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  1. Home
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  3. The Cambridge History of Africa
  • Cited by 8
  • Volume 2: From c.500 BC to AD 1050
  • Edited by J. D. Fage
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
March 2008
Print publication year:
1979
Online ISBN:
9781139054560
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521215923
Subjects:
History, Regional History Before 1500, African History
Series:
The Cambridge History of Africa
Collection:
Cambridge Histories - Middle East & African Studies
Information

Book description

After the prehistory of Volume I, Volume II of The Cambridge History of Africa deals with the beginnings of history. It is about 500 BC that historical sources begin to embrace all Africa north of the Sahara and, by the end of the period, documentation is also beginning to appear for parts of sub-Saharan Africa. North of the Sahara, this situation arises since Africans were sharing in the major civilizations of the Mediterranean world. It is shown that these northern Africans were not simply passive recipients of Phoenician, Greek, Roman and Arab influences, or of the great religions and cultures of Judaism, Christianity and Islam coming from the Semitic world. They adapted these things to their own particular needs and purposes, and sometimes too contributed to their general development. But the North African civilization failed to make headway south of the Sahara.

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‘… a work of elegant scholarship and an invaluable research tool.’

Source: The American Historical Review

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Contents

Contents
  • 1 - The legacy of prehistory: an essay on the background to the individuality of African cultures
    pp 11-86
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Palaeoanthropology is the means whereby the developmental stages in man's intellectual and cultural evolution are investigated and interpreted and, on the evidence as it exists today, it would appear that man the tool-maker was a product of the African tropical savannas. The basic stock was perhaps as variable as are the Kibish crania from Omo in East Africa, and became differentiated during the 40-50,000 years' duration of the later Pleistocene, that culture became differentiated, coincidently with the genetic changes that followed increasing identification of the populations with specific geographical regions and ecosystems. The extent of Middle Palaeolithic/Middle Stone Age variability will serve to demonstrate the degree of environmental adaptation that had been achieved by the early Homo sapiens populations. Between 16,000 and 10,000 BC there is evidence for much local variation in the forms of the stone industries in Nubia and Upper Egypt.
  • 2 - North Africa in the period of Phoenician and Greek colonization, c. 800 to 323 BC
    pp 87-147
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter discusses that Greek and Phoenician colonization had a different character from that of the European nations in recent times. Egyptian control over Syria and over Kush to the south had been lost. The history of Egypt during the 'period of colonization' was still the history of the Egyptian state, that of the rest of North Africa has to be treated as the history of the new states established by the Greek and Phoenician immigrants. The Greek colonists occupied the area known, from the name of their principal city Cyrene, as Cyrenaica. The relative isolation of Cyrenaica was ended when the Greek army under Alexander occupied Egypt in 332 BC. The Phoenicians colonized a much greater area of North Africa than the Greeks, and their influence on Africa was probably more profound as well as being more widespread. The Phoenicians were established on the coast of North Africa considerably earlier than the Greeks.
  • 3 - North Africa in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, 323 BC to AD 305
    pp 148-209
  • View abstract

    Summary

    By the end of the fourth century BC, the two colonizing nations, Greeks and Phoenicians, appeared to be securely established in control of the Mediterranean, and northern Africa was effectively divided between a Greek and a Phoenician state. The official cult of Alexander and the Ptolemies at Alexandria was designed to legitimize the dynasty in the eyes of its Greek subjects. The bulk of the bureaucracy continued to be recruited from Greeks and Hellenized Egyptians, and Greek remained the principal language of the Egyptian administration. Alexandria continued to be an important centre of Greek literature and learning, and with the spread of Christianity among the Egyptian Greeks it became also a principal intellectual centre for the Greek speaking section of the Christian Church. During the third century AD the Roman empire suffered a prolonged period of political and economic crisis.
  • 4 - The Nilotic Sudan and Ethiopia, c. 660 bc to c.ad 600
    pp 210-271
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The ancient Egyptians had entered what is now the northern Sudan, known to them as Kush, in about 1500 BC and had rapidly occupied it as far upstream as Kurgus, near to the modern Abu Hamed. Tanwetamani was the last of the kings of Kush to be buried in the ancestral cemetery at Kurru. By the middle of the fourth century, Aksum had become a considerable power and the court of the king had been Christianized. The inscriptions of Ezana, both in Greek and Ge'ez, the indigenous language and the forerunner of Amharic and Tigrinya, the main Semitic tongues of modern Ethiopia, are the main sources for knowledge of contact between Aksum and Meroe. Meroitic was the written language of the whole stretch of river over which the Meroitic kings ruled from at least as early as 200 BC until the fourth century AD.
  • 5 - Trans-Saharan contacts and the Iron Age in West Africa
    pp 272-341
  • View abstract

    Summary

    From about 3000 BC onwards, the Sahara began to exert a constraining influence on the freedom of human movement. This chapter considers the problem of the origins and the development of agriculture and animal husbandry in Africa south of the Tropic of Cancer, than to try and establish the situation relating to food production in the Sahara and in the sub-Saharan western Sudan towards the beginning of the Christian era. The most important material evidence for a North- West African Bronze Age has begun to come to light far to the south of Morocco, in Mauritania. Most West African peoples passed directly from the Neolithic to the Iron Age, in the Sahel and the Sudan from the fifth century BC, and in the forest lands after the beginning of the Christian era, with 'paleonigritic' peoples in their mountain or island fastnesses catching up between about the fifth and eleventh centuries AD.
  • 6 - The emergence of Bantu Africa
    pp 342-409
  • View abstract

