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Author Topic: Writing and the wheel in Africa
PreColonialAfrica13
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Do you think that African societies and civilizations are unceremoniously dismissed unfairly if they lack these two elements of "civilization"?

I think so, I think that is exactly what people have against African history, that it is not a history of civilized peoples but a history of people who should be ignored.

The part about writing is bogus, obviously, Tifinagh, yoruba carvings, nsbidi(which is a completely independent writing system), ancient egyptian, meriotic, ge'ez, amharic, ancient somali script,etc. Variations of Arabic in the Sahel: Ajami, Sudani,etc. Alfonso of Kongo in the 15th century adopted the Latin alphabet, so Africans are obviously capable of both creating their own writing systems, as well as adopting and ADAPTING new scripts in their local languages.

There are other scripts i am not entirely sure of as to their origin(bassa script,etc), so I'll leave em out. But besides that, there are plenty to chose from.

Even societies without writing were sophisticated and advanced, we've learned so much from the benin kingdom for example, whose beautiful bronzes tells us so much about their society. History can be expressed thru art as well as writing, people need to accept that.

If you look at Africa without looking at it through the eyes of a African, you will never truly understand Africa. Stop comparing them to Europe, Asia, or the Americas, all that does is cause everything to become convoluted. Especially when you try to measure Africa up to the standards of European or Asian civilizations. This is not to say Africa is inferior, Africa is different, simply put. It is as unique from Europe as Europe is from Asia and as Asia is from the Americas, despite whatever diffusion may have occured.

As for the wheel, here is where things get tricky, ancient egypt and nubia are both documented with using the well, but I've found little info on the maghreb, the Sahel, East Africa, Ethiopia, or Southern/Central Africa. Obviously the wheel was invented in a few scarce locations and spread from there, like writing, but diffusion in Africa was limited, apparently. I don't know this for sure, the wheel may have been present in other parts of Africa, as most of the continent has had load bearing animals for thousands of years.

Here's the thing, topography may prevent diffusion, deserts, tropical forests(with crippling diseases), mountain ranges, large bodies of water, so that may just be the answer.

If I'm wrong, and if anyone knows of the wheel being used outside of Egypt and Nubia(I do know of saharan rock paintings that are thousands of years old depicting chariots and the wheel, as well as the Garamentes civilization using them as well) please feel free to add to what I hope will be a stimulating and long-lasting thread.

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PreColonialAfrica13
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Also, navigable rivers also help with diffusion. The three greatest in Africa are the Niger, Nile, and Congo, but large swathes of the continent are without rivers and the tsetse fly kills horses and cattle as well.

Africa's rivers:  -

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Clyde Winters
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Precolonial this is a great topic. I am sorry to tell you this but you have been lied yoo. Africans invented writing and the use of the wheel.

The horse period is dated between 2000 and 1200 BC. These dates correspond to the archaeological research.There were two horses common to Africa. A horse introduced to Africa by the Hysos and a native small size horse common to much of North and West Africa.Most researchers believe the horse was introduced to Africa/Egypt by 1700BC. This is an interesting date, and far to late for the introduction of the horse given the archaeological evidence for horses at Maadi and the Saharan zone.Saharan Africans used the donkey and later horses as beast of burden. A domesticated Equus was found at Hierakonpolis dating to around the 3600 BC at Maadi in the Sahara (Fekri A Hassan, The predynastic of Egypt, Journal of World Prehistory,2(2) (1988) .145; J. McArdle, Preliminary report on the predynastic fauna of the Hierkonpolis, Project Studies Association, Cairo. Publication No.1 (1982), p.116-120.)

The archaeological evidence of horses in the Sahara at this early time make it clear that horses were in Africa years before the Hysos arrived on the Continent, and that a horse native to Saharan Africa was already in existence before this time as well.

Secondly we have Kushites horsebackriding at Buhen in 4th millennium BP. This shows that while Asians used the horse for chariots Africans had long recognized that they could ride the horse. As a result, the presence of writing and Saharans horseback riding support a probably much earlier origin than the late horse period (e.g., 700 BC) assigned these inscriptions by some researchers.


Read more:

http://bafsudralam.blogspot.com/2008/07/horse-rock-inscriptions-and-writing-in.html


.  -


The fact that the chariots found in West Africa resemble those of Crete does not mean that the riders of these chariots had to have come from Crete. In fact Greek traditions make it clear that the ancient Cretans, called Minoans came from Africa

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The Dravidian and African languages share similar names for the wheel. For example:

Galla makurakura Tulu gali, tagori
Swahili guru, dumu Mande koli, kori, muru-fe
Tamil kal, ari, urul , tikiri Ka. gali tiguri, tigari

It would appear that the proto-African-Dravidian term for wheel was *-ori / *-uri *go/uri and *ko/uri. The proto-South Dravidian term for wheel *tigu/ori . The linguistic evidence suggest that in the proto- language the speakers of proto-African-Dravidian used either the vowels o/u or a/i after the consonants. It is also evident that the l and r, were interchangeable in the construction of the term for wheel.

