts who adopted horses between 1000 BC and 0 AD. The third lived in desert oases and outcrops scattered in the desert, including the Garamantes of the Fezzan and the ancestors of the Tubu in the Tibesti mountains of the modern central Sahara.
These groups practiced a religion focused on nature and fertility, and had a social system where each person belonged to several groups (family, lineage, clan, tribe, maybe confederation) acting collectively when a member had a conflict with another group of equivalent size. The society was very egalitarian, with little central authority-- in fact the Roman historian Livy says there “was a dislike of kings with great authority”, although local chiefs did exist, especially during crises.
Around 1300-1000 BC, Phoenician traders from Lebanon colonized the North African coast, setting up the settlement of Carthage north of modern Tunisia founded in 814 BC governed by their wealthy traders. The Phoenicians tried to capture western Mediterranean trade, and they connected part of north Africa and the greater Mediterranean. They stayed on the coast until the 500s BC, when they extended 200 km into the fertile plains of north and east Tunisia, leaving the rest of North Africa to the Imazighen/Berbers.
They also traded with the Garamantes, who supplied gems and a few slaves from the South. The Garamantes rose up in the Fezzan oases of the north-central Sahara after 900 BC. They may have been intermediaries of trans-Saharan trade too, with at least occasional contact between Carthage and the Inland Niger Delta.
In the coastal [plains, they established huge wheat farms, and on the Sahel to the east they introduced olives which made the region famous. These farms were slave estates, or they were tenanted by Imazighen/Berber sharecroppers. They were skilled in metalworking, especially bronze but also with iron. In 241 BC Carthage’s mercenary army lost a great war against Rome, and they demanded more tax and tribute from surrounding Berbers, and constructed Punic ditches to defend Carthage and control the movements of pastoralists.
The followers of the Numidian chief Masinissa in the coastal plain west of Carthage resented this, even as the Numidians engaged in cultural exchange with the Phoenicians. They soon learned to write Berber in a script derived from Phoenician, and the Carthaginian fertility goddess originated with the Berbers. Masinissa helped Rome defeat Carthage in 202 BC and make it a dependency; once allied with Rome, he encroached on Carthage and when Carthage attacked him, the Romans razed Carthage completely. They were said to sow salt in its fields so nothing could grow there; they left the city ruined, and it was deserted for a hundred years. Roman Imazighen/Berber client kings remained powerful. Jugurtha, descendent of Masinissa, fought against the Romans until betrayed in 105 BC. The Romans settled west of Carthage, and began colonizing along the North African coasts building military veteran settlements about sixty years later; by the first few decades AD there were 10,000-20,000 Roman immigrants in this area from Morocco to western Libya.
In the 2000 years after 0 CE, a lot more stuff happened in Africa. The Bantu expansion, the empires in West Africa, the Swahili city states, the slave trade, the spread of Islam in north Africa-- all these things will be covered separately in the next part (African History after 0 CE).
-----------AFTER O CE ---------
Part 1: THE BANTU EXPANSION INTO SUB-SAHARAN/CENTRAL AFRICA AFTER 0 CE
Bantu Expansion & Kingdoms
In the equatorial rainforests of west-Central Africa, long-distance commerce developed on the rivers of the Congo basin from 1000-O BC out of trade in fish, agricultural products, products of the hunt products, and products of the hunt among the Bantu societies who had spread agriculture across the region from 3000-1000 BC and with the Batwa (“Pygmies”)—the ancient foraging peoples of equatorial Africa. By around 500 CE, the spread of iron across the Congo Basin introduced manufacturing to this trade, and other industries like raffia textile weaving and boat building also increased trade. The Batwa became specialists providers of honey, wax, skins, ivory and other forest products. The Batwa of the rainforest remained distinct (they didn’t contribute much genetically to the Bantu populations), perhaps because they formed too sparse a population to leave more than a small genetic imprint.
The Bantu’s various combinations of technology enabled them to survive in varied niches from riverbanks to drier southern savannas to mountainous regions. The Bantu also met with Indonesians from Borneo whose outrigger canoes took them across the Indian Ocean to the eastern coast of Africa where they settled Madagascar. They introduced taro, sugarcane, yams, chickens, and cooking bananas, all crops thriving on the temperate coast and the Great Lakes and Congo basin. (These ancestors of modern Malagasay on Madagascar benefited as well by adopted Bantu food products such as cattle, sheep, and goat raising). The most influential crops introduced by these people from Borneo were the cooking bananas or plantains; the second most were chickens and Asian tuber crops.” The cooking banana actually had a huge impact. The Banana was especially popular in the Great Lakes Region. People practiced intercropping with it and a shallower-rooted vegetable, it provided lots of calories and, in combination with animal protein or legumes. a balanced diet. It was less labor intensive and more productive. It was even useful for created shady meeting places in the village. It dramatically changed life in the mountainous areas of Tanzania and around the Great Lakes. The mountains of the area created lots of ecological niches where people grew different kinds of crops and fostered trade. By the 900s CE, in the highlands around Mt. Kenya people cultivated bananas, african and asian yams, arrowroot, taro, sugarcane, sorghum and pearl millet on the different types of slopes (wet, dry, high, low, etc.) Around Mt. Kilimanjaro, ancestral Chaga people intensely cultivated bananas, and also raised finger millet and yams. Because there was less time spent on growing food due to bananas, people had time freed up to make goods like raffia cloth, metal products, and pottery. By 700 CE (5th phase), many Great Lakes people had adopted banana cultivation. The Lake Bantu deforested the area, so the tsetse fly (deadly to cattle & harmful to humans) could not live (it needs woods and bush) and were then able to raise livestock i.e. cattle. By 1000 CE, areas between Lake Nyanza and the western rift had become grassland savannas due to farmers removing the rainforest for cultivation.
Ceramic and iron technologies had been invented (pottery was invented 10,000 years BC in the Niger-Congo region, and the earliest known African ironworking was 2,000 years BC in the modern Central African Republic. Women used to be the major Bantu potters, and the act of making a pot was considered sacred and spiritual. To this day, groups in modern Zambia view clay sources only honored elder women could access. Women couldn’t have sex the day before making a pot, or make one while menstruating, because they were thought to be in a temporary state of power. Iron production, by contrast, was a male-centered process which spread from the modern Central African Republic to the Great Lakes region by 500 BC. They made hoes, axes, and then by 500 BC the tech had spread to the rest of Bantu-speaking Africa. The technique for smelting was heating ore to 1200 degrees C in an atmosphere of 75% carbon monoxide to separate out oxygen, reducing iron oxide to iron metal. Inside the smelter or furnace, a charcoal fire burned, and men and boys worked bellows to blow in oxygen to get the fire hot enough, or used a system of tubes with plugs. They sometimes even got the temp so high they make carbon steel out of iron ore, hundreds of years before Europeans learned to do so.
Bantu also moved into the bright-colored, copper-rich but dry soils of east-central Africa. Sabi Bantu moved into this area, and they practiced cutting down and burning vegetable material to improve fertility. Then they tilled the ash into the soil. They supplemented with cattle raising learned from the Mashariki bantu. The Botatwe Bantu moved into dry southern Zambia from the wet Katanga region, and practiced slash-and-burn and tilling ash into the soil as well, but with their own distinct techniques. The Botatwe adopted cattle herding from the Kaskazi and Kusi groups who had preceded them and intermarried with these groups. The Bantu were in modern Zambia by the 200s AD, using iron and cattle and copper and agriculture, building thatched wattle-and-daub huts in compact villages about 50 m across, with cattle penned at the village center, living a nomadic lifestyle that required moving on to the next suitable area for their lifestyle once the fields were exhausted, not returning to former villages, until the 700s-1000 AD creation of more settled communities.
In the very center of sub-Saharan Africa, in the southeastern part of the modern Democratic Republic of the Congo, archaeologists found pottery, the earliest from 400 CE, similar to that of the Bantu Sabi people of modern Zambia. By the 500s or 600s CE, the Sabi had been replaced by Luba speakers, who had their own unique pottery styles. The timing of the archaeological record corresponds well with linguistic (glottochronological) estimates that the Sabi speakers spread eastward into the southern Congo basin in the 600s. The rise of the Upemba Kingdom (described in more detail later) between 1100 and 1400 CE is surmised from the fact that grave goods increased in quantity and quality in some graves (indicating social stratification) and royal burials also were found. Linguistic evidence also demonstrate that the Luba speakers of the area also borrowed from the language of the Sabi speakers.
From 1000 BC-0 CE, there was deforestation of the Lake Victoria region perhaps for agriculture and iron smelting, and between 500 BC and 500 AD farmers colonized the entire region around Lake Victoria. The Kaskazi Bantu had learned cattle-raising and grain agriculture from southern Cushitic people, and the Bantu brought their pottery and cattle-raising technology from here down to the Upper Zambezi valley from the 100s BC on, and reached Tanzania and the Indian Ocean soon after 0 CE. The Bantu tended to favor fertile land on mountain slopes in preference to plains already in use by stone-working pastoral groups. When they reached the coast, they learned to fish and eat shellfish, reaching modern Mozambique by the 100s AD and then finally South Africa.
Between 1000 BC and 0 CE, groups in the savannas west of the Mashariki Bantu around the Great Lakes area developed their own distinct societies. Two important societies were the Sabi and Botatwe speakers. They inhabited what is today a province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. To their west, the Luban people settled the middle Kasai and upper Lomami rivers. There was cross-cultural interaction between Bantu groups, who migrated in all directions including back where they came from and into areas already inhabited by other Bantu. The Njila subgroup spread into modern-day Angola and western Zambia. Between 200 BC and 300 CE, Njila reached the Kunene and Zambezi rivers, where they met Khoesan shepherd peoples. They learned about sheep raising and about cattle, goats, sorghum, and pearl millet from the Mashiriki bantu, and then the Njila speakers spread across Angola and northern Namibia between 200 and 500 CE. Iron spread from the Mashariki Bantu to the west Atlantic coast by 400 BC, and southwest to the Njila peoples by 0 CE.
The fifth phase of the Bantu expansion was from was 500 CE-1800 CE. During this period, the Bantu filled in niches and encountered populations who already used these territories at least part of the years, bantu who pioneered communities in the fifth phase settled into more severe niches, and economic specialization grew. Between 800 and 1200 CE, two groups of Mashariki Bantu built centralized urban societies. One was the Sabaki speakers, an offshoot of which, the Swahili, created at least 75 city-states along the coast starting in the 800s CE, building a system of long-distance trade across East Africa’s coral reefs and the Indian ocean. Some of the earliest large states date to 1100-1400 in the African Great Lakes region, supported by capital wealth with spread-out towns as political and ritual centers.
The Bantu intermarried with groups they met. The southern Cushites and Nilo-Saharans contributed somewhat to the gene pool, although we haven’t studied the genes of the central Savanna Bantu and the western savannah Njila peoples enough to determine if they genetically assimilated other societies they encountered.
Before the 700s BC (fourth phase), Kusi-speaking communities migrated south and met the Khoesan, and some societies adopted Khoesan click consonants and words. The Khoekhoe had adopted sheep and cattle raising supplemented by hunting and gathering after the 500s CE. The Kusi brought to them sorghum, pearl millet, and iron working, and they exchanged these technologies. Kusi people, especially to the south of the Limpopo river, grew wealthy in cattle, livestock became the preferred wealth form and cattle ownership gave owners social standing. Khoesan ostrich shell beads, leopard skins, and ivory from elephant tusks became “prestige goods”. From 0- 1000 CE, Bantu and Khoekhoe often intermarried, being incorporated into what today are the Bantu-descended Sotho and Nguni societies of South Africa. Men took over cattle production while women still provided the majority of calories by farming. The first mini-states were built in southern Africa between 500 and 900 CE. The bantu Shona people living in the Limpopo province of South Africa, the Sotho of the High Veld, and the Nguni of KwaZulu-Natal, developed political systems with authority based on cattle ownership. The Sotho and Nguni became patrilineal. Chiefs, then kings, belonged to royal clans but most belonged to commoner clans. The Zulu kingdom was one of these states, and Great Zimbabwe originated from one of these groups. Bantu left the western cape and Namibia’s mediterranean region, where their sorghum was not suitable, to the Khoisan people.
Southern Africa’s first town, Mapungubwe, flourished in the Limpopo Valley during 1000-1100. Built by the Shona Bantu, another offshoot of the Kusi Mashariki Bantu from the Great Lakes Region, it was a royal capital with large stone structures, and it connected the source areas of ivory and gold in the interior to the sea routes of the Indian ocean. Mapungubwe was the first great Shona kingdom, and it was built on the banks of the Limpopo River.
The second great Shona empire, the Zimbabwe empire, developed in the 1200s, shifting the heartland of urban development north to modern-day Zimbabwe on the Zimbbabwe plateau. The Zimbabwe Empire controlled the gold trade, which passed from the city of Great Zimbabwe to the seaport of Sofala to the Swahili city of Kilwa between 1200 and the early 1400s CE. The capital city of Great Zimbabwe was famous for its great stone buildings and stone walls and had 15,000-18,000 inhabitants during the 1300s CE. The empire of Zimbabwe lasted from the 1100s-1400s, with a strong religious tradition and great wealth due to its trade in products from the African interior. This state and its king grew powerful by controlling gold and ivory, and traded it with seafaring Swahili merchants on the coast. The rulers in Great Zimbabwe had a religion encompassing, ancestors, territorial spirits, and Mwari (God) which underpinned their power. The Mwene or rulers of the region built upon the work of previous generations, in the politico-religious urban center, as masons worked over a two hundred year period started in the late 1100s CE to build and update Great Zimbabwe. Shona engineers in this empire cut stone to build the huge monuments of Great Zimbabwe (the empire’s royal residence, a great city), set in a valley surrounded by hills and giant boulders. The biggest structure in Great Zimbabwe is the Great Enclosure, an ellipsis built of millions of shaped granite stones set with no mortar and topped with huge carved birds. The stone birds were of religious significance to the Shona people. The structures were built of local granite and blended in with the surroundings; 18,000 people could have lived in the valley and structures around the great enclosure. With great Zimbabwe’s construction starting in the later 1200s, over a century and a half other chiefs built smaller stone cities (Zimbabwes), over two hundred in all. The authority of the rulers collapsed in the early 1400s CE due to environmental degradation in the urban center and rebellions from those dissatisfied with rulers, as the political elite were struggling because traders had found an alternative trade route bypassing the Zimbabwe Empire’s access to interior gold resources.
Other centralized states emerged founded by Mashariki Bantu: the Bunyoro in the 1200s and the Baganda in the 1300s CE among Kaskazi Bantu people of the African Great Lakes.
In central and west-central sub-Saharan Africa, centralized states also emerged. In the Congo Basin, chiefdoms emerged between 500 and 1100 CE and after 1100 CE kingdoms emerged. Some of the earliest known kingdoms were the Songye and Upemba states of the middle Lualaba River region 1100-1400 CE. In the Upemba Depression, in modern-day southeast Democratic Republic of the Congo, the earliest archaeological evidence dates back to 400 CE. Both linguistic (glottochronological) and archaeological evidence (different styles in pottery) indicate that the Bantu Sabi lived in the area before being supplanted by the Bantu Luba people who spread in from the south in the 600s CE. The number of grave goods in certain graves increases coinciding with a period of royal burials, suggesting the existence of the Upemba Kingdom, between around 1100 and 1400 CE. The Luba speakers were the prevailing population during those centuries and continue to be so today. In Central Africa, the Luba kingdom in the 1500s and the Lunda kingdom in the 1600s emerged.
The kingdom of Kongo on the Pacific coast with its capital Mbanzakongo and smaller capitals flourished from 1300-1665, although during that period it had to contend with the challenges brought by the Atlantic slave trade.
All these centralized states shared control of long-distance transoceanic, transcontinental, or intercontinental trade products and access to these networks. Economic needs, or social or religious rationales, were used to gain loyalty.
(Bantu) Swahili City-States of East Africa
Bantu communities arrived at the East African coast just before the birth of Christ, and came into contact with the communities and developments of commerce along the edge of the Indian ocean. These were the pre-Swahili city states. These communities were inhabited by merchants who frequented East Africa’s earliest town, Rhapta, but the most important contact was with Indonesian immigrants from Borneo and Sumatra who settled for a while on the coast before moving to Madagascar around 300 CE. They brought several Southeast Asian crops, most importantly bananas, well suited for the wet African tropical environments. Banana cultivation spread rapidly west to the Great Lakes and into the Congo basin, was less labor-intensive and more productive than yam raising, and fostered a major leap in commercial activity in those areas because reliance on the new crop freed up time for people to engage in trade and in the production of trade commodities.
Around 800 CE, the Bantu began creating urbanized and centralized societies. One group, the Swahili, created a series of city-states along the eastern coast of Africa. They traded with Persian and Arab traders (who had already had outposts on the east coast of Africa by the 600s and 700s CE), and with India. These city-states were Islamic in nature, and existed all the way from Kenya down to just above Madagascar, exporting African goods to Asia and the Middle East. The Swahili city-state economy was booming by the 1100s, and by the 1300s Chinese imperial ships carried silk, porcelain, and goods to east Africa.
The Muslim Swahili, a city-state, seagoing, trading Bantu nation actually built houses out of coral that was cut and shaped underwater. Surrounded by mangroves on the hot humid east African coast, they used mangrove trunks as roof beams and supporting beams and sealed the outside of the houses with white limestone plaster. Because Islam forbade creating idols, the Swahili carved ornate wooden doors and furniture with flowers and abstract designs. Swahili merchants lived in more and more decorated homes, and they even had indoor plumbing by the 1300s CE. The houses had a rectangular floor plan with a middle eastern-style flat roof. Merchants lived thus, but the average Swahili lived in traditional rectangular, gable-roofed houses.
According to Ibn Battuta, Zeila near the Bab el-Mandeb Strait (between Eritrea and Yemen on the Horn of Africa) had lots of fisheries, and also used camels as beast of burden and for meat. The people were very dark-skinned. The area from Zeila down to Mogadishu on the Somalian coast also on the Horn of Africa was a desert. In Mogadishu they kept camels for meat and also herded sheep. In the town, young men act as hosts to one of the merchants and trades his wares for him. Ibn Battuta was hosted by a local qadi (judge). Sultans (rulers) in the area were called Shaikhs. It was the custom that any visiting lawyer or holy man (Sharif) could not find lodging until he had first visited the Sultan. Ibn Battuta ate there a repast of rice, pickles, meat stew, etc. and was dressed in fine clothes, and was gifted with six betel leaves and areca nuts.
In Mogadishu the Sheikh keeps audience, matters of religious law are decided by the qadi, others are decided by the council of wazirs (high ranking muslim officials) and amirs, and the Sultan sometimes decides a case by sending back his answer in writing.
Ibn Battuta traveled from Mogadishu towards the Swahili land, to Kilwa which is the land of Zanj. On the way is the island of Mombasa, where the people import grain from the Swahili and mainly eat bananas and fish, and are Shafi Muslims (one of the major four schools of Sunni islam).
According to Ibn Battuta, in Kilwa the majority of the inhabitants are black with scarifications on their skin. Sofala is half a day’s walk from Kilwa and Yufi, a month’s walk away, is the source of powdered gold. The people of Kilwa are engaged in a holy war against the pagan Zanj; they are pious Shafi’is and their town is beautifully built, their roofs of mangrove poles; there is much rain in the town. In this time (1331 CE), the Sultan often made raids into the Zanj country carrying off booty and himself keeping a fifth, and he keeps a part reserved by the Koran for the family of the prophet and gives it to Sharifs when they come to visit. The Sultan is very humble and pious, sitting and eating with beggars and worshipping the Prophet, holy men, and descendents of the Prophet. Fakirs are Sufi holy men.
According to one story, the Sultan gave a visiting beggar holy man the clothes off his back. Then his son bought the clothes back with ten slaves, and the Sultan then ordered ten more slaves and two loads of ivory be given the beggar. Ivory is the main stuff given as a gift, gold is very rarely given.
Bantu Culture after 0 CE: Matrilinealism and Patrilinealism
Matrilinealism and the cultural features that had existed throughout the Bantu expansion continued, but as time progressed patrilineality also appeared. The root -ganda used to mean “clan” (or in some areas “matriclan”) but around 1200 to 1400 CE near Lake Victoria it came to mean “patriclan”. Today, it also means “patriclan” in East Africa and in some languages in the western equatorial forest. The Herero cattle-keepers of Namibia have dual descent, recognizing patrilineage for political office inherit matrilineage for cattle inheritance; they use -ganda to mean only “matrilineages”.
The Bantu Ruvu Gogo people emerged in modern Tanzania around 1200-1400 CE, and sometime after switched from matrilineal to patrilineal thanks to interactions with the Nilo-Saharan Maasai, and the southern Cushitic Kw’adza and Njombe. -Longo, the root word for patriclan, had already existed but was elevated in status. Gogo women continued to be educated and guided by living matrilineage elders, who determined when a woman was ready for womanhood. However, a new tradition of circumcising Gogo women arose. For some, this was less invasive as they only cut to draw blood falling on the sand. However, the Parakuyu performed complete clitoridectomies (female genital mutilation involving cutting out the clitoris). Gogo oral traditions acknowledge that female circumcision is new, but also relate that it is an important or essential practice.
The Bantu Kikuya in kenya relate that according to oral tradition, women were once stronger than men and ruled society, but men overthrew the old order by seducing all the women, and since they all conceived at once, they were unable to fight back in the later stage of pregnancy; as a result the men imposed patrilineality. The women refused to have any more children if the men changed the name of the ancestresses to male names. So today, though the Kikuya are patrilineal, the ancestors are remembered as being women. The Kikuya probably switched from matrilineal to patrilineal before the more detailed Kikuya oral histories from 1500 CE.
In Zambia, the Bantu Ila developed an economy of mixed agriculture and cattle keeping; they elevated the status of a father’s lineage but they stayed matrilineal. The matrilineage according to clan rules held the actual authority over the children. According to the British, men got to keep their kids if there was a divorce, but the children remain part of the mother’s clan, so that the maternal uncles have greater power over them than the father.
Some groups also switched from patrilineal Bantu communities to matrilineal, as in the originally patrilineal Ngoni, who arrived as conquering refugees. They arrived formally organized into military units and tried to impose patrilineal practices on conquered peoples, but were not successful: they adapted and became matrilineal too. Likewise in the early 1500s, in the Luapula province of Zambia, the militarized patrilineal Lunda moved east from the modern Democratic Republic of the Congo to invade and establish the Kazembe Kingdom. They forced matrilineal Sabi peoples to pay tribute. But today only the Lunda ruling elite follow patrilineal descent, and even some of the ruling Lunda elite have become matrilineal. Political dominance does not necessitate patrilineal organizing.
