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alTakruri
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To understand the first known empire of the Sahel and
Savanna region abutting the Niger parabola we must look
toward Tichitt-Walata and Tagant not the yam zone.

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Sundjata
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This is what I was thinking, but what is the distinction between the Yam zone and Tichitt-Walata, etc.? Can Ancient Ghana be seen as a continuation of the Tichitt-Walata complex?

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mr.writer.asa@gmail.com

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Clyde Winters
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quote:
Originally posted by Sundiata:
This is what I was thinking, but what is the distinction between the Yam zone and Tichitt-Walata, etc.? Can Ancient Ghana be seen as a continuation of the Tichitt-Walata complex?

The Yam Zone may have been settled much earlier than Tichitt-Walata.


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Clyde Winters
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THE EMPIRE OF GHANA

An ancient empire in West Africa following Tichitt was Ghana. The Soninke speaking people who found this nation called the empire Aouker. The term Ghana/ Gana means "War Chief". The King of Ghana was called Kaya Maghan or Manga . Kaya Maghan , means 'King of Gold'. The king of Ghana was both the political head of the empire, and leader of the snake cult.

Ghana is believed to be an offshoot of the Dar Tichitt civilization. The empire of Ghana was founded by the Soninke speaking Mande. The people in this empire practiced an agropastoral economy based on cattle herding and millet cultivation.

The empire of Ghana was around 200,000 Km. in length. It was centrally located in the Aouker region, between the Niger and Senegal rivers. The capital city of Ghana was Kumbi Saleh. Kumbi Saleh was divided into three parts, the king's residence , a central sector inhabited by Soninke and non-Soninke speaking merchants and craftsmen , and the third part of the city occupied by citizens, slaves and livestock. Much of the grain of the empire was stored at Tegdaoust (the Aoudaghast of the Arab writers).

Ghana exported gold to the Romans. The empire of Ghana which began around 300 B.C., lasted for over 1000 years. By A.D. 700 Ghana had become an empire made up of many African nations in the Sahel. By A.D. 1154 the Soninke had begun to adopt Islam.

According to Ptolemy, Gannaria denoted a cape on the north coast of what is now called Mauritania. This is interesting because the Wolof call Mauritania Ganar and both Gannaria and Ganar agree with Gana (Ghana) the name for the Soninke empire.

This suggest that ancient Ghana stretched from the Sahara to the Atlantic Ocean.

The people of Ghana wore loin cloths and short trousers. In war they used both elephants and horses. The people of Ghana also had a fine navy consisting of various types of boats.

The empire of Ghana went into a period of decline after they were attacked by the Almoravids in 1076. Sometime later the Maghan Sumaguru lost a battle to Sundiata, a King of ancient Mali. After this victory of Sundiata, Ghana went into a period of decline and was absorbed by the empire of Mali.

Rferences:
A. Holl, "Background to the Ghana Empire: Archaeological investigation on the transition to statehood in the Dar Tichitt Region (Mauritania)". Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, no.4 (1985),pp.73-115.

P.J. Munson, "Archaeological data on the origin of cultivation in the southwestern Sahara and its implications for West Africa". In Origin of African Plant Domestication, (ed.) by J.R. Harlan, et al . The Hague: Mouton,1976.

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C. A. Winters

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Myra Wysinger
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Dhar Tichitt-Walata area

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African Civilizations: An Archaeological Perspective, by Graham Connah, Cambridge University Press, pp. 116-117 (2001):

"In the Dhar Tichitt-Walata area, in south-eastern Mauritania, where Holl (1985; 1993) studied a large series of drystone-built settlement sites dating from about Holocene c.a. 4500 to about 2000 years ago, which are strung out along more than 100 kilometers [62 miles] of steep sand-stone cliffs. Towards the end of their occupation these sites formed a settlement hierarchy of four ranks; seventy-two hamlets with less than twenty compounds each, twelve small villages with twenty to fifty compounds each, five large villages with 120 to 198 compounds each, and one "regional center of Dakhlet el Atrous I, measuring 92.75 ha with 590 compounds, which may be characterized as a city (Holl 1993: 129).

The communities that inhabited these settlements practiced mixed farming based on grain cultivation (particularly bulrush millet, and the herding of cattle, sheep and goats). They also exploited wild grains and fruits, fished in the freshwater lakes that then existed, and hunted a range of wild animals. Climatic deterioration almost certainly played a part in concentrating population into this area. It also eventually led to the abandonment of the settlements and indeed to their survival as archaeological sites, providing us with some of the earliest indications of developing social complexity in the West African savanna and the adjacent Sahara."


Other references:

Holl, Augustin. 1985. Background to the Ghana Empire: archaeological investigations on the transition to statehood in the Dhar Tichitt region (Mauritania). Anthropological Archaeology vol. 4, pp. 73-115

Photo from: African Archaeology, by David Phillipson, Cambridge University Press (2005)

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Myra Wysinger
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Reposted

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Swiss Archaeologist Digs Up West Africa's Past

Simon Bradley, Swissinfo
January 16, 2007

A Swiss led team of archaeologists has discovered pieces of the oldest African pottery in central Mali, dating back to at least 9,400 BC.

The sensational find by Geneva University's Eric Huysecom and his international research team, at Ounjougou near the UNESCO listed Bandiagara cliffs, reveals important information about man's interaction with nature.

The age of the sediment in which they were found suggests that the six ceramic fragments discovered between 2002 and 2005 are at least 11,400 years old. Most ancient ceramics from the Middle East and the central and eastern Sahara regions are 10,000 and between 9-10,000 years old, respectively.

"At the beginning, the very first piece we found stayed in my desk drawer for years, as I didn't realise how old it was," Huysecom told swissinfo.

Huysecom heads a 50 strong interdisciplinary team, composed of 28 international researchers mainly from Germany, Mali, Switzerland, France and Britain on the largest current archaeological research project in Africa, entitled "Human population and paleo-environment in West Africa".

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Ounjougou during the rainy season.

Ounjougou was selected as the location, "as everything led us to believe that there we could follow the evolution of man, the environment and the climate", explained Huysecom.

The site is an archaeologist's dream, a ravine made up of layers of easy-to-date sediment rich in West African history.

Significant findings

Since the launch of the project in 1997, the team has made numerous discoveries about ancient stone cutting techniques and tools, and other important findings that shed light on human development in the region.

But the unearthing of the ancient fragments of burnt clay is one of the most significant to date. Huysecom is convinced that pottery was invented in West Africa to enable man to adapt to climate change.

"Apart from finding the oldest ceramic in Africa, the interesting thing is that it gives us information about when and under what circumstances man can invent new things, such as pottery," he explained.

"And the invention of ceramic is linked to specific environmental conditions the transformation of the region from desert into grassland."

Grasslands

Some 10,000 years ago, at the end of the ice age, the climate is thought to have fluctuated between warm and cold periods. This led to the formation of an 800 kilometre wide band of tropical vegetation extending northwards from the Sahel region, which attracted people who slowly moved north from southern and central Africa.

Wild grasses and pearl millet started sprouting on the former desert land. But for man to be able to eat and properly digest the new plants, they had to be stored and cooked in pots.

"Man had to adapt his food and way of life by inventing pottery," said the Geneva professor.

The invention of ceramic also coincided with that of small arrowheads also discovered by the team and which were probably used to hunt hares, pheasants and other small game on the grassy plains.

To date, East Asia the triangle between Siberia, China and Japan is the only other area where similar pottery and arrowheads have been found which are as old as those in West Africa, explained Huysecom.