It is clear that African people employed chariots in aadition to boats to travel long distances in many parts of Africa.

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Horseback riding did originate in Africa.

At Buhen, one of the major fortresses of Nubia, which served as the headquarters of the Egyptian Viceroy of Kush a skeleton of a horse was found lying on the pavement of a Middle Kingdom rampart (W.B. Emery, A master-work of Egyptian military architecture 3900 years ago" Illustrated London News, 12 September, pp.250-251). This was only 25 years after the Hysos had conquered Egypt.The Kushites appear to have rode the horses on horseback instead of a chariot.

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This suggest that the Kushites had been riding horses for an extended period of time for them to be able to attack Buhen on horseback. This supports supports the early habit of Africans riding horses as depicted in the rock art.This tradition was continued throughout the history of Kush.

The Kushites and upper Egyptians were great horsemen, whereas the Lower Egyptians usually rode the chariot, the Kushite calvary of the Twenty-Fifth Dynasty usually rode on horseback (W.A. Fairservis, The ancient kingdoms of the Nile (London,1962) p.129).

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.

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Clyde Winters
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The first syllabic writing system of Africans was the Thinite script. This writing was used first by Blacks in Nubia, like the Niger-Congo people who migrated out of this region into the rest of Africa.

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The Thinite script provides many of the signs that are included in later scripts used by Africans.

In Nubia, Black Africans were using Thinite symbols before the rise of Egypt to record their ideas and report on important events.

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At this time your people may have been living in the caves of the Caucasus mountains.


This writing was later used by Africans to write inscriptions throughout Middle Africa.

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The evidence of this writing is found throughout the Sahara. By the time Mande speaking people settled Dar Tichitt they left numerous inscriptions.

The people of Dar Tichitt were Mande speakers. These Mande speaking people also lived in the Fezzan where they were called Garamante/Garamandes. The Garamante settled Crete and are recognized as the Eteo-Cretans or Minoans.
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As you can see from the above chart the Linear A signs and Mande/Manding signs are identical. If you look careful you will note that Africans, or Black people had also taken their writing system to Anatolia were your ancestors were living in the Caucasus mountains as hunter-gatherers.

The Minoans, who were Africans introduced Linear A, whose signs are identical to the writing left by Africans throughout the Sahara, like those found at Tichitt and presently represented in the Vai and several other West African scripts.


Your people adopted this writing to write business documents and we know it as Linear B.

Europeans only got writing from the Egyptians. The Greeks who obtained writing from the Blacks of Africa and Phonesia passed on writing to the Romans. With the fall of Rome Western Europeans got writing from the African Muslims who taught them the arts and sciences.
.

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

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Firewall
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African Kingdom of Benin

quote:

Written Language: We don't know much about the early days of Benin, as the people did not have a written language until the Portuguese arrived. They learned Portuguese from the traders - both how to speak it and how to write it.


The akan had writing too.
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PreColonialAfrica13
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Yeah, should've mentioned that.

By akan writing do you mean the symbols they put on their cloth patterns? I considered that too but wasn't sure what it meant.

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zarahan aka Enrique Cardova
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If you look at Africa without looking at it through the eyes of a African,
you will never truly understand Africa. Stop comparing them to Europe,
Asia, or the Americas, all that does is cause everything to become
convoluted. Especially when you try to measure Africa up to the standards
of European or Asian civilizations.


There is nothing wrong per se in comparing civilizations, as long as you are
clear on what parameters you are using. The key point to keep in mind is
that (a) Africa has produced civilization equal to any of the other
continents, and (b) Africa need not follow various European or Asian
models to validate its civilizations. Africa stand by itself in head to head
comparisons, AND African civilizations stand on their own as unique
expressions of the African environment or peoples, without necessarily
adhering to some Euro models. For example, a neat linear shift from
hunter-gathering, to herders, to farmers need not define every African
development. There were large sedentary African cultures in place and
eating quite well in the Nile Valley BEFORE intensive one-place
agriculture came along. Likewise the ancient religions of Africa do not
need to borrow patterns from the "Middle East" to become more elaborate.
The king as divine priest, the numerous animal gods, regalia like grass
skirts, masks and other trappings, etc etc are from the deep cultural
foundations of Africa. No allegedly "universal" Eurasian "mother goddess"
and such is needed as claimed by some Euro writers.


As for the wheel, here is where things get tricky, ancient egypt and
nubia are both documented with using the whell, but I've found little info
on the maghreb, the Sahel, East Africa, Ethiopia, or Southern/Central
Africa.