West-central Africa’s Kongo Kingdom provides a different example: there the -kanda, the matriclan basis of belonging, was diminished. In the early 1500s, the new Mani Kongo (king of Kongo) Afonso I built a more centralized state and interacted with Europeans and the Portuguese, and consequently Christianity became important among the elites and a bit in the countryside. In Kongo, the hereditary chiefs of the -kandas formed a council of royal advisors, the Mwissikongo. After 1535, Afonso I began to appoint advisors from his own -kanda to serve in government. Soon thereafter young men used wealth accumulation from commerce to gain power relative to female and male elders and chiefs, so both elders and chiefs and their matriclans weakened. Churchmen without -kanda connections also gained power. People without -kanda connections, like the children of kinless wives who had been separated from their families during slave raids, looked to patrilineal connections. So more people over time reckoned descent through paternal line. Then later after the slave trade declined, the Kongo kingdom economy again began to focus on agriculture, and this allowed the makanda to regain authority since they controlled most land. Christianity waned, and the -kanda authority increased as the Mwissikongo became again composed of people who matrilineal descent. In 250 years, the matriclans’ power diminished then rose again.
Yet another authority structure existed wherein elder men took on great power with respect to women and younger men, but mother-in-laws retained authority over son-in-laws and women over their daughters.
In patrilineal societies, patriclan members gained access to agricultural surpluses. Polygyny was more common in these societies, and facilitated production of agricultural surplus for such men. The family paid bride prices to a woman’s kin for the transfer of woman’s work and productivity, and for the children she bore. Yet marriage didn’t change a clan and a woman still could go to her old lineage as a source of support-- she would have few rights in her spouse’s village til she had her own kids. Society tried to control the sexuality of in-marrying women more. Divorce for a young woman was hard because her patrilineage had to return the bridewealth. Yet once she had given birth to several kids she could depart without recompense and upon her return to her native village have full rights to status and products. Post-menopausal and divorced women could become well-established economically independent people in their own right.
In patrilineal societies there were still female initiation ceremonies, but no longer a first pregnancy ritual as in earlier Bantu history. Changes in the meaning of the word -gole changes also reveal the different ways patrilineal and matrilineal societies viewed marriage and motherhood. -Gole was the life stage before a woman became a –yadi (woman who had given birth). Around 700 CE, with a patrilineal shift, the proto-North Nyanza made –gole mean the ‘bride with maternal potential’. Thus, women shifted their life stages in the context of being a wife, and the authority of the role of mothers contracted in the African Great Lakes area North Nyanza. Women could take on the role of female husbands: within Agiyuku patriclans (living in modern Kenya), only fathers could start a lineage, but an older independent woman could pay a brideprice for a younger woman and thus become a female husband. The wife took on a male paramour to have children. Thus older women could start their own patrilineage within a patriclan.
The matrilineal Yao could also transcend the lineage philosophy. There was no need for a female husband since a mom’s kids belonged to her matriclan, but sometimes men looked for ways to increase their authority within the matrilineage. Many became traders and bypassed powerful older women and their requirement of brideservice for marriage, purchasing and marrying unfree kinless woman. These unfree (no-kinship ties) kinless individuals could father kids with a Yao man without obligation to perform brideservice (when a man to get a wife must work for or live with the bride’s family for a time) for a matrilineage, creating a patrilineage.
Matrilineal societies tended to distribute goods more widely among members of the matriclan, forming a social safety net. This made sense for migrating people who sought to build lives in new places and especially in less productive agricultural lands. But even in productive farming economies, matrilineal cooperatism maintained its appeal (like the Yao and Kongo who got wealthy through trade, though they were patrilineal).
Mashariki-descended societies belonging to the Kusi subgroup, notably the Nguni and Sotho in SE Africa, who became patrilineal, continued to use circumcision to initiate young men. The age groups of young men initiated at once often acted as military contingents too. Circumcision was preserved due to close culture interaction of Bantu with southern Cushitic people who also circumcised. By contrast, the ancestral Botatwe and Sabi people of east-central Africa dropped male circumcision, and the practice disappeared among Bantu people inhabiting much of the eastern parts of the Savannah belt.
Finally, many Bantu groups stayed matrilineal but simply ceased to practice circumcision at all from 1000 CE on. They maintained the seclusion, overseen by post-menopausal women of the lineage and elder, but not the circumcision.
The role of women and the matrilineage continued for a long time (or in perpetuity) after 0 CE in many areas. For one group, the mother of chief was most important—she placed in hollowed out trees with medicines during battles and the Bantu believed they would win as long as she remained safely in the trunk.
Bantu Culture: Woodcarvings, Body Art, Clothing, Furniture, Architecture
Bark cloth was very old, developed by the ancient Niger-Congo bantu ancestors before 6,000 BC. They produced -kando bark cloth by peeling the inner bark off Ficus trees, chemically treating and pounding the bark, then dyeing pieces of the cloth that was sewed together to make designs. Bark cloth even reached the status of currency in some areas. In the last few centuries, it’s been used in wall hangings and throw pillows in colonial-era and modern homes.
Raffia cloth was soft, silky, and durable and was beautiful. Worn by elite Tio and Laongo kingdoms just north of the lower Congo in the 1600s CE; it looked like velvet or silk. Weavers made it from the under-membranes of palm tree fronds, and it was easily dyed and could have complicated designs embroidered on it. In the Kuba Kingdom near the Sankuru river, men grew the raffia palms and wove cloth, and women embroidered the raffia and turned the cloth into skirts, tribute cloths, headdresses, and basketry. In the Kingdom of Kongo raffia cloth replaced currency around 1575 CE when the Portuguese seized control of the source of main local currency, cowrie shells. Raffia was used to pay legal fees and fines, and in the Kongo Kingdom paid bride wealth and tribute to central rulers. It was challenged in the mid-1600s when cotton cloth became fashionable and widely valued though mainly used by the powerful. Raffia was thereafter still used for ceremonies, but cotton was a status symbol.
Bantu carved from wood their boats, masks, religious objects, musical instruments, building materials, cooking implements, agricultural and medicinal tools, etc. Woodcarvers, created human forms, animals, and spirits. Symbolic stylized carvings for ancestors were important, and seen as containing spiritual energy that could positively help living people. Kongo people in modern Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Congo created ancestor portraits, “wooden human likenesses called -tumba”, which expressed sadness and symbolized a person looking into the future at his role as spirit. Kuba people produced -ndop, stylized carvings of living leaders to be kept in houses of pregnant women until after childbirth. A dead ruler’s spirit was thought to continue to reside in the -ndop, so future rulers had to display the symbol at official ceremonies. Bantu work actually really influenced Picasso, especially Bantu masks. Primarily men produced wood-carved art.
Women produced rock art associated with female initiation, using geometric figures and/or symbols to represent ideas. Much imagery was adopted from the Batwa, but unlike the Batwa, Mashariki Bantu women almost entirely used white clay, which was the ritual color and material of the spiritual world throughout Bantu history. Female initiates were “covered in white clay”. But rock or wall art older women drew for initiation ceremonies did include designs in red and black from the batwa.
Raised marks and scarification were used by many Bantu, layering these “beauty marks” to “create personal, generational, and community” identity. Most today do not practice it, but it’s use is spread over a wide area. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo to the west the Yombe, Bakuta, and Topoke and to the east the Yasayana, Luba, and Tabwa practice it. In Tanzania the Safwa practice it; in Zimbabwe the Shona do to this day. Artists cut incisions and place soot and fruit juice that turned shiny black in the incision, creating raised tattoo scars. Luba called this “ntapo” and used the same term to refer to decorations on gourds, pots, baskets, house walls, etc. Young women began this body art after initiation, choosing cultural designs and adding more as she became a mother and grandmother: Luba viewed these as enhancing status/beauty. The adult woman with no scars was called “man” or “slimy mushroom”. This indicated the importance of motherhood/mothers too. Elaborate hairdo and scarifications indicated that one was a mother in the modern Katanga province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Muslim Bantu along the east African coast would much later decorate their body with henna acquired from Indian ocean traders, especially at weddings.
In the proto-Bantu era people built rectangular homes with gabled roofs made of woven palm thatch, which helped preventing rain from pooling. The Mashariki Bantu still built these, but by 500 BC, many communities shifted to building round houses with cone roofs as they had learned from Nilo-Saharan neighbors, and thatching their roofs with grasses (evidence: the new word -bimb meaning to thatch which previously had just meant “to cover up”). The Northeast-coastal Bantu who settled along the Indian ocean from 0-1000 CE, kept building houses in the old style. Mashariki bantu in modern northern Tanzania adopted a rectangular house with a flat thatched roof plastered over with thick clay from their southern Cushite neighbors and used it somewhere between 0-1000 CE. The Swahili Bantu on the mortheast around 700 CE built distinctive houses and mosques from corals that divers cut and shaped under water while it was still pliable. It was brought up to shore to dry a durable and porous building material that kept people cool in the hot, humid environment. The houses were sealed with white limestone plaster to protect against deterioration. Mangrove forests surrounded the Swahili coasts; they used mangrove trunks as roof beams and supports. Muslim Swahili (because Islam forbade creating idols) carved ornate wooden doors and furniture with flowers and abstract designs. Swahili merchants lived in more and more decorated homes, and they even had indoor plumbing by the 1300s. The houses had a rectangular floor plan by a middle eastern-style flat roof. Merchants lived thus, but the average Swahili lived in traditional rectangular, gable-roofed houses.
The Shona empire Zimbabwe empire, developed in the 1200s, built in their capital city of Great Zimbabwe great stone buildings and stone walls. The Mwene or rulers of the region built upon the work of previous generations, as masons worked over a two hundred year period starting in the late 1100s CE to build and update Great Zimbabwe. Shona engineers in this empire cut stone to build the huge monuments of Great Zimbabwe (the empire’s royal residence, a great city), set in a valley surrounded by hills and giant boulders. The biggest structure in Great Zimbabwe is the Great Enclosure, an ellipsis built of millions of shaped granite stones set with no mortar and topped with huge carved birds. The stone birds were of religious significance to the Shona people. The structures were built of local granite and blended in with the surroundings; 18,000 people could have lived in the valley and structures around the great enclosure.
Pots were women’s technology. The seven terracotta “Lyndenburg” heads of the ancestors of the Shona and Sala of the 500s CE in modern South Africa are the best known early african pottery. Even to the 1900s women produced 90% of pots in Africa.
Bantu culture: Religion & Proverbs after 0 CE
The Haya in western Tanzania have a riddle asking which people never get their bellies full with beer, money, or wealth? The answer, the greedy one, indicates the social value of not desiring more than one needs.
A Bemba proverb indicated that a “real leader should make themselves humble”.
Bantu religions also underwent some developments after 0 CE. In 500 CE, the proto-Sabi in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, began to use a new word to name God, Leza. Implying that god now nurtures, doesn’t just create.
Ethnographies of the Bantu Buni on Bioki Island off the coast of Cameroon, recognize ancestor spirits as being key to guiding newborn children into the lineage. The WaGogo after 0 CE believed in a complex of spirits called milungo, and they had to please such spirits to secure societal well-being. In the Bantu Gogo of Tanzania, ancestors are believed to intervene on behalf of the living through the assistance of diviners, being supplicated when children become ill. This type of ritual is widespread among the Bantu, and the importance of ancestors is found all across Bantu ethnographies, in politics, arts, ritual, sacred sites, oral traditions, etc.
PART 2: EGYPT & THE SAHARA & NUBIA 0-600S CE (BEFORE ISLAM)
Egypt & the Sahara after 0 CE and before the birth of the Prophet Muhammed
The Romans controlled much of Northern Africa in the 100s BC after conquering Carthage, and northern Africa became known as the granary of the Roman empire. Roman control was concentrated in coastal towns surrounded by ‘villa belts’ of estates, drawing wealth from the Berber interior. These plains were Rome’s chief source of grain by 0 CE. During the next 3 centuries, drier areas became the empire’s main supplier of olive oil. Imperial properties by AD 422 occupied ⅙ of Roman territory in modern Tunisia; leased out to contractors who farmed part of the land with help from the tenants who stayed on the rest and paid one-third their crops in rent. Roman villas interspersed with Berber villages, and moving south it was mainly Berber villages. The Berbers built floodwater controls enabling them to grow olives on land with extremely minimal rainfall, only ⅓ that needed for olives elsewhere. Prominent Berbers adopted Roman culture and lifestyle, such as Memnius Pacatus, chief of the Chinithi tribe and head of a family that by 200 AD produced Roman senators. Berber goddess Tanit of Carthage became Juno Caelestis, the Roman Queen of Heaven. Berbers like Apuleius became mosaic artists and writers. The Berber pastoralists between the coast and the oases of the interior engaged in occasional rebellions against the Romans, but they relied on grain, harvest, and grazing stubble in the northern zones where they drove their stock each summer, and the Romans tried to control these pastoralists by creating a line of ditches, lateral roads, and strong-points known as the limes running parallel with the coast from Morocco to Libya to police them.
The Sahara was quite dry by this time, and Berbers pastoralists clustered to oases, depending on horses for communication and the camels that came into use after 0 CE. The main group in this desert economy were the Garamantes of the Fezzan, descended from both the Berbers and farther south groups, who built thousands of kilometers of underground irrigation channels in their oasis, numbered 50,000-100,000 living at this oasis, and cultivated wheat, barley, dates, vines, and olives. They clashed with Roman expeditions but then built up a trading relationship importing roman models and building materials for a stone capital, and exporting slaves, exotic goods, and semiprecious stones. They raided at least as far south as Lake Chad. The Garamantes peaked during the 100s and 200s AD, and declined coincident with Rome. Berber chiefs created successor states replacing the Romans on the coast, one ruler in 508 CE proclaiming himself “King of the Moorish and Roman Peoples”. Vandals from Spain invaded North Africa, took Carthage a decade later, extended their power to north Africa.
The trans-Saharan trade also became extremely important during this period. The Sahara was traversed occasionally in early days; we know this because Roman coins from 0-200 CE were found south of the Sahara. The Garamantes of the Fezzan in modern Libya exported ivory and a few black slaves north in Roman times. But by about 300 AD the climate was less arid, with more rainfall, and the Berbers were using camels and the desert was open to trade. Roman Carthage by 296 used Senegalian gold to make coins, and gave a standard gold weight (solidus coins) to west African producers. By 700 CE Kairwan, an Islamic city on the coast of north Africa. A new trade base was established by Kharijite Berbers in 700 CE in Eastern Fezzan at Zawila. This supplied black slaves to Ifriqiya, Egypt, and the Middle East. Meanwhile, Herodotus reports that the Phoenicians, organized by King Necho II of Egypt, went on a sea journey around the entire continent of Africa in the 400s CE.
Alexandria was founded by Alexander the Great around 300 BC, and became the capital of Egypt until the Islamic conquest in 641 CE. Alexandria was famous for its great lighthouse (one of the seven wonders of the ancient world), its great library which attracted many scholars, and its Necropolis (one of the wonders of the middle ages, founded in the 100s CE.)
By 100 CE, Alexandria in Egypt had converted to Christianity. Starting soon after the birth of Christ, Christianity rapidly spread to Egypt via Alexandria, where the Coptic Christian church developed, by 325 the Bible was widely disseminated in the Coptic language (ancient Egyptian in Greek script), and there were at least 51 bishoprics. In 312 Constantine had made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire, and by 400 AD 90% of Egyptians were Christians. By the 300s CE, Christianity had grown from a persecuted sect to the dominant one throughout the Roman empire. Many Christian doctrines would be formulated in Africa.
Christianity from 30-630 AD rapidly spread to the Maghreb (North Africa) by 180 CE where in 284 CE many Christians were martyred and persecuted by Roman emperors in North Africa and Numidia (the Berber-dominated inland plains of present Algeria). Diocletian then launched the great persecution in 303, and church leaders who surrendered scriptures for destruction were then excommunicated by a group of purists, the Donatists. According to Donatism, a true Christian could never surrender before persecution, and the movement rose up and remained in force until 400 CE when it was decried by St. Augustine of Hippo, who turned the focus from acts (martyrdom) to inner faith, and the Catholic Church declared donatism a criminal offence in 411 CE. Nevertheless, Donatism lived on in Numidia in north Africa until the 600s CE Arab invasion.
As a chief example of a Christian doctrine formulated in Africa, the 451 AD council of Chalcedon created a schism between the monophysite Egyptians (who believed that Christ had one nature), and the Byzantines, Romans and upper class who believed Christ had two distinct natures, one human and one divine, and who tried to impose control over Egypt. Some historians argue that this infighting weakened the Christians, so that in 639 the Muslims were able to take control, keeping the Coptic Christians as dhimmi (protected groups who paid tribute.)
The majority of theologians in those days were not in Rome, but in Alexandra or Tunisia or Algeria. Many credit St. Anthony, who according to tradition lived in a cave in the eastern desert of Egypt in the Red Sea Hills, with founding the monastic tradition; pilgrims still worship at the mouth of this cave. The monastic ideal was based on idea of going into solitude to connect with God, of recapturing early Christianity’s ideals of feeding the poor, being self-sufficient, working hard, rather than just being educated and studying texts. The monastery became a center of preserving the tenets of the faith.
Kush after 0 CE
South of Egypt, Lower Nubia’s prosperity was revived in the early Christian era with the arrival of new crops and animal-driven waterwheel irrigation. In Lower Nubia, new leaders acquired luxuries from the north, adopted royal regalia, and were buried with their beloved horses just as spectacularly as the ancient Egyptian kings.
The area in Nubia north of the 3rd cataract was sparsely settled, and further south in Meroe people settled in the Dongola reach mostly in river basins. Farther south, permanent agricultural settlements may have existed along the Blue and White Niles, and the savannah and the rainlands were the key nexus of Meroe, with monument centers like Musawwarat es Sofra and Naqa. We know relatively little about the Meroitic economy and the relative importance of agriculture, local productivity, or subsistence living, but we do believe external trade was important, and Meroe imported goods from Egypt and the Mediterranean found from lower Nubia to Sennar. This trade collapsing may even have led to the decline of royal power. Sorghum was dominant, and some surplus was produced to support the royal families, but historians argue that raiding and trade were more important sources of power. Sheep, goat, and cattle herding was widespread and wheat was introduced later. There were stone and brick buildings, temples, water tanks (as many as 800 scattered in the region, which took organized labor to build and maintain), and deep wells. The water tanks may have been useful in maintaining control over a dispersed or mobile population, and they often were closely associated with small temples. The local royal cult of Apedemak was the subject of many small temples. Apedemak is a war-god, with also some indications of a role as a provider of food and fertility god. In the Butana (a plain in modern day Sudan surrounded by rivers), though not elsewhere, there’s some evidence for state controls over subsistence. The palaces were where commodities or weapons were collected and stored, not so much the temples, except maybe at one temple at Meroe but this may have been associated with a nearby palace. At the palaces, sealings of jars, baskets, sacks, wooden chests and doors were intentionally stored, showing the palace stored and processed many different foodstuffs and commodities. They had a sophisticated written accounting system. At Wad Ben Naqa in the Shendi Reach, palaces contain groups of storage jars for foods, also ivory and wooden blocks (maybe ebony). Or maybe palaces were just centers of consumption. A lot of the trade probably took place through the form of royal gift-giving and exchange between leaders of different polities. The imperial powers also gave gifts/subsidies to their peripheral states (like Meroe), and the Kushite Kings gave to their northern neighbors at an early date. Between 525 and 521 BC the Persian embassy to Ethiopia brought a purple cloak, gold, incense, alabaster, and palm wine and the Ethiopians gave the Persians in 521-486 BC gold, blocks of ebony, five slave boys, and twenty elephant tusks.
Strabo also describes one Nubian group in 22 CE that used clubs armed with iron knobs, spears and shields covered in raw hides, and bows and lances. These were herding people, traveling by night with their cattle, the bulls having bells around their necks to scare away wild beasts (they also used flaming torches and arrows to scare away predators). He wrote of these Nubians that they kept sheep, goats, and oxen, and also dogs, and ate millet, barley, meat, milk, butter, and cheese.
Imports to Kush & Meroe south of Egypt (discovered in burials) included jewelry, metal goods, silver and bronze vessels, bronze lamps, glassware, wooden furniture, faience, and ceramics. Three categories of pottery: fine tablewares, wine and oil containers, utilitarian kitchen and storage vessels. Fine tablewares were small class of imports but came from as far as Greece, and amphorae (tall thin-necked containers came from as far as France, north Africa, Greece, and Egypt). The biggest group of imports is cooking utility vessels from the Aswan area, common in lower Nubia-- otherwise mostly imported luxury items, like the silver vessels, jewelry, fancy glasswork etc found in royal burials, and small in number but widespread egyptian wine/oil containers, metalwork, simple bronze bowls, glassware, etc. These were rarely found as far south as Sennar, almost absent where they are abundant farther north (north of the 2nd cataract). Luxury items were probably controlled and redistributed and dispersed by the central power, whereas Egyptian ceramics might have been obtained in the frontier areas more informally (not by the royal monopoly).
Farther south lay Meroe. The Kondakes or the Roman term “Candaces”, the queens of Meroe (the capital of ancient Kush at the time), kept the Romans at bay for several hundred years. Petronius invaded Nubia in 23 BC, sacking Napata before turning back. The Greek writer Strabo claims this was due to the bad conditions of the roads, while other historians contend it was due to the fierce resistance of the people of Kush led by their one-eyed warrior queen Amanirenas.
According to Strabo the Greek, the Ethiopians (Meroites/Kushites) under their queen Amanirenas attacked Syene (modern Aswan), Elephantine (at Aswan at the 1st cataract), and Philae (another island near Aswan), enslaving the inhabitants and destroying statues of Caesar. A Roman general, Petronius, was able to retake the cities and rout the Ethiopians to a city (Pselchis) now submerged by Lake Nasser below Aswan. Petronius also attacked and took Pselchis and then Napata, which he razed and enslaved the inhabitants. He then left the area (Strabo says “on account of the roads”, but Strabo and Dio Cassius are biased sources who views the Roman military machine as far superior), and left a garrison at Premnis. The one-eyed Queen (Kondake), attacked the garrison, and Petronius had to return to reinforce it. Finally the Queen sent ambassadors to Caesar, who brokered a peace deal with Caesar that also involved lifting the tribute that had been imposed on the Ethiopians.