"This is important, as they both appear in same way, at the same time and under similar climatic conditions, which indicates that man has certain modes of adaptation to cope with environmental changes," he commented.

Ahead of the final publication of the team's research findings this year, Huysecom is returning to Ounjougou to rejoin his colleagues, in particular those from West Africa "who are extremely proud of the discovery".

He plans to scour the region for caves and other settlement sites to try and find out exactly where the pottery came from so as to determine more precisely the age of the fragments.

"We know [from the sediment] that they are at least 11,400 years old, but they could be 50 or even 1,000 years older."


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A cultural flow, from the southeast of Subsaharan Africa and to the Sahara, could explain the diffusion of the microlithic industries all the way through West Africa. We observe them initially in Cameroon at Shum Laka (30,600-29,000 BC), then at the Ivory Coast in Bingerville (14,100-13,400 BC), in Nigeria in Iwo Eleru (11,460-11,050 BC), and finally in Ounjougou (phase 1, 10th millennium BC).

The Beginning of the Holocene in Ounjougou


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Whatbox
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Great thread.

I learned that Wagadu exported gold to the Romans.

I learned about the Dhar Tichitt-Walata area.

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Red, White, and Blue + Christian
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Inside of an old house in Walata

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Another house

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Wide View

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Red, White, and Blue + Christian
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Ancient Manuscripts of Tichit

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Link to very large map

http://www.plu.edu/~allenjjj/img/Empire%20of%20Ghana.jpg

Walata horizontal view

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Djehuti
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The only thing I know about Wagandu is their export of gold to the Romans and few legends concerning the royalty such as the fact that their chief deity was a serpent.

Other than that, I want to learn more.

Archaeology is seriously lacking in this part of Africa (West Africa), or any part other than the Nile Valley for that matter. There are only a few white Western scholars (Graham Connah is one of them) that show any interest in that area. So I guess it is up to native Africans and hopefully blacks in the West to make a difference.

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Clyde Winters
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quote:
Originally posted by Djehuti:
The only thing I know about Wagandu is their export of gold to the Romans and few legends concerning the royalty such as the fact that their chief deity was a serpent.

Other than that, I want to learn more.

Archaeology is seriously lacking in this part of Africa (West Africa), or any part other than the Nile Valley for that matter. There are only a few white Western scholars (Graham Connah is one of them) that show any interest in that area. So I guess it is up to native Africans and hopefully blacks in the West to make a difference.

Not really. There are an abundance of articles on this civilization in French. Holl the leading authority on this topic is presently teaching in the United States.

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Hotep2u
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Greetings:

What books have Holl written or where can one get good materials on Ghana?

I have a question does Modern Ghana have a connection with Ancient Ghana?
I have been told this is quite controversial topic.
I know the Soninke were in Ancient Ghana though the Soninke are not known for Gold today, what happened?

Hotep

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TruthSeeker

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Clyde Winters
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quote:
Originally posted by Hotep2u:
Greetings:

What books have Holl written or where can one get good materials on Ghana?

I have a question does Modern Ghana have a connection with Ancient Ghana?
I have been told this is quite controversial topic.
I know the Soninke were in Ancient Ghana though the Soninke are not known for Gold today, what happened?

Hotep

Above Myra and I cited one of his best known articles. He is presently at the University of Michigan. At the web site below you will find a list of some of his English language publications.

web page

He may respond if you contact him.

There is a fine tape on Holl's research in Africa that you may also find interesting at the site below:

Researching African History/Archaeology

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alTakruri
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Been meaning to ask this for a while and since this
is the third time it's been stated I've just got to know.
How, when, and to which Romans did Wagadu directly export gold?

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Myra Wysinger
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Ancient Ghana (Wagadu)

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NOTE:

The Ethiopic Ocean or Ethiopian Ocean is an older name for what is now called the South Atlantic Ocean. Use of term illustrates a past trend towards referring to the whole continent of Africa by the name Aethiopia as well, as Ethiopia proper is nowhere near the Ethiopic Ocean. The term Ethiopian Ocean was sometimes in use as late as until the mid 19th century.

The oldest known mention of the name Atlantic Ocean is contained in The Histories of Herodotus around 450 BC (I 202).


Image Resource:

Black Man of the Nile and His Family, by Yosef A A. Ben-Jochannan (1989)

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Obelisk_18
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the ghana empire existed before the christian era? I keep reading it was established by 600 A.D.? just wondering...
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alTakruri
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While Wagadu certainly was around as a polity more
than 2000 years ago, it was not an empire so early
in its existance.

We know more now than was known at the time Doc Ben
charted and noted his map.

Romans didn't reach the Niger River. The Gir or Niger
in Latin authors is believed to be just south of the
Algerian chotts region, known as Negrine(?).

Al-Murabitun never destroyed Wagadu nor was Djenne
ever its capitol.

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Red, White, and Blue + Christian
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The Kingdom of Wagadu came first. Then Ghana came into existence later around 790 AD. The Ashanti Kingdom's ancestors were one of the 7 gold producing cities for the empire. Bambouk was problaby the main one.

The Soninke have spread out and are mostly in Senegal, Mali and Mauretania. Their legends say they came from Egypt. When they arrived they enountered pygmies who were hunter-gatherers and blended in with the natives.

Their calendar was originally solar based on agriculture. It was akin to the gregorian.


The Mande worship/worshipped the "FORCE" which is represented by the SNAKE-GOD and the force encountered under the SACRED GROVE/WOOD/TREE.

This is the religion of Adam and Eve after the fall.

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Mystery Solver
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quote:
Originally posted by Red,White, and Blue + Christian:

The Kingdom of Wagadu came first. Then Ghana came into existence later around 790 AD.

Concrete evidence?
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fellati achawi
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quote:
This is the religion of Adam and Eve after the fall
even more concrete evidence please?

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لا اله الا الله و محمد الرسول الله

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Myra Wysinger
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Sabour and Vikør, Ethnic Encounter and Culture Change, Bergen/London 1997, 116-42

Origins of the Trans-Saharan Contacts
Professor Pekka Masonen, Department of History, University of Tampere, Finland

The regular commercial and cultural exchange between Western Africa and the Mediterranean world did not start properly until the 8th century AD. Yet the beginning of trans-Saharan trade was not such a sudden and dramatic event like the coming of Europeans to America, but it had a long history of sporadic encounters for more than 1000 years. When and how the very first contacts took place is still obscure, although their origins can be traced already to the prehistoric times. Archaeologists have, for example, found in southern Mauritania some copper objects of Hispano-Moroccan style, which are dated to the 11th century BC. The reciprocal action between Moroccan and Mauritanian prehistoric inhabitants was possible, for the northern and southern 50 mm isohyets are close together in western Sahara, forming there a kind of natural corridor along which the desert can be crossed.

Establishment of the early trans-Saharan contacts is customarily attributed to the Libyan tribe of Garamantes. According to the Greek historian Herodotus, they hunted with their chariots the Ethiopian Troglodytes, or "cave-dwellers", who lived in the desert. This account has been associated with the rock paintings depicting horse-pulled chariots, the first of which were found in Fezzan in the early 1930s. Afterwards more paintings were discovered in Tassili and southern Morocco, and they seem to form two tracks leading to the direction of the Niger Bend. Subsequently, a theory was created, according to which the Garamantes (or alternatively some other Saharan people) had carried West African gold and ivory to the markets of Carthage and Rome.

