If one major southward movement was the spread of farming
in southern
Africa, another was the spread of literate culture in northern Africa.
Africa was the home of what was probably the world's
second- oldest
civilization, that of ancient Egypt. For most of its prehistory, Egypt
had been rather a backwater. Farming is not attested in the Nile Valley
until the sixth millennium B.C., and it is only in the fourth
millennium that Egypt becomes a place to watch. But the development
that then took place was rapid, with archaeological evidence of
increased social stratification culminating in the emergence of the
Egyptian state toward the end of the millennium. From that point on
there was a tradition of Egyptian monarchy that was still in place in
the fourth century B.C. and survived in a residual form into Roman
times.
This monarchic institution played a remarkably salient
role in Egyptian
civilization, or at least in what we know of it. Like the Narmer
Palette (see figure 10), the remains of ancient Egypt give us a great
deal of information (or disinformation) about the exploits of kings,
but tell us much less about anything else. The major exception is the
Egyptian way of death, as we will see in the final section of this
chapter; but even there, much of what we learn, particularly in the
early period, is about the death of kings. At the same time, the roll
call of the Egyptian kings lay at the core of Egyptian historical
memory. Manetho, an Egyptian priest who wrote an account of the history
of his country for the Greeks in the early third century B.C., still
had at his disposal an authentic historical record going back to around
3000 B.c.—a time depth that could have been matched only in
Mesopotamia. But the tradition of monarchic rule was not, in practice,
unbroken. It was interrupted every few centuries by periods of
disunity, and more seriously it was increasingly subject to episodes of
foreign rule. No such episodes had occurred in the third millennium,
and only one in the second; but in the first millennium they became so
numerous as to make foreign rule the normal condition of the country.
This in turn sapped the foundations of the high culture that had been
associated with the Egyptian state. Already in retreat in the time of
Manetho, within a few centuries it was dead.
One might have expected a civilization that lasted
over two and a half
millennia to have found many imitators beyond its borders. Yet this was
not the case. As we will see in later chapters, civilizations vary
enormously in the degree to which they export themselves, or are
imported by others; that of ancient Egypt was more or less confined to
the home market. For the peoples of the Near East it seems to have been
in some way less eligible than its Mesopotamian competitor. For the
peoples of Africa it was not very accessible. The Nile Valley is
flanked by desert on two sides, and desert dwellers do not have much
use for civilization. Farther up the river to the south were the
Nubians, who unlike the desert dwellers did have a need for a high
culture; and in contrast to the peoples of the Near East, they were a
captive audience for the Egyptians— sometimes literally so. So the
Nubian adoption of the culture of their northern neighbors, with or
without ethnic customization, has a long history. But Nubia was a dead
end; it was not on the way to other territories where Egyptian
civilization might have been in demand, such as the grasslands to the
south of the Sahara. It may be possible to find traces of Egyptian
civilization here and there in sub- Saharan Africa, but there was no
instance of the transfer of the culture as a whole.
It was in the first millennium B.C. that literate cultures
began to
appear in parts of Africa other than the Nile Valley. The origins of
these cultures lay outside Africa altogether, and the process that
brought them to the continent was colonization. It began when the
Phoenicians, maritime traders of the Syrian coast, founded the city of
Carthage in what is now Tunisia. Carthage preserved a Phoenician
culture (complete with its alphabetic script) from its foundation in
the ninth century until its fall in the second century B.C. Toward the
end of this period kingdoms were emerging among the native population
of the hinterland, and one of these adopted Carthaginian culture. As a
result of this interaction a version of the Carthaginian script came to
be widely used for inscriptions in the native languages of ancient
North Africa; this script was preserved down to modern times by the
Tuareg nomads of the Sahara, among whom it was traditionally taught by
the women. But there was no lasting native adoption of Phoenician
literary culture.