Strabo wrote of Meroe that it is a royal seat, on a mountainous and forested island with mines of copper, iron, gold, various precious stones, and rock salt, and surrounded on one side by sand dunes and on the other by crags. It is surrounded by the White and Blue Nile. According to Strabo, the houses there are made of interwoven split palm wood, or of bricks. In the area they had peach, ebony, and carob trees and hunt elephants, lions, and panthers. They dispute over territory with the Libyans (nomadic desert peoples). They use wood hardened 6-foot wood bows, and the women fight as well and sometimes wear a upper lip copper ring. They wear sheepskins, or wear loincloths in warm weather. Strabo claimed the people elected their king based on his special qualities: beauty, skill at breeding cattle, wealth, or courage. According to this account, the priests anciently were the most powerful and deposed kings sometimes, until one king decided to turn this state of affairs around and went to the temple of the golden shrine and killed the priests. The custom is that any harm done to the king, his attendants must also undergo, including death-- causing the king to be guarded with great care.
Meroe also had a thriving iron industry. But we don’t have enough archaeological evidence to discover what kind of iron tools they used mainly, though small arrowheads, spears, knives and hoes have been found but not yet any swords or battle axes, except in royal reliefs where they might have been symbolic. Pottery was very common and widespread too, often find and elaborate, and with social significance at times especially in mortuary rites. Cotton cloth manufacture was quite important in central Sudan, and it may have been important in Meroe. Glass, metalwork, and faience (tin-glazed) pottery may have been important manufactures.
Between 60 and 56 BC there were envoys from Meroe in Egypt, and they continued to send envoys to the Romans. In 235 AD one envoy went to Philae bringing gifts, and brought gifts back to Meroe.
Taxation and control over subsistence was probably limited to the kingdom’s core-- especially in western Butana-- where the control of permanent water supplies was the focus of tribute gathering. Elsewhere, procurement of resources was based on raiding, or on the control of regions providing exotic goods like gold around the Blue Nile and ivory, animal skins, and ostrich feathers around the rainland zones, whether through customary rights or tributes.
Political alliances might have been mediated through trading prestige goods, and other things like expertise and skills and ideas might have transferred through alliances too, leading to the adoption and assimilation of Egyptian royal cults, as demonstrated in the series of Amun temples at Meroe and at centers in the Dongola Reach.
The key to Sudanic power was: the control of exchange networks and prestige-goods via trade, the procurement of valuables through warfare, and control over ritual (helping bind together different groups, also borrowing from Egyptian cults at time). Less important were the development of administrative structures and the direct control of production. Similar patterns seen in the Middle Nile in the medieval times and after, and archaeological research into the Kushite state suggests they existed much earlier. So Sudan may have had an independent state earlier than thought.
The Bible also speaks of Nubia in 90 AD: the Kondake during this time kept a eunuch as a court official, who the bible says was converted to Christianity. Side note: Jebel Barkel is the name of mountains in modern-day Sudan near modern-day Khartoum.
Meroe was weakened by a shift in trade from the Nile to the Red Sea when Rome occupied Egypt, and there was increased violence and economic decline. In 325 CE, King Ezana of Aksum went to war against the Nubians of Meroe to quell their revolt, and defeated them as well as burning their masonry and straw towns. He traveled for 23 days after them, arriving at Kush (at Meroe) which he destroyed. After the collapse of Meroe in the 300s CE, Nubian rulers created three kingdoms: Nobatia in the north, Makuria in the center, and Alwa or Alodia in the south. In Nobatia, Christianity grew from the bottom up, from the commoners to the nobles. Missionaries from Egypt or Constantinople helped carry it. The three kingdoms rapidly adopted monophysite Christianity, and remained Christian for a thousand years, although pagan temples survived for two more centuries. Styles changed from Coptic to Byzantine, Greek religious language was translated to Nubian in Greek script, and kings adopted the religion. Nobatia converted to Christianity in the mid-500s CE, and became one with the kingdom of Makuria with the capital at Dongola between 690 and 710 CE. Styles changed from Coptic to Byzantine, Greek religious language was translated to Nubian in Greek script, and kings adopted the religion. In the Nubian desert, archaeologists found a 600s CE Christian cathedral at modern Faras in the capital of ancient Nobatia, now submerged under floodwaters. One mural depicts the Virgin Mary, crowned like a Nubian Princess and with the archangels Michael and Gabriel watching over her, with baby Jesus in a crib, and a Nubian King in a corner. However, Nubian Christianity did not survive completely as Ethiopian Christianity has, although it lasted for a thousand years. Some scholars have suggested that perhaps this is because Nubian Christianity did not fully adapt to the local culture. Mary and Jesus were depicted in Nubian art as white, while the queens and kings of Nubia were depicted as brown or black. Alwa was further south at the confluence of the blue and white Nile, and while also subject to influence from the north and Egypt had increased Arab and Islamic influence over time.
Procopius of Caesarea: History of the Wars (a Roman history published in the 500s CE) says that the Roman control extends to Aswan, and between Aswan and Ethiopia are the nations of the Nubians and the Blemmyae (a nomadic Beja tribal kingdom that existed from 600 BC to at least the 400s CE in Nubia; Strabo described them as a peaceful people living in the eastern desert near Meroe). Also Romans set up a temple and altars for the local Nubians and Romans at an the island of Philae (named “friendship” to improve relations between the Nubians and Blemmyae and Romans), and even paid a fixed amount of gold to them provided they didn’t plunder the Romans. It says the Nubians believe in the Roman and Greek pantheon and also in Isis and Osiris and a fertility/agricultural/nature God.
Egypt & Kush in the Islamic Era (after 623 CE)
Later Kingdoms in the Middle Nile after the spread of Islam were the Keira in Darfur and Funj Sennar, in the 1600s and 1700s CE. Arab groups in Darfur had introduced camel nomadism, and cattle nomadism and hoe agriculture were practiced in wetter areas. In the late 1600s, land was plentiful but the state was putting it into estates regulated by Islamic law, whose holders owned rights to lesser (‘by custom’) taxes and dues from tenants plus their labour, while direct taxes were paid to Sultan. They mainly benefited from owning livestock through these estates, so controlling people to be herders for lord’s herds was most important. Only members of the royal Keira clan had full rights to the land and its taxes, as well as later Muslim religious leaders and merchants. The wealth derived was used to maintain the royal palace and for ritual roles. In the late 1800s is there also evidence a network of granaries was installed throughout the kingdom to supply the royal troops.
PART 4: WEST AFRICA
The Savanna/Sahel Kingdoms
In West Africa, populations were concentrated in the savannah and along coastal areas of fishing and trade. Infertile rainforest soils needed 30 or 40 years to regenerate between cropping cycles, and changing climates (the shrinking and spreading of the Sahara) threatened agriculture even in the savannah areas.
Nevertheless, after 0 CE, an age of commerce, cities, and empire began in West Africa. In Old Jenne (jenne-jeno), a thriving commercial town rose up with not much social stratification or central authority in the form of powerful rulers. Jenne Jeno is located on the Niger in modern Mali. Interestingly, archaeologists haven’t found much agricultural intensification associated with the city. In the late pre-0 CE deposits at Jenne trade across the Sahara must have been very small, although there is evidence that West Africans traded with the Garamantes of the Fezzan in modern Libya, who exported ivory and a few black slaves north in Roman times. But by about 300 AD the climate was less arid, with more rainfall, and the Berbers were using camels and desert was open to trade. The trans-Saharan trade would be important in the development of great cities and empire. Other great cities included Gao and Timbuktu, located on the banks of the Niger river. By the 1000 ADs, horses in the savannah and later firearms, especially in the forested areas, were key to the rise of several states. At this time near Jenne Jeno, raiding was the most direct method for a state to gain wealth externally, but trade was even more important, usually involving luxury goods.
The earliest empire was Wagadu (Ghana), which rose to prominence before 500 CE, stretching from the inland delta of the Niger to modern-day Senegal, on top of key trade routes linking southern goldfields to the merchant networks of the Sahara. Ghana/Wagadu was a kingdom of the Soninke people, black speakers of a Niger-Congo language. At a time when cities did not exist in Europe north of Spain, urban life flourished in Wagadu and all across the western and central Sudan belt. The capital of Wagadu (Ghana) was Khoumbi Salah, and the town of Awdaghust or Aoudaghust was very important as well. Gaining control of Aoudaghust enabled Ghana to establish a monopoly over the gold trade and have access to salt from the Sahara. Ghana is first mentioned in an Arab source around 790 AD from Berber Kharijites at Tahert who traded over the Sahara; the source describes the trade route as running west from Tahert to southern Morocco and then south to Awdaghust and Ghana, following easy crossing parallel to the Atlantic coast. Ghana thus was strategically located along this route northeast of the Bambuk goldfield, in a position to control the gold trade (though not necessarily gold production). Ghana’s royal town had a palace and a city walls, and the King decorated himself with gold. The king was not a Muslim, though many of his ministers were. Ghana had several rivals: it was challenged from the west by the Takrur kingdom on the Senegal, which siphoned away Bambuk’s gold to feed the newly created Islamic Almoravid empire. But anciently, Ghana’s commercial rival was Gao, later the capital of Songhai, where Mali and the Niger meet. Like Ghana’s capital, Gao was a dual town on both banks of the Niger, with a desert route leading north to Tahert and North African coast. Ghana also coexisted with Kanem.
To the west in the Chad Basin north of Lake Chad, the Kanem-Borno empire built its wealth and power from the 800s-1400s by controlling neighboring states’ access to trade. Kanem and its successor Borno states supplied states to buy horses in return. Many slaves went to the Islamic Aghlabids who ruled Ifriqiya and relied on black slave soldiers, as did their Fatimid and Zirid successors. Kanem was one of Africa’s main savanna kingdoms, coexisting with the states of Ghana and Gao to its west. The same Arab source that mentions Ghana as a trading partner for Kharijite Berbers from Tahert indicates that Kharijite Berbers located at Zawila traded with Kanem.
Following Wagadu (Ghana) after its decline in the late 1100s CE, a group known as the Susu or Soso gained power for a time, and sought to control of the goldfields. Soso territorial ambition was soon halted by Sundiata Keita, the great warrior-king of legend who rallied the local kings to defeat the Soso ruler and subsequently founded the empire of Mali, which lasted from the 1240s CE to 1545 CE, controlling both gold and northern outlets of the trade. The Malinke-speaking people, with their capital located close to the Bure goldfields, formed the Mali Empire which replaced the non-Islamic Soninke-speaking people of Ghana as the great empire of the time. This empire centered not only on the desert edge but in the agricultural upper Niger valley, growing larger than Ghana had been. By the early 1300s Mali officially became Islamic and Ibn Battuta admired the Malian peoples’ assiduity in prayer in 1352, though masked dancing, public recitation of pagan traditions, abasement before the king, eating unclean foods, and scanty female clothing remained as traditions. The story of Sundiata and the early days of Mali can be found in Mali’s national oral epic Sundiata: An Epic of Mali). Later the kings of Mali (the Mansaw singular Mansa) would become Muslim, as would many of the empire’s people.
PRIMARY SOURCE: IBN BATTUTA
Ibn Battuta, born in Tangier in Morocco, in 1352 CE crossed the Sahara toward the Sudan region of west Africa. He first went to Sijilmasa, a caravan town at the edge of the desert where camels could be bought, then Taghaza (a desert salt mining town worked by slaves of the Massufa tribe set among sand dunes, which had mosques at this time which along with the houses were built of blocks of salt and roofed with camel skins). Crossing the desert was dangerous, and getting separated from the caravan or your guide getting lost meant death by thirst. Same thing if the “takshif” (a man hired to go ahead to carry letters and prepare the town for a caravan) got lost. It was a 2 month journey from Sijilmasa to the oasis town of Walata on the northern edge of Mali. In his life, Ibn Battuta made a pilgrimage to Mecca at 21 and then traveled to East Africa and much of Asia, including China. He returned to India in 1345 and then to Ceylon, Sumatra, Baghdad, and Cairo, reaching Fez in 1349 and in 1352 crossing the Sahara toward the Sudan and traversing the kingdom of Mali (1238-1468). He describes firsthand the customs of Mali and Gao at that time.
“Sijilmasa was a caravan town at the edge of the desert where camels from be bought. Taghaza in the desert was a salt mining town set among sand dunes, and it had mosques by 1352. Its houses and mosques were built of salt and roofed with camel skins. They find the salt formed naturally in thick rectangular slabs, and a camel carries two of these slabs. The inhabitants of Taghaza are the slaves of the Massufa tribe who live on dates brought from Dar’a and Sijilmasa, camel meat, millet from the South, and local brackish water. It exports the salt to the south, where its price varies by town: a load is from 8-10 mithqals in Walata, and 20-30 in the city of Mala. Salt is used as a medium of exchange in the cities to the south of the desert.
Travelers wear necklaces of mercury to kill lice, which are common in areas of the desert. Caravan travel was dangerous as those who went ahead or lagged behind to graze their animals could get lost and die of thirst.
Tisarahla was an oasis with an underground water-source.
IIt was about a two month journey from Sijilmasa to the oasis of Walata, the northernmost city of the subsaharan west Africans. It was ruled by a deputy of the sultan, Farba Husayn. Merchants deposited their goods in the square where they were guarded, and travelers went o visit the deputy (‘farba’). The inspector of Walata also invited those who came with to partake in a meal of pounded millet, a little honey, and milk.
Ibn Battuta stayed in Walata for 50 days and was fed and entertained by its populace. The city of Walata is hot, with a few date-palms with watermelons growing under, and is an oasis with an underground watersource. Walata had access to plenty of sheep meat. The people there are mostly of the Massufa tribe and “wear fine Egyptian fabrics”. The women are accorded an equal position in society to men, did not wear a veil, and the society is matrilineal so that men claim descent from their mother’s brother not father, and a person’s heirs are his sister’s sons. The people here are also Muslims who observe five times daily prayer, study law books, and memorize the Koran. Married women stay at home and do not travel with their husbands. Both the women and the men freely take lovers, including Islamic judges (qadis) and theologians who had traveled to Mecca.
The “takshif” was a man hired to go ahead to Walata to carry letters and prepare the town for a caravan, sending out an envoy to meet the travelers about 4 days out from the town with water and give them lodging. If the takshif gets lost (which is easy, because there is no visible road) or dies in the desert, most or all of those traveling in the caravan may also die. The takshif was paid a hundred gold mithqals.
The city of Walata was hot, with a few date-palms with watermelons growing under them, where they people ate mutton and some wore fine Egyptian fabrics. The women of Walata were accorded an equal position in society and don’t wear a veil, the society is matrilineal, and women and men freely take lovers. The people of Walata are devout Muslims praying five times daily, studying law books, and memorizing the Quran.
~Ibn Battuta gets from Walata to Mali~
“The road to Mali from the desert is kept extremely safe, and along the way are many baobab trees which can serve as shelters from the heat, or once the inside is rotted sources of rainwater and drinking water. They have bee-hives providing honey. Malian people have weavers, and one actually used a baobab tree to set up his loom and weave. Travellers carry salt and glass ornaments which they trade for food (millet, milk, chickens, pulped lotus fruit, rice, “funi” grain couscous, gruel, mashed haricot beans) at local villages. Interestingly, the rice can make some of the whites who ingest it ill.
The cities of Kabara, Zagha (known for its devotedly Islamic people), Timbuktu, Gogo, and Muli along the Niger are part of the Malian empire. Farther down the river is Yufi, a large town ruled by a Kingdom outside the Malian empire, whose inhabitants kill any white visitors.
The Sultan (Mansa Sulayman) holds ceremonial audiences in the palace yard on a platform under a tree with three steps called the “pempi”, carpeted with silk and with cushions, and covered with an umbrella pavilion of silk surmounted by a golden bird the size of a falcon. The sultan arives wearing a golden skull-cap bound with a gold band with tapered knife-shaped ends, wears a velvety red tunic of European fabrics, and carries a bow and quiver. He slowly walks to the pempi and when he is seated drums, trumpets, and bugles are sounded and the deputy and military commanders enter. Two saddled and bridled horses and two goats are brought to protect against the evil eye, and Dugha the intepreter or griot stands at the gate while the people stay in the street under the trees. When summoned before him, a Malian must replace his clothes with worn garments and a dirty skullcap, raise his garments and trousers knee-high, and prostrate himself before the sultan hitting the ground with his elbows. He then stands with his back bent and head down, and if the King speaks to him he uncovers his back and throws dust over his head and back, and if sultan speaks to the audience, they took off their turbans and put them down and listen in silence. One sometimes mentions what he has done for the sultan, and those who know he did so pluck a bow and “twang” it. If the sultan confirms this and thanks him, he again covers his back with dust.
The Malians have “two festivals: of the sacrifice and of the fast-breaking”. The sultan prays in midafternoon, rises to the pempi, and armour bearers bring in quivers and swords and lances and maces of gold and silver. Four amirs stand at his head waving off the flies with silver ornaments looking like saddle stirrups. The commanders, qadi, and preachers sit around. The interpreter Dugha has 4 wives and 100 slave girls, who wear beautiful robes and wear gold and silver pieces with gold and silver balls attached on their heads, and Dugha plays a reed and calabash instrument and chants a poem in praise of the sultan recording his bravery and battle deeds. Women and girls sing along, and 30 youths wearing red wool tunics and white skull caps beat their individual drums, and boy students turn wheels in the area and also play with swords, as does the griot. The sultan then gifts the griot Dugha a purse with 200 mithqals of fold dust. The commanders rise and twang bows in thanks, and the next day each gives Dugha the griot a gift, while Dugha carries out a similar ceremony every Friday after the main prayer. Poets on feast days after Dugha’s display wear bird masks with a wooden head and red beak made of feathers. They recite poems to the sultan recounting the deeds of ancient kings, and exhorting the king to do great deeds so he too might be remembered. The poet chief as a mark of respect lays his head on the sultan’s lap, then on the soldier’s right shoulder and left, speaking during this time. This is an ancient custom.
The Sultan gave as a gift to Ibn Battuta some beef and cakes of bread after the banquet.
The roads of Mali are extremely safe for travelers and brigands are not tolerated.
The city of Mali, capital of the Malian empire, had its own quarters for foreigners, and had a qadi Abd ar-Rahman who had been to Mecca. One of the great men there was the interpreter and djeli or griot Dugha. The king of Mali during this time was Mansa Sulayman, Mansa meaning king or sultan in Mandingo. The king of Mali held a banquet to which he invited generals, doctors, judges or qadis, and preachers, and there he read the Koran at reading desks and the invitees prayed for Mansa Sulayman and for the late sultan of Morocco Abu’l-Hasan.
The Malian people hate injustice, and their sultan “shows no mercy to anyone who is guilty of the least act of injustice”. The country is totally secure, and inhabitants and travellers don’t fear robbery or highwaymen. They even return the wealth of foreigners who die in their country to the rightful hair. They carefully observe the hours of prayer, attend services at the mosque so that the mosques are totally full each Friday and men send their boys to go early to stake out a place for them by laying down their prayer mat made out of woven palm, wear clean white clothes on Friday, and and bring up their children as Muslim: they see it as so important to learn the Koran that one qadi chained up his children on a festival day until they had learned the Koran by heart. The women servants, slaves, and young girls walk about naked and see the sultan thus, and his daughters do too. As a mark of respect they put dust and ashes on their heads. They also eat dog and donkey meat.”
Ibn Battuta was in Mali from 1352-1353, and traveled by camel (horses are expensive cost a hundred mithqals each) and crossed a channel near the Niger that had to be crossed by boats, at night to avoid mosquito, and that had many hippos in it. Boatmen fear the hippopotami that swim in the Niger on the way from Timbuktu to Gogo and keep to the banks to avoid getting sunk. People also hunt the hippopotami using spears with holes in them through which cords are attached, throwing the spears right through their legs or necks and then pulling the hippopotami up the bank by the rope.
“At a village down the Niger was a village governed by Farba Magha, who had traveled to Mecca with Sultan mansa Musa. Mansa Musa brought with him a white qadi, and the qadi tried to steal 4,000 mithqals, so he was exiled to the land of the cannibals where he stayed for 4 years (but wasn’t eaten because his white skin was viewed as indigestible) before the sultan sent him back to his country.
Ibn Battuta reports that the people to the south wear giant ear pendants, and wrap themselves in silk cloaks, and mine gold in their country. He also says they are cannibals and the sultan actually gave them a female servant who they killed, ate, and smeared themselves with her blood.
Timbuktu’s inhabitants are mostly members of the Massufa tribe, who wear the face-veil. Its governor is Farba Musa, and when he appointed a Massufa to be an amir (officer), he gave him a dyed cloth robe, turban, and trousers, sat him on a shield and lifted the shield above their heads. In this town is the grave of a great poet from Granada.
Down from Timbuktu on the Nile is Gogo, a large city on the nile and one of the biggest and best-provisioned, with lots of rice, milk, and fish, and a delicious species of cucumber called inani. They use cowry-shells as a currency, as they do at Mali. Tagadda is another merchant town.” END OF PRIMARY SOURCE IBN BATTUTA
Before Ibn Battuta’s time, what happened to Mali? How did it rise up? Traditions in Mali related that it was already an empire when the Soso attacked and took over Mali as well, and the ruler of the Soso, Sumaouro Kanté took over the land.[24] Ibn Khaldun, who cited Shaykh Uthman, the faqih of Ghana, writing in 1394: according to this source, the Almoravids weakened Ghana and collected tribute from the Sudan, to the extent that the authority of the rulers of Ghana dwindled away, and they were subjugated and absorbed by the Susu, a neighboring people of the Sudan, before the Malian empire rose up. The story of the origin of the Malian Empire is detailed in the book Sundiata or Sunjata. However criticism from Conrad and Fisher (1982) argued that the notion of any Almoravid military conquest at its core is merely perpetuated folklore, derived from a misinterpretation or naive reliance on Arabic sources.[25] According to Professor Timothy Insoll, the archaeology of ancient Ghana simply does not show the signs of rapid change and destruction that would be associated with any Almoravid-era military conquests.[26] Dierke Lange agreed with the original military incursion theory but argues that this doesn't preclude Almoravid political agitation, claiming that the main factor of the demise of Ghana empire owed much to the latter.[27] According to Lange, the Almoravid religious influence was gradual and not heavily involved in military strife; there the Almoravids increased in power by marrying among the nation's nobility. Lange attributes the decline of ancient Ghana to numerous unrelated factors, only one of which can be likely attributable to internal dynastic struggles that were instigated by Almoravid influence and Islamic pressures, but devoid of military conversion and conquest.[28] Anyway, the empire of Ghana did decline and it was followed by the empire of Mali.
The third great savannah empire was Songhai, from the middle 1400s to late 1500s, which controlled major Sahel trading cities and the salt trade of the Sahara.