The theory of chariot routes became soon widely accepted, and it is still found in numerous general histories of Africa, although severe criticism against its historicity began in the early 1970s. Opposers of the theory have correctly pointed out that the existence of paintings depicting chariots is not sufficient proof that the desert was ever crossed with such vehicles. Furthermore, all paintings depict light, two-wheeled chariots. According to the experimental tests made by French researchers, these tiny vehicles, which have hardly room enough even for the driver, cannot be used for transporting heavy material for long distances. It is also interesting that no skeletal remains of horses, contemporary to the paintings which were created during a long period reaching from 1000 BC till 500 AD, has been found in southern Mauritania or in the vicinity of Niger Bend. Thus it is likely that the rock paintings represent nothing but the diffusion of a form of art from the Mediterranean coast to the southern Sahara.

On the other hand, there are few mentions in classical Graeco-Roman literature, which suggest that some occasional contacts did really take place. Herodotus, for example, has another interesting account, according to which some youths belonging to the Libyan tribe of Nasamones travelled to the south until the arrived in a swampy area. There they met small-sized black men who took them into their town. This story has been associated both with the "little people", a common element in West African oral tradition referring to the original inhabitants of the area, and with the geographical conditions of the Niger inland delta. On these grounds, it has been suggested that the young Nasamones had reached the Niger valley. According to another Greek writer, Marinus of Tyre, a Roman merchant called Julianus Maternus had travelled with the King of the Garamantes to a land called Agisymba where he had seen a lot of rhinoceros. Since no rhinoceros lived in Northern Africa in the classical Antiquity, it is widely assumed that Julianus Maternus probably visited the areas of northern Chad.

There is also some archaeological evidence of the early contacts of West Africans with the classical world. Some Roman objects, dated to the 3rd century AD, has been found in Abalessa, in Ahaggar, in the so called tomb of queen Tin Hinan. Beyond Ahaggar, Roman objects are, however, extremely rare: only two coins has been found in southern Mauritania, although they are not necessarily ended up there during the Antiquity, for Roman coins were circulating in Northern Africa still in the Islamic period. Yet some new and interesting objects have recently came into daylight. In Jenne-Jenó, "the old Jenne", archaeologists have found foreign beads which are dated to the second century AD. Furthermore, a Hellenistic statuette depicting a feminine Janus, which was made in Cyrenaica in the second century AD, was found in 1976 in the Republic of Niger. It is quite probable that more such discoveries will appear in the future, since the excavations in the Niger valley are only at the beginning: the large man-made tumuli around the Niger bend, for example, are still untouched.


The discovery of Graeco-Roman objects does not, of course, prove that any Greek or Roman merchant had ever visited Jenne-Jenó or any other urban settlement in the Niger valley. Contrariwise, it is most likely that these objects had ended up to the south of Sahara through many intermediators the last of whom have hardly had any idea of the origins of the objects. But who were these intermediators?

In spite of the fearless Garamantes with their galloping horses, the real initiators of trans-Saharan trade were the Berber nomads who frequently crossed the desert with their camel flocks. The nomads, who resided at southern edge of Sahara, left to the north in the beginning of the rainy season, returning back by the eve of the dry season. While staying in their pastures in southern Morocco and the Atlas mountains, these nomads have certainly met people who, in their turn, had contacts beyond the Roman limes. As the nomads learned to know the great value of gold in Roman world, they perhaps started bartering it from the peoples of West Africa for salt and copper. The gold was carried to the north, where it was probably used for payment of dates, corn and such handycrafts which the nomads could not produce themselves. The nomads may have bought also some luxury objects made in the Roman world, which they bartered for gold in the south. This trade could have started only after the adoption of dromedary by the Saharan peoples, for horses do not survive in the harsh conditions of the desert. The camels were important not so much as mounts than beasts of burden, for they enabled to transport efficiently both the merchandizes and the food and water which were needed during the crossing of the desert; the traders usually walked all the way. Customarily the adoption of the dromedary in Northern Africa is dated to the beginning of our era, and on the grounds of classical literature its introduction is attributed to the Romans. However, some camel bones have been found recently in the Senegal valley, and they are dated to the third century AD, suggesting that the dromedary was domesticated by Saharan inhabitants at least by that time, since there never lived any wild camels in Africa.

What were the consequences of these sporadic contacts? First, it seems that they did not increase at all the knowledge of sub-Saharan African among the Mediterranean peoples. According to the survived classical sources, ancient geographers believed that after the fertile North African littoral began nothing but a vast, arid, hot and uninhabited desert. The same can be said of West Africans who were presumably not aware of the existence of Mediterranean peoples either. Secondly, the volume of the trade must have been humble, for the Roman empire made no effective efforts to expand her political dominance beyond the limes. Neither had the Romans any economic reason to develope closer commercial contacts with the unknown lands in the south, because they obtained all the merchandize the West Africans could offer them, namely gold, ivory, exotic beasts and slaves, more easily within her own borders or from the nearby frontier areas in Europe and the Middle East. Similarly, the Roman world had very few products which could have encouraged the West Africans to increase the volume of trade.

Finally, no significant cultural influences did spread through these early contacts, but urbanisation and state-formation started in Western Africa independently without any impulses from the Mediterranean civilisations. There was a radical interruption in the pottery used in the Niger valley during the third century AD, correlating thus with the adoption of dromedary, which suggests that fundamental changes in social organisation took place by that time. However, there are no signs of any alien conquest of the area and it was certainly the accumulation of wealth produced by the internal trade, rather than the vague extenal trade, which gave birth to the first West African states.

Reference:

http://www.smi.uib.no/paj/Masonen.html


Book review

The Negroland Revisited: Discovery and Invention of the Sudanese Middle Ages. By Pekka Masonen, Helsinki: The Finnish Academy of Science and Letters, 2000.

The great West African empires of Ghana, Mali, and Songhay figure prominently in introductory surveys of world history as early examples of indigenous African statecraft and achievement. In the era of decolonization, the symbolic importance of these ancient states was such that the nationalist movements of the Gold Coast and the French Sudan opted for their countries to gain independence as Ghana and Mali, respectively. But how had these storied empires become known to modern scholars? This question forms the central focus of Finnish historian Pekka Masonen's study of African historiography in Europe. Through meticulous scholarship, Masonen provides us with a glimpse of the four-hundred-year, serendipitous process by which a disparate group of scholars and adventurers established a fund of consensual facts that form the basis of our current understanding of the great Sudanic empires.

In his introduction, Masonen informs us that his study of historiography can best be understood as an exercise in what Michel Foucault called "the archeology of knowledge." He describes his project as an effort to "reconstruct the way in which European knowledge of African history has evolved by pursuing its textual genealogy through the previous historical and geographical literature". In pursuing this project, Masonen is concerned above all with how primary and secondary texts have been read and used by European historians to create historiographical myths that gradually could be refined into solid historical facts.

His method, he informs us, is to reconstruct an isnad, or "chain of authority" similar to those created by Medieval Muslim scholars to evaluate the reliability of various religious texts by tracing their origins back to the hadith of the Prophet or to the Quran itself. In Masonen's secularized version of isnad, historical statements can be considered reliable if they originated from a respected scholar and were repeated by subsequent scholars. Unfortunately, with respect to the Sudanic empires, the task of establishing a central chain of reliable authorities proved a challenging one.

