1.18 - Summary of Classical and Post-Classical Africa

Summary

No known alphabet was ever invented by a European.

Jeffreys 1952: 428

Africa has the dubious reputation of being “prehistoric” until the introduction of “historical” narrative (i.e., written documentation) with the arrival of Europeans in the so-called Age of Exploration. This is in fact true over many parts of Africa but, as in many “prehistoric” cultures, image, memory, lore and myth provided a surprisingly tangible alternative. Written “history”, administrative recording and other documentation on the African continent extend back in time almost to the beginning of writing itself, with the development of Hieroglyphic script in Egypt (see Chapters 1.16 and 1.17). Egyptian is in fact the only indisputably indigenous grammatical writing system in Africa, all others being either adopted or adapted from an external source (excluding artificially developed scripts of recent origin; Jeffreys 1952; Pasch 2008; Wikipedia 2010). This chapter presents those literate societies and cultures on the African continent other than Dynastic Egypt, organised in terms of the origin or introduction and dissemination of the different languages and their script(s). The accompanying bibliography emphasises recent publications with good further bibliographies. Note that the use of “bce” and “ce” for many regions under discussion here is incorrect: almost all are now Muslim states, for whom the only “common era” begins in year 622, while the Christian Ethiopian and Coptic calendars begin in years 7 and 284 respectively, of the Western calendar. Dates “bc(e)” only in the present chapter are therefore asterisked (*). Dates “CE” are unmarked.