What's tricky? The wheel is old news in Africa. It is old news in Egypt,
Nubia, Ethiopia, and the Sudan, and the Sahara. As for the Maghreb, well
the wheel is known there as well- Tunisia and Libya- not only Carthage but
Saharan rock art in Libya shows wheeled vehicles with skeletal remains
resembling Upper Egyptians (fentress 1997). It is old news in the West
African Saharan kingdoms like Mali. Indeed art reliefs showing wheeled
vehicles are found in Mali, in Goundam, about 50 miles from Timbuktu.
And ox-drawn carts appear in the central Sahara. All this is BEFORE the
Islamic incursion, so "Arabs" aren't needed to explain the appearance of the
wheel in Africa (Robin Law, The Horse in West African History, 1980).
The wheel is/was independently invented or spread to many different
cultures in the Old World- in Africa as well as Europe and Asia. Ancient
Greece did not invent the wheel- it comes from someplace else- outside
Greece. Furthermore the spread of the Sahara desert southward obscures
the nature of developments in Africa, making numerous places NON
"sub-Saharan" that once had been "sub-Saharan." Pyramids for example are
found in the Sudan, but the shift of the desert now moves such pyramids
"out" of "sub-Saharan" Africa.


Here's the thing, topography may prevent diffusion, deserts, tropical
forests(with crippling diseases), mountain ranges, large bodies of water, so
that may just be the answer.


^^True, and old news indeed to students of Africa.
The wheel is just another tool, and like any tool unless it can find practical
use, it is not of much value. Hunters in West Africa's deep rain forest have
little need of the wheel, and slash and burn horticulturalists or flood plain,
or hoe terrace farmers nearby likewise do not need it much. The wheel for
transport depends on large load-bearing draught animals, AND even when
such are in place if you don't have to haul a lot of stuff for shelter and food
its has little utility.

The Tsetse-flybelt in Africa limited the use of such load-bearing animals in
many places. Without them, the wheel is of little value, even more so when
shelter could be easily and quickly built from materials close at hand such
as grass or reeds for making huts. Zulu cattle herders for example could
easily erect shelter including building thorn-bush barricades from materials
right at hand with no need for carts piled high with tenting and building
material. Likewise in Egypt, the massive pyramid blocks did not move on
wheeled carts, although such were known. Such carts would break, or sink
into sandy terrain. 20-ton blocks of stone move by sled much more
efficiently.

It is actually more efficient to float the massive blocks into place down the
Nile or various canals and then use sledges, ramps, and even the circular
motion of logs which provide part of the rotary motion of the wheel played
a part. And Nubians and Egyptians are old hands at the wheel as in their
use of pulleys and the lathe for example


If I'm wrong, and if anyone knows of the wheel being used outside of
Egypt and Nubia(I do know of saharan rock paintings that are thousands of
years old depicting chariots and the wheel, as well as the Garamentes
civilization using them as well) please feel free to add to what I hope will
be a stimulating and long-lasting thread.


Use of the wheel outside Egypt and Nubia is nothing special. Ethiopia, the
savannah/ Saharan kingdoms towards the West like Mali, etc, all used the
wheel. They used it like any other tool, when it was practical.


Also, navigable rivers also help with diffusion. The three greatest in
Africa are the Niger, Nile, and Congo, but large swathes of the continent
are without rivers and the tsetse fly kills horses and cattle as well.


True to a certain extent. Africa does not have the navigable rivers, or the
natural harbors other continents have. Many African rivers are blocked by
cataracts and sandbars, hindering the movement of ideas, people and
technology. This has in part limited the diffusion of knowledge from
elsewhere into certain parts of Africa. Europe by contrast has a network of
rivers spanning cross peninsula routes, including the Rhine and the Danube.
Also of critical importance that allowed Europe to borrow, copy and adapt
technologies and ideas developed outside is Europe's favorable coastline,
almost 23,000 miles, more than enough to gird the earth, with numerous
natural harbors. Added to this would be the broad highway belt of the
Mediterranean. Good water transport is one reason Europeans have been
able to borrow and copy from elsewhere so successfully from others.
Nevertheless, when Africans have good water access they have made the
most of it. The Nile River is the foremost case in point. This does not mean Africans elsewhere
did not use the rivers- they surely did, just that
compared to other places with long navigable rivers
leading to the sea, Africa did not have similar advantages.

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PreColonialAfrica13
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Thanks for the reply zarahan, very informative!
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the lioness,
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 -
The Egyptian chariot betrayed its Asiatic origin in a number of ways, by the names of its parts which were Semitic and by its decorations which often took the form of date palm branches or animals opposing each other, both Syrian motifs.
However, by the 15th century BC, Pharaoh Tutmoses III had over a thousand chariots at his disposal; by 1400 BC the Great King of the Mitanni had amassed several times that number. We can picture these huge numbers of vehicles charging across the plain straight towards the enemy; the psychological impact of such a charge would have been enormous on untrained and unsteady troops.