The ancient Sudanic empires were not wholly unknown to contemporary Europeans, as evidencedby West African and Saharan toponyms sprinkled across Medieval maps. With the beginnings of Portuguese exploration of the African coast, firsthand knowledge accumulated but was not widely diffused among the European public. Only with the appearance in 1550 of Description of Africa, by the renegade Moor Leo Africanus, did something resembling a West African geography and historiography begin to find a wide audience among European readers. Although he criticizes the superficiality and multiple errors of Leo Africanus's account, Masonen sees it as clearly marking the beginning of the isnad, since it, more than any other source, evoked the themes and terms of discussion for the next two hundred and fifty years. It was Leo, for example, who first popularized the unfortunate notion that the peoples of the Western Sudan had been uncivilized brutes until they came in contact with the Islamic world, a notion that was to persist unchallenged in European literature until the latter part of the twentieth century.

Indeed it was not until the rise of Orientalist scholarship and European exploration of the western Sudan in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that Leo Africanus's version of Western Sudanic history was effectively called into question and revised. The most noteworthy protagonists of this stage of the process were the English scholar William Desborough Cooley (whose photo graces the frontispiece of the book) and the German philologist-turned-explorer Heinrich Barth. Cooley exhaustively analyzed the various known Arabic sources and created a narrative remarkably free of prevailing racial and cultural prejudices, a narrative that focused on black Africans and their own past, not the actions of outside invaders. Barth carried forward and popularized Cooley's work while adding a wealth of information gathered during his travels through the Western Sudan in the 1850s. Barth's most singular contributions were his careful chronology of Western and Central Sudanic history from the fourth century until his own times and his introduction into European scholarly circles of the first examples of histories written by local African scholars, most notably Ta'rikh al-Sudan.

Masonen ends his study with the colonial period when the study of the history of the Western Sudan simultaneously achieved new heights and plumbed to new depths. On the positive side of the ledger were the first studies based on African oral traditions such as the epics of Wagadu and Sundiata and the beginnings of serious archeological research. On the other hand, these genuine advances came largely in a context forged by the colonizers' relentless racism and blind preoccupation with diffusionist theories of culture change that reinforced the biased perspective pioneered by Leo Africanus. Still, for all their faults, the writers and researchers of the colonial period set the stage for the emergence of a historiography based firmly based in a wide range of internal as well as external sources.

Masonen's isnad is exhaustive if somewhat exhausting. Through 534 pages of clear if rather uninspiring prose, he provides us with a thorough and painstaking account of how our present historical narrative for the Sudanic empires took shape. Oddly enough Masonen nowhere explicitly summarizes the present state of the narrative itself. Instead, he assumes reader familiarity with current textbook accounts. While such an approach is no doubt justifiable, it limits the appeal of the book. By not only tracing the elements of our current account back to their original sources but also explicitly showing how they came together form a narrative whole, Masonen would have rounded out his project and reinforced its larger underlying message: the contingent, tentative nature of historical knowledge.

Nevertheless, for those already well versed in the history of the Western Sudan, The Negroland Revisited provides a comprehensive and sometimes fascinating historiographical journey.

DAVID H. GROFF
Linfield College Portland Campus

.

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alTakruri
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In keeping with the subject of this thread -- which is
Wagadu located between the Tagant and the Hodh --
and bypassing west and central Africa in general, we
can assuredly say post-Akjinjeir phase "Tichitt" was in
touch with the expansive Garamante federation supplying
it with the gold that was then traded to Khart Hhadash
(Carthage) and from there on to Rome. None of this needs,
or supposes a need for, Romans to personally come get the
goods that were part of the already old and in place trade
network built by west central and Saharan Africans beginning
about 600 BCE without the aid of any extra-continentals.

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alTakruri
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The Garamante network (~550 BCE to ~550 CE) had five main routes. The one
that immediately concerns our topic is the GARAMANTE BAMBUK-BURE PRODUCT
or southwest mainline (though I've included the two other inner African lanes).
code:
                                           

1 --- GARAMANTE
/
| \
HAGGAR 2 3
| \
/ |
/ | TIBESTI
/ |
TICHITT/GHANA / | \
/ | \
/ \ / | \
/ \ / | \
| \
SENEGAL VALLEY MID NIGER VALLEY |
| DARFUR ---- MEROE/'NUBIA'
\ / / |
/ |
BAMBUK FIELD / |
/ |
/
AGISYMBA/TSCHAD
BURE FIELD


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Red, White, and Blue + Christian
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quote:
Originally posted by Mystery Solver:
quote:
Originally posted by Red,White, and Blue + Christian:

The Kingdom of Wagadu came first. Then Ghana came into existence later around 790 AD.

Concrete evidence?
Y'all forgive me. I just take stuff from Soninkara.com and put it into English in my own little way.


http://www.soninkara.org/histoire-soninkara/wagadou/index.php

And I get pics and stuff...

http://www.soninkara.org/histoire-soninkara/wagadou/geographie.php

 -


About the religion of Adam and Eve....well I am just quessing that Africa was where the Human race started and that trees and snakes and all those references that appear in African myths, legends, etc and some of those where carried to the Americas on slaveships.

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Red, White, and Blue + Christian
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 -

 -

 -


 -

Y'all should have read my Gullah thread. You would have realized that the descendants of Ghana/Mali wet west to Ngabu and down ito Sierra Leone and ended up on slaveships to the Americas. You got nothing over me.

Y'all ha

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Djehuti
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quote:
Originally posted by Clyde Winters:

Not really. There are an abundance of articles on this civilization in French. Holl the leading authority on this topic is presently teaching in the United States.

That's the thing, they are mostly in French and such information is not as well known so to speak as say that on Egypt etc.

The same old academic biases.

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Clyde Winters
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quote:
Originally posted by Djehuti:
quote:
Originally posted by Clyde Winters:

Not really. There are an abundance of articles on this civilization in French. Holl the leading authority on this topic is presently teaching in the United States.

That's the thing, they are mostly in French and such information is not as well known so to speak as say that on Egypt etc.

The same old academic biases.

It's not just academic bias its the way things are in relation to researching African history. As a result, traditionally you had to study German, to do research on Egypt and Nubia. To research West African history you studied French.

When I attended the U of Ill.-Urbana,back in the 1970's as an undergraduate student, to examine many of the primary documents relating to Islamic history called on the students to be able to read French. (Back then most of the Arabic documents that had been translated into European languages were written in French.)

It is ludicris to believe that you can do research in African history and not study at least French or German, and/ or Egyptian and Arabic. To study East African history it would be helpful to study KiSwahili. There are many good text you can buy that will give you a reading knowledge of French or German. I believe that most Master Degree programs demand that you have a reading knowledge of at least one foriegn language.


.

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Djehuti
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Well then they need more English speakers to do more research or make publications.
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Mystery Solver
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quote:
Originally posted by Red,White, and Blue + Christian:

quote:
Originally posted by Mystery Solver:

quote:
Originally posted by Red,White, and Blue + Christian:

The Kingdom of Wagadu came first. Then Ghana came into existence later around 790 AD.

Concrete evidence?
Y'all forgive me. I just take stuff from Soninkara.com and put it into English in my own little way.


http://www.soninkara.org/histoire-soninkara/wagadou/index.php


Well, what is the proposed concrete evidence? Effortlessly posting a link in French, a language I don't speak, does me [or anyone else in the same boat] what good?

The onus is on you to make sure that you provide links readable to the majority of the posters herein; just about anyone who frequents this site knows how to read English to one degree or another. The least you can do, is to tell us what you understand by the 'concrete evidence' provided for your claim, if you've actually come across it anywhere in any language.

