Great African Civilizations

Century 21 New Braunfels Tx - Great African Civilizations

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There have been many misconceptions about the lives of Africans before the advent of European and American colonization. according to some historians, Africans were nothing more than savages whose only contributions to the world were farming and slaves. This is not true. The history of aged Africa is just as interesting, complex, and sophisticated as any other aged civilization, yet almost without exception; it is only Egypt that receives any notice at all when writing history. Because of this mentality, European and American historians have long espoused that Africa and its inhabitants had no culture or history of their own, except what was given to them by exterior factors.

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Century 21 New Braunfels Tx

However, long before the colonization of Europeans, Africans built kingdoms and monuments that rivaled any European monarchy. Nevertheless, because of racial prejudice, much of Black African history has been distorted and ignored to give justification to the enslavement of millions for financial profit. This paper will be discussing the aged African kingdoms of Meroë, Ghana, and the Swahili and their rich contributions to the pages of history.

The kingdom of Meroë started nearby 1000 Bc when Nubian rulers built up a politically independent state known to the Egyptians as Kush. Eventually, the rulers of Kush would move to Nubia and originate the kingdom of Meroë (Davis & Gates, p. 30). These rulers established their capital at Meroë nearby 300 B.C., and the kingdom lasted there for more than nine centuries.
However, some historians feel that because Meroitic culture imitated the Egyptian culture so closely, the Meroitës brought no culture of their own to the pages of history. This is not true according to archaeological evidence discovered in North Sudan that is over 2,500 years old, there was an old civilization along the Nile River at lower and Upper Nubia (modern day Sudan) that was older than the civilizations in the North (Egypt). Also, there is evidence that proves that the known Old Egyptian Civilization was an advanced stage of an even older civilization located in the Sudan (Davis & Gates, p. 35).

This evidence proves that Meroë had a culture and history that was even older than of the Egyptians. If anything, Egypt was a carbon copy of Meroë. This kingdom also had its own language. Most historians however, attributed their language and alphabet law to the Egyptians. It was a common belief that aged Black Africans could not and did not originate a written language. However, inscriptions in a inescapable indigenous alphabet appear in Meroë as early as the 2nd century B.C, proving that these assumptions are not true (Davis & Gates, p. 110).
This written Meroitic language was used into the 5th century, when Old Nubian finally replaced it. Total use of Meroitic on monuments indicates that a vital division of the people was able to read it. However, the meanings of these inscriptions remain unknown, as this hieroglyphic-derived script is as yet untranslatable.

Another little know fact about the Meroitës is that they had a unusually high whole of
queens who ruled without male intervention. One queen, Queen Amanirenus led her army against a Roman invasion in 24 Bc. She won the first battle, and despite losing a second battle, the Romans had enough, agreed to a truce and went back to Rome. Rome never did conquer Meroë, and this kingdom continued to thrive for someone else 200 years. in effect "queendom" would be more accurate, since the leader of Meroë was commonly a warrior queen, called a "kandake" which means "queen mother" or more simply "gore"meaning "ruler"(Fairservis. P.60).

In terms of economics, Meroë was famed for its huge iron production, the first large-scale manufactures of its kind in the Nile Valley and had Total trade with Greece and Rome. Because of the production of iron, the armies had good weapons to use during battle and the farmers had good axes and hoes to work their lands. Meroitë traders exported ivory, leopard skins, ostrich feathers, ebony, and gold and soon gained direct access to the addition trade of the Red Sea (Shillington, p. 40).

The kingdom of Meroë finally went into decline. Causes for the decline of the Meroitic Kingdom are still largely unknown. The Meroitic kingdom faced formidable competition because of the expansion of Axum, a excellent Abyssinian state in modern Ethiopia to the east. About A.D. 350, an Axumite army captured and destroyed Meroe city, ending the kingdom's independent existence.
The West African Empire of Ghana is someone else kingdom whose history was downplayed and attributed to exterior factors. Although the Berbers originally founded Ghana in the fifth century, it was built on the southern edge of Berber populations. In time, the land became dominated by the Soninke, a Mande speaking people who lived in the region bordering the Sahara (McKissack & McKissack, p. 112). They built their capital city, Kumbi Saleh, right on the edge of the Sahara and the city quickly became the town of the Trans-Saharan trade routes.

Ghana accumulated great wealth because of the Trans-Saharan trade routes. This wealth made it possible for Ghana to conquer local chieftaincies and query tribute from these subordinate states. This tribute, however, paled next to the wealth generated by the manufactures of goods that passed from western Africa east to Egypt and the Middle East. This trade primarily complicated gold, salt, and copper (Koslow, p. 70).

A hereditary king called the Ghana ruled Ghana. The kingship was matrilineal (as were all Sahelian monarchies to follow); the king's sister in case,granted the heir to the throne (McKissack & McKissack, p. 115). In addition to troops power, the king appears to have been the consummate judge of the kingdom.

Although northern African had been dominated by the religion of Islam since the eighth century, the kingdom of Ghana never converted (McKissack & McKissack, p. 120). The Ghanaian court, however, allowed Muslims to decree in the cities and even encouraged Muslim specialists to help the royal court administer the government and guidance on legal matters.

The original founders of Ghana finally proved to be its demise. Unlike the Ghanaians, the Berbers, now calling themselves Almoravids, fervently converted to Islam and in 1075, declared a holy war, or jihad, against the kingdom of Ghana. little is known about what exactly happened but nonetheless, Ghana ceased to be a commercial or troops power after 1100. The Almoravid revolution finally ended the reign of Ghana.