Evidence of wheeled vehicles appears from the mid-4th millennium BC, near-simultaneously in Mesopotamia(Sumerian civilization), Indus Valley (Mohenjodaro), the Northern Caucasus (Maykop culture) and Central Europe, so that the question of which culture originally invented the wheeled vehicle remains unresolved and under debate. The Ljubljana Marshes Wooden Wheel, the world's oldest known wooden wheel, dating from 5,250 ± 100 BP as part of Globular Amphora Culture, was discovered by Slovenian archeologists in 2002.[3]

The earliest well-dated depiction of a wheeled vehicle (here a wagon—four wheels, two axles) is on the Bronocice pot, a c. 3500 – 3350 BC clay pot excavated in a Funnelbeaker culture settlement in southern Poland.[

Nubians from after about 400 BC used wheels for spinning pottery and as water wheels.[9] It is thought that Nubian waterwheels may have been ox-driven[10] It is also known that Nubians used horse-driven chariots imported from Egypt.[1


The tricky thing about the wheel is not conceiving of a cylinder rolling on its edge. It's figuring out how to connect a stable, stationary platform to that cylinder.

"The stroke of brilliance was the wheel-and-axle concept," said David Anthony, a professor of anthropology at Hartwick College and author of "The Horse, the Wheel, and Language" (Princeton, 2007). "But then making it was also difficult."

To make a fixed axle with revolving wheels, Anthony explained, the ends of the axle had to be nearly perfectly smooth and round, as did the holes in the center of the wheels; otherwise, there would be too much friction for the wheels to turn. Furthermore, the axles had to fit snugly inside the wheels' holes, but not too snugly — they had to be free to rotate.


Whoever invented it must have had access to wide slabs of wood from thick-trunked trees in order to carve large, round wheels. They also needed metal tools to chisel fine-fitted holes and axles. And they must have had a need for hauling heavy burdens over land. According to Anthony, "It was the carpentry that probably delayed the invention until 3500 B.C. or so, because it was only after about 4000 B.C. that cast copper chisels and gouges became common in the Near East."

The invention of the wheel was so challenging that it probably happened only once, in one place. However, from that place, it seems to have spread so rapidly across Eurasia and the Middle East that experts cannot say for sure where it originated. The earliest images of wheeled carts have been excavated in Poland and elsewhere in the Eurasian steppes, and this region is overtaking Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq) as the wheel's most likely birthplace. According to Asko Parpola, an Indologist at the University of Helsinki in Finland, there are linguistic reasons to believe the wheel originated with the Tripolye people of modern-day Ukraine. That is, the words associated with wheels and wagons derive from the language of that culture.

Horses were introduced into Egypt during the Second Intermediate Period (about 1700-1550 BC). The earliest remains of horses are a few bones from Avaris and the skeleton of a horse found at Buhen. The Buhen remains date to the early Second Intermediate Period, but this date is disputed. In the wars between the Theban 17th Dynasty and the Hyksos both sides used horses. In later times, the kingdom of Kush in the Sudan was famous for its horses, perhaps from good grazing grounds in areas of Upper Nubia: in the Victory Stela of king Piy, special mention is made of the royal attention to horses.

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Son of Ra
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@Zaharan

Great post! [Smile] I loved it!


Do you have sources where it states West Africa specifically Mali had the wheel before the arrival of Arabs??? Because man this will be the final nail to the so called Arab contribution to Sahel Africa

So far we know.


1. Arabs didn't bring civilizations. Around 2000 BC or earlier there were urban towns/cities like Tichit Walate and Gao.
2. Arabs didn't bring Islam but North Africans like Berbers and even still Muslim were an elite minority.
3. Arabs were not responsible for the education or writing.

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the lioness,
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quote:
Originally posted by Son of Ra:
@Zaharan

Great post! [Smile] I loved it!


Do you have sources where it states West Africa specifically Mali had the wheel before the arrival of Arabs??? Because man this will be the final nail to the so called Arab contribution to Sahel Africa

So far we know.


1. Arabs didn't bring civilizations. Around 2000 BC or earlier there were urban towns/cities like Tichit Walate and Gao.
2. Arabs didn't bring Islam but North Africans like Berbers and even still Muslim were an elite minority.
3. Arabs were not responsible for the education or writing.

Islam was invented in Arabia

Africans didn't speak Arabic language until it was taught to them by Arabs.

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Son of Ra
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@Lioness

If I stated otherwise than I would be an idiot...I know that Islam was invented in Arabia by an Arab. I said Arabs DID NOT bring Islam to West Africa like people usually think, but most likely African Berbers, since early Sahelian African states like Ghana Empire and North Africans had close relations.

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the lioness,
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quote:
Originally posted by Son of Ra:
@Lioness

If I stated otherwise than I would be an idiot...I know that Islam was invented in Arabia by an Arab. I said Arabs DID NOT bring Islam to West Africa like people usually think, but most likely African Berbers, since early Sahelian African states like Ghana Empire and North Africans had close relations.