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Doug M
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quote:
Originally posted by Myra Wysinger:
Sabour and Vikør, Ethnic Encounter and Culture Change, Bergen/London 1997, 116-42

Origins of the Trans-Saharan Contacts
Professor Pekka Masonen, Department of History, University of Tampere, Finland

The regular commercial and cultural exchange between Western Africa and the Mediterranean world did not start properly until the 8th century AD. Yet the beginning of trans-Saharan trade was not such a sudden and dramatic event like the coming of Europeans to America, but it had a long history of sporadic encounters for more than 1000 years. When and how the very first contacts took place is still obscure, although their origins can be traced already to the prehistoric times. Archaeologists have, for example, found in southern Mauritania some copper objects of Hispano-Moroccan style, which are dated to the 11th century BC. The reciprocal action between Moroccan and Mauritanian prehistoric inhabitants was possible, for the northern and southern 50 mm isohyets are close together in western Sahara, forming there a kind of natural corridor along which the desert can be crossed.

Establishment of the early trans-Saharan contacts is customarily attributed to the Libyan tribe of Garamantes. According to the Greek historian Herodotus, they hunted with their chariots the Ethiopian Troglodytes, or "cave-dwellers", who lived in the desert. This account has been associated with the rock paintings depicting horse-pulled chariots, the first of which were found in Fezzan in the early 1930s. Afterwards more paintings were discovered in Tassili and southern Morocco, and they seem to form two tracks leading to the direction of the Niger Bend. Subsequently, a theory was created, according to which the Garamantes (or alternatively some other Saharan people) had carried West African gold and ivory to the markets of Carthage and Rome.

The theory of chariot routes became soon widely accepted, and it is still found in numerous general histories of Africa, although severe criticism against its historicity began in the early 1970s. Opposers of the theory have correctly pointed out that the existence of paintings depicting chariots is not sufficient proof that the desert was ever crossed with such vehicles. Furthermore, all paintings depict light, two-wheeled chariots. According to the experimental tests made by French researchers, these tiny vehicles, which have hardly room enough even for the driver, cannot be used for transporting heavy material for long distances. It is also interesting that no skeletal remains of horses, contemporary to the paintings which were created during a long period reaching from 1000 BC till 500 AD, has been found in southern Mauritania or in the vicinity of Niger Bend. Thus it is likely that the rock paintings represent nothing but the diffusion of a form of art from the Mediterranean coast to the southern Sahara.

On the other hand, there are few mentions in classical Graeco-Roman literature, which suggest that some occasional contacts did really take place. Herodotus, for example, has another interesting account, according to which some youths belonging to the Libyan tribe of Nasamones travelled to the south until the arrived in a swampy area. There they met small-sized black men who took them into their town. This story has been associated both with the "little people", a common element in West African oral tradition referring to the original inhabitants of the area, and with the geographical conditions of the Niger inland delta. On these grounds, it has been suggested that the young Nasamones had reached the Niger valley. According to another Greek writer, Marinus of Tyre, a Roman merchant called Julianus Maternus had travelled with the King of the Garamantes to a land called Agisymba where he had seen a lot of rhinoceros. Since no rhinoceros lived in Northern Africa in the classical Antiquity, it is widely assumed that Julianus Maternus probably visited the areas of northern Chad.

There is also some archaeological evidence of the early contacts of West Africans with the classical world. Some Roman objects, dated to the 3rd century AD, has been found in Abalessa, in Ahaggar, in the so called tomb of queen Tin Hinan. Beyond Ahaggar, Roman objects are, however, extremely rare: only two coins has been found in southern Mauritania, although they are not necessarily ended up there during the Antiquity, for Roman coins were circulating in Northern Africa still in the Islamic period. Yet some new and interesting objects have recently came into daylight. In Jenne-Jenó, "the old Jenne", archaeologists have found foreign beads which are dated to the second century AD. Furthermore, a Hellenistic statuette depicting a feminine Janus, which was made in Cyrenaica in the second century AD, was found in 1976 in the Republic of Niger. It is quite probable that more such discoveries will appear in the future, since the excavations in the Niger valley are only at the beginning: the large man-made tumuli around the Niger bend, for example, are still untouched.


The discovery of Graeco-Roman objects does not, of course, prove that any Greek or Roman merchant had ever visited Jenne-Jenó or any other urban settlement in the Niger valley. Contrariwise, it is most likely that these objects had ended up to the south of Sahara through many intermediators the last of whom have hardly had any idea of the origins of the objects. But who were these intermediators?

In spite of the fearless Garamantes with their galloping horses, the real initiators of trans-Saharan trade were the Berber nomads who frequently crossed the desert with their camel flocks. The nomads, who resided at southern edge of Sahara, left to the north in the beginning of the rainy season, returning back by the eve of the dry season. While staying in their pastures in southern Morocco and the Atlas mountains, these nomads have certainly met people who, in their turn, had contacts beyond the Roman limes. As the nomads learned to know the great value of gold in Roman world, they perhaps started bartering it from the peoples of West Africa for salt and copper. The gold was carried to the north, where it was probably used for payment of dates, corn and such handycrafts which the nomads could not produce themselves. The nomads may have bought also some luxury objects made in the Roman world, which they bartered for gold in the south. This trade could have started only after the adoption of dromedary by the Saharan peoples, for horses do not survive in the harsh conditions of the desert. The camels were important not so much as mounts than beasts of burden, for they enabled to transport efficiently both the merchandizes and the food and water which were needed during the crossing of the desert; the traders usually walked all the way. Customarily the adoption of the dromedary in Northern Africa is dated to the beginning of our era, and on the grounds of classical literature its introduction is attributed to the Romans. However, some camel bones have been found recently in the Senegal valley, and they are dated to the third century AD, suggesting that the dromedary was domesticated by Saharan inhabitants at least by that time, since there never lived any wild camels in Africa.

What were the consequences of these sporadic contacts? First, it seems that they did not increase at all the knowledge of sub-Saharan African among the Mediterranean peoples. According to the survived classical sources, ancient geographers believed that after the fertile North African littoral began nothing but a vast, arid, hot and uninhabited desert. The same can be said of West Africans who were presumably not aware of the existence of Mediterranean peoples either. Secondly, the volume of the trade must have been humble, for the Roman empire made no effective efforts to expand her political dominance beyond the limes. Neither had the Romans any economic reason to develope closer commercial contacts with the unknown lands in the south, because they obtained all the merchandize the West Africans could offer them, namely gold, ivory, exotic beasts and slaves, more easily within her own borders or from the nearby frontier areas in Europe and the Middle East. Similarly, the Roman world had very few products which could have encouraged the West Africans to increase the volume of trade.

Finally, no significant cultural influences did spread through these early contacts, but urbanisation and state-formation started in Western Africa independently without any impulses from the Mediterranean civilisations. There was a radical interruption in the pottery used in the Niger valley during the third century AD, correlating thus with the adoption of dromedary, which suggests that fundamental changes in social organisation took place by that time. However, there are no signs of any alien conquest of the area and it was certainly the accumulation of wealth produced by the internal trade, rather than the vague extenal trade, which gave birth to the first West African states.

Reference:

http://www.smi.uib.no/paj/Masonen.html


Book review

The Negroland Revisited: Discovery and Invention of the Sudanese Middle Ages. By Pekka Masonen, Helsinki: The Finnish Academy of Science and Letters, 2000.

The great West African empires of Ghana, Mali, and Songhay figure prominently in introductory surveys of world history as early examples of indigenous African statecraft and achievement. In the era of decolonization, the symbolic importance of these ancient states was such that the nationalist movements of the Gold Coast and the French Sudan opted for their countries to gain independence as Ghana and Mali, respectively. But how had these storied empires become known to modern scholars? This question forms the central focus of Finnish historian Pekka Masonen's study of African historiography in Europe. Through meticulous scholarship, Masonen provides us with a glimpse of the four-hundred-year, serendipitous process by which a disparate group of scholars and adventurers established a fund of consensual facts that form the basis of our current understanding of the great Sudanic empires.