Another example of the process takes us to the Ethiopian
highlands in
the middle of the first millennium B.C. In this case the colonists had
crossed the sea from Yemen, bringing with them their language and
culture, which likewise included an alphabetic script. This time the
colonial culture was not imitated by independent African societies, and
thus did not spread beyond Ethiopia; but thanks to its association with
a resilient monarchic tradition, it has survived down to the present
day in a distinctly Africanized form. The core of the Ethiopian
population still speaks languages derived from that of the Yemenite
colonists and uses a version of the script they brought with them from
Yemen, where it died out more than a thousand years ago.
Meanwhile, along the Mediterranean coast, the Phoenicians
had been
followed by the Greeks and Romans. The Greeks began to colonize
Cyrenaica, to the west of Egypt, in the seventh century B.C., and
thanks to Alexander the Great they occupied Egypt itself in the fourth.
The Romans occupied North Africa and took over Egypt in the course of
building their empire in the last centuries B.C. The ruins and Latin
inscriptions of Volubilis in wha$,Is pow Morocco date from the early
centuries A.D. and show members of a native tribe living a literate
urban life in Roman style.
Yet of all the outsiders of premodern times, none had
so far- reaching
a cultural impact as the Arabs. The rise of Islam in the seventh
century A.D. led to the Arab conquest of the northern coast of Africa,
from Egypt to Morocco; ultimately it is due to this expansion that
Arabic literary culture prevails throughout this area today. But the
Arabs also had something that their predecessors had lacked: they were
a desert people for whom the Sahara was territory of a familiar kind.
They did not in general make it their business to send armies across
the desert, but they did establish a degree of trans-Saharan contact
that cannot have been witnessed for several thousand years. When we
peer through the eyes of the Greek and Latin authors of antiquity, we
catch only the most fleeting glimpses of the world beyond the desert;
but with the appearance of the Arabs, for the first time in recorded
history the Sahara becomes transparent.
An immediate effect of this is to reveal the existence
among the black
populations of the savanna of a kingdom called Ghana. It was already
there in the eighth century; we have no way to know when it was
founded, or what predecessors it may have had, though there is
archaeological evidence of urban life in West Africa by A.D. 300. In an
eleventh- century source Ghana still appears as very much a pagan
kingdom: we hear of idols and sorcerers, and of royal burials in which
the dead king was supplied with grave goods and accompanied by the men
who used to serve his meals. A reminder that we are in Africa, where
matrilineal kinship systems are common, is the rule of succession: the
kingship went not to the dead ruler's son but rather to his sister's
son. There is no sign of any tradition of literacy in the native
language. But like many rulers of societies lacking literate culture,
those of Ghana clearly saw a use for it. The king's treasurer, and most
of his ministers, were Muslims, and presumably literate in Arabic.
There was also a Muslim town a few miles from the pagan capital; its
existence doubtless reflected the role of Muslims from the north in the
trans-Saharan trade.
In the long run the pagan Africans of this region themselves
converted
to Islam. Thus Mali, a major West African kingdom in the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries, was already a Muslim state. Its people were not,
perhaps, very good Muslims. A Moroccan traveler visiting West Africa in
the mid-fourteenth century, who comments on the degree of respect shown
to women, was shocked when a local Muslim judge casually introduced his
girlfriend; she laughed at the traveler's embarrassment. A century and
a half later a ruler who took Islam to heart was perturbed by the fact
that all the prettiest girls in the city of Jenne walked about naked,
even the daughters of Muslim judges. But the people of the West African
savanna were now part of the Muslim world, and under pressure to
assimilate its mores.
While Islam came to West Africa by land, it reached
East Africa by sea.
Here too the Muslim Arabs went farther than their predecessors—their
accounts of the region reach far into the Southern Hemisphere. As in
West Africa an early result of this is to give us vivid images of
societies that we could otherwise hope to know only through the veil of
archaeology. A tenth- century source describes an East African kingdom
among the Zanj in what is now Mozambique; we hear that an unjust ruler
would be killed and his descendants barred from ruling. The king had a
cavalry force ofthree thousand men mounted on cattle—an entirely
credible report, since this practice is known elsewhere in southern
Africa at a later date. In this region south of the Horn of Africa, the
interaction between native pagans and foreign Muslims did not result in
a general conversion to Islam, but it did lead to the emergence of a
Muslim African population along the coast.