You didn't say West Africa before you just said Africa.
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Son of Ra
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^^^

Um...In my post I clearly hinted that I was talking mainly about Sahel West Africa.

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PreColonialAfrica13
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Ibn Battuta wrote in a passage that the trek across the Sahara(towards the lands of Mali) was extremely dangerous and treacherous. Only hardened berber nomads could safely traverse the sands via caravans. Some of the Arabs who went with him got lost, some went mad. Arabs are desert nomads, originally anyway, but the Sahara desert is as large as China, and is the hottest desert on Earth. I highly doubt any foreigner could cross it, even with plentiful supplies and knowledge of trade routes, without help from the natives.
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the lioness,
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Containment: Ghana and the Takrur
The early presence of Islam was limited to segregated Muslim communities linked to the trans-Saharan trade. In the 11th century Andalusian geographer, Al-Bakri, reported accounts of Arab and North African Berber settlements in the region. Several factors led to the growth of the Muslim merchant-scholar class in non-Muslim kingdoms. Islam facilitated long distance trade by offering useful sets of tools for merchants including contract law, credit, and information networks. Muslim merchant-scholars also played an important role in non-Muslim kingdoms as advisors and scribes in Ghana. They had the crucial skill of written script, which helped in the administration of kingdoms. Many Muslim were also religious specialists whose amulets were prized by non-Muslims.

Merchant-scholars also played a large role in the spread of Islam into the forest zones. These included the Jakhanke merchant-scholars in [name region], the Jula merchants in Mali and the Ivory Coast, and the Hausa merchants during the nineteenth century in Nigeria, Ghana, and Guinea Basau,]. Muslim communities in the forest zones were minority communities often linked to trading diasporas. Many of the traditions in the forest zones still reflect the tradition of Al-Hajj Salim Suwari, a late fifteenth-century Soninke scholar, who focused on responsibilities of Muslims in a non-Muslim society. His tradition, known as the Suwarian tradition, discouraged proselytizing, believing that God would bring people around to Islam in his own ways. This tradition worked for centuries in the forest zone including the present day, where there are vibrant Muslim minority communities.

Although modern Ghana is unrelated to the ancient kingdom of Ghana, modern Ghana chose the name as a way of honoring early African history. The boundaries of the ancient Kingdom encompassed the Middle Niger Delta region, which consists of modern-day Mali and parts of present-day Mauritania and Senegal. This region has historically been home to the Soninken Malinke, Wa’kuri and Wangari peoples. Fulanis and the Southern Saharan Sanhaja Berbers also played a prominent role in the spread of Islam in the Niger Delta region. Large towns emerged in the Niger Delta region around 300 A.D. Around the eighth century, Arab documents mentioned ancient Ghana and that Muslims crossed the Sahara into West Africa for trade. North African and Saharan merchants traded salt, horses, dates, and camels from the north with gold, timber, and foodstuff from regions south of the Sahara. Ghana kings, however, did not permit North African and Saharan merchants to stay overnight in the city. This gave rise to one of the major features of Ghana—the dual city; Ghana Kings benefited from Muslim traders, but kept them outside centers of power.

From the eighth to the thirteenth century, contact between Muslims and Africans increased and Muslim states began to emerge in the Sahel. Eventually, African kings began to allow Muslims to integrate. Accounts during the eleventh century reported a Muslim state called Takrur in the middle Senegal valley. Around this time, the Almoravid reform movement began in Western Sahara and expanded throughout modern Mauritania, North Africa and Southern Spain. The Almoravids imposed a fundamentalist version of Islam, in an attempt to purify beliefs and practices from syncretistic or heretical beliefs. The Almoravid movement imposed greater uniformity of practice and Islamic law among West African Muslims. The Almoravids captured trade routes and posts, leading to the weakening of the Takruri state. Over the next hundred years, the empire dissolved into a number of small kingdoms.


read more here:


THE SPREAD OF ISLAM IN WEST AFRICA


Margari Hill, Stanford University
January 2009

http://spice.stanford.edu/docs/the_spread_of_islam_in_west_africa_containment_mixing_and_reform_from_the_eighth_to_the_twentieth_century/

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Son of Ra
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quote:
Originally posted by PreColonialAfrica13:
Ibn Battuta wrote in a passage that the trek across the Sahara(towards the lands of Mali) was extremely dangerous and treacherous. Only hardened berber nomads could safely traverse the sands via caravans. Some of the Arabs who went with him got lost, some went mad. Arabs are desert nomads, originally anyway, but the Sahara desert is as large as China, and is the hottest desert on Earth. I highly doubt any foreigner could cross it, even with plentiful supplies and knowledge of trade routes, without help from the natives.

 -
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PreColonialAfrica13
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Hehe, love that gif. As for lioness, yeah the ghana kingdom kept the Muslims at arms length for quite some time, they lived in segregated cities on two hills, one for the king and his subjects, the other for muslims. The Muslims also were uncomfortable with being in close proximity to practitioners of west african tribal religions, some of which involved the use of witchcraft. The Muslim part of the city was inhabited mainly by merchants, in essence it was the "business/financial hub" of the capital.