In his introduction, Masonen informs us that his study of historiography can best be understood as an exercise in what Michel Foucault called "the archeology of knowledge." He describes his project as an effort to "reconstruct the way in which European knowledge of African history has evolved by pursuing its textual genealogy through the previous historical and geographical literature". In pursuing this project, Masonen is concerned above all with how primary and secondary texts have been read and used by European historians to create historiographical myths that gradually could be refined into solid historical facts.

His method, he informs us, is to reconstruct an isnad, or "chain of authority" similar to those created by Medieval Muslim scholars to evaluate the reliability of various religious texts by tracing their origins back to the hadith of the Prophet or to the Quran itself. In Masonen's secularized version of isnad, historical statements can be considered reliable if they originated from a respected scholar and were repeated by subsequent scholars. Unfortunately, with respect to the Sudanic empires, the task of establishing a central chain of reliable authorities proved a challenging one.

The ancient Sudanic empires were not wholly unknown to contemporary Europeans, as evidencedby West African and Saharan toponyms sprinkled across Medieval maps. With the beginnings of Portuguese exploration of the African coast, firsthand knowledge accumulated but was not widely diffused among the European public. Only with the appearance in 1550 of Description of Africa, by the renegade Moor Leo Africanus, did something resembling a West African geography and historiography begin to find a wide audience among European readers. Although he criticizes the superficiality and multiple errors of Leo Africanus's account, Masonen sees it as clearly marking the beginning of the isnad, since it, more than any other source, evoked the themes and terms of discussion for the next two hundred and fifty years. It was Leo, for example, who first popularized the unfortunate notion that the peoples of the Western Sudan had been uncivilized brutes until they came in contact with the Islamic world, a notion that was to persist unchallenged in European literature until the latter part of the twentieth century.

Indeed it was not until the rise of Orientalist scholarship and European exploration of the western Sudan in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that Leo Africanus's version of Western Sudanic history was effectively called into question and revised. The most noteworthy protagonists of this stage of the process were the English scholar William Desborough Cooley (whose photo graces the frontispiece of the book) and the German philologist-turned-explorer Heinrich Barth. Cooley exhaustively analyzed the various known Arabic sources and created a narrative remarkably free of prevailing racial and cultural prejudices, a narrative that focused on black Africans and their own past, not the actions of outside invaders. Barth carried forward and popularized Cooley's work while adding a wealth of information gathered during his travels through the Western Sudan in the 1850s. Barth's most singular contributions were his careful chronology of Western and Central Sudanic history from the fourth century until his own times and his introduction into European scholarly circles of the first examples of histories written by local African scholars, most notably Ta'rikh al-Sudan.

Masonen ends his study with the colonial period when the study of the history of the Western Sudan simultaneously achieved new heights and plumbed to new depths. On the positive side of the ledger were the first studies based on African oral traditions such as the epics of Wagadu and Sundiata and the beginnings of serious archeological research. On the other hand, these genuine advances came largely in a context forged by the colonizers' relentless racism and blind preoccupation with diffusionist theories of culture change that reinforced the biased perspective pioneered by Leo Africanus. Still, for all their faults, the writers and researchers of the colonial period set the stage for the emergence of a historiography based firmly based in a wide range of internal as well as external sources.

Masonen's isnad is exhaustive if somewhat exhausting. Through 534 pages of clear if rather uninspiring prose, he provides us with a thorough and painstaking account of how our present historical narrative for the Sudanic empires took shape. Oddly enough Masonen nowhere explicitly summarizes the present state of the narrative itself. Instead, he assumes reader familiarity with current textbook accounts. While such an approach is no doubt justifiable, it limits the appeal of the book. By not only tracing the elements of our current account back to their original sources but also explicitly showing how they came together form a narrative whole, Masonen would have rounded out his project and reinforced its larger underlying message: the contingent, tentative nature of historical knowledge.

Nevertheless, for those already well versed in the history of the Western Sudan, The Negroland Revisited provides a comprehensive and sometimes fascinating historiographical journey.

DAVID H. GROFF
Linfield College Portland Campus

.

quote:

In spite of the fearless Garamantes with their galloping horses, the real initiators of trans-Saharan trade were the Berber nomads who frequently crossed the desert with their camel flocks. The nomads, who resided at southern edge of Sahara, left to the north in the beginning of the rainy season, returning back by the eve of the dry season. While staying in their pastures in southern Morocco and the Atlas mountains, these nomads have certainly met people who, in their turn, had contacts beyond the Roman limes. As the nomads learned to know the great value of gold in Roman world, they perhaps started bartering it from the peoples of West Africa for salt and copper. The gold was carried to the north, where it was probably used for payment of dates, corn and such handycrafts which the nomads could not produce themselves. The nomads may have bought also some luxury objects made in the Roman world, which they bartered for gold in the south. This trade could have started only after the adoption of dromedary by the Saharan peoples, for horses do not survive in the harsh conditions of the desert. The camels were important not so much as mounts than beasts of burden, for they enabled to transport efficiently both the merchandizes and the food and water which were needed during the crossing of the desert; the traders usually walked all the way. Customarily the adoption of the dromedary in Northern Africa is dated to the beginning of our era, and on the grounds of classical literature its introduction is attributed to the Romans. However, some camel bones have been found recently in the Senegal valley, and they are dated to the third century AD, suggesting that the dromedary was domesticated by Saharan inhabitants at least by that time, since there never lived any wild camels in Africa.

The only comment here is that the Nomads actually were living in the Sahara SOUTH of the Atlas Mountains in Morocco, generally between Morocco proper and Southern Mauretania. The Berber Speakers of the Atlas mountains were more semi sedentary pastoralists who worked the oases. Southern Mauretania always had a group of sendentary populations who practiced trade and built cities.
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Hotep2u
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Greetings:

Clyde Winters wrote:

quote:
Above Myra and I cited one of his best known articles. He is presently at the University of Michigan. At the web site below you will find a list of some of his English language publications.

web page

He may respond if you contact him.

There is a fine tape on Holl's research in Africa that you may also find interesting at the site below:

Researching African History/Archaeology

Thank you for the response Clyde Winters, it's very informative.

Hotep

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Obelisk_18
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hey uh, jus wondering, what type of houses/settlements did they have at tichitt walata and other ancient mande settlements? were they round, rectangular, what? get back to me. peace.
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Clyde Winters
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Tichitt
 -


.

 -


.
 -

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Red, White, and Blue + Christian
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Mystery Solver asked:

Well, what is the proposed concrete evidence? Effortlessly posting a link in French, a language I don't speak, does me [or anyone else in the same boat] what good?

The onus is on you to make sure that you provide links readable to the majority of the posters herein; just about anyone who frequents this site knows how to read English to one degree or another. The least you can do, is to tell us what you understand by the 'concrete evidence' provided for your claim, if you've actually come across it anywhere in any language.


I say:

Mystery Solver,

I am not getting any $$$$$$$$$$ for being here.
I am not getting academic credit for being here.
I am not chasing after African continental women.

I am curious about my African heritage.

I am not looking for the exact date of when Wagadu began.

It's not that important to me. The general
information is available and that's good enough
for me.

If you need more, seek it out for yourself.
Don't be offended. This is just the way it is.

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Mystery Solver
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^Why should I be the one to be offended [Confused] If you are incapable of backing up your claims, then this underachievement reflects badly on 'you'.