Islam also got involved after early Muslim conquests of north Africa from 642-710. Islam became the religion of trans-Saharan trading networks, and of merchants and commercial centers in the Wagadu (Ghana) and Mali Empires. Islam reached West Africa via the trade routes across the Sahara desert. Exports of gold from the western savannah increased steadily: in the 700s, they were only found at Kairwan and Fustat in Egypt. But gold was a mark of the Caliph (the civil and religious ruler of the Muslim community), so when the Umayyad Caliphate in Spain, Fatimids in Ifriqiya, and the Amoravids and Almohads in Morocco aspired to this, they all began to coin gold. Then Genoa and Florence in 1252, Venice in 1284, and northern European states in later 1300s began to coin gold, largely from Africa, leading to a late medieval gold rush. The expansion of the gold trade augmented the power of the empire of Ghana in West Africa initially (which maintained a gold monopoly especially via control of the trading city of Awdaghust), until new goldfields at Bure at the Niger Headwater emerged, while at the same time Ghana’s location on the desert edge suffered due to drying out after 1100 CE. The ruler of Ghana’s contemporary, the city of Gao, was the first in tropical Africa to accept Islam (1040), followed by Kanem (near Lake Chad) in 1067, while Ghana became Islamic under Almoravid pressure in the 1070s CE. Around 1000-1100 CE, the rulers of the Takrur Kingdom in modern Senegal, and the Kanem Empire around Lake Chad at the border of modern Chad, Niger, Nigeria, and Cameroon converted to Islam. In Takrur and Kanem it was a people’s religion; it Ghana and Gao it stayed limited to the courts.
Islam also was a significant part of Mali and Songhai. As already described, by the early 1300s Mali officially became Islamic and Ibn Battuta admired the Malian peoples’ assiduity in prayer in 1352, though masked dancing, public recitation of pagan traditions, abasement before the king, eating unclean foods, and scanty female clothing remained as traditions. In 1324, Mali’s most famous ruler, Mansa Musa, known for his vast wealth of gold, went on pilgrimage to Mecca. The city of Timbuktu in the 1200s was not only a trade center with Mediterranean and the Middle East, but a university town where noted Islamic scholars gathered to write and teach.
Djeli, known today as griots (bards) served as lessons on moral behavior and model citizenship. Over time, the question was is if they should serve the rulers or the people. Specialized occupation groups were sometimes in hierarchies, like blacksmiths, who formed a caste in the west African savanna that married within itself. Griots, warriors, and merchants were castes. But people also “treated these groups were treated more as ethnicities than castes”, like “Fulbe herders and Jula merchants”. Elders and council members in a family were very powerful; they decided adoption rules and could excommunicate family members, send children to other families for apprenticeship or as pawns (security for loan of land or wealth).
Commonly power relations in the Sudanic states involved limited centralized states and poorly defined territories, but extensive ritual power over the inhabitants. Agricultural intensification and managing surpluses was a common theme in Eurasian civilizations and Pharaonic Egypt-- but this role is harder to define in the Sudan, may not be as important. Although control of productive river systems might well have been important. There were less surpluses and intensive agriculture in the Sudan, and land didn’t have as much value as it was abundant but poor quality. Labor remained the most important factor of production, and controlling people was more important than controlling land.
States in these areas (for example in Bornu-Kanem and Songhai) often were distinguished by their ability to make war and their dominance over trade. By the 1000 ADs, horses in the savannah and later firearms, especially in the forested areas, were key to the rise of several states. Raiding was one method for a state to gain wealth externally, but trade was even more important, usually involving luxury goods.
Forest Kingdoms (modern day Ghana, Nigeria, Ivory Coast etc.)
The rainforest and forest lands farther south also benefited from the introduction of new crops diffused from east African immigrants from Indonesia, such as the cooking banana or plantain (and in the 1500s the cassava or manioc) , which helped increase agricultural productivity and thus increase population size. Living in the rainforest was difficult because of the tsetse fly, which killed livestock and could sicken humans, malaria, and the infertility of rainforest soils which needed 30-40 years to regenerate. In spite of these challenges, intricate kingdoms and civilizations rose up.
South of the savannah empires, at the lower Niger River in today’s Nigeria, multiple civilizations grew up from 500-1000 CE. Ife, an early Yoruba city-state, became a major center of commerce, manufacturing glass beads, trading goods from the rainforest and the savannas, and making beautiful sculptures via brass casting using a long-lost wax method. Ife became the major religious and ritual center of the Yoruba.
The Igbo city of Igbo-Ukwe located in modern southeast Nigeria, a contemporary of Ile-Ife, was just as notable and was also an artistic center for brass sculpture and the capital of a state whose highly ritualized kings ruled the lands across the lower Niger, east of the Yoruba. Archaeologists have found grave-goods buried in the 800s CE with a ruler or ritual leader including bronze artifacts that showed a technical skill unequalled elsewhere in the world at the time. The symbolism on the bronze artifacts was just like that employed by the Igbo one thousand years later, implying cultural continuity. But the area was not isolated; grave-goods included glass beads probably from Egypt or the Middle East.
African Traditional Religions in West Africa
According to Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton, “Religion is a cultural response to perceived transcendent reality, affirmed by community, myth, and ritual, through which people attempt to bring their daily existence into closer alignment with their sense of spiritual reality”.
From the 600s CE, the Ife Yoruba peoples in modern day southwestern Nigeria practiced divination to learn about the hidden realities of the present. They used palm nuts and later cowrie shells for this divination, as is still done in modern Senegal. Ifá was a religion and a system of divination. The priest makes marks using cowry shells or palm nuts on sand, and must ascertain the meaning of these combinations of marks. 256 combinations of marks (Odu) existed, though to represent all possible situations. The Ifa priest was the babalowo, and he used ikin, sacred palm nuts, and ese (sets of verses chanted by priests in poetic language reflecting Yoruba history and beliefs). The religion’s literary corpus is the Odu Ifa, which basically is the set of the 256 combinations of marks thought to represent all possible situations and energies . Ifá was called Afá by the Igbo and Ewe peoples living nearby. To the Yoruba in Nigeria to this day, Ifa refers to mystical Ifa, the deity of wisdom and intellectual development, and Ifa relies on signs interpreted by diviner.
PART 5: ETHIOPIA & THE HORN OF AFRICA
Kingdom of Axum in Ethiopia: glory days of 0 CE-600s CE and the feudal period 600s CE-1100 CE
After the fall of D’mt or Daama in modern-day Ethiopia, the Kingdom of Aksum emerged in the first century CE during a time of rainfall with great stone buildings, stone stellae, and two centuries later roman-style coinage. Aksum engaged in trade and taxation on the Horn of Africa and in the southern Red Sea, extending also to south Arabia at times. According to one Roman source, Aksum was considered one of the four great empires of the ancient world at the time along with Rome, Persia, and India. King Ezana in Aksum in Ethiopia officially adopted Christianity in 333 CE thanks to the spread of the Coptic Church, years before Rome made Christianity its official religion in 380 CE (it issued an “edict of tolerance” in 1313 CE). Other religions remained, however, at least a hundred years later. The Bible was translated into Ge’ez, the language of Aksum.
Periplus of Erythraean sea, a Roman travelers’ guide, described the ports and trading partners encountered along the Red Sea describes a key port on the red sea, Adulis: the maritime gateway to the powerful ancient kingdom of Axum. Imports flowed into Adulis: copper and bronze, gold, silver, olive oil, and wine. Exports of ivory, rhinoceros horn, and turtle shell went the other way. Adulis was the gateway between the interior of Africa and the Red Sea and Middle east. Periplus provides a colorful account of the Aksumite King, Zosakles, who reigned in the middle of the first century AD, described as miserly in his ways but otherwise upright.
In the capital of Aksum, tall vertical Stellae (obelisks) were erected as grave markers. The rulers were buried under syenite (igneous granite-like rock). These stellae were aller than any other monoliths crafted in the ancient world. The biggest found was one of the largest single pieces of stone every carved in one piece, was 700 tons, took ten years to carve, and took 3 years to drag from the quarry. Historians believed it buckled and crashed during its erection. It is believed the stellae, made for Ella Amida or Ousanus, ruled during the golden age of Axum in 320 CE. Gold coins with his face and name, and inscribed in Greek, were actually unearthed in India. Ousanus’ son, Ezana, one of the most famous kings of Aksum, was memorialized by another great stellae. A network of chambers lie buried beneath the great stellae: these are the tombs of Kings; on one side in chambers they have the king’s body, and on the other side the possessions of the king. Carved into the stellae, are carved storeys, windows, even doorframes. 90% of ancient Aksum remains unexcavated beneath the city’s modern buildings. This was a city of 20,000, with a monumental palace at its center, “adorned with bronze statues and its grand processional ways lined with granite victory ways”. Aksum was powerful and wealthy because of its access to resources. Frankincense was a valuable religious commodity, thought to have magical powers. An aromatic gum resin produced from the bark of a tree growing very high up in a harsh environment and hard to get at, in the highlands of Ethiopia, Somalia, and Southern Arabia (the area of the kingdom of Aksum). Frankincense was a valuable in those days, pound-for-pound, as gold. Aksum practiced the same religion as ancient Yeha and Seba before it.
Axum converted to Christianity from the top down, as one of the first converts was King Ezana. According to The legend of Ezana, two Christian youths Fermentius and Edesius are traveling with their merchant father and are waylaid by pirates and their father killed. They are taken in by king Ousanus or Ella Amida in the court of Aksum, and they educate the king’s son Ezana. This story is realistic in the sense that Aksum was right in the center of the trade routes, so it is not unlikely that merchants would be sailing there. In the 300s CE, Aksum converted to Christianity (King Ezana converted in 333 CE). Earlier Aksumite coins had been embedded with a crescent (symbolizing the moon god, Al-maqah) and a disc (symbolizing the sun god, Shamash, a Mesopotamian deity). These gods had been worshipped in Yeha and Sheba for over a thousand years. King Ezana’s coins after his conversion had the symbol of a cross. Emperor Constantine of Rome had converted to Christianity just a couple of decades earlier. The two great civilizations might have done some business. Christianity from 30-630 AD and thereafter Islam as well rapidly spread to a variety of different societies in Africa. indigenous Cushitic traditions and the Coptic Church merged to form Ethiopian Christianity. The Bible was translated into Ge’ez, the language of Aksum. Ethiopia remained Christian, especially in its isolated highlands, to the present day.
Ezana had territorial ambitions, and in 350 CE began to conquer lands to north, heading toward Meroe, the third and last capital of the great kingdom of Kush. Aksum’s rise had brought Kush into decline, as Meroe’s trade-based economy suffered. During Ezana’s attack, Aksum conquered Meroe and smashes statues into small bits, capturing and burning down the city. The Aksumite empire then extended from the horn of Africa to Southern Arabia, and was considered one of the greatest empires of its day.
Procopius of Caesarea (a Roman history) says that in 550 CE, Ellesthaeus, king of Ethiopia, hearing that Christians were being oppressed in neighboring modern-day Yemen by Jews and believers in the Greek pantheon, invaded the area and set up a Christian king (Esimiphaeus), leaving behind Ethiopian slaves and criminals who did not follow the king back in the army, who soon overthrew the king in the area and established their own king, Abramus. Ellesthaeus then sent an army of 3,000 to quell this uprising, but this army decided to stay and actually joined the ranks of their enemy. Ellesthaeus then sent another army which was defeated and returned home. After Ellesthaeus, Abramus became a tributary king of the Ethiopians.
Procopius of Caesarea also says that in 550 CE, when Ellestheaeus and Esimiphaeus were kings, Justinian allied himself with the Ethiopians at Axum against the Persians. He proposed that the Ethiopians help Rome bypass the Persian monopoly on silk from India by acting as intermediaries, bringing the Ethiopians wealth and helping Rome avoid buying from their enemy Persia. The Romans also asked the king over in modern Yemen to invade the Persian land. Both countries promised they would, but didn’t follow through-- The Ethiopians couldn’t buy silk from the Indians because the Persians controlled the harbors where the Indians first landed, and the people in modern-day Yemen didn’t want to cross a desert to fight a difficult war. Abramus also made the same promise to the Romans many times, and attempted the desert crossing once but then soon turned back.
Aksum went into a decline however in the 570s when Persian Sassanian conquest of South Arabia, the Byzantine and Persian war undermined Aksum’s dominance in Red Sea trade. Soon thereafter, Aksum’s trade was further hurt when the rise of the Islamic Empire in the 640s to 750s CE isolated Aksum from commerce, after the Islamic Umayyads established Damascus as their capital and shifted trade to the Persian Gulf. Axum’s thriving trading port of Adulis in particular suffered. Rainfall was also declining during this period. Aksum’s last coins were made in the early 600s.
Aksumite kings became feudal kings, with a horse-mounted military class, fiefs and peasants owing a portion of products to lord, and monasteries as centers of education and literacy-- just like medieval Christian western Europe. One main difference was that rights to land in pre-feudal Aksum were vested in local peasantry, not great landed magnates, so a fief in feudal Aksum and its successor states (the Zagwe kingdom of 1100s-1200s CE and Solomonic kingdom from 1270 onward) gave a lord the right to a portion of his peasants’ labor but left local farmers not as serfs but free people able to bequeath their land to relatives and descendants
Ethiopia in the Middle Ages (1100 CE on): Zagwe Dynasty and Lalibela, Zara Yaqob, the Solomonids, &c.
Out of the ashes of Aksum, the Zagwe Ethiopian dynasty arose in the 1100s-1200s, reviving the Red Sea trade routes. As the centers of population moved south, the Zagwe dynasty was founded by a local Cushitic Agaw prince in 1137. The Zagwe dynasty lasted until 1270 and built the incredible site of Lalibela, a complex of 12 churches carved out of living rock. King Lalibela, according to legend, was given the plans and instructions by angels, then dug for 24 years to create these churches. The angels had Instructed him to create a “New Jerusalem” in Africa. King Lalibela was one of the few Ethiopian kings who was made a saint.The most celebrated building is St. George’s church, shaped like a cross. The holiest is the church of Betagolgatha, which contains replicas of Christ’s tombs.
Ethiopian Christian settlement moved farther south toward higher rainfall and lure of trade through the eastern lowlands to the coast, trading slaves, gold and ivory for salt from the lowlands and imported Islamic stuff. Muslims controlled this trade and people along the trade route adopted Islam, from the Somali people of the Eastern lowlands, to the semitic speakers of the southeast highland fringe of Ethiopia.
Yekuno Amlak overthrew the Zagwe dynasty in 1270 and claimed descent from Solomon and Sheba, installing the Solomonid dynasty. His grandson Amda Siyon was Ethiopia’s greatest warrior king and conquered Ifat (a Muslim state bordering the area comprising ancient Axum on the horn of Africa), forcing its Muslim leaders to create a new emirate further east in Harar. Amda Siyon extended the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia’s south and western borders, saying “goodbye” to non-Christian Cushites and people preserving Aksum’s ancient Jewish traditions (the Beta Israel) Falasha community. Amda Siyon created the Solomonic kingdom.
The Christian kingdom of Ethiopia exchanged emissaries with the courts of Europe, including the Vatican, in the 1400s.
Solomonic Ethiopia was one of the earliest African society analyzed in detail. The Ethiopians sought to control nature and colonize land. Theirs was a mountainous kingdom, and they settled on warm and moist plateaus between mountain slopes, wooded valleys, and dry lowlands. Settlements on plateaus were surrounded by rings of less and less intensive cultivation. To protect against nature was at heart of Ethiopian culture. Holy men could cross the boundary to live as hermits among animals and eat wild produce. There was constant threat of famine despite higher rainfall, and the threat of epidemics because a wide variety of bred a variety of diseases. Ethiopian farmers sowed a lot of grain hoping that not all would be spoiled by locusts and hail. Self-reliance was vital, as only local transport of food possible. Wheat, barley, and tepp were staples on the plateau, false banana in the wet south. Ethiopia was one of the first if not the first sub-Saharan African kingdoms to use a plough-- the plough was handled by men and drawn by one or two beasts. The women had less economic independence than in many African regions, and families generally had few children, although the Tigray region was more fertile and populous. Polygyny wasn’t allowed by the religion though great men did defy these rules, and men inherited land from both parents and moved away with their brides to establish independent households, thus preventing generational conflict. Christians didn’t have family names. Ethiopian royal power depended on constant territorial expansion to reward followers; holders of tribute-collecting rights (the equivalent of medieval lords) were charged with maintaining law and order and supplying fighting men.
Christianity was central to Ethiopian culture. Indigenous people incorporated Islamic/Christian belief by replacing old feasts with Christian ones and forming a possession cult (by saints or Islamic or indigenous spirits) to provide psychological relief for the marginal and unfortunate. Ethiopia was like zion: isolated, defending Christian homeland against others, emphasizing the majesty of Jehovah and the divinity (not the humanity) of Christ. Judaic practices like diet restrictions, ritual dancing, etc. were emphasized, but mysticism or end of times was less important. The clergy were a hereditary caste engaged in agriculture.
Ethiopian Christianity was heroic in nature, with holy men, fasting, symbols of St George, etc. From 1434-68 CE the country was ruled by Zara Yaqob, a South Arabian priest-king renowned for violence, polygyny unfortunately, and decider of doctrine. He ordered the church to engage in monastic evangelization, codified it, strengthened, and strove to impose orthodoxy. Zara Yaqob created a fixed capital at Debra Berhan in Shoa and revived ancient custom of coronation at Aksum. Because he had been a rather harsh, authoritarian king, his death elicited a reaction involving relaxing centralization. From 1478-1527 the average age of kings at accession was 11.
The beneficiary of this reduction in central authority was the Sultanate of Harar, where zealous Muslims had taken refuge from Amda Siyon. As Somalia Islamized, Islamic Cushitic pastoralist forces from the horn of Africa led by Ahmad Gurey (1527-43) embarked on a jihad or holy war against the Christian Solomonic kingdom of the Ethiopian highlands. They were very successful, and newly conquered Cushitic inhabitants joined the invaders. They devastated highlands, damaged rock churches at Lalibela, and their Imam appointed governors to rule the area-- but in 1543 they were defeated and their leader killed in battle with a Christian army which included a body of Portuguese musketeers. The Islamic forces dissolved to Harar, leaving Ethiopian Church alone. In the end, Cushitic traditions were merged with the Coptic CHurch to form a distinct Ethiopian church with its own local traditions, such as the cult of possession.
Ethiopia had great continuity: both its religion, and its rulers. According to legend, the queen of Sheba (probably the queen of Saba in Yemen, but possibly also the queen of D’mt the precursor state to Axum) married the wise and wealthy King Solomon described in the bible. The legend states that Sheba had a son with Solomon, Menelik, who was was said to be the first king of Aksum, leading to an unbroken line of succession by Solomonid kings except a 133 year usurpation period (the Zagwe dynasty) until 1974 and Haile Selassie’s overthrow, marking 2,900 years of the Solomonid dynasty.
PART 6: ISLAM IN AFRICA
Islamic Expansion
From 622 CE, the date of the Hijra, Islam burst onto the scene. The Hijra was when the Prophet Mohammed left Mecca for Medina along with his followers. He would return triumphantly to conquer Mecca, and the his message of the religion of Islam would rapidly spread under the banner of Muslim armies all across North Africa, and into Spain. It would also spread south into East Africa (the Swahili city states) and West Africa. Mohammed sent some of his family and friends to find refuge in the Christian kingdom of Aksum, where they were received. From 632 Ad to 1000 AD, the central process in world history was the expansion of Arab power and Islamic religion. Islam became the predominant faith throughout North Africa and established footholds in West and East Africa. It reintegrated sub-Saharan Africa to the history of the rest of the world for the first time since the drying of the Sahara.
A brief summary of the dramatic Islamic expansion is as follows: Arab armies expanded westward into Egypt, taking control of the Christian provinces of Byzantium in modern-day Turkey, then moving into the Maghreb in North Africa (comprising modern day Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, and Libya), all the way to Morocco. In 711, from their base in Tangier, they invaded Spain.
In 639 CE, Amr Ibn al-As invaded Egypt and conquered it and then went into Libya and defeated the main Byzantine army in modern Tunisia, gaining access to fertile lands at the heart of North Africa (the breadbasket of North Africa) rich in grains and olives. In North Africa, an Islamic political rule took over. Expansion paused due to a succession battle over who would become the next Caliph, but resumed in 665 as the main leader bypassed North Africa’s coastal cities and founded Qayrawan (Kairwan) as capital of the New Muslim province Ifriqiya (the source of the word Africa). A Berber coalition destroyed his army on the way back and captured Kairwan. The Berbers restricted Arab power to the colonial heartland of Ifriqiya. The Muslim army that finally conquered western Algeria and Morocco in the early 700s CE was a largely Berber army, as was the one conquering Spain in 711-712 CE.
Although until 750 CE the Umayyad dynasty promoted an Arab, Mecca-focused Islam, the Abbasids after 750 CE shifted the capital to Baghdad and reduced the Arab focus of Islam. An example is Egypt, whose rulers during this period included the early Turkish military rulers of Egypt following the Umayyads, then the Berber Shia fatimids with their black and Slavic slave army who took control of Qayrawan (in modern Tunisia) and Egypt in the early 900s CE, then Saladin’s Ayyubid dynasty in Egypt, then the Mamluk Turkish military rulers. It was during this time period that Egypt went from 90% Christian to 90% Muslim.
In the Maghrib, the Kharijid Berbers grew powerful and became a breakaway wing of Islam, rejecting the legitimacy of the Caliphate and focusing on absolute equality, honor, and the right of any Muslim to be elected Imam (leader). In Tangiers in modern-day Morocco, the Kharijids overthrew the Umayyads (who were replaced by equally anti-Kharajid Abbasids), and formed kingdoms in Morocco, while the Abbasids mainly maintained control in the fertile North African plains of Ifriqiya. Then Ifriqiya too became largely independent of the Abbasids in 800 CE.
There were two main dynasties set up in Morocco by Berber groups. A group of Islamic Berber nomads, the Sanhaja, set up their own kingdom in Morocco and ruled as the Almoravid dynasty, creating a capital at Marrakesh in 1070 CE, and conquering the Maghreb west of Algiers. They entered Muslim Spain to organize its resistance to Christian expansion. They also developed Morocco’s plains grainland and captured West African gold trade. The Almohads helped fight against Christian expansion in still-Umayyad Spain. The Almoravids focused on strict Maliki Sunnism, legalism, and rigid religious control of daily life. The Almoravids actually had quite an effect on North Africa. Previously, the Ibadi Kharijites (the more moderate sect of the Kharijites) had been trading throughout the Sahara and North Africa, and the Sanjaha Berber tribes of the southwest Sahara had also converted to Islam. One of their number (who would found the Almoravid dynasty) went on hajj (pilgrimage) to Mecca, learnt about strict Sunni Malikism, and brought it back to the desert where he gained control over most of the tribes of the Sahara in his region, forming the Almoravid empire. The Almoravids may have at one point invaded Ghana in sub-Saharan west Africa and converted its king, and meanwhile the Takrur kingdom and Gao converted to Islam. Later the kings of Mali, Ghana’s successor regime, would become Muslim as well and even go on pilgrimage to Mecca (Ibn Battuta reports that the people became Muslims as well).