Still, any Arab or foreigner who visited the Sahelian kingdoms had nothing but praise for their piety, sophistication, and honor.

Muslims take the practice of witchcraft VERY seriously, lol. It's punishable by death in Iran and Saudi Arabia today.

In the land of Ghana one enjoys complete safety, of all peoples the Negroes abhor injustice the most, belongings of foreigners are passed along to other foreigners to safeguard rather than being repossessed,etc. All quotes attributed to the Sahelian kingdoms.

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Clyde Winters
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Sadly many Blacks have an inferiority complex when it comes to history.It is a myth that you can not measure African civilization to Asian and European civilizations because CIVILIZATION was taken to Asia and Europe by Africans. That is obvious in the earlier post on writing and the chariot.

The absence of navigable rivers in Africa is a recent phenomena, that is why we find engravings of boats throughout the Sahara dating to periods before the Sahara became a desert.

 -


 -

The idea that Africans did not have navigation knowledge is a myth. As early as 12kya Africans already had canoes.

 -

It was African people who spread boating and boat technology around the world, not Europeans.


In ancient times a wonderful civilization existed in the Highland regions of Middle Africa. In this
wonderful civilization 6000 years ago lived the ancestors of the Dravidians, Black Africans,
Elamites and the Sumerians. Today we call this Proto-Saharan civilization the "Fertile African
Crescent", because the highland regions in which the Proto-Saharans l lived formed a crescent
shape across the Saharan region of middle Africa.

The ancestors of the Dravidians, Manding and Sumerians were organized into a federal system
during the neolithic subpluvial. These early Proto- Saharans made adequate uses of local game
and plant life and they established permanent and seasonal settlements around well stocked
fishing holes. They lived on plains, punctuated by mountains and numerous points of inundation
due to the frequency of rain in the ancient Sahara.


The Proto-Saharans were great sailors. They used celestial navigation to make long voyages.
The Proto-Saharans also used boats called PS *kalam.

As a result, we find numerous engravings of boats throughout the Sahara.


 -

.

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

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Firewall
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quote:
Originally posted by PreColonialAfrica13:
Yeah, should've mentioned that.

By akan writing do you mean the symbols they put on their cloth patterns? I considered that too but wasn't sure what it meant.

I believe most or all those civilizations in southern west africa had writing one way or the other from either the islamic states north and the west trading with them like portugal etc.. and some had native writing.


_______________________________________
Here something about the akan.


I got this from the other website.

The Ashanti

Surprises in Kumasi, the Ashanti capital

Sir Garnet Wolseley commanded the British forces in their Third Ashanti War in west Africa, 1873-1874. After winning several victories over the Ashanti Wolseley and his army occupied their capital of Kumasi; finding it abandoned, they explored it for a little while and then burned it.

They made two discoveries of note - one macabre and one fascinating. Supposedly there was extensive evidence of human sacrifice. How important was this tradition in Ashanti culture, how and why was it done? I have not come across many references to human sacrifice in African history.

Secondly, the British supposedly found 'rows of books' in a multitude of languages. How did the Ashanti come to own this library, and what were some of these languages? To what extent were the Ashanti people literate? Had they commited their own tongue to writing?


_______________


Quote:
Because of the long history of mutual interaction between Ashanti and European powers, the Ashanti have the greatest amount of historiography in sub-Saharan Africa. The British touted the Ashanti as one of the more civilized African peoples, cataloguing their religious, familial, and legal systems in works like R.S. Rattray's Ashanti Law and Constitution.

Quote:
Ashanti was one of the few African states able to offer serious resistance to European colonizers

http://www.historum.com/middle-eastern-african-history/42038-surprises-kumasi-ashanti-capital.html

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Son of Ra
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^^^Do you have a link or citation for that?
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Firewall
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ASANTE Ashanti West Africa RARE ETHNIC 78 RPM EX


http://collectorsfrenzy.com/details/390177773280/GHANA_ASANTE_Ashanti_West_Africa_RARE_ETHNIC_78_RPM__EX

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Son of Ra
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Thanks! Saving that link?

But wheres the one with the Ashantis having a library, that one surprised me the most.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashanti_people
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zarahan aka Enrique Cardova
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quote:
Originally posted by Son of Ra:
@Zaharan

Great post! [Smile] I loved it!


Do you have sources where it states West Africa specifically Mali had the wheel before the arrival of Arabs??? Because man this will be the final nail to the so called Arab contribution to Sahel Africa

So far we know.
<<file://C:\Users\quango\AppData\Local\Temp\bkbqfy31.bmp>>

1. Arabs didn't bring civilizations. Around 2000 BC or earlier there were urban towns/cities like Tichit Walate and Gao.
2. Arabs didn't bring Islam but North Africans like Berbers and even still Muslim were an elite minority.
3. Arabs were not responsible for the education or writing.