And no, I cannot seek information on a 'baseless' claim; if you make one, the burden lies solely on yourself to support it with factual/substantive material.

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alTakruri
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While still working on an original post on the continuing
"Tichitt Traditiona" thought I'd keep the thread alive
by posting this tentative timeline I intend to flesh out
into a text (time permitting).


code:
    -2000          (hunting of megafauna)
.
.
1 -1880 to -1620 Akreijit

-1500 to -1100 (limited hunting, gathering and herding
* milling
- first cramcram/kram kram
- then millet & sorghum)
.
2 -1500 Khimiya -- Cenchrus biflorus
.
.
-1400 to - 800 (? Chebka/Arriane ?)
.
3 -1300 ± 100 Goungou
.
4 -1100 Naghez -- Pennisetum Brachiaria deflexa
.
-1100
Naghez (dry phase)
* villages
- autonomous
- large
- stone masonry
- planned street layout
* low population density
* incipient cultivators
.
5 -1050 ± 50 Glaib Tija
.
.
6 -1000 to - 800 Chebka
.
6 - 950 ± 50 Chebka III Seyyid Orinq
.
-1000 to - 800
Chebka
* villages
- fortified
* rapid population increase
* full-blown agriculture
- limited agricultural land
_ silt deposits
_ seasonally wetted former lake beds
- rain 150mm annually
- no artificial irrigation
.
.
7 - 800 to - 600 Arriane
- 800 to - 600
Arriane
* population increase continues
* subsistence economy
- cultivated products
* Trachitt Tradition
- spreads
_ Dhar Tichitt to Dhar Nema
* Kedama
- over a kilometre big
- central administration of a complex political system(?)
.
- 700 to - 600 Libyco-Berber marauders (?)
- 700 to - 600
Garamante/Libyco-Berber marauders (?)
* ox-cart
* later with horses
* metal weapons
* kill and enslave the population (? I doubt it!)
.
.
8 - 650 ± 150 Akjinjeir Bledd Initi
8 - 600 to - 300 Akjinjeir
-600 to - 300
Akjinjeir
*terminal neolithic
*decline in
-architecture
-lithic
-ceramic
*villages
-concealed
-fortified
*domestic animal bones
-drop dramatically

town of Tichitt

-300
symbiotic relationship

* trans-Saharan route
iMazighen
- establish
_ supply stations
* south-Saharan sahel
Soninke
- establish
_ terminal trading posts
~ gold salt cloth



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alTakruri
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quote:

(3) [Northern Mande or Soninke]

By contrast the area around Dar Tichitt in southern Mauritania
has been the subject of much archaeological attention, revealing
successive layers of settlement near what still were small lakes
as late as 1200 BCE. At this time people there built circular
compounds, 60-100 feet in diameter, near the beaches of the lakes.
(‘Compound’ is the name given to a housing type, still common today,
in which several members of related families share space within a wall.)
These compounds were arranged into large villages located about
12 miles from each other. Inhabitants fished, herded cattle and
planted some millet, which they stored in pottery vessels. This
was the last era of reasonable moisture in this part of the Sahara.
By 1000 BCE the villages, still made up of compounds, had been
relocated to hilltop positions, and were walled. Cattle were still
herded, more millet was grown, but there were no more lakes for fishing.
From 700-300 BCE the villages decreased in size and farming was reduced
at the expense of pastoralism.

Architecturally, the villages of Dar Tichitt resemble those of
the modern northern Mande (Soninke), who live in the savanna
300-400 miles to the south. These ancient villagers were not
only farmers, but were engaged in trade connected with the salt
and copper mines which developed to the north. Horse drawn
vehicles passed through the Tichitt valley, bringing trading
opportunities, ideas, and opening up the inhabitants to raids
from their more nomadic northern neighbors (1). Development
of the social and political organization necessary to handle
commerce and defense must have been a factor in the subsequent
development of Ghana, the first great Sudannic empire, in this
part of West Africa.

ANCIENT AFRICAN CIVILIZATIONS TO ca. 1500:
Text Supplement and Study Guide for History/PAS 393

Dr. Susan J. Herlin

© Revised edition, 2003

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alTakruri
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The below chronology accompanied the above posted text
and puts Tichitt within a broad context. But read it cautiously.
It needs serious revision in spots where its presentation is
seriously marred by outdated Eurocentricisms. I've bracketed
the two things I find not to be factual or only partially true.

code:
CHRONOLOGY OF ANCIENT WEST AFRICA
.
.
After 12,000 BCE Beginning of a wetter phase in Africa north of the equator.
Populations ancestral to most West Africans make up the
foragers and hunters of these lands.
.
By about 8,000 BCE Great lakes formed in Niger Bend, Lake Chad and Upper Nile
regions. Spread of 'African aquatic culture' through this
‘great lakes’ region. Sedentary fishing communities using
pottery and microlithic tools become established long the
shores of lakes and rivers. Saharan region enjoys savanna-type
climate. Favorable conditions lead to population growth.
.
9,000 to 6,000 BCE Saharan region in its wettest phases.
.
By 6,000 BCE Evidence of domesticated 'humpless' cattle in the Saharan
region. Also seed-cropping (or harvesting) of grains.
.
6,000-2,500 BCE Spread of predominantly cattle-raising peoples throughout
the Sahara. Probably ancestral to [modern-day Berber groups].
.
3,000-1,000 BCE Farming spreads through the former fishing belt of the tropical
woodland savannas and forest margins of West Africa. This Guinea
Neolithic era saw the domestication of millets, rice, sorghum, yams,
and palm trees among others.
.
After 2,500 BCE Saharan region enters a period of rapid desertification,
driving people and larger game animals to seek better
watered lands to the north and south for habitation.
Neolithic settlements spread along the Saharan borderlands
and near rivers and lakes in the West.
.
1,200-700 BCE Excavations at Dar Tichitt (modern Mauritania) reveal
progression from large, un-walled lakeside villages to
smaller walled hilltop villages in response to drier
climate and increasing pressure from nomads.
.
After 2,000 BCE Favorable climatic conditions and developing technology
and socio-cultural systems lead to population growth in
the Niger valleys. Neolithic farming spreading south and
east from the area of modern-day Cameroon. Probably
associated with speakers of proto-Bantu languages.
.
After 500 BCE [Advent of iron-smelting and iron use in West Africa.]
Height of the civilization known as Nok, which produced
art work ancestral to that of later Yoruba and Igbo peoples.

ANCIENT AFRICAN CIVILIZATIONS TO ca. 1500:
Text Supplement and Study Guide for History/PAS 393

Dr. Susan J. Herlin

© Revised edition, 2003

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Clyde Winters
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^^ Good post.

.

--------------------
C. A. Winters

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alTakruri
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Thank you Dr. Winters

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Nice Vidadavida *sigh*
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I thought iron smelting went back as far as 2000 bce in Africa?
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Sundjata
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quote:
Originally posted by Nice Vidadavida *sigh*:
I thought iron smelting went back as far as 2000 bce in Africa?

"Iron use, in smelting and forging for tools, appears in Nok civilization in Africa by 1200 BC. In other regions of Europe, it started much later. Making it one of the first places for the birth of the iron age."

(Duncan E. Miller and N.J. Van Der Merwe, 'Early Metal Working in Sub Saharan Africa' Journal of African History 35 (1994) 1-36; Minze Stuiver and N.J. Van Der Merwe, 'Radiocarbon Chronology of the Iron Age in Sub-Saharan Africa', Current Anthropology 1968)

IRON IN AFRICA: REVISING THE HISTORY
http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=3432&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html

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alTakruri
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We have an old thread that succinctly explains all
about iron in Africa and it includes a super-informative
map.