The Almoravids were supplanted by the other main Moroccan dynasty, the unitarian Almohad movement (called unitarian because it focused specifically on the oneness of God) arising not among nomads but among Berber agriculturalists of the Atlas mountains, and offering itself as an alternative to the Almoravids’ strict Maliki Sunnism, legalism, and rigid religious control of daily life, and supporting personal spirituality and mysticism including Sufism. The Almohads took Marrakesh in Morocco and Ifriqiya in 1147-1160 CE, then united the Maghreb under Berber rule, but were very repressive of Christians and Jews. The Christians defeated the Almohad empire in Spain in 1212 CE during the “reconquista”, and the Almohads had difficulty controlling nomadic tribes such as the Arab pastoralists. In 1269 CE one such tribe captured Morocco and ruled it as the Marinid dynasty. The Almohad successors the Hafsids ruled Ifriqiya until the Ottoman conquest in the 1500s CE, while Zayyanids exercised minimal central authority in Algeria. The countryside for much of this time was dominated by pastoral tribes and Sufi brotherhoods.
At this time, economic developments were under way. Kairwan in Tunisia grew wealthy, due to its textile industry, trade in gold from West Africa, and its agricultural markets. Slaves grew food, initially Berbers than white and black slaves. Famine was almost unknown for a time. In Egypt, the Fatimids sacked Genoa and took over Mediterranean trade. The Fatimid army’s Berber and Slav army captured Egypt, and then it became the center of trading and wealth. But exploitation of the countryside led to famine in 1062-73 causing the Fatimid decline. In 1171 CE the Fatimids were overthrown by their Kurdish Vizier, the Great Saladin (famous for his resistance against the Christians during their Crusades). Around the 1000s CE many Arab immigrants filtered into the plains and began to replace the Berbers, coinciding with a contraction in rainfall.
A variety of different ethnic groups, thus, with different traditions incorporated into their religious beliefs, held sway at different times in different places under the Islamic banner.
In Egypt, first the Fatimid caliphate, then Saladin and his Ayyubid dynasty, and then the Mamluk generals ruled Egypt prosperously until the Black death reached Egypt and wrecked everything. At this point, European trade also siphoned away gold and damaged Cairo’s textile industry. Relative decline became crisis when the Black Death killed ¼ to 1/3 of Egypt’s population. The Mamluks tried to get the same tax revenue from fewer cultivators unsuccessfully; wages went up in cities for some, but the Mamluks and the military class went into decline especially as firearms rendered their skills obsolete.
Islam in West Africa
Further south in Western and central sub-Saharan Africa, there were powerful trading nations such as old Jenne with its unstratified, trade-based social structure and great earthen buildings, the great empire of Songhai with its capital Gao, Ghana which for a time tried to hold a gold trade monopoly, the smaller Igbo-Ukwu much farther south earlier on in the 800s CE with its excellent iron working, and Kanem-Borno, which engaged in trade of slaves and some gold and ivory across the desert. Along with this trade (often with Kharijite Berbers as intermediaries) came Islamization.
These different groups all incorporated Islam into their culture and in turn left their mark on the religion, so that practitioners still engaged in age-old practices such as dancing rituals, the idea of honor, and many more. The history of Islam, therefore, is in large part the history of Africa during this same period.
Islam reached West Africa via the trade routes across the Sahara desert. Exports of gold from the western savannah increased steadily: in the 700s, they were only found at Kairwan and Fustat in Egypt. But gold was a mark of the Caliph, so when the Umayyad Caliphate in Spain, Fatimids in Ifriqiya, and the Amoravids and Almohads in Morocco aspired to this, they all began to coin gold. Then Genoa and Florence in 1252, Venice in 1284, and northern European states in later 1300s began to coin gold, largely from Africa, leading to a late medieval gold rush. The expansion of the gold trade augmented the power of the empire of Ghana in West Africa initially (which maintained a gold monopoly especially via control of the trading city of Awdaghust), until new goldfields at Bure at the Niger Headwater emerged, while at the same time Ghana’s location on the desert edge suffered due to drying out after 1100 CE. The ruler of Ghana’s contemporary, the city of Gao, was the first in tropical Africa to accept Islam (1040), followed by Kanem (near Lake Chad) in 1067, while Ghana became Islamic under Almoravid pressure in the 1070s CE. In Takrur and Kanem it was a people’s religion; it Ghana and Gao it stayed limited to the courts.
The Malinke-speaking people, with their capital located close to the Bure goldfields, formed the Mali Empire which supplanted the non-Islamic Soninke-speaking people of Ghana. This empire centered not only on the desert edge but in the agricultural upper Niger valley, growing larger than Ghana had been. By the early 1300s Mali officially became Islamic and Ibn Battuta admired the Malian peoples’ assiduity in prayer in 1352, though masked dancing, public recitation of pagan traditions, abasement before the king, eating unclean foods, and scanty female clothing remained as traditions.
Islami would continue to be important in West Africa after the Mali empire and its Islamic successor, Songhai. The Sufis Mukhtariyya brotherhood located around Timbuktu wielded quite a bit of influence in its area. Islam was also important after the collapse of the Songhai empire in Hausaland (in modern northern Nigeria between the Niger river and Lake Chad), where Fulani pastoralists and Hausa groups went on jihad (holy war) and attained political control under its banner. The non-Islamic Segu Empire was a smaller successor state to the Mali empire ruled by Bambara families related to the Keita clan that founded Mali. The Masina Caliphate was another local Islamic kingdom that was originally a vassal of Mali, Songhai, Timbuktu, and then the Segu Empire, which at one point was able to defeat the Segu empire to control Timbuktu and Jenne. The Tijaniyya Sufi order at Futa Jallon (an Islamic state founded in 1727 CE), led by Al Hajj Umar, would go on to conquer the entire Middle Niger region including both the Segu Empire the Masina Caliphate. Later, the Sokoto caliphate in 1809 CE led by Usman Dan Fodio also conquered the area by waging jihad, before its rule was ended by the British in the early 1900s.
Islam as a Religion & Way of Life
What was the religion of Islam like in North Africa? The key tenet of the religion of Islam is the Shahadah: “there is no god but Allah and Mohammed is his prophet.” Islam, therefore is a monotheistic religion, identified with a specific place and time (Mecca in 622, when Mohammed, the seal of prophets or last living prophet, left the city), and a specific historical role model, much as Christianity is identified with Jesus. Islam is also based on a written book, the Quran, and regulates daily life and behavior as well as general morality. The 5 pillars of Islam are considered obligatory for all believers. They are Shahada (faith or belief that there is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet), Salat (5 times daily prayer facing towards Mecca), Charity (giving to the poor and needy), Sawm or fasting (taking the form of the month of Ramadan when believers may not eat during daylight hours), and Hajj (pilgrimage to Mecca).
Religious study was not feasible for many Africans, who were not literate or did not speak Arabic, so many throughout the Muslim umma (‘community’) relied on the ulama or religious scholars to interpret and transmit the Quran and the hadith, or sayings of the prophet. State taxes and religiously dedicated estates supported the ulama. In the Sahara, Islamic nomadic warring Arab or Tuareg tribes coexisted with religious settlements populated by scholarly ulama, who did not act directly in political matters. African students and scholars regularly traveled from the Sudan or below the Sahara through the Sahara or went on pilgrimage (hajj) to Mecca. In North Africa during the original Arab Islamic conquests and the time of first the Umayyads and then the Abbasids, converts were largely Sunni (the largest branch of Islam, which split into two groups, the Shia and Sunni, in 661 during a struggle over succession). But then the Aghlabids (an offshoot of the Abbasids who ruled Tunisia) tried to incorporate sophisticated nuance into Islam, including considerations of Shi’ism and Greek philosophy, the local ulama more successfully opposed them, advocating an orthodox Sunni doctrine (Malikism).
Although in this case strict Sunni Malikism won out, it was challenged elsewhere in North Africa by Kharijites and Shiites. The Kharijites as already described were a breakaway sect who believed anyone in the umma could be the Caliph, and did not bow to faraway rule in Damascus during the 700s, controlling Qayrawan for a time before being restricted to the interior of the Sahara, where they proved important mediators of the trans-Saharan trade. The short-lived Idrissids of Morocco were Shia (claiming descent from Ali and setting up their own Islamic state outside the control of the Sunni Caliphate), and then the more important Fatimids, who sought to replace the Abbasids with “the descendents of Ismail, who was the seventh imam in the line of succession from Ali”. The Fatimids took over the Maghrib in the 800s CE and in the 900s CE conquered Egypt and shifted their capital and focus to Cairo. The last Shia rulers in North Africa were the Almohades, whose ruler claimed to be the “Mahdi” sent by God before the judgment day, and whose base was in the Atlas mountains in Morocco—they gained power as a reaction against the strict Malikism of the prior Almoravids. The Almohades went on to control the Maghrib, Morocco, and southern Spain.
Though the land was ruled by Muslims, conversion was not forced if you were one of the “people of the book” also known as the protected people (Dhimmi): if you were a Jew, Christian, Zoroastrian, Hindu or any religion with a scripture. These protected tributaries (Dhimmi) had to pay land or poll taxes or become Muslim converts. By the 700s CE, Arab immigrants increased and Christians were gradually excluded from office. Many Coptic Christians became Muslims by 717-720 CE to escape heavy taxes to the point where the rulers, quickly losing tax revenues, declared that new converts were still liable to the land tax. Officially business was now conducted in Arabic, Coptic language became church-only, and by the 1300s CE only 10% of Egyptians were Christians.
Trends toward Sunni Malikism in Africa periodically received challenges from Sufism, a mystical form of Islam elevating the importance of an ecstatic connection to God and seclusion from the world. Sufis, like the Malikis before them, created settlements or zawiyas where they could live and worship. The Sufis began to coalesce into brotherhoods, of which one of the most important was the Mukhtariyya located around Timbuktu, which wielded quite a bit of influence in its area. Islam was also important in Hausaland (in modern northern Nigeria between the Niger river and Lake Chad), where Fulani pastoralists and Hausa groups went on jihad (holy war) and attained political control under its banner. Here, too, the Sufis gained some influence. The Tijaniyya Sufi order at Futa Jallon, a medieval-era Islamic state founded in 1727 CE, led by Al Hajj Umar, actually conquered the entire Middle Niger region including the Masina Caliphate (another local Islamic kingdom that was originally a vassal of Mali, Songhai, Timbuktu, and then the Segu Empire that went on to defeat the Segu empire and controlled Timbuktu and Jenne) and the non-Islamic Segu Empire (a smaller successor state to the Mali empire ruled by Bambara families related to the Keita clan that founded Mali). The Sokoto Caliphate in 1809 CE led by Usman Dan Fodio also conquered the area by waging jihad, before its rule was ended by the British in the early 1900s.
PART 7: POST 1500s: SLAVE TRADE AND COLONIALISM
In 1498, the Portuguese first arrived on the Atlantic coast of west Africa. The Portuguese initially were looking for gold, but as time went on their focus shifted to procuring slaves to work on the sugar plantations. Mostly, the Portuguese were not able to conquer local kingdoms or defeat local leaders: they faced both local diseases like malaria and sleeping sickness, and the armies of local rulers. One exception is that they occupied the island of Sao Tome by 1485-1500 CE as a sugar colony, forcing slaves they had captured or purchased to work there. However, in 1574 CE slaves imported to Sao Tome to work the sugarcane plantations rebelled, and many of the Portuguese were driven off (but not all). In other islands like Annoba similar events drove all the Portuguese off. The freed slaves built their own society on Sao Tome.
The population, meanwhile, increased due to introduction of plantains, and after the 1500s CE cassava from the Americas, helped the rainforest area and woodland savanna support larger populations. Previously, the infertile soil needed 30 or 40 years to regenerate between cropping cycles. Cassava or manioc especially changed society: it didn’t require the labor of men in society at regular times to plant or harvest, as it can easily be planted in a way that is unobtrusive to the ecosystem and doesn’t require disturbing the delicate soils, simply by placing a cutting in the ground, leaving for several months and returning to unearth a large starchy root with a high caloric yield. It did, however, require hard work from women to process the root and make it edible.
The Portuguese focus would soon shift from trying capturing slaves and looking for gold to buying slaves fueled first by African island sugar plantations, and they would be joined by other European. The Atlantic slave trade would have devastating Europeans gained slaves by trading not raiding, but the balance of power shifted with time in favor of European partners, Africa suffered population loss, lost energy that could be productive, undercut African manufacturing with cheap goods, and tied Africans in a stifling relationship with European economy. Progresses were despite the Atlantic slave trade. The exchanging of slaves was “trade”, but the actual way of obtaining slaves was not through trade, but was through warfare, trickery, banditry, and kidnapping. The effects of this “trade” are the effects of social violence. It was generally destructive, creating population loss. When the population in the tsetse fly area fell below a certain number the rest had to abandon the area, causing people to lose their battle to tame and harness nature and develop. It created insecurity, social violence between and within communities, took the form of raiding and kidnapping rather than regular warfare more often, and created general fear. Europeans recognized slave trade was not compatible with other trade (the British wanting Africans collecting palm produce and rubber, and the Portuguese and Dutch discouraging it on the gold coast because they knew it would interfere with the gold trade). Between 1700 and 1710, African slaves became more important than gold, as gold flowed in from the New World, during which time the gold coast came to supply 5-6,000 captives per year. Fewer were exported by the end of the 1700s, but by then social damage had been done. Europeans sought out different areas for slaves at different times, so every section of the coast from the Senegal and Cunene river experienced a few years of intensive slave trading, and some periods exports of many thousands per year extended over decades, in many areas that were also relatively developed for Africa. The slave trade took men from agricultural activities and caused famine, halted economic development, and did not even help the slaving groups as captives were shipped away and not used to created wealth from nature in African lands. European products Africans received for slaves also “competed with and strangled African products”. Primary source: Hawkins, an alliance.
By 1650 new world had replaced middle east as destination of slave exports; the slave trade grew by 2% each year thereafter and around 1700 in thirty years the price of slaves rose fourfold. The demand for slaves was fueled by sugar plantations in Brazil and the Caribbean islands. The Bight of Benin and the Gold Coast “bore the brunt” of this increase, until the population was decreased and then slave exports slowly declined. Upper Guinea experienced the worst of it from 1600-1630, Senegambia in the late 1600s, Bight of Biafra from 1740s to 1760s and remained high to the 1820s, the Loango coast from 1720-1800, Angola in the 1650s and from 1720 to 1740. War was the main way of attaining slaves in most of West Africa, kidnapping in the Bight of Biafra, and “judicial procedures” was the dominant method in Central Africa. In the Bight of Benin, the Danhome Aja people had the slave trade focused on them, so that they lost 3% of their population every year for forty years in a row. More than their neighbors the Yoruba. Slaves were young adults, twice as many men as women. This reinforced polygyny, and women did more work (including agricultural). Some have suggested King Ajaga’s wars in the 1770s were an attempt to create a strong Dahomean kingdom to fight against the slave trade. The Kingdom of Benin also withdrew from supplying slaves in the 1500s. The Oyo empire though with ties to slavers managed to provide only very few slaves until the late 1700s, until it was beset by factionalism, a “constitutional crisis” and disputes in the 1770s.
Asante rose in the late 1600s to challenge Denkyira, dominant state in the Gold Coast, and incorporated all the Twi-speaking peoples, causing a decline in the the people of Asante being exported after 1730, so that the major part of the slaves more and more came from the interior Volta River region peoples.
The peak of the slave trade was in the late 1700s, when slave exports averaged 100,000 per year, continuing into the 1800s. The focuses of enslavement moved during this time from west to east and coast to interior. In the western coast with a population of 25 million in 1700, six million slaves left during the 1700s. The total number enslaved is 12 million, with four million in domestic slavery and two million killed during the process of enslavement. The northern savanna and Horn experienced greater losses despite slave experts of 20,000 or less per year as more women were taken, so they were probably unable to grow as a population. There was a terrible drought in the mid-1700s in the northern Savannah, which initially increased slave exports as destitute families sold themselves, but then caused population and exports to decline. A few decades climate shifts led to recovery and growth which resulted in increased slave exports and the rise of the Sokoto caliphate.
In the late 1700s, there were more women than men, on average 6 to 5, but in heavily affected areas like Angola as much as two to one. Between 1780 and 1850, the price of slaves on the African coast fell by half, and the market was oversupplied with slaves, but still many were being captured. More women stayed behind, and births increased dramatically, and the population grew dramatically, while on the coast large numbers of cheap male slaves were used for agricultural plantations and the area began to export palm oil, coffee, and peanuts. In the last days of African slavery in the early 1900s, slaves had more legal and societal protection and potential for upward mobility.
Europeans primarily exported textiles (clothing); metalware like raw iron and copper, cooking pans, knives, etc; weapons; and cowry shells for currency. Cowry shells were especially important in Benin and the Slave Coast though they were also imported into central Africa. Also there were jewelry (beads mostly), toys and curiosities, and alcoholic beverages. None were essential; Africa already had industries producing every item on the list. But these were prestige items, driven by fashion and purchasing power.
African Diaspora: A History Through Culture 58-89 (Manning): argues griots served as lessons on moral behavior and model citizenship, over time, the question was is if they should serve the rulers or the people. Specialized occupation groups were sometimes in hierarchies, like blacksmiths, who formed a caste in the west african savanna that married within itself. Griots, warriors, and merchants were castes. But people also “treated these groups were treated more as ethnicities than castes”, like “Fulbe herders and Jula merchants”. Elders and council members in a family were very powerful; they decided adoption rules and could excommunicate family members, send children to other families for apprenticeship or as pawns (security for loan of land or wealth).
John Thornton: argues slavery was already widespread in Africa before the Atlantic slave trade. His explanation was that slaves was the equivalent of landed property, since Africans who wished to acquire wealth necessarily had to own a means of production. Issues raised with Thornton’s ideas include: subordinates are not slaves, land ownership was determined by tradition not formal contracts, and during later centuries the slave trade expanded dramatically-- it was not to its full extent before then.
Initially, the population of West African coast and Central Africa was over 20 million, and up to 5,000 people (0.025 percent) were seized yearly by Europeans in the 1400s and 1500s. This increased to 70,000 per year by the late 1700s, 15 times as many. Also not all regions of the African coast participated in the slave trade as the Portuguese had a monopoly in the 1400s and got their slaves from Senegambia, Upper Guinea, the Kongo kingdom, and Angola.
The Africans may not have had as many slaves also because dominant classes didn’t have often enough reason to hold them (sell to a foreign market, or exploit to produce goods and services). One exception was Songhay-- the monarchy from the 1400s captured thousands of slaves to supply goods for the palace and produce grains sold to the savannas. Songhay merchants sold captives to the Mediterranean. The kingdoms of Benin, Kogo, and Kilwa also had significant slave populations, and the Gold Coast and maybe Mwenemutapa (kingdom of Mutapa of the Shona in modern day Mozambique) had enough wealth to buy and use slaves. But otherwise not so much.
More important factors in society were increasing West African exports of gold, pepper, and gum arabic and imports of stuff like cowries, metals, and textiles. Also increased trade between West African ports. In Europe slavery increase for a few centuries during the time of Viking raiders and merchants, then declined. Perhaps it would have done the same in Africa? But it didn’t, becoming huge after 1600. Before that, some kingdoms tried to stop it. The Kingdom of Benin banned slave exports in the 1520s, reversing the ban 200 years later. Rebel leaders in Senegambia and the king of Kongo tried and failed to stop the slave trade. Slave exports from West Africa almost tripled from 1450 to 1650, mostly from areas next to the Atlantic, fostering captive seizing, armed raids, kidnapping, and increased judicial enslavement. Regions went through cycles of increase and decrease of slave exports. In peak years, men were in short supply and populations declined. Walter Rodney argues that slavery had not been previously prevalent in Upper Guinea, where it expanded. In the 14th centuries, african societies had more hierarchies that bred beautiful buildings and civilizations but also battles for dominance, yet the society remained in many ways egalitarian (maybe).
Migrations to Old World Destinations took place from 1400-1600 also (the diaspora didn’t just go to the New World via the slade trde). Mongol states in the 1200s and 1300s created overland links, and the 1400s there was increased oceanic links. More Africans traveled the Indian Ocean than the Atlantics, and Swahili coast ports were linked to South Arabia, India, and Madagascar, as well as the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden below it. The center of migration toward the Old World was the sub-saharan African homeland, and slaves crossed the Sahara desert, leading to interaction with N. Africa and Arabia and Austronesian-and-Bantu Madagascar with its Malagasy-speaking people who migrated from Borneo. A further afield diaspora went from western Europe to the edge of South Asia, the Black sea, turkey, slavic nations, the fertile crescent, Persia and Iran, south Asia, and India and the Indian ocean.Further afield the diaspora stretched to northern Europe, central Asia, southeast and east Asia. Then there’s the Atlantic trade.
In the 1300s, Europe was overrun my mongols, and the most powerful person in Eurasia from 1370 to 1405 was Timur or Tamerlane who was based in the central Asian city of Samarkand. A Roman soldier and Christian patron saint, Saint Maurice of Thebes, was a black man. One of the Magi who visited Jesus was described by monks and portrayed as a black Ethiopian. The Ottoman empire rebounded after Timur in 1403 and conquered Constantinople by 1453, monopolizing the Black sea trade from Venice and Genoa. Venice had many black inhabitants (often gondoliers), and Abkazhia on the edge of the Black Sea had a black community. African and central Asian turkish warriors were the main fighting forces in north India, associated with Islamic princes. Black warriors are depicted in the 1580s at the Mughal court of Delhi. A group of Swahili africans called Siddis lived in India, and gained control of Janjira island south of Mumbai in the 1480s. African diaspora women were often personal servants, typically domestics or concubines. Men were laborers and warriors typically, many took up Islam and some converted to Christianity. From 1512, the Ottomans expanded and became the dominant power along with the great Iranian Safavid Empire founded by a Turkish Prince and the 1526 Mughal Empire in India and Afghanistan also founded by a Turkish prince, while the Funj Sultanate arose in the middle Nile Valley in 1500.
The Portuguese at this time went to the Indian Ocean, brutalizing it from 1500-1512 and establishing forts. They did not dominate the local slave trade, and the local Islamic state of Adal based in the port of Zeila in modern Somalia had been raiding Ethiopia for slaves. Ethiopia fought back resulting in many captives on both sides. In 1527 Ahmad bin Ibrahim came to power in Adal with Ottoman allies and threatened Ethiopia, which brought in Portugal’s army (which was defeated, but bin Ibrahim died and the sultanate of Adal soon collapsed.) After that, war soon declined on the Horn of Africa and slaving diminished, though leftover slave Habshis to India became important as warriors and officials. Slave trade remained but did not grow in the region.