Ra see Robin Law, The Horse in West African History, 1980- pg 160, 155-163)

"Heavy draught work in these early times had therefore to be done by oxen rather
than horses; and there are, in addition to the horse-drawn chariots, numerous rock
engravings depicting ox-drawn carts in both the central and the western Sahara.
However by the Islamic era wheeled transport had apparently gone completely out
of use in the Sahara... "

then it talks about the engravings in Mali:

"The most southerly depiction of a wheeled cart in Saharan rock art is an engraving at
TOndia, near Goundam to the northwest of the Niger bend: unfortunately the engraving
is too stylized for it to be clear whether the draught animals shown are intended to
be horses or oxen."


And you are right- Africa had writing and education long before Arabs showed up. A lot
of people seem to think that EUrope invented writing, but this is not so. Europe copied
the invention from non-Europeans elsewhere. Egyptian writing systems appear before that
of Mesopotamia, and variants of this were modified by Phonecians (a Middle Eastern people)
to produce their version of alphabetic script (see book by Yale scholar David Sacks 2003,
Language Visible) It is from this Middle Eastern variant that European alphabets are derived.
Europe never invented writing.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

lioness said:
Nubians from after about 400 BC used wheels for spinning pottery and as water wheels.[9] It is thought that Nubian waterwheels may have been ox-driven[10] It is also known that Nubians used horse-driven chariots imported from Egypt.

Keep in mind that Nubians are the closest cousin of Egyptians and were involved
in Egypt since pre-dynastic times. Limiting "Nubia" to 400 BC is probelmatic,
for Egyptians were deploying wheeled vehicles long before then.

"Interestingly, the earliest representation of
wheeled vehicle from Egypt (tomb of Sebeknekht at
El Kab, Dynasty XIII) shows sledges, mounted on
four disk wheels rather than rollers."

-- Wheeled vehicles and ridden animals in the
ancient Near East (1997), By M. A. Littauer, J.
H. Crouwel. p14
--------------------------------------------------------
"Little is known about the raising of loads using ropes,
but stone grooves and pulleys, around which ropes
would have passed, are preserved from the 4th Dynasty,
and wooden wheels for simple rope pulleys existed from
the Middle Kingdom onwards."

-------------------------------------

"Much earlier forerunners are shown in tomb paintings of the late
Old Kingdom and the 11th Dynasty showing siege towers with
wheels; depictions of movable siege towers exist from the 6th
Dynasty onwards.) This indicates that the wheel was used in the
transport of heavy loads more frequently than assumed..
The use of wheeled equipment in building is not yet attested
to but may have been fairly common. The soft surface of the
desert sand and the mud of the cultivation may have been a
serious obstacle for heavy carriages but not so much for sledges."


--The encyclopaedia of ancient Egyptian architecture
By Dieter Arnold. 2002. p 195
--------------------------

"In all probability wheels would have been of little practical use,
for the building blocks used were far too large and too heavy to
be carried on a wooden-wheeled cart. The relative scarcity of
wood in ancient Egypt would have made the building of such
carts difficult and overcoming the practical and technical difficulties
of building carts to carry and move great weights would have probably
proved impossible.

Wheels would have been, in any event, a far from practical method
of transport on either agricultural land or the desert where they would
have become quickly bogged down in either mud or sand."


--R. Partridge. (1996) Transport in ancient Egypt. p76


--------------------------------------------------------

CLyde says:
The absence of navigable rivers in Africa is a recent phenomena, that is why we find engravings of boats throughout the Sahara dating to periods before the Sahara became a desert.

Climate/enviro factors no doubt has changed the watery landscape once allowing boats in the Sahara.
The time periods & amount of change varies over time. Africa has always had navigable rivers but the
crucial point is (a) how far they were navigable internally before being interrupted
by sandbars, rapids or cataracts, and (b) their access to the sea without continual
interruption. Other factors include unpredictable rainfall that makes water
levels fluctuate problematically. Another is how navigable by large vessels. It
has been estimated that long stretches of the Niger Riger can only handle barges below 20 tons
during the low-water level dry season. Whereas the Yangtse River in China can
handle huge barges weighing in at 10,000 tons going hundreds of miles inland without
interruption at any time. All the above just points out that substantial movement of materials
and technology is not as easy in many parts of Africa as in other places. It does not
mean Africans did not master boat technology. They did, long before others. And it is true
that Africans had navigation knowledge as well.

--------------------
Note: I am not an "Egyptologist" as claimed by some still bitter, defeated, trolls creating fake profiles and posts elsewhere. Hapless losers, you still fail. My output of hard data debunking racist nonsense has actually INCREASED since you began..