Europeans and Arabs alike have portrayed the history of the Swahili kingdom as one of Muslim-Arab domination, with the African people and its rulers playing a passive role in the process. However, up-to-date archaeological evidence found shows that the Swahili people are descendants of the Bantu speaking people who located along the East African coast in the first millennium (Horton & Middleton, p. 70). Although both Arabians and Persians intermarried with the Swahili, neither of these cultures had anyone to do with the making ready of Swahili civilization. These cultures became absorbed into an already flourishing African civilization founded by aged Bantu Africans.

The eastern coast of Africa changed profoundly nearby the close of the first millennium Ad. during this time, Bantu-speaking Africans from the interior migrated and located along the coast from Kenya to South Africa. Next, merchants and traders from the Muslim world realized the strategic significance of the east coast of Africa for commercial traffic and began to decree there (Horton & Middleton, p. 72). Marriage in the middle of the Bantu women and men of the Middle East created and cemented a rich Swahili culture, fusing religion, agricultural architecture, textiles, food, as well as purchasing power. From 900 A.D., the east coast of Africa saw an influx of Shirazi Arabs from the Persian Gulf and even small settlements of Indians. The Arabs called this region al-Zanj, "The Blacks," and the coastal areas moderately came under the operate of Muslim merchants from Arabia and Persia (Horton & Middleton, p. 75). By the 1300's, the major east African ports from Mombaza in the north to Sofala in the south had come to be thoroughly Islamic cities and cultural centers.

The language that grew out of this civilization is one of the most common and Total of the lingua franca: a lingua franca is a secondary language that is a combination of two or more languages. Swahili or Kiswahili comes from the Arabic word sawahil, which means, "coast." Swahili belongs to the Sabaki subgroup of the Northeastern coast Bantu languages. It is intimately linked to the Miji Kenda group of languages, Pokomo and Ngazija (Horton & Middleton, p.110). Over at least a thousand years of intense and discrete interaction with the Middle East has given Swahili a rich infusion of loanwords from a wide assortment of languages. Even with the expansive whole of Arabic loanwords gift in Swahili, the language is in fact, Bantu.

The Swahili civilization wide southwards until they reached Kilwa in Zanzibar (from the Arabic word al-Zan). Later, its inhabitants carved out a small territory even additional south nearby Sofala in Zimbabwe (Horton & Middleton, p. 140). While the northern cities remained localized and had little influence on African culture inland from the coast, the Sofalans actively went inland and spread Islam and Islamic culture deep in African territory (Horton & Middleton, p. 150).
The major Swahili city-states were Mogadishu, Barawa, Mombasa (Kenya), Gedi, Pate, Malindi, Zanzibar, Kilwa, and Sofala in the far south (Horton & Middleton, p. 155). Kilwa was the most famous of these city-states and was particularly wealthy because it controlled the southern port of Sofala, which had access to the gold, produced in the interior (near "Great Zimbabwe"), and its location as the farthest point south at which ships from India could hope to sail and return in a singular monsoon season.

These city-states were very cosmopolitan for their time and they were all politically independent of one another. In fact, they were more like contentious associates or corporations, each vying for the lion's share of African trade. The chief export was ivory, sandalwood, ebony, and gold. Textiles from India and porcelain from China were also brought by Arab traders (Horton & Middleton, p. 175). While the Arabs and Persians played a role in the increase of the Swahili civilization, the nobility was of African descent and they ran the city-states (Horton & Middleton p.195). However, the nobility were Muslims and it was the Muslims who controlled the wealth. Below the nobility were the commoners and the resident foreigners who made up a large part of the citizenry.

However, Islam itself penetrated very little into the interior among the hunters, pastoralists, and farmers. Even the areas of the coast near the trading towns remained relatively unaffected (Horton & Middleton p.198). In the towns, the mud and thatch houses of the non-Muslim common people surrounded the stone and coral buildings of the Muslim elite, and it seems that most followers of Islam were wealthy, not poor.

Still, a culture advanced for the Swahili that fused African and Islamic elements. House lineage, for example, was traced both straight through the maternal line, which controlled property, an African practice, and straight through the paternal line, which was the Muslim tradition. Swahili culture had a strong Islamic influence but retained many of its African origins.

These city-states began to decline in the sixteenth century; the advent of Portuguese trade disrupted the old trade routes and made the Swahili commercial centers obsolete. The Portuguese wanted native Africans to have no share in African trade and busily set about conquering the Islamic city-states along the eastern coast (Horton & Middleton, p.225). In the late seventeenth century, the imam (religious leader) of Oman drove the Portuguese from the coast, and moderately established his authority over the coast.

The existence of these aged Black African civilizations proves once and for all that Africa had a culture and a history of its own other than Egyptian that endured for centuries before the advent of exterior factors. The kingdom of Meroë ruled for centuries before the Egyptians and deserves its rightful place as one of the premier aged civilizations of the world. The kingdom of Ghana proved that Africans were capable of managing their own affairs without the intervention of Europeans. The Swahili and their language were nearby for centuries before Arabians and others "discovered" them.

These civilizations had their own culture, language and manufactures before the advent of Europeans and Muslims in Africa and for the most part, the world does not know anyone about them. That is a major crime against the study of history and hopefully, straight through more archaeological studies and writings, the rich and intelligent history of these magnificent civilizations will be told and treasured for time to come generations.

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