Portuguese explorers visited Africa along the Atlantic coast in the 1400s, after learning new sailing methods (tacking against the wind) and learned where the better winds were (farther west) that enabled them to make the return journey to Europe. The Portuguese got to Sao Tome by 1472, and reached the congo in 1482. Vasco de Gama got all the way to India in 1498. The primary objectives originally were gold and spreading Christianity. Many Portuguese fell to malaria (which was also a reason for high mortality of children in Africa-- though survivors who were reinfected regularly for them would only be a periodic fever). Portuguese brought captives to portugal and to Atlantic islands, lasting from 1450 to 1550, to work in wheat production, mostly upper guinea coast slaves on Cape Verde and Senegambia slaves in Portugal, about 600 persons per year during this time. In the Cape Verde mixed Portuguese and African settlers spoke the beginnings of the Crioulo language, linking African trading coast communities. Then the sugar plantations became more important in the 1500s, in the spanish controlled canary islands, and from 1485 in sao tome using slaves (island became world’s leading sugar producer in the 1500s). Portuguese focused until 1575 on Senegambia, Upper Guinea, the Gold Coast, Benin, and Kongo. Then after 1575 also Angola. 200,000 slaves in total brought to Portugal and some spread to Europe. African population in Spain and Portugal declined after peaking in early 1500s; island populations reached max and leveled off.
America was discovered in 1492! Africans were in Columbus’ crew.
Early African settlers, free and slave and soldiers and adventurers, fought and had chlldren with the Tainos of the Bahamas and Greater Antilles, worked on sugar plantations of Hispaniola (modern Haiti and Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico) and led slave revolts in ports of modern day Cuba, originally in fewer number coming than Span/Portuguese. After 1550, more Africans (150,000 estimated) came, in the 1500s. Brazil started planting sugar in 1536, and in 1580s portuguese seized Luanda and gained captive from Angola wars, after which lots of Africans went to Brazil.
Americas in those days were very populous, between 40 and 100 million, but smallpox primarily and then also measles, typhus, and respiratory diseases devastated the people, while malaria and yellow fever came from Africans. Hernando de Soto in 1540-1543 came to southeastern North America and encountered large villages and powerful rulers, but French visitors a century later found very sparse populations. The native populations of the Taino either intermarried or died out.
Spanish and Portuguese turned to African laborers to replace natives, and by 1600 the majority of African slaves went to the Americas. “Spanish awarded contracts (known as asiento) to merchants to supply fixed numbers of African slaves”, mainly to portuguese merchants. Lots of West African slaves went to Lima, Peru and Mexico City and Vera Cruz, Mexico. Urban slaves were artisans and house servants, rural ones were field laborers, artisans, or miners in the northern Mexico and Andean silver mines. Slaves were mostly from Senegambia, Upper Guinea, and the Bight of Benin. The journeys were often long and dangerous for slaves. The Portuguese in Brazil put their slaves to work planting sugarcane and harvesting (sandalwood, etc), most successfully growing sugar in the northeast of Brazil fueled by slaves from the Kingdom of Kongo and (after 1575) Angola. Most Africans crossing the sea at the end of the 1500s went to Mexico, Brazil, and Hispaniola (modern Dominican Republic and Haiti). Many slaves were baptized as Catholics.
Portuguese developed maneuverable sailing ships called caravels to sail along the West African coast; the design was good for speed and for sailing windward.
From 1400-1600, the new idea of “race” developed.
There were several Great Empires at this time: Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal. The Ottomans “supported Muslim expansion in Ethiopia and Somalia”, and the Portuguese had to fight the Turks so that in 1698 Ottomans expelled Portuguese from their hold on Mombasa where Portuguese had built fort jesus in the 1590s. Spanish (Europe, Americas, pacific and caribbean islands), and Portuguese (portugal, islands in Atlantic and Indian ocean) empires too. Russian empire across Siberia. Ming dynasty arose in 1400s and ruled East Asia. Several successors to preceding Mongol Empire. Great states in Africa: Songhay, Funj, Benin, Kongo, Luba, Lunda, competing states in Ethiopia (Zambezi Valley state of Mwenemutapa declined in first hundred years of connection with the Portuguese).
Africa’s gold deposits in 3 main areas: in Bambuk and Bure (upper Senegal valley), Akan-speaking areas of the Gold Coast, in highlands south of the Zambezi River. During the 1500s, gold trade brought wealth to Gold Coast but mixed results to Bambuk-Bure. Gold was Africa’s main contribution to world trade until late 1600s when exports of slaves exceeded gold value. In Peru and Mexico, Spanish rulers found tons of silver which they exploited. People all across the world, even especially in india and china, desired silver- so Spanish founded the town of Manila in 1571 and started sending galleons of silver across the Pacific to the Phillipines to trade to Chinese merchants, bringing silk and other commodities to Mexico. Portuguese looked for silver in Africa, but it never came to much. Around this time smallpox as a major African killer might have spread significantly (though not much evidence yet).
Songhay rose up in 1464, expanded from the Niger Bend homeland to control a vast savannah area, around the same time the Portuguese began voyaging. Dominated east-west savannah trade and the north-south trans-Saharan gold trade, also the desert slave trade and had large slave populations to provide food and goods for the rulers. Lasted until 1591 when they lost a battle near Timbuktu to invading Sa’dian kingdom of Morocco, which beat Songhay archers and horseman with musket-wielding infantrymen, seiizing the capital of Gao on the Niger, and uprisings in Songhay followed. Empire collapsed, later kings got back Gao but after Songhay was a small Niger kingdom. Songhay was very diverse, multi-ethnic
In the 1440s, Portuguese reached desert port of Arguin and the savanna shore of Senegal, edged along Guinea Coast in 1470s, built fortresses in 1482 to capture gold trade, and seized Moroccan coastal cities from 1471 to 1505. Traded in local hides and waxes, bought gold and sugar (and clothes to buy gold with) Began production on Atlantic islands in 1485 (most successful Sao Tome), and the Spanish did the same on Canary Islands off Morocco in 1500, Morocco’s southern coast became significant sugar exporter in 1530s to Portuguese. The Moroccan Sa’dians expelled portuguese in 1540s, and English replaced them buying sugar for woolen cloth. Songhay igored Portuguese and expanded its political/economic power, in part due to Ottomans (how?).
Ottomans conquered Egypt in 1517, Algeria in 1517, got control of Red Sea after 1525, Tripoli on the coast of modern day Libya in 1546, gained power in Morocco in 1545. In Spain, Castilian monarchy conquered Granada in 1492, claimed Americas in same year, and undr Charles I 1516-1556 sought primacy in Europe. For a brief time in the late 1500s, Morocco was a great power, after its victory in 1578 Battle of al-Qsar al-Kabir (battle of Three Kings), when Abdul-Malik claimant to throne of new Sa’dian dynasty gained Ottoman support and displaced Muhammad al-Mutawakkil in 1576 Al-Mutawakkil went to Portuguese for help, and king Sebastiao helped him. Abdul-Malik won, but all three kings died and his brother Ahmad rose to power, taking the title al-Mansur (the victorious) and remaining independent of the Ottomans and Spain. Portugal lost its heir and its throne was taken over by Philip II of Spain, so from then til 1640 Portugal had Spanish rulers. Al-Mansur was king of united Morocco, taking in taxes and trade revenue from sugar, gold, slaves. He was allied with England and played Spanish and Ottoman empires against each other, and used Turkish military strategies in his diverse army with a strong musket corps. Al-Mansur claimed descent from the prophet and tried to be recognized as caliph of all Islam (spiritual leader) Then the English defeated the Spanish Armada in 1588, and al-Mansur went to control desert salt mines, taking Saharan oases of Gurara and Tuat and in 1588 demanding that Askia Isbaq II of Songhay pay him tax in gold on salt removed from Taghaza mines. Isbaq refused, and al-Mansur invaded in 1590 with an army led by Spanish captives. Half the army died during the desert crossing maybe of malaria but the musketmen still won outside Timbuktu, with multiple more victories. Morocco held on to Timbuktu and governed it with the occupying “Arma” force. The Arma soon gained independence and was its own regime.
Then Brazil’s sugar squeezed out Morocco and the Canaries from the market, Silver from Peru and Mexico became most important contribution to precious metals, gold still important but didn’t monopolize market; gold and slave routes by sea grew and Saharan ones stagnated. Europeans used Mexican silver to buy textiles in India. Cowries brought by coast by Portuguese and Dutch, not from Maldives to Egypt to Africa via trans saharan trade. New era: slave trade dominates Atlantic economy.
Initially the Portuguese tried to raid slaves, but found themselves unsuccessful and many of their number died (from poisoned arrows, among other things). They helped local kings fight wars and got slaves taken during these wars in recompense, but the local kings let them keep only those slaves which they took during the wars not slave the king’s forces took. But this would change over time.
Primary Source: Letter from Afonso I of Kongo to Joao III of Portugal, 1526
Nzinga Mbemba also known as Afonso I, became ruler of the Kongo kingdom in 1506. He originally welcomed foreign trade, but the slave trade destabilized his kingdom. Afonso I wrote to King Joao III of Portugal in 1526 that the slave trade and other trade was ruining his kingdom. Afonso I kept his people under control by giving them gifts and controlling trade, and the freedom of Portuguese merchants to trade these things to the people directly rapidly was undermining these king’s control. What’s more, the citizens of the populace are being taken into slavery constantly since “bad men” are greedy for the goods traded by the Portuguese and are taking people into slavery, and both corruption and greed are being spread widely while simultaneously the whole country is being depopulated.
Nzinga, queen of Maramba southeast of Kongo, fought the Portuguese in Angola from accession in 1624 until 1655 but eventually central africa too would fall prey. African diaspora by 1800 would rise to more than 10% the population of Africa.
An employee of the Royal African company (Lambe) lived at a trading station in Jakin, a port in the kingdom of Allada. The Allada were conquered by the Dahomean King Agaja in 1724. The king was very powerful, and could send out 500,000 armed men into battle, had fought 209 battles, and conquered many kings and kingdoms, and by custom used to go out and give gifts and money to the people and make sacrifices to gods and ancestors (sometimes slaves-- but the king breaks this custom, or of horses/oxen/animals). The king goes out 8 miles from his palace to see how many forces he can marshal in 2 or 3 hours, bringing out 2 or 3 hundred of his wives to attend him, holding his arms, gun, pistols, sabers, whisking away flies, holding an umbrella, filling and lighting his pipe, carrying each a case of brandy and clothed in colored velvets and silks and wearing coral decorations. The king says his slaves buy him goods from all nations. Note: the Dahomeans were strong, but the peoples around them ended up getting sold into slavery during wars the Dahomeans embarked on. When the Dahomean kingdom collapsed the Dahomeans too would end up getting enslaved and sold to Portuguese traders.
How did people enter into a state of slavery? There are six ways
Being proven guilty of theft or adultery or punished for some severe crime
Being named to go into slavery instead of the guilty party by someone with a claim over you (your father, uncle, or husband)
After being taken captive in a war
Captured by pirates or brigands who sell you into slavery for profit
Being sold by your poor father who wants to punish his children or concubines by selling them into slavery
Source (Vansina Peoples of the Forest). By the early 1500s, the main kingdom on the Atlantic was Loango, founded by a house of smiths, the Buvanji ruling dynasty (who came from Ngoyo in the south and were linked to the shrine of Buunzi). At this time, Kakongo and Ngoyo to its south either didn’t yet exist or were mere dependents of Loango. These principalities and then the kingdom of Loango came to be due to the rise in copper mining in northern Kongo and trade in fish, ocean salt, and palm products for minerals from the forest. Coastal leaders fused principalities to form kingdoms and forged trade ties with the forest lands, and the kingdom. By 1600 Loango had a capital and seven provinces, with matrilineal descent, a king with great power, with a royal guard and power based on the Shrine of Buunzi, who appointed local governors and officials who controlled trade, collected tribute, waged war, and performed rituals. One of the officials was “prime minister”, ruling between successions of Kings. Some said aristocrats may have had the power by the 1600s to form councils to install kings, and definitely in the mid-1700s when the ruling dynasty died out they installed their own regime.
Another principality was Bungu, the cradle of the dynasty that founded the kingdom of Kongo in the 1300s, destroyed in 1620 by Kongo warriors.
The Tio kingdom developed in the plateau to the north, and was originally connected by ritual to a ruler of faraway Alima; it drew its strength from iron and copper mines and markets of Malebo Pool, a large lake a little removed from the coast in the modern Democratic Republic of the Congo, but the original kingdom sprung up further from these resources, based on sparse, mobile population groups living on the Tio plateaus, who worshipped nature spirit shrines, which banded together into a kingdom. It was a low population, uncentralized kingdom with a priest-king, with local lords officiating when new kings were recognized, and local lords did hold some power. The country sometimes struggled from poverty, water scarcity, and shortages of food possibly leading to forced emigrations.
To the east of the Tio was the small, connected Boma kingdom first heard of in the 1600s, who defeated all their neighbors except the fishing and trading Nunu principality and the salt trading Dia principality. Land was governed by an aristocracy which collected tribute, gave justice, and only be overridden by the king and his council in times of necessity. It was a rigid, socially stratified society with the ruling dynasty marrying into the aristocracy.
In the Central African rainforest, the basic social unit was the house, and the basic territorial unit was the village. Generally the area was based on autonomous, decentralized units-- only a few principalities rose up and became kingdoms by themselves (the island of Bioko, also near Lake Mayi Ndombe and in the lower Zaire area). The Mangbetu kingdom temporarily formed as a cluster of principalities.
The Portuguese first landed at Bioko in 1472, and began trading by 1500. They occupied Sao Tome by 1485-1500 as a sugar colony. They stuck near the estuary and away from the forested coast; the Kingdom of Kongo was their main trading partner, which was exporting slaves by 1514 who originally came from the Zaire river trading network above the Malebo Pool. In Loango, the royal capital was also a trading center for local goods, exporting ivory, redwood and raffia cloth by 1576 followed by a smaller trade in slaves. Sao Tome rebelled in 1574 as slaves imported there to work the sugarcane plantations rebelled, and many of the Portuguese were driven off (but not all). In other islands like Annoba similar events drove all the Portuguese off. The freed slaves built their own society on Sao Tome. The Dutch also traded in the Gabon estuary of the central African coast for ivory and tropical wood started in 1594, building a trade settlement in 1650 at the outlet of the Cameroon rivers.
In the 1660s massive slave trading went on on the Loango coast, but no European group managed a slave monopoly at any one harbour, or control over the harbour, and slave prices rose. Also imports of gun and powder increased, at a rate of 50,000 guns per year. The Cameroon grasslands were subject to slave raids, and slaves from Gabon were sold by 1700. During the 1700s, the slave trade shifted down to the Zaire estuary and in the 1760s and 1770s farther south, and this contributed to the Loango’s decline.
In the 1800s, trade shifted and trade in ivory and agricultural materials rose up alongside the slaving, and trading posts sprang up all along the forest coast, along with British and French naval stations in the 1820s and 1830s, as well as mission posts, with traders and hunters moving inland by the 1850s. As they moved toward the center, it created upheaval and strife, especially in Cameroon and northern Gabon after 1830. There were mass migrations either to and away from trading posts, and some frontier communities became very militarized, and piracy and slave raiders became frequent. Different regions started to specialize in different products (like raffia cloth, tobacco, groundnuts, salt, pottery, ironware, canoes, food for traders, or even sugarcane, wine, and goats). Slave raiders and pirates appeared, along with set trade routes. Extremely rapidly did traders come in from the Eastern coast as well, soon reaching upper Zaire to trade for ivory and slaves, shocking the local economy since foreigners (travelling in armed caravans, raiding and looting and recruiting local leaders) controlled this new trade. The result was a generation of fighting and strife, then followed by colonial occupation.
Also new crops came via the Europeans. Before 1600 the banana used to be the staple of the forest, sorghum and millet were staples in the grasslands and forest patches of savanna. These began to be replaced by maise and later cassava, changing the calendar of crop rotation, and increasing food surpluses (increasing trade and especially slave trade). In 1608 cassava and tobacco arrived, groundnuts/beans/vegetables from the Americas soon arrived, then European cabbage, and the last was the cocoyam in 1842. By 1850, the whole region was affected. Cassava was the most successful, spreading faster than tobacco which came at the same time, and had long been a staple crop at Malebo pool by 1700 when tobacco was scarce. Cassava bread, sour kwange, was developed and cassava was ideal because it didn’t require regular harvesting (which if interrupted caused famine) and could be left in the ground, and the leaves were a vegetable. Its disadvantages were extra work by women to prepare it into food, it was less nutritious than yams or bananas, and it took up more soil nutrients than yams-- yet it still replaced yams everywhere. It only displaced bananas on the Loango slave routes. Maize (corn) soon replaced sorghum and millet everywhere, being better adapted to the wet climate, and it went through crop rotations with legumes like beans and groundnuts which were nitrogen-fixers. Beans also were cultivated in the forested hills and great lake areas of eastern Africa.
Foods changed the social structure: some men left agriculture to be traders, leaving ‘pygmy’ slaves to clear the forest and women to process cassava, and cassava supported an increase in population that enabled the slave trade. Farm clearings increased, but so did mosquitos increasing malaria and yellow fever, and women had to work harder leading to higher miscarriage and abortion rates.
The impact of domestic animals was much less significant. Domestic animals did arrive, like pigs which became substitute for the wild game warthogs, which were desirable and the mangbetu were trying to domesticate them in the 1860s. Also ducks, doves, and forest sheep were raised but none became staples.
On the east, Kongo (the state where King Afonso would later be struggling to stop the Portuguese from ruining his country) and Loango were the only large states-- small kingdoms later came about north of Loango and elsewhere trade was tied to networks of households, and on the east coast these networks of households were linked to patronage, so some successful houses acquired dependent houses. Most traders were slave traders. Kingdoms became less centralized as merchant traders gained power for their houses, the number of social ranks or levels increased, and more of the population became unfree. Commercial entrepreneurs could reach into the top ranks more often, but there was more turmoil in communities and greater gulfs between social strata, with constant social disorder threatening and lack of legitimacy, all of these happening just before the European invasion.
In the 1580s, caravan systems were developed by clan leaders for Loango trade ensuring safe passage to allies. A ritual organization the lemba was developed to regulate markets and ensure law and order. The Kongo kingdom then collapsed, spawning several smaller principalities some of whom assimilated the Tio people, took over the northern Mindouli mining district, and spread the lemba and immigrant farmers and Kongo nobles and economic diversification and trade. Loango merchant princes after 1750 and their clans (27 in total) disputed the royal succession when a king died without a clear heir, and even after a king was nominated (Mwe Pati) the factions grabbed power and made the capital the town where aristocratic representatives lived and built crown councils to elect or depose kings. After Mwe pati died, the merchant capital won out and the new order was tradition, and no more kings were installed for a century-- the state decentralized, and merchants held power, even as Loango’s territory decreased and provinces seceded and the old state of Ngoyo grew larger than Loango.
Merchant lords also took over the Tio kingdom based on a religion based on portable shrines (nkobi), and provincial lords carved out domains resulting in a compromise when in 1830 the king acquired some of the shrines while some other shrines were legitimized, but by the 1860s decentralization won out.
The northern Ogowe area also engaged in kingdom-building in the 1700s but the Orungu couldn’t control the slave trade and dissolved, ending as the European established trading posts upstream in the 1860s.
In the Gabon estuary, the area was dominated by a single group whose leader was called King by the Dutch when they arrived in 1600. There was still a little infighting, however, as soon groups bought slaves from the Dutch to bolster their power as these men worked the fields as the houses went on sea trading/raiding expeditions. The order fell apart by 1700, and the French got control by gaining influence over a faction that won out in 1840, so Mpongwe society became more unified again, in a highly economically stratified society, marriage being based on class and conspicuous consumption being key.
In the Cameroon port of Douala, starting in 1750, became a slave trading port at the mouth of several trading networks, and its rulers split in 1775 with one offshoot founding a rival town near Mt. Cameroon. Slaves soon became a large portion of the town, with an 1840s association called jengu developed to control and terrorize them. A different group called epanga connected less powerful free men and those who ran away from Douala to smaller towns. By 1880s the town was filled with strife and infighting, and by 1880 a European protectorate came in. Douala was the only house/village case to entirely descend into anarchy.
Households as units soon turned into business firms, as traders acquired junior kin, wives, clients and slaves, and founded towns, ideally near the mouth of a tributary; really good locations had several house-firms. Several of these places had populations of over 10,000 grouped in 10-12 firms. Smaller towns had more than 5,000 people. Ownership of slaves here increased a lot, in many towns with ⅔ of the inhabitants technically being slaves.
Trade along the Zaire homogenized the culture of locals, including fashion, customs, charms and laws, and even wives who wed in distant places, as well as slaves. There was constant mobility, and a spirit of pure competition along the river, with competition and inequality combined with ideas of witchcraft and sorcery. Along the river, people believed guardian spirits took the shape of hippopotamuses or crocodiles and travel with people. In these areas along the river, the system increased abortion, and relied on foreign women and young male slaves to reproduce the system and society. Large houses united together due to to military threat, but village organizations declined, and the Swahili traders to the east settled in forest-margin towns led by “big men” who gained commercial domination. They made local allies who moved with caravans, adopted eastern culture, and created a territorial organization appointing big men as “mokota” or to the north “sultani”, transferred originally to older leaders and then to whoever could best provide ivory. Some of the more important leaders were Tippu Tip and Mwene Dugumbi. There was a system of “patronship” and a “client system”, but men shifted patrons if necessary, and the system only really was dismantled in the 1920s.
In all, the new system of intercontinental trade in slaves destroyed the nature and autonomy of the forest peoples, increasing inequality, creating strict social stratification in larger areas, formation of social classes, and had wide-ranging effects.
Primary source John Thornton, thesis: People held slaves as a store of wealth since land was owned only if you (or a dependent) worked it. Since land couldn’t be owned otherwise, slaves working land served as a store of wealth and source of income. There was lots of land and not enough people to work it in Africa, so wealth was in people not land.
Primary source Miers & Kopytoff: African-style slavery was about belonging, and you were less free if you belonged less and were more in the social fringe, and African-style slavery was on a continuum from family relationships to literal chattel slave, with clientship and pawnship and other in-betweens.
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PART 8: MEROE & THE SUDANIC KINGDOMS
The Kingdom of Kush was well-developed before it conquered Egypt in the 700s BC. Kerma was located at the third cataract just above the bend in the Nile at the bottom of which Meroe was located.