Search map + egyptsearch.com

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Mystery Solver
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Mentioned briefly in the 'Ancient African Chronology/Timeline index' topic...


IRON IN AFRICA: REVISING THE HISTORY

24-06-2002 10:00 pm Paris - Africa developed its own iron industry some 5,000 years ago, according to a formidable new scientific work from UNESCO Publishing that challenges a lot of conventional thinking on the subject.

Iron technology did not come to Africa from western Asia via Carthage or Merowe as was long thought, concludes "Aux origines de la métallurgie du fer en Afrique, Une ancienneté méconnue: Afrique de l'Ouest et Afrique centrale". The theory that it was imported from somewhere else, which - the book points out - nicely fitted colonial prejudices, does not stand up in the face of new scientific discoveries, including the probable existence of one or more centres of iron-working in west and central Africa and the Great Lakes area.

The authors of this joint work, which is part of the "Iron Roads in Africa" project (see box), are distinguished archaeologists, engineers, historians, anthropologists and sociologists. As they trace the history of iron in Africa, including many technical details and discussion of the social, economic and cultural effects of the industry, they restore to the continent "this important yardstick of civilisation that it has been denied up to now," writes Doudou Diène, former head of UNESCO's Division of Intercultural Dialogue, who wrote the book's preface.

But the facts speak for themselves. Tests on material excavated since the 1980s show that iron was worked at least as long ago as 1500 BC at Termit, in eastern Niger, while iron did not appear in Tunisia or Nubia before the 6th century BC. At Egaro, west of Termit, material has been dated earlier than 2500 BC, which makes African metalworking contemporary with that of the Middle East.

The roots of metallurgy in Africa go very deep. However, French archaeologist Gérard Quéchon cautions that "having roots does not mean they are deeper than those of others," that "it is not important whether African metallurgy is the newest or the oldest" and that if new discoveries "show iron came from somewhere else, this would not make Africa less or more virtuous."

"In fact, only in Africa do you find such a range of practices in the process of direct reduction [a method in which metal is obtained in a single operation without smelting],and metal workers who were so inventive that they could extract iron in furnaces made out of the trunks of banana trees," says Hamady Bocoum, one of the authors.

This ingenuity was praised in the early 19th century by the Tunisian scholar Mohamed el-Tounsy, who told of travelling in Chad and Sudan and coming across spears and daggers made "with the skill of the English" and iron piping with "bends and twists like some European pipes, but more elegant and graceful and shining so brightly they seem to be made of silver." ...


Courtesy UNESCO.org

The theory that sub-Saharan Africa borrowed its iron technology from other cultures is no longer tenable. The fact is that the continent invented and developed its own iron metallurgy as far back as the third millennium B.C. -

Author(s) I.A. Akinjogbin, D.A. Aremu, H. Bocoum, P. de Maret, J.M. Essomba, P. Fluzin, J.F.Jemkur, L.-M. Maes Diop, B. Martinelli, G. Quéchon, E.E. Okafor, A. Person. Prefaced by Doudou Diène. Edited by Hamady Bocoum.
Book Binary File DossierPresse.pdf
Editor(s) UNESCO Publishing
Publication Date 01 Jan 2004

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Nice Vidadavida *sigh*
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So the anthropologists are saying that metalworking started independantly in the Middle East and Africa at the same time?

This seems fishy to me. Isn't it more likely that there was a connection from Africa to the Middle East?

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Obelisk_18
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quote:
Originally posted by Nice Vidadavida *sigh*:


This seems fishy to me. Isn't it more likely that there was a connection from Africa to the Middle East?

Uh no, that's like saying Aztecs got the ideas for Pyramids from the Egyptians, diffusion isn't always the answer babe [Smile] .
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alTakruri
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Leo Fobenius did us the service of presenting the
voice of the Soninke from their grand epic Dausi
parts of which no doubt retain accurate history
from as far back as the Akjinjeir stage of the
Dhar Tichitt/Tagant civilization circa 450 BCE.

Could the Fasa of the following tale (Gassire's
Lute
) be a geo-ethnonym recalling the Fezzan
whence the Libyco-Berbers/Garamantes before
their assumption of trade and politics with the
civilization and cultures slightly north of and
directly between the Niger and the Senegal?

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alTakruri
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GASSIRE'S LUTE


Four times Wagadu stood there in all her splendor.

Four times Wagadu disappeared and was lost to human sight;
once through vanity,
once through falsehood,
once through greed, and
once through dissentation.

Four times Wagadu changed her name.
First she was called Dierra,
then Agada,
then Ganna,
then Silla.

Four times she turned her face.
Once to the north,
once to the west,
once to the east and
once to the south.

For Wagadu, whenever men have seen her, has always
had four gates: one to the north, one to the west,
one to the east and one to the south. Those are
the directions whence the strength of Wagadu comes,
the strength in which she endures no matter whether
she be built of stone, wood and earth, or lives but
as a shadow in the mind and longing of her children.

For really, Wagadu is not of stone, not of wood,
not of earth. Wagadu is the strength which lives
in the hearts of men and is, sometimes visible
because eyes see her and ears hear the clash
of swords and ring of shields, and is sometimes
invisible because the indomitability of men has
overtired her, so that she sleeps.

Sleep came to Wagadu
for the first time through vanity,
for the second time through falsehood,
for the third time through greed and
for the fourth time through dissension.

Should Wagadu ever be found for the fifth time,
then she will live so forcefully in the minds of
men that she will never be lost again, so forcefully
that vanity, falsehood, greed and dissension will
never be able to harm her.

Hoooh! Dierra, Agada, Ganna, Silla! Hoooh! Fasa!

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alTakruri
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GASSIRE'S LUTE (pt 2)


Every time that the guilt of man caused Wagadu to
disappear she won a new beauty which made the
splendor of her next appearance still more glorious.

Vanity brought the song of the bards, which all
peoples (of the Sahel/Savanna) imitate and value
today.

Falsehood brought a rain of gold and pearls.

Greed brought writing, as the Burdama ("Tuareg")
still practice it today and which in Wagadu was
the business of the women.

Dissension will enable the fifth Wagadu to be as enduring as
the rain of the south and
as the rocks of the Sahara,
for every man will then have Wagadu in his heart
and every woman a Wagadu in her womb.

Hoooh! Dierra, Agada, Ganna, Silla! Hoooh! Fasa!

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GASSIRE'S LUTE (pt 3)


Wagadu was lost for the first time through vanity.
At that time Wagadu faced north and was called Dierra.
Her last king was called Nganamba Fasa. The Fasa were
strong. But the Fasa were growing old.

Daily they fought against the Burdama and the Boroma
("Fulani"). They fought every day and every month.
Never was there an end to the fighting. And out of
the fighting the strength of the Fasa grew.

All Nganamba's men were heroes, all the women
were lovely and proud of the strength and the
heroism of the men of Wagadu.

All the Fasa who had not fallen in single combat
with the Burdama were growing old. Nganamba was
very old. Nganamba had a son, Gassire, and he was
old enough, for he already had eight grown sons with
children of their own.

They were all living and Nganamba ruled in his
family and reigned as a king over the Fasa and
the doglike Boroma. Nganamba grew so old that
Wagadu was lost because of him and the Boroma
became slaves again to the Burdama who seized
power with the sword.

Had Nganamba died earlier would Wagadu
then have disappeared for the first time?

Hoooh! Dierra, Agada, Ganna, Silla! Hoooh! Fasa!


[to be continued]

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