The People Of Africa: African History
African history: It was mostly Berbers and Negroes living in Africa in the early days. The Berbers were people who lived on or near the Mediterranean coast. The Berbers and the ancient Egyptians came from Hamitic stock, which means they were Caucasian and had “European” facial traits.
The Pygmies were part of the group of people called Negroes. The third group of people, the Bushmen, may have lived all over central & southern Africa until Negroes pushed them out of the best places to eat and live. They now live in the forest areas of central Africa, where Pygmies lived before. Only a few Bushmen are still alive, mostly in the Desert in the south.
It’s between the northern shore and equatorial Africa that the Sahara desert is found. It was green and full of grass as the last Glaciation came to an end around 8000 B.C.
There was then a lot of it that was still livable until about 2000 BC. The first people who lived in the Sahara were likely a combination of Berbers and Africans.
This is based on new rock paintings that show that farm animals’ keeping was a big part of what looks like a peaceful life. The illustrations also show that singing and dancing were crucial to these ancient Africans, just like they are important to modern Africans today.
Somewhere between 4000 and 2000 B.C., as the desert grew, the people who lived in the Sahara moved north, east, and south, but some stayed and learned how to live with very little water.
It was in western and southern Sudan that the people who went south lived. It refers to a wide strip of pastures that runs across Zimbabwe, southern and southeastern, and Egypt.
Western South Africa is detached from the shoreline to the southeast by such a thick belt of dense forest that is hard to get through. With other Negro tribes, they formed Bantu-speaking people in Sudan. They then spread across central, eastern as well as southern Africa over time.
At some point around 1000 BC, another civilization began to form in eastern Uganda, south of Egypt. It was called the Kushites, and it was probably made up of a mix of Hamitic and Negro people. Ethiopia is farther east. There is a good chance that the Ethiopians came from Hamitic people who later mixed with Arabs from Arabia.
Their name is Meroe. Nubia is the name of their home country. For a long time during the third millennia BC, the people who lived in the land south had a lot to do with Egyptian culture.
This land was called Nubia, but to the Egyptians, it was known as Kush. The northern Nubians, who had darker skin than just the Egyptians, may have come from Asia. People who lived further south were Negroes, and they came from Africa.
Egypt did business with, battled with, and in some ways, ruled over all of these peoples. From the 11th millennium Bce, a Kushite c.e. in Western Asia, with its investment at Napata, thrived.
At the same time, Egypt went through a long timespan of weakness and split rule. As early as 750 BC, the Kushites started taking over Egypt. In 715, they built a Kushite kingdom in Egypt.
They were driven out of Egypt just around 50 years later by Assyrians who came into the country. After a lot of fighting, the Kushites had to leave Egypt. When the Kushites left their new capital, they moved back to Napata, where they ruled until the early 6th century BC.
They then moved their equity to Meroe, which was 300 miles south. This may have been because Meroe was in an area that was rich in iron. Meroe was ruled for about eight centuries by the Kushite Kingdom.
The Kingdom of Meroe came to an end in about AD 320 when Ethiopia’s King of Axum destroyed it. The Kushite civilization was completely wiped out. A lot of people didn’t know about it until a long time ago when tombs and the destroys of Mycenae and Napata were left behind. The writing in the Meroitic language has indeed been partly deciphered, but the language itself is long gone.
During the last centuries BC, the Kushites were very good traders. They moved goods from the Red Sea to the east and through Egypt, where they had a good relationship with the Ptolemies.
For their army, the Kushites were very good at making iron. They also used horses and elephants to help them fight, which made their army strong. Meroe was a beautiful city, with a great palace or a beautiful Temple of both the Sun.
Nubians who were descendants of both the Kushites were adopted Christianity by evangelistic monks from Egypt about 200 years after the city of Meroe was burned down.
There were then Christian empires in Nubia for a long time, where the people seemed to be living well. They were good buys and craftsmen, but they were also very interested in learning.
For their language, they made Greek writing easier to read and write. They also built schools and libraries, so people could learn about the world around them.
People who lived in Nubia were still friendly with Syria till about 1250 when their kingdoms were taken over by Arabs who had been joined isis and African peers who had also changed their ways. There were no more Christians in Nubia by the 14th century.
People lived in North Africa only until the 7th Century A.D. They lived in Carthage, Rome, the Vandals, and Byzantium. A lot of the countries in this african history are now in North Africa. These countries are now called Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, and Libya.
Mauretania, the territory of the Mauri, or Moors, was about the same size as modern Morocco in Roman times. A country called Mauritania does not have to be confused on this one.
African history: It’s in the middle of Africa. Also, the Romans called a few of what was then Country & Algeria “Numidia,” which is what it was back then. In the past, western Libya was named Tripolitania, but also eastern Libya was called Cyrenaica, which is still the case today.
A lot of the Berber people who lived in North Africa back then were nomadic. They didn’t live together in a single state. There were also a lot of traders, especially those who did business with Sudanese people in the trans-Saharan trade.