Commonly power relations in the Sudanic states involved limited centralized states and poorly defined territories, but extensive ritual power over the inhabitants. Agricultural intensification and managing surpluses was a common theme in Eurasian civilizations and Pharaonic Egypt-- but this role is harder to define in the Sudan, may not be as important. Although control of productive river systems might well have been important. There were less surpluses and intensive agriculture in the Sudan, and land didn’t have as much value as it was abundant but poor quality. Labor remained the most important factor of production, and controlling people was more important than controlling land.
Later Kingdoms in the Middle Nile after the spread of Islam were the Keira in Darfur and Funj Sennar, in the 1600s and 1700s. Arab groups in Darfur had introduced camel nomadism, and cattle nomadism and hoe agriculture were practiced in wetter areas. In the late 1600s, land was plentiful but the state was putting it into estates regulated by Islamic law, whose holders owned rights to lesser (‘by custom’) taxes and dues from tenants plus their labour, while direct taxes were paid to Sultan. They mainly benefited from owning livestock through these estates, so controlling people to be herders for lord’s herds was most important. Only members of the royal Keira clan had full rights to the land and its taxes, as well as later Muslim religious leaders and merchants. The wealth derived was used to maintain the royal palace and for ritual roles. In the late 1800s is there also evidence a network of granaries was installed throughout the kingdom to supply the royal troops.
The Keira likely inherited the trade networks of the previous non-Islamic Tunjur dynasty, where Egyptian merchants went to trade at their capital at Uri in the 1500s, from whence Darfur exported slaves, gold, camels, rhinoceros horn, ivory, ostrich feathers, tamarind, gum arabic and natron and imported clothes, copper, tin, lead, beads, cowries, and metal goods (cloth, iron hoes and copper and tin rings even became forms of money and prestige items).
The 1500-1821 Funj Sultanate’s center of power was in the southern rainlands, where rain and not rivers were the main source of irrigation. Agricultural fields were moved about, seasonal crops were grown, and labor not land was in most short supply. Population centers were at rivers or near permanent wells. Along with the agriculture, there was also semi-mobile pastoralism with seasonal migrations to watering holes and by season. In the Funj Sultanate, the sultan collected dues in the form of labor, the first fruits of harvest, set quantities of certain crops, fees following the burning of new land, and grazing lands provided for the horses of the rulers. Some direct taxes required a portion of crops and herds, and (only later on after the royal court was at Sennar and not mobile as previously) grain accumulated in granaries. The Sultan also had gold, slaves, iron, honey, exotic, skins, rhinoceros horns delivered to him. A gold nugget would be sent to the king, smaller finds to royal officials, the finder being rewarded. In some areas a gold-dust tax was required to bury someone. Hunting and hunting for exotic skins was regulated and restricted. The elite and commoners by law differed by the wearing of clothes, and had different rules. The military imported horses from the Dongola Reach, and raided on the periphery. Funj armies took control of large areas from the 3rd cataract to the north the Red Sea to the east. The Funj Sultanate’s long-distance trade was based on gold, slaves, and ivory at Sennar under the sultan’s monopoly. They also levied a salatiya tax which gave the sultan slaves to export and personal retainers. Around the time when the Funj lost trading rights, soon they weakened and slipped from power.
<-- Jebel Barkal
Key term: Jebel Barkal, a mountain located at the edge of trade routes and next to Khartoum, where a Temple to Amun stood, erected by the Nubian Pharaoh Piye. Now a World Heritage Site.
The area north of the 3rd cataract was sparsely settled, and people settled in the Dongola reach mostly in river basins. Farther south, permanent agricultural settlements may have existed along the Blue and White Niles, and the savannah and the rainlands were the key nexus of Meroe, with monument centers like Musawwarat es Sofra and Naqa. We know relatively little about the Meroitic economy and the relative importance of agriculture, local productivity, or subsistence living, but we do believe external trade was important, and Meroe imported goods from Egypt and the Mediterranean found from lower Nubia to Sennar. This trade collapsing may even have led to the decline of royal power. Sorghum was dominant, and some surplus was produced to support the royal families, but historians argue that raiding and trade were more important sources of power. Sheep, goat, and cattle herding was widespread and wheat was introduced later. There were stone and brick buildings, temples, water tanks (as many as 800 scattered in the region, which took organized labor to build and maintain), and deep wells. The water tanks may have been useful in maintaining control over a dispersed or mobile population, and they often were closely associated with small temples. The local royal cult of Apedemak was the subject of many small temples. Apedemak is a war-god, with also some indications of a role as a provider of food and fertility god. In the Butana (a region in ___), though not elsewhere, there’s some evidence for state controls over subsistence. The palaces were where commodities or weapons were collected and stored, not so much the temples, except maybe at one temple at Meroe but this may have been associated with a nearby palace. At the palaces, sealings of jars, baskets, sacks, wooden chests and doors were intentionally stored, showing the palace stored and processed many different foodstuffs and commodities. They had a sophisticated written accounting system, but we don’t yet have any proof they had a sophisticated and extensive written accounting system. At Wad Ben Naqa in the Shendi Reach, palaces contain groups of storage jars for foods, also ivory and wooden blocks (maybe ebony). Or maybe palaces were just centers of consumption. A lot of the trade probably took place through the form of royal gift-giving and exchange between leaders of different polities. The imperial powers also gave gifts/subsidies to their peripheral states (like Meroe), and the Kushite Kings gave to their northern neighbors at an early date. Between 525 and 521 BC the Persian embassy to Ethiopia brought a purple cloak, gold, incense, alabaster, and palm wine and the Ethiopians gave the Persians in 521-486 BC gold, blocks of ebony, five slave boys, and twenty elephant tusks.
Meroe also had a thriving iron industry. But we don’t have enough archaeological evidence to discover what kind of iron tools they used mainly, though small arrowheads, spears, knives and hoes have been found but not yet any swords or battle axes, except in royal reliefs where they might have been symbolic. Pottery was very common and widespread too, often find and elaborate, and with social significance at times especially in mortuary rites. Cotton cloth manufacture was quite important in central Sudan, and it may have been important in Meroe. Glass, metalwork, and faience (tin-glazed) pottery may have been important manufactures.
Between 60 and 56 BC there were envoys from Meroe in Egypt, and they continued to send envoys to the Romans. In 235 AD one envoy went to Philae bringing gifts, and brought gifts back to Meroe.
Imports (discovered in burials) included jewelry, metal goods, silver and bronze vessels, bronze lamps, glassware, wooden furniture, faience, and ceramics. Three categories of pottery: fine tablewares, wine and oil containers, utilitarian kitchen and storage vessels. Fine tablewares were small class of imports but came from as far as Greece, and amphorae (tall thin-necked containers came from as far as France, north Africa, Greece, and Egypt). The biggest group of imports is cooking utility vessels from the Aswan area, common in lower Nubia-- otherwise mostly imported luxury items, like the silver vessels, jewelry, fancy glasswork etc found in royal burials, and small in number but widespread egyptian wine/oil containers, metalwork, simple bronze bowls, glassware, etc. These were rarely found as far south as Sennar, almost absent where they are abundant farther north (north of the 2nd cataract). Luxury items were probably controlled and redistributed and dispersed by the central power, whereas Egyptian ceramics might have been obtained in the frontier areas more informally (not by the royal monopoly).
Taxation and control over subsistence was probably limited to the kingdom’s core-- especially in western Butana-- where the control of permanent water supplies was the focus of tribute gathering. Elsewhere, procurement of resources was based on raiding, or on the control of regions providing exotic goods like gold around the Blue Nile and ivory, animal skins, and ostrich feathers around the rainland zones, whether through customary rights or tributes.
Political alliances might have been mediated through trading prestige goods, and other things like expertise and skills and ideas might have transferred through alliances too, leading to the adoption and assimilation of Egyptian royal cults, as demonstrated in the series of Amun temples at Meroe and at centers in the Dongola Reach.
The key to Sudanic power was: the control of exchange networks and prestige-goods via trade, the procurement of valuables through warfare, and control over ritual (helping bind together different groups, also borrowing from Egyptian cults at time). Less important were the development of administrative structures and the direct control of production. Similar patterns seen in the Middle Nile in the medieval times and after, and archaeological research into the Kushite state suggests they existed much earlier. So Sudan may have had an independent state earlier than thought.
PART 9: RANDOM PRIMARY SOURCE SUMMARIES/TEXTS
Primary source: Ibn Battuta On the East African Coast (Time period 1300s):
“Zeila near the Bab el-Mandeb Strait (between Eritrea and Yemen on the Horn of Africa) had lots of fisheries, and also used camels as beast of burden and for meat. The people are very dark-skinned. The area from Zeila down to Mogadishu on the Somalian coast also on the Horn of Africa was a desert. Mogadishu kept camels for meat and also herded sheep. In the town, young men come down and each acts as a host to one of the merchants and trades his wares for him. Ibn Battuta was hosted by a local qadi (judge). Sultans (rulers) in the area were called Shaikhs. It was the custom that any visiting lawyer or holy man (Sharif) could not find lodging until he had first visited the Sultan. Ibn Battuta ate there a repast of rice, pickles, meat stew, etc. and was dressed in fine clothes, and was gifted with six betel leaves and areca nuts.
In Mogadishu the Sheikh keeps audience, matters of religious law are decided by the qadi, others are decided by the council of wazirs (high ranking muslim officials) and amirs, and the Sultan sometimes decides a case by sending back his answer in writing.”
Ibn Battuta traveled from Mogadishu towards the Swahili land, to Kilwa which is the land of Zanj. On the way is the island of Mombasa, where the people import grain from the Swahili and mainly eat bananas and fish, and are Shafi Muslims (one of the major four schools of Sunni islam).
“In Kilwa, the majority of the inhabitants are black with scarifications on their skin. Sofala is half a day’s walk from Kilwa and Yufi, a month’s walk away, is the source of powdered gold. The people of Kilwa are engaged in a holy war against the pagan Zanj; they are pious Shafi’is and their town is beautifully built, their roofs of mangrove poles; there is much rain in the town. In this time (1331), the Sultan often made raids into the Zanj country carrying off booty and himself keeping a fifth, and he keeps a part reserved by the Koran for the family of the prophet and gives it to Sharifs when they come to visit. The Sultan is very humble and pious, sitting and eating with beggars and worshipping the Prophet, holy men, and descendents of the Prophet. Fakirs are Sufi holy men.
According to one story, the Sultan gave a visiting beggar holy man the clothes off his back. Then his son bought the clothes back with ten slaves, and the Sultan then ordered ten more slaves and two loads of ivory be given the beggar. Ivory is the main stuff given as a gift, gold is very rarely given.”
Dom Francisco d’Almeida sacked Kilwa and Mombasa in 1505. Kilwa at this time was a fertile island and town with perhaps a population of 4,000 at least
Primary Source: Ecology & Culture in West Africa
Early human communities burned out holes in the rainforest where lightning and natural tree fall had created gaps, to build productive edge environments to enhance their chance to harvest game.
West Africans share a language family; the languages they speak are closely related.
The period from 6,000-5,000 BC was a dried phase when ecological bands were compressed south. The period from 4,000-2,500 this was a wetter phase when ecological bands migrated north in West Africa. The ecological bands are: Sahara, Sahel, Savanna, Savanna woodland, and off on the eastern coast the Rainforest. Rainfall was the main limiting factor for bioproductivity in these area. Highland areas are the sources of the Senegal and Gambia rivers and Niger and Volta rivers.
In West Africa Sleeping sickness and Malaria were common diseases and challenges all the way from the sahel south to the rainforest. Sleeping sickness could be combated by burning the bush habitat of the tsetse fly; one mutation protected against vivax malaria, and sickle-cell allowed some people protection from falciparum malaria. This was one of the most difficult human- and animal-disease environments in the world.
The white and yellow Guinea Crams were two staple crops, thought to be first domesticated around 6000 BC and becoming staples at least by 1000 BC. Niger River peoples developed millets, sorghum, and wild rice by 3000-2000 BC. The agricultural systems produced very low yields adapted to unpredictable rainfall and flooding, and so population growth was slow.
There was generally a symbiotic (trading) relationship between herding and agricultural populations, although some groups combined elements of the two. Herding wasn’t really possible south of the savannah (due to sleeping sickness) until new furnace designs and thus iron smelting tech came to west Africa, enabling making iron farming tools and land-clearing tools.
After 1000 BC, larger communities started to form in the southern rainforests because of iron working technology to clear land and engage in yam cultivation with enormous investments of labor (2.5 acres being cleared required 500 days of work). Yet it took a lot of work, not enough people to engage in forest clearance, diseases, and nutritional limits of a yam-based diet, all kept the population low. In the northern regions, castes were developed each specializing in specific technologies. In the woodlands and rainforests, communities were organized into clans which directed ownership of agricultural fields. West Africans made beautiful art, and pushed wild animals away from their villages almost driving the elephant, a capstone species, to extinction. Camels replaced horses and oxen as the beast of burden in North Africa by 300-600 CE and by 800 CE regularly traveled in caravans across the Sahara.
One benefit of Atlantic slave trade was transfer of new high calorie crops from the Americas like corn, cassava/manioc, and to a smaller degree peanut/groundnut and potato.
Trade between west and north africa and demand for west african exports stimulated economic growth, though only high value-to-bulk ratio goods could be transported across the Sahara (primarily gold and slaves). Near the sahelian gold fields, local states rose up to organize gold mining and protect these exports militarily, especially with the advent of steel weapons and cavalry from north africa. This led to the growth of the empires of Ghana (c. 800-1240 CE), Mali (1240-1464 CE), and Songhai (1464-1591 CE).
The slave trade would wreak havoc, however, so trade could be both good and bad.
After the 1830s the Atlantic slave trade was abolished, and communities started to specialize in producing vegetable oils like peanut, palm kernel, and palm oil. Created new gendered division of labor- men controlled vegetable oil cash crops, the women the grain food crops. Also rapid population growth, and rainforest and savannah converted to agricultural field. Some soil was damaged, especially cotton and peanuts damaged sahel and savannah sil. In rainforests, cocoa regions of Ghana for example, soils depleted. Mono-cropping also increased insect plagues and fungal blights, which had also plagued fields of millet, sorghum, rice. Rootborers striking the Gold Coast (Ghana) cocao plantations in 1930s, threatened entire colonial economy.
The export economy wasn’t as beneficial as imagined to the local economy and development, since colonial authorities made sure they got rich before passing money to producers. European paper and metal coin replaced cowry shell and brass manila currencies.
Europeans actually thought shifting culivation (long fallow periods) caused environmental degradation, so “prescribed intensified agricultural production.” Another colonial belief was Sahara was expanding due to destructive human land-use, like destruction of trees by villagers or poor use of grasslands. Europeans were frustrated by low productivity with small farmers agriculture. French colonial projects to irrigate with floodplains of Niger Riger failed miserably. French and British & others’ concerted efforts to join to build large dams for storage in Senegal, Niger, and Volta rivers for irrigation and hydroelectricity uprooted communities, reversed ancient floodplains, with mixed success. In dryland farming systems, reworking as well. By 1980s rainforest converted to agriculture, and alarmed ecologists in the West. The World Wildlife Fund and other NGOs sent in small military forces to keep forest peoples fro protected areas. Urban centers grew stretching back to colonial period when railroads and roads built to help move cash crops, and rural Africans went to the city to find a better life, especially since the 1960s (when west african governments started subsidizing the import of staple foods for urban populations, reducing incentives for farmers to grow food for the cities, this intensified). Globalization and products from all over the world arrived, but West African standards of living remain low compared to the globe. West African population dramatically expanded despite malaria and HIV/AIDS epidemic, pressuring usage of new lands for agriculture, herding, mining, logging, urban settlements, etc→ biome conversion.
Asante was the largest precolonial state in the West African rainforest, which exported gold to international markets and imported slaves more than exported them, from the savanna and the coastal lands along the Gulf of Guinea. These slaves were used for a massive rainforest clearance, creating the kingdom of Asante replacing earlier matriclan hunters and gatherers.
Before 1500 CE, there was an export of captives across the Sahara, despite the low supply of labor in West Africa and the mechanisms to control labor, including social identities for dependants and slaves. Yet nevertheless they still sold slaves to import war horses and steel weaponry used to collect taxes and gather more slaves. Eventually also guns.
Primary Source: Strabo the Greek and Dio Cassus, History of Rome
Strabo the Greek and Dio Cassius in his History of Rome wrote that the Ethiopians under their queen attacked Syene (modern Aswan), Elephantine (at Aswan at the 1st cataract), Philae (another island near Aswan), enslaving the inhabitants and destroying statues of Caesar. A Roman general, Petronius, was able to retake the cities and they retreated to a city (Pselchis) now submerged by Lake Nasser below Aswan. Petronius also attacked and took Pselchis and then Napata, which he razed and enslaved the inhabitants. He then left the area (Strabo says “on account of the roads”, but Strabo and Dio Cassius are biased sources who views the Roman military machine as far superior), and left a garrison at Premnis. The one-eyed Queen (Kondake), attacked the garrison, and Petronius had to return to reinforce it. Finally the Queen sent ambassadors to Caesar, who brokered a peace deal with Caesar that also involved lifting the tribute that had been imposed on the Ethiopians.
Primary Source: Strabo the Greek Writing in 22 CE about King Ezana of Aksum
In 325 CE, King Ezana of Aksum went to war against the Nubians to quell their revolt, and defeated them as well as burning their masonry and straw towns. He traveled for 23 days after them, arriving at Kush (at Meroe) which he destroyed.
Primary Source: Procopius of Caesarea: history of the Wars :
It says that the Roman control extends to Aswan, and between Aswan and Ethiopia are the nations of the Nubians and the Blemmyae (a nomadic Beja tribal kingdom that existed from 600 BC to at least the 400s CE in Nubia; Strabo described them as a peaceful people living in the eastern desert near Meroe). Also Romans set up a temple and altars for the local Nubians and Romans at an island then named Philae (meaning “friendship” to improve relations between the Nubians and Blemmyae and Roans, and even paid a fixed amount of gold to them assuming they didn’t plunder the Romans. It says the Nubians believe in the Roman and Greek pantheon and also in Isis and Osiris and a fertility/agricultural/nature God.
It also says that Ellesthaeus, king of Ethiopia, hearing that Christians were being oppressed in neighboring modern-day Yemen by Jews and believers in the Greek pantheon, invaded the area and set up a Christian king, leaving behind Ethiopian slaves and criminals who did not follow the king back in the army, who soon overthrew the king in the area and established their own king Abramus. Ellesthaeus sent an army of 3,000 who decided to stay and actually joined the ranks of their enemy. Ellesthaeus then sent another army which was defeated and returned home. After Ellesthaeus, Abramus became a tributary king of the Ethiopians.
Procopius of Caesarea further says that in 550 CE, when Ellestheaeus and Esimiphaeus were kings, Justinian allied himself with the Ethiopians at Axum against the Persians. He proposed that the Ethiopians held Rome bypass the Persian monopoly on silk from India by acting as intermediaries, bringing the Ethiopians wealth and helping Rome not have to buy money from their enemy Persia. The Romans also asked the king over in modern Yemen to invade the Persian land. Both countries promised they would, but didn’t follow through-- The Ethiopians couldn’t buy silk from the Indians because the Persians controlled the harbors where the Indians landed, and the people in modern-day yemen didn’t want to cross a desert to fight a difficult war. Abramus also made the same promise to the Romans many times, and attempted the desert crossing once but then soon turned back.
Primary Source: Strabo the Greek Writing in 22 CE about Meroe
Strabo wrote of Meroe that it is a royal seat, on a mountainous and forested island with mines of copper, iron, gold, various precious stones, and rock salt, and surrounded on one side by sand dunes and on the other by crags. It is surrounded by the White and Blue Nile. The houses there are made of interwoven split palm wood, or of bricks. In the area they had peach, ebony, and carob trees and hunt elephants, lions, and panthers. They dispute over territory with the Libyans (nomadic desert peoples). They use wood hardened 6-foot wood bows, and the women fight as well and sometimes wear a upper lip copper ring. They wear sheepskins, or wear loincloths in warm weather. Strabo claimed the people elected their king based on his special qualities: beauty, skill at breeding cattle, wealth, or courage. The priests anciently were the most powerful and deposed kings sometimes, until one king decided to turn this state of affairs around and went to the temple of the golden shrine and killed the priests. The custom is that any harm done to the king, his attendants must undergo the same harm, including death-- causing the king to be guarded with great care.
Primary Source: Strabo the Greek Writing in 22 CE about the Ethiopians
Strabo said one ethiopian group in 22 CE used clubs armed with iron knobs, also spears and shields covered in raw hides, others bows and lances. These were herding people, traveling by note with their cattle, the bulls having bells around their necks to scare away wild beasts (they also used flaming torches and arrows to scare away predators). He wroe of the Ethiopians that they kept sheep, goats, and oxen, and also dogs, and ate millet, barley, meat, milk, butter, and cheese.
Primary source: the Bible, speaking of Ethiopia in 90 AD:
“The Kondake during this time kept a eunuch as a court official, who the bible says was converted to Christianity.”
Primary source: the Egyptian Book of the Dead (1240 BC)
Osiris is the king of the Gods. In Egypt ddw (djedu) was an important necropolis and center for worship of Osiris. Khem was the capital of the second nome (Egyptian divisions of the country) of Lower Egypt, on modern-day Ausim, where people worshipped Horus and the book of the dead describes the city as ruled over by Osiris. Osiris is also said to rule Elephantine, Memphis, Abydos (a site of ancient temples including the royal necropolis Umm el-Qa’ab where early pharoahs were buried, and also the temple of Seti I which contains a list of pharoahs from Menes/Narmer to Ramesses I), and be the soul of Ra (the sun), and his soul rests in Herakleopolis, an important city during the First Intermediate Period, 2181-2055 BC when Egypt was divided into Upper and Lower and Herakleopolis was capital of Lower Egypt and controlled much of it.
The goddess Nut was goddess of the sky and heavens, and her husband/brother Geb or Keb/Seb was god of the Earth. Ra was the sun-god, and Hathor was the goddess of joy, music, dancing and motherhood and lady of heaven (personification of the milky way), her worship going back to pre-dynastic times where she is associated with many different gods and roles. Hathor was the daughter of Nut and Ra, and also the wife of Horus the elder (an ancient sky god, whose face was considered to be the sun). Horus the elder was the original counterpart/enemy of Set.