    Summary

    In Africa south of the Equator the period from 500 BC until AD 1000 was first and foremost the period which saw the change to food production. The transition to food production coincided with the transition from the Stone to the Iron Age. This chapter considers the historical implications of recent work on the classification of the Bantu languages at the end of the Stone Age. The archaeological evidence surveyed suggests that the Iron Age entered Bantu Africa across the western half of its northern frontier. The introduction of the South-East Asian food-plants was the most significant event of Early Iron Age times in the forest region. This must presumably have been a process which started on the east coast of Africa with the oceanic voyages of Indonesian traders and migrants. A scatter of exotic objects, such as glass beads and seashells, has come from Early Iron Age sites in the southern half of Bantu Africa.
  • 7 - The Christian period in Mediterranean Africa, c.ad 200 to 700
    pp 410-489
  • View abstract

    Summary

    For more than three centuries, from the reign of Constantine to the Arab invasions of the 630s, Mediterranean Africa was the scene of a Christian civilization. The Christian leaders, Augustine of Hippo and Cyril of Alexandria moulded the teaching of the Latin and Greek Churches respectively in a way that has survived for centuries. This chapter outlines the history of Christian civilization from its beginnings to its collapse before the Arabs, partial in Egypt but complete in North Africa. Inevitably Christianity itself must take the centre of the stage. The Church in North Africa west of the Gulf of Syrtis was separated from that in Egypt and Cyrenaica by geography, language and theological tradition. The Church in Egypt and Cyrenaica was, Greek-speaking and outward-looking, responsible for missions to Nubia, Ethiopia and south India, and while not denying the importance of ecclesiastical discipline, directed its energies towards arriving at an understanding of the mystery of human salvation through the Incarnation.
  • 8 - The Arab conquest and the rise of Islam in North Africa
    pp 490-555
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The Arab conquests, which created a great new empire and led to the establishment of Islam as one of the great religions of the world, are one of the traditional landmarks of history. The Egyptian papyri form an invaluable record; they also demonstrate that the written tradition, when it made its appearance in Egypt from the middle of the eighth century onwards, was indebted to an archive going back to the establishment of a regular administration under Arab control. The movement of soldiers, slaves and tribute to and fro along the North African coast from Egypt to Spain had revived the market economy after the lapse into subsistence of the late Roman and Byzantine period. In the ninth century, all the great mosques of Egypt and North Africa which dated from the early days of the conquest were enlarged to their present size, while new ones were founded.
  • 9 - Christian Nubia
    pp 556-588
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The strong influence of Christianity in Egypt is likely to have been felt in Nubia and, though the First Cataract marked a political, religious and linguistic frontier as it had done since pharaonic times, it was not impassable. This chapter examines the fact of the existence of a Christian Church and a Christian ruler became the dominant feature of Nubian history and culture for about 800 years, from the first formal missionary activity in the mid sixth century until the taking of power by a Muslim ruler in the mid fourteenth. Christian buildings, Christian symbols and Christian belief formed the characteristic culture of the period. From the time of Merkurios, there is evidence for the full political and cultural development of Christian Nubia. There is some historical data to be gained from Arab writers, while the archaeological material is rich and much is now known of the material culture.
  • 10 - The Fatimid revolution (861–973) and its aftermath in North Africa
    pp 589-636
  • View abstract

    Summary

    In AD 861 the 'Abbasid Caliph Mutawakkil was murdered by the Turkish guard in the imperial capital of Samarra on the Tigris at the instigation of the heir to the throne, his son Muntasir. The Muslim population, including the beduin tribes and the army, was susceptible to agitation on behalf of Shi'ite pretenders. If Ibn Mudabbir's achievements were more than legendary, however, they are obscured by political events. The Fatimids had turned their attention to the west, even though, in 921, the Mahdi had taken up residence in a city built to promote the eastern enterprise. By the middle of the tenth century AD, the troubles which had afflicted both Islam and Christendom over the past hundred years had resulted in a new political order. The efforts of the Ifriqiyan navy had been directed against the western extremity of the Byzantine empire, in southern Italy.
  • 11 - The Sahara and the Sudan from the Arab conquest of the Maghrib to the rise of the Almoravids
    pp 637-684
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The Saharan trade and the introduction of Islam were the two principal external factors in the history of West Africa before 1500. The journey across the Sahara with slaves must have been extremely difficult and exhausting. This is fully borne out in an anecdote about an Ibāḍī from Wargla in the eleventh century. The Umayyad government sought to encourage the flow of gold from the Sudan. But direct imperial involvement in the organization of the gold-trade was short-lived. In 750, when the Umayyad caliphate was overthrown, the Maghrib was in the throes of a Berber revolt under the banners of different sects of the Kharijiyya. In the tenth and eleventh centuries, Kairouan was an important centre of Islamic learning, and almost all the important fuqahāʾ of the Maghrib studied there for some time. The Almoravids left their impact in the Sudan, where their intervention brought about the islamization of Ghana and eradicated traces of Ibadi influence.
  • Bibliographical essays
    pp 685-718
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This bibliography presents a list of titles that help the reader to understand African prehistory. The initial and main impetus for the study of African prehistory has come from two directions: on the one hand from French geologists, palaeontologists and archaeologists working in the Maghrib and later in the Sahara, who applied the western European terminology; and, on the other hand, from investigators in South Africa who introduced their own terminology because of the morphological differences between the artefact assemblages from Africa and Europe and the lack of reliable means of dating and making correlations over such great distances. For the various geographic regions of the continent there are a number of monographs providing detailed and/or specialized information. The development of food production is more generally associated with the so-called 'neolithic' occurrences in northern and West Africa and in the East African Rift.

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