The Traders Set Up Shop In Towns, Which Often Turned Into Kingdoms
African history: At some point in the second millennium BC, Libyan leaders would raid Egypt. After the authority of the Pharaohs fell in the 11th century B.C., Libyan conscripts in the Egyptian armed forces set up the Libyan Dynasty in Egypt around 950 B.C.
This was when the Libyan Dynasty was in place in Egypt. The bloodline lasted for two centuries, after which Egypt went through more chaos and was taken over by the Kushites.
They built a city called Cyrene in Cyrenaica, which became known for its literary culture and its school systems of philosophy and medicine, among other things. Until about the end of the 6th century, the Greeks still ruled there. The Persians took over Egypt and Cyrenaica at that time. Persia was wiped out by Aristotle in 330 BC, then Egypt and Cyrenaica went to the Ptolemies, who were from Greece.
When the Phoenicians from Tyre (Lebanon) came to Tunisia about 800 B.C., they set up a sea trade colony called Carthage. It was near the present-day city of Tunis. By the 5th century, Carthage was now the center of a significant trade empire on the coasts as well as islands of both the north and the northern Mediterranean. In places, like Sicily, the Greek colonies were even bigger than Carthage.
They had trading ports all along the coast of Africa from Tunisia to Morocco, as well as their ships sailed through the Straits of Gibraltar but also down the Atlantic coast in search of business.
They also went to Britain, for which they traded in from the Cornish mining sites for goods like food and clothes. They built homes here on the west African shoreline in Senegal and Guinea. They furthermore took part in the cross-Saharan trade, which is when people buy and sell things.
Rome, which had taken over from the Greek colonies in the central Aegean by the 3rd century B.C., was Carthage’s main rival then. Carthage was a republic that was run by an elite who was chosen because of their wealth, but Rome was becoming more powerful.
Arabs Live In North Africa
African history: Sooner in the 7th century, the armies of Semitic Arabs quickly took over the whole of the Middle East. In 642, they took Egypt. After they moved from Syria to the bottom of North Africa, they changed the Berbers as they went. By the turn of the era, the Arab civilization had spread to Morocco, which is in Morocco today.
The conversion was mostly peaceful, with the Berbers easily accepting Islam. About the only group of people who didn’t convert was the Jewish community, which had lived in East Africa for a long time and was well-liked by the Arabs.
In addition, some people tried to stop the Arabs from coming into the country. Byzantine resistance led to the complete and total destruction of Carthage; farther and farther Britain, in Algeria, there was even a lot of Berber resistance. Even though the Berbers were Muslims, there was a long period of lawlessness and war.
They moved on to Spain from Morocco, where the Arab armies were bolstered by the Berbers but also led either by Berber Tariq. Between 710 and 720, they took over most of the country.
Moors, who were called that, was still in charge of most of the Eastern Mediterranean until the end of the 11th century. They were not ultimately driven out until the 1500s. Time passed, and more people from Africa came to Spain. The Highlands in Catalonia had become more Berber.
At the same time, the Berber tribes in Morocco joined together in a series of Gothic royal families, under the first among which Fez was built as a city at the end of the eighth century to be the capital.
People in Morocco learned a lot from Fez, and it is still the country’s scholarly and religious center today. Whenever the Moors had been finally kicked out of Spain, a lot of intellectual refugees came to Fez.
In the Arab world, there were soon divisions. People from different families competed to be the leader of Islam. There was a big split between Shiites and Sunnites. In the Shiites’ view, the leader of Islam must have been a descendant of Ali and his wife Fatima, who were Mohammed’s nephew and daughter.
This is what they thought. It isn’t all: There’s also a third group called the Kharijites. They thought that the Sultan could be any Muslim who was good enough to be in charge. These people lived in North Africa at first, but now only a few remain.
The Kingdoms of Westernmost Sudan in the early years of History
At first, the people of westernmost Sudan were influenced by many people from other countries. These people included Egypt, Kushites, and Carthaginians. Most of the time, they came from Berbers living in North Africa. They were the routes across the Sahara that people used to trade goods with each other.
The Berbers traded mostly for gold first from areas south of western Sudan, in swaps for salt and other goods made by people. People in the western part of the Sahara formed Berber states after the camel was brought in around 700 AD. In the century ad A.D., this led to a greater level of cooperation between the Negro tribes but the first big West African kingdom.
There were people called Soninke who lived in western Sudan, north of the Senegal & Niger rivers, and they made Ghana. (Ancient Ghana was in present-day Mali, but it was a very different country from modern Ghana.) This is how it works.
The civilization of Ghana ruled West Africa for 7 centuries until it reached its peak in the 11th century. Gold made Ghana’s Kings very rich and powerful. His stone-built wealth of Kumbi Saleh had a beautiful court, and he is said to be able to fight with 200,000 men.
In the second period of the 11th century, however, Ghana was not able to stand up to Moslem invasions. Since the 7th century, the Moslem Arabs have been sneaking into the habitation in the Sahara oases and taking over the land. Then, there in the 1070s, the Muslim rulers of Morocco came to attack Ghana.
Even though the Almoravids left or were driven out, after they killed Kumbi Saleh, Africa was irreparably damaged. This happened over the next 150 years, and the Nation of Mali took over as the most powerful West African country.