Legends say the goddess Nut gave birth to four children: the sons Osiris and (the evil) Set and the daughters Isi and Nephthys. Isis was Osiris’ sister and wife, queen of the gods, and gave birth to Osiris’ son Horus. Set and Nephthys also married. Isis helped make her brother/husband sole ruler of Egypt after learning the Secret Name of Re (the most ancient God and most powerful until then), and she discovered wheat and barley and Osiris taught men to plant them in the Nile and how to make wine and beer. Osiris traveled to spread wisdom to other countries, leaving Isis to rule. Osiris was also a man, a primeval king of Egypt, and was murdered by his brother Set who usurped the throne. Isis cared for Osiris’ son Horus, and found Osiris’ body which she kept. But Set found the body in a chest where she hid it, and tore it into 14 pieces. Isis and her sister Nephthys searched for the 14 pieces and found 13 of them, creating shrines in each place where she found them, and burying him on the island of Philae. She joined the pieces together and laid him to rest. Osiris’ son Horus defeated Seth, and became Pharaoh.
In ancient egypt, the Ka was the divine soul of a person and could reside in a statue, the Ba expressed the mobility of the soul after death and expressed as a bird, and the akh was the spirit of a dead person that could revisit the earth in any form and live as an entity in the next world.
Thoth was an ibis-headed god in the Egyptian pantheon, and his wife was Ma’at (the goddess of truth and justice who helped maintain the cosmic order), and they stood on both sides of Ra’s boat, and Thoth also helped maintain the universe. In later ancient Egypt, he was associated with judgment, science and writing, including judgment of the dead.
The great gods of Egypt were Ra (the sun God), Horus the Elder or Heru (the ancient sky god often represented with the sun as a face), Hathor (the ancient sky goddess), Atum or Temu (god of the earth and close associate of sun god Re representing the setting sun, also the first god to emerge, described as both male and female and able to reproduce with himself); his children Shu (the god of air, dryness, heat, and light) and Tefnut (the goddess of moisture and the moon often depicted with a lion’s head) who were the children of Atum and together gave birth to Nut and Geb, Nut (goddess of the sky/heaven married to Ra but who loved her brother Geb), Geb (god of the earth), the children of Nut and Geb Osiris, Set, Isis, and Nepthys; Horus the child of Isis and Osiris. Also there are the children who sprang from Ra alone Hu (the god of the spoken word), and Saa or Sia (the personification of divine knowledge and perception). Other gods included Thoth (God of Wisdom) and his wife Ma’at and also Ptah (the local god of Memphis).
Primary source: Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, describing the area of Axum and Ethiopia
“1. Of the designated ports on the Erythraean Sea, and the market-towns around it, the first is the Egyptian port of Mussel Harbor. To those sailing down from that place, on the right hand, after eighteen hundred stadia, there is Berenice. The harbors of both are at the boundary of Egypt, and are bays opening from the Erythraean Sea.
2. On the right-hand coast next below Berenice is the country of the Berbers. Along the shore are the Fish-Eaters, living in scattered caves in the narrow valleys. Further inland are the Berbers, and beyond them the Wild-flesh-Eaters and Calf-Eaters, each tribe governed by its chief; and behind them, further inland, in the country towards the west, there lies a city called Meroe.
3. Below the Calf-Eaters there is a little market-town on the shore after sailing about four thousand stadia from Berenice, called Ptolemais of the Hunts, from which the hunters started for the interior under the dynasty of the Ptolemies. This market-town has the true land-tortoise in small quantity; it is white and smaller in the shells. And here also is found a little ivory like that of Adulis. But the place has no harbor and is reached only by small boats.
4. Below Ptolemais of the Hunts, at a distance of about three thousand stadia, there is Adulis, a port established by law, lying at the inner end of a bay that runs in toward the south. Before the harbor lies the so-called Mountain Island, about two hundred stadia seaward from the very head of the bay, with the shores of the mainland close to it on both sides. Ships bound for this port now anchor here because of attacks from the land. They used formerly to anchor at the very head of the bay, by an island called Diodorus, close to the shore, which could be reached on foot from the land; by which means the barbarous natives attacked the island. Opposite Mountain Island, on the mainland twenty stadia from shore, lies Adulis, a fair-sized village, from which there is a three-days' journey to Coloe, an inland town and the first market for ivory. From that place to the city of the people called Auxumites there is a five days' journey more; to that place all the ivory is brought from the country beyond the Nile through the district called Cyeneum, and thence to Adulis. Practically the whole number of elephants and rhinoceros that are killed live in the places inland, although at rare intervals they are hunted on the seacoast even near Adulis. Before the harbor of that market-town, out at sea on the right hand, there lie a great many little sandy islands called Alalaei, yielding tortoise-shell, which is brought to market there by the Fish-Eaters.
5. And about eight hundred stadia beyond there is another very deep bay, with a great mound of sand piled up at the right of the entrance; at the bottom of which the opsian stone is found, and this is the only place where it is produced. These places, from the Calf-Eaters to the other Berber country, are governed by Zoscales; who is miserly in his ways and always striving for more, but otherwise upright, and acquainted with Greek literature.
6. There are imported into these places, undressed cloth made in Egypt for the Berbers; robes from Arsinoe; cloaks of poor quality dyed in colors; double-fringed linen mantles; many articles of flint glass, and others of murrhine, made in Diospolis; and brass, which is used for ornament and in cut pieces instead of coin; sheets of soft copper, used for cooking-utensils and cut up for bracelets and anklets for the women; iron, which is made into spears used against the elephants and other wild beasts, and in their wars. Besides these, small axes are imported, and adzes and swords; copper drinking-cups, round and large; a little coin for those coming to the market; wine of Laodicea and Italy, not much; olive oil, not much; for the king, gold and silver plate made after the fashion of the country, and for clothing, military cloaks, and thin coats of skin, of no great value. Likewise from the district of Ariaca across this sea, there are imported Indian iron, and steel, and Indian cotton cloth; the broad cloth called monache and that called sagmatogene, and girdles, and coats of skin and mallow-colored cloth, and a few muslins, and colored lac. There are exported from these places ivory, and tortoiseshell and rhinoceros-horn. The most from Egypt is brought to this market from the month of January to September, that is, from Tybi to Thoth; but seasonably they put to sea about the month of September.
7. From this place the Arabian Gulf trends toward the east and becomes narrowest just before the Gulf of Avalites. After about four thousand stadia, for those sailing eastward along the same coast, there are other Berber market-towns, known as the 'far-side' ports; lying at intervals one after the other, without harbors but having roadsteads where ships can anchor and lie in good weather. The first is called Avalites; to this place the voyage from Arabia to the far-side coast is the shortest. Here there is a small market-town called Avalites, which must be reached by boats and rafts. There are imported into this place, flint glass, assorted; juice of sour grapes from Diospolis; dressed cloth, assorted, made for the Berbers; wheat, wine, and a little tin. There are exported from the same place, and sometimes by the Berbers themselves crossing on rafts to Ocelis and Muza on the opposite shore, spices, a little ivory, tortoise-shell, and a very little myrrh, but better than the rest. And the Berbers who live in the place are very unruly.
8. After Avalites there is another market-town, better than this, called Malao, distant a sail of about eight hundred stadia. The anchorage is an open roadstead, sheltered by a spit running out from the east. Here the natives are more peaceable. There are imported into this place the things already mentioned, and many tunics, cloaks from Arsinoe, dressed and dyed; drinking-cups, sheets of soft copper in small quantity, iron, and gold and silver coin, not much. There are exported from these places myrrh, a little frankincense, (that known as far-side), the harder cinnamon, duaca, Indian copal and macir, which are imported into Arabia; and slaves, but rarely.
9. Two days' sail, or three, beyond Malao is the market-town of Mundus, where the ships lie at anchor more safely behind a projecting island close to the shore. There are imported into this place the things previously set forth, and from it likewise are exported the merchandise already stated, and the incense called mocrotu. And the traders living here are more quarrelsome.
10. Beyond Mundus, sailing toward the east, after another two days' sail, or three, you reach Mosyllum, on a beach, with a bad anchorage. There are imported here the same things already mentioned, also silver plate, a very little iron, and glass. There are shipped from the place a great quantity of cinnamon, (so that this market-town requires ships of larger size), and fragrant gums, spices, a little tortoise shell, and mocrotu, (poorer, than that of Mundus), frankincense, (the far-side), ivory and myrrh in small quantities.
11. Sailing along the coast beyond Mosyllum, after a two days' course you come to the so-called Little Nile River, and a fine spring, and a small laurel-grove, and Cape Elephant. Then the shore recedes into a bay, and has a river, called Elephant, and a large laurel-grove called Acannae; where alone is produced the far-side frankincense, in great quantity and of the best grade.
12. Beyond this place, the coast trending toward the south, there is the Market and Cape of Spices, an abrupt promontory, at the very end of the Berber coast toward the east. The anchorage is dangerous at times from the ground-swell, because the place is exposed to the north. A sign of an approaching storm which is peculiar to the place, is that the deep water becomes more turbid and changes its color. When this happens they all run to a large promontory called Tabae, which offers safe shelter. There are imported into this market town the things already mentioned; and there are produced in it cinnamon (and its different varieties, gizir, asypha, areho, iriagia, and moto) and frankincense.
13. Beyond Tabae, after four hundred stadia, there is the village of Pano. And then, after sailing four hundred stadia along a promontory, toward which place the current also draws you, there is another market-town called Opone, into which the same things are imported as those already mentioned, and in it the greatest quantity of cinnamon is produced, (the arebo and moto), ind slaves of the better sort, which are brought to Egypt in increasing numbers; and a great quantity of tortoiseshell, better than that found elsewhere.
14. The voyage to all these farside market-towns is made from Egypt about the month of July, that is Epiphi. And ships are also customarily fitted out from the places across this sea, from Ariaca and Barygaza, bringing to these far-side market-towns the products of their own places; wheat, rice, clarified butter, sesame oil, cotton cloth, (the monache and the sagmatogene), and girdles, and honey from the reed called sacchari. Some make the voyage especially to these market-towns, and others exchange their cargoes while sailing along the coast. This country is not subject to a King, but each market-town is ruled by its separate chief.
15. Beyond Opone, the shore trending more toward the south, first there are the small and great bluffs of Azania; this coast is destitute of harbors, but there are places where ships can lie at anchor, the shore being abrupt; and this course is of six days, the direction being south-west. Then come the small and great beach for another six days' course and after that in order, the Courses of Azania, the first being called Sarapion and the next Nicon; and after that several rivers and other anchorages, one after the other, separately a rest and a run for each day, seven in all, until the Pyralax islands and what is called the channel; beyond which, a little to the south of south-west, after two courses of a day and night along the Ausanitic coast, is the island Menuthias, about three hundred stadia from the mainland, low and and wooded, in which there are rivers and many kinds of birds and the mountain-tortoise. There are no wild beasts except the crocodiles; but there they do not attack men. In this place there are sewed boats, and canoes hollowed from single logs, which they use for fishing and catching tortoise. In this island they also catch them in a peculiar wav, in wicker baskets, which they fasten across the channel-opening between the breakers.
16. Two days' sail beyond, there lies the very last market-town of the continent of Azania, which is called Rhapta; which has its name from the sewed boats (rhapton ploiarion) already mentioned; in which there is ivory in great quantity, and tortoise-shell. Along this coast live men of piratical habits, very great in stature, and under separate chiefs for each place. The Mapharitic chief governs it under some ancient right that subjects it to the sovereignty of the state that is become first in Arabia. And the people of Muza now hold it under his authority, and send thither many large ships; using Arab captains and agents, who are familiar with the natives and intermarry with them, and who know the whole coast and understand the language.
17. There are imported into these markets the lances made at Muza especially for this trade, and hatchets and daggers and awls, and various kinds of glass; and at some places a little wine, and wheat, not for trade, but to serve for getting the good-will of the savages. There are exported from these places a great quantity of ivory, but inferior to that of Adulis, and rhinoceros-horn and tortoise-shell (which is in best demand after that from India), and a little palm-oil.
18. And these markets of Azania are the very last of the continent that stretches down on the right hand from Berenice; for beyong these places the unexplored ocean curves around toward the west, and running along by the regions to the south of Aethiopia and Libya and Africa, it mingles with the western sea.”
Primary Source: Letter from Afonso I of Kongo to Joao III of Portugal, 1526
Nzinga Mbemba also known as Afonso I, became ruler of the Kongo kingdom in 1506. He originally welcomed foreign trade, but the slave trade destabilized his kingdom. Afonso I wrote to King Joao III of Portugal in 1526 that the slave trade and other trade was ruining his kingdom. Afonso I kept his people under control by giving them gifts and controlling trade, and the freedom of Portuguese merchants to trade these things to the people directly rapidly was undermining these king’s control. What’s more, the citizens of the populace are being taken into slavery constantly since “bad men” are greedy for the goods traded by the Portuguese and are taking people into slavery, and both corruption and greed are being spread widely while simultaneously the whole country is being depopulated.
Primary Source: Ibn Battuta
Ibn Battuta, born in Tangier in Morocco, in 1352 CE crossed the Sahara toward the Sudan region of west Africa. He first went to Sijilmasa, a caravan town at the edge of the desert where camels could be bought, then Taghaza (a desert salt mining town worked by slaves of the Massufa tribe set among sand dunes, which had mosques at this time which along with the houses were built of blocks of salt and roofed with camel skins). Crossing the desert was dangerous, and getting separated from the caravan or your guide getting lost meant death by thirst. Same thing if the “takshif” (a man hired to go ahead to carry letters and prepare the town for a caravan) got lost. It was a 2 month journey from Sijilmasa to the oasis town of Walata on the northern edge of Mali. In his life, Ibn Battuta made a pilgrimage to Mecca at 21 and then traveled to East Africa and much of Asia, including China. He returned to India in 1345 and then to Ceylon, Sumatra, Baghdad, and Cairo, reaching Fez in 1349 and in 1352 crossing the Sahara toward the Sudan and traversing the kingdom of Mali (1238-1468). He describes firsthand the customs of Mali and Gao at that time.
“Sijilmasa was a caravan town at the edge of the desert where camels from be bought. Taghaza in the desert was a salt mining town set among sand dunes, and it had mosques by 1352. Its houses and mosques were built of salt and roofed with camel skins. They find the salt formed naturally in thick rectangular slabs, and a camel carries two of these slabs. The inhabitants of Taghaza are the slaves of the Massufa tribe who live on dates brought from Dar’a and Sijilmasa, camel meat, millet from the South, and local brackish water. It exports the salt to the south, where its price varies by town: a load is from 8-10 mithqals in Walata, and 20-30 in the city of Mala. Salt is used as a medium of exchange in the cities to the south of the desert.
Travelers wear necklaces of mercury to kill lice, which are common in areas of the desert. Caravan travel was dangerous as those who went ahead or lagged behind to graze their animals could get lost and die of thirst.
Tisarahla was an oasis with an underground water-source.
IIt was about a two month journey from Sijilmasa to the oasis of Walata, the northernmost city of the subsaharan west Africans. It was ruled by a deputy of the sultan, Farba Husayn. Merchants deposited their goods in the square where they were guarded, and travelers went o visit the deputy (‘farba’). The inspector of Walata also invited those who came with to partake in a meal of pounded millet, a little honey, and milk.
Ibn Battuta stayed in Walata for 50 days and was fed and entertained by its populace. The city of Walata is hot, with a few date-palms with watermelons growing under, and is an oasis with an underground watersource. Walata had access to plenty of sheep meat. The people there are mostly of the Massufa tribe and “wear fine Egyptian fabrics”. The women are accorded an equal position in society to men, did not wear a veil, and the society is matrilineal so that men claim descent from their mother’s brother not father, and a person’s heirs are his sister’s sons. The people here are also Muslims who observe five times daily prayer, study law books, and memorize the Koran. Married women stay at home and do not travel with their husbands. Both the women and the men freely take lovers, including Islamic judges (qadis) and theologians who had traveled to Mecca.
The “takshif” was a man hired to go ahead to Walata to carry letters and prepare the town for a caravan, sending out an envoy to meet the travelers about 4 days out from the town with water and give them lodging. If the takshif gets lost (which is easy, because there is no visible road) or dies in the desert, most or all of those traveling in the caravan may also die. The takshif was paid a hundred gold mithqals.
The city of Walata was hot, with a few date-palms with watermelons growing under them, where they people ate mutton and some wore fine Egyptian fabrics. The women of Walata were accorded an equal position in society and don’t wear a veil, the society is matrilineal, and women and men freely take lovers. The people of Walata are devout Muslims praying five times daily, studying law books, and memorizing the Quran.
~Ibn Battuta gets from Walata to Mali~
“The road to Mali from the desert is kept extremely safe, and along the way are many baobab trees which can serve as shelters from the heat, or once the inside is rotted sources of rainwater and drinking water. They have bee-hives providing honey. Malian people have weavers, and one actually used a baobab tree to set up his loom and weave. Travellers carry salt and glass ornaments which they trade for food (millet, milk, chickens, pulped lotus fruit, rice, “funi” grain couscous, gruel, mashed haricot beans) at local villages. Interestingly, the rice can make some of the whites who ingest it ill.
The cities of Kabara, Zagha (known for its devotedly Islamic people), Timbuktu, Gogo, and Muli along the Niger are part of the Malian empire. Farther down the river is Yufi, a large town ruled by a Kingdom outside the Malian empire, whose inhabitants kill any white visitors.
The Sultan (Mansa Sulayman) holds ceremonial audiences in the palace yard on a platform under a tree with three steps called the “pempi”, carpeted with silk and with cushions, and covered with an umbrella pavilion of silk surmounted by a golden bird the size of a falcon. The sultan arives wearing a golden skull-cap bound with a gold band with tapered knife-shaped ends, wears a velvety red tunic of European fabrics, and carries a bow and quiver. He slowly walks to the pempi and when he is seated drums, trumpets, and bugles are sounded and the deputy and military commanders enter. Two saddled and bridled horses and two goats are brought to protect against the evil eye, and Dugha the intepreter or griot stands at the gate while the people stay in the street under the trees. When summoned before him, a Malian must replace his clothes with worn garments and a dirty skullcap, raise his garments and trousers knee-high, and prostrate himself before the sultan hitting the ground with his elbows. He then stands with his back bent and head down, and if the King speaks to him he uncovers his back and throws dust over his head and back, and if sultan speaks to the audience, they took off their turbans and put them down and listen in silence. One sometimes mentions what he has done for the sultan, and those who know he did so pluck a bow and “twang” it. If the sultan confirms this and thanks him, he again covers his back with dust.
The Malians have “two festivals: of the sacrifice and of the fast-breaking”. The sultan prays in midafternoon, rises to the pempi, and armour bearers bring in quivers and swords and lances and maces of gold and silver. Four amirs stand at his head waving off the flies with silver ornaments looking like saddle stirrups. The commanders, qadi, and preachers sit around. The interpreter Dugha has 4 wives and 100 slave girls, who wear beautiful robes and wear gold and silver pieces with gold and silver balls attached on their heads, and Dugha plays a reed and calabash instrument and chants a poem in praise of the sultan recording his bravery and battle deeds. Women and girls sing along, and 30 youths wearing red wool tunics and white skull caps beat their individual drums, and boy students turn wheels in the area and also play with swords, as does the griot. The sultan then gifts the griot Dugha a purse with 200 mithqals of fold dust. The commanders rise and twang bows in thanks, and the next day each gives Dugha the griot a gift, while Dugha carries out a similar ceremony every Friday after the main prayer. Poets on feast days after Dugha’s display wear bird masks with a wooden head and red beak made of feathers. They recite poems to the sultan recounting the deeds of ancient kings, and exhorting the king to do great deeds so he too might be remembered. The poet chief as a mark of respect lays his head on the sultan’s lap, then on the soldier’s right shoulder and left, speaking during this time. This is an ancient custom.
The Sultan gave as a gift to Ibn Battuta some beef and cakes of bread after the banquet.
The roads of Mali are extremely safe for travelers and brigands are not tolerated.
The city of Mali, capital of the Malian empire, had its own quarters for foreigners, and had a qadi Abd ar-Rahman who had been to Mecca. One of the great men there was the interpreter and djeli or griot Dugha. The king of Mali during this time was Mansa Sulayman, Mansa meaning king or sultan in Mandingo. The king of Mali held a banquet to which he invited generals, doctors, judges or qadis, and preachers, and there he read the Koran at reading desks and the invitees prayed for Mansa Sulayman and for the late sultan of Morocco Abu’l-Hasan.
The Malian people hate injustice, and their sultan “shows no mercy to anyone who is guilty of the least act of injustice”. The country is totally secure, and inhabitants and travellers don’t fear robbery or highwaymen. They even return the wealth of foreigners who die in their country to the rightful hair. They carefully observe the hours of prayer, attend services at the mosque so that the mosques are totally full each Friday and men send their boys to go early to stake out a place for them by laying down their prayer mat made out of woven palm, wear clean white clothes on Friday, and and bring up their children as Muslim: they see it as so important to learn the Koran that one qadi chained up his children on a festival day until they had learned the Koran by heart. The women servants, slaves, and young girls walk about naked and see the sultan thus, and his daughters do too. As a mark of respect they put dust and ashes on their heads. They also eat dog and donkey meat.”
Ibn Battuta was in Mali from 1352-1353, and traveled by camel (horses are expensive cost a hundred mithqals each) and crossed a channel near the Niger that had to be crossed by boats, at night to avoid mosquito, and that had many hippos in it. Boatmen fear the hippopotami that swim in the Niger on the way from Timbuktu to Gogo and keep to the banks to avoid getting sunk. People also hunt the hippopotami using spears with holes in them through which cords are attached, throwing the spears right through their legs or necks and then pulling the hippopotami up the bank by the rope.
“At a village down the Niger was a village governed by Farba Magha, who had traveled to Mecca with Sultan mansa Musa. Mansa Musa brought with him a white qadi, and the qadi tried to steal 4,000 mithqals, so he was exiled to the land of the cannibals where he stayed for 4 years (but wasn’t eaten because his white skin was viewed as indigestible) before the sultan sent him back to his country.
Ibn Battuta reports that the people to the south wear giant ear pendants, and wrap themselves in silk cloaks, and mine gold in their country. He also says they are cannibals and the sultan actually gave them a female servant who they killed, ate, and smeared themselves with her blood.
Timbuktu’s inhabitants are mostly members of the Massufa tribe, who wear the face-veil. Its governor is Farba Musa, and when he appointed a Massufa to be an amir (officer), he gave him a dyed cloth robe, turban, and trousers, sat him on a shield and lifted the shield above their heads. In this town is the grave of a great poet from Granada.
Down from Timbuktu on the Nile is Gogo, a large city on the nile and one of the biggest and best-provisioned, with lots of rice, milk, and fish, and a delicious species of cucumber called inani. They use cowry-shells as a currency, as they do at Mali. Tagadda is another merchant town.”
Primary Source: Sundiata Keita (read the book)
Further Readings Outside of Class
Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas.
Primary Source: Herodotus: a History
Isaza and the King of the Underworld
Kintu and Nambi
Writings about Masaailand