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Bilal Dogon
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I also read that the Asantehene ruler had a large collection of books that the British found when they attacked. As nice as it sounds, I don’t believe that there was much literacy within the Asante empire, at least among the Asante people. The Asante were known for using Islamic talismans and portions of scriptures from the Quran (even though they didn’t know Arabic) sewed into clothing, or worn, for their spiritual properties and belief that they brought good fortune.

They did however, encourage Hausa scholars and Hausa people in general, to settle in Asante because they were literate in Arabic. The Asante assigned various positions in government to Hausa for helping in administration, so maybe some of those books could have been brought by Hausa from the north.

However, it’s not to discount that the Asante themselves never learned to read also.

One thing I really admire about the Asante is the extremely developed and complex government structure they had, without literacy (their use of drums also helped in communication across distances). It impressed the British tremendously, and dispelled their myths of “African savages”. The Asante really showed that a civilization doesn't require literacy, and that pre-literate African states were just as complex as the Islamic ones, and those of the rest of the world.

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Here something about early african mathematics.

quote:

The Lebombo bone is the oldest known mathematical artifact. It dates from 35,000 BCE and consists of 29 distinct notches that were deliberately cut into a baboon's fibula.


The Ishango bone is a bone tool, dated to the Upper Paleolithic era, about 18,000 to 20,000 BCE. It is a dark brown length of bone, the fibula of a baboon, with a sharp piece of quartz affixed to one end, perhaps for engraving or writing. It was first thought to be a tally stick, as it has a series of tally marks carved in three columns running the length of the tool, but some scientists have suggested that the groupings of notches indicate a mathematical understanding that goes beyond counting. These are the function postulated about the Ishango bones: 1. A tool for multiplication, division, and simple mathematical calculation; 2. A six-month lunar calendar;. a construct of a woman, keeping track of her menstrual cycle;


In the book How Mathematics Happened: the First 50,000 Years, Peter Rudman argues that the development of the concept of prime numbers could only have come about after the concept of division, which he dates to after 10,000 BC, with prime numbers probably not being understood until about 500 BC. He also writes that "no attempt has been made to explain why a tally of something should exhibit multiples of two, prime numbers between 10 and 20, and some numbers that are almost multiples of 10." see History of mathematics


Nile Valley

quote:



The earliest attested examples of mathematical calculations date to the predynastic Naqada period, and show a fully developed numeral system. The importance of mathematics to an educated Egyptian is suggested by a New Kingdom fictional letter in which the writer proposes a scholarly competition between himself and another scribe regarding everyday calculation tasks such as accounting of land, labor and grain. Texts such as the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus and the Moscow Mathematical Papyrus show that the ancient Egyptians could perform the four basic mathematical operations—addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division—use fractions, compute the volumes of boxes and pyramids, and calculate the surface areas of rectangles, triangles, circles and even spheres[citation needed]. They understood basic concepts of algebra and geometry, and could solve simple sets of simultaneous equations.

Mathematical notation was decimal, and based on hieroglyphic signs for each power of ten up to one million. Each of these could be written as many times as necessary to add up to the desired number; so to write the number eighty or eight hundred, the symbol for ten or one hundred was written eight times respectively. Because their methods of calculation could not handle most fractions with a numerator greater than one, ancient Egyptian fractions had to be written as the sum of several fractions. For example, the fraction two-fifths was resolved into the sum of one-third + one-fifteenth; this was facilitated by standard tables of values.[ Some common fractions, however, were written with a special glyph; the equivalent of the modern two-thirds is shown on the right.


Ancient Egyptian mathematicians had a grasp of the principles underlying the Pythagorean theorem, knowing, for example, that a triangle had a right angle opposite the hypotenuse when its sides were in a 3–4–5 ratio. They were able to estimate the area of a circle by subtracting one-ninth from its diameter and squaring the result:

Area ≈ [(8⁄9)D]2 = (256⁄81)r2 ≈ 3.16r2,

a reasonable approximation of the formula πr2.

The golden ratio seems to be reflected in many Egyptian constructions, including the pyramids, but its use may have been an unintended consequence of the ancient Egyptian practice of combining the use of knotted ropes with an intuitive sense of proportion and harmony.

Based on engraved plans of Meroitic King Amanikhabali's pyramids, Nubians had a sophisticated understanding of mathematics and an appreciation of the harmonic ratio. The engraved plans is indicative of much to be revealed about Nubian mathematics.


Sahelian
quote:



All of the mathematical learning of the Islamic world during the medieval period was available and advanced by Timbuktu scholars: arithmetic, algebra, geometry, and trigonometry.



Other African traditions

quote:

One of the major achievements found in Africa was the advance knowledge of fractal geometry and mathematics. The knowledge of fractal geometry can be found in a wide aspect of African life from art, social design structures, architecture, to games, trade, and divination systems. With the discovery of fractal mathematics in widespread use in Africa, Ron Eglash had this to say,


"We used to think of mathematics as a kind of ladder that you climb, and we would think of counting systems – one plus one equals two – as the first step and simple shapes as the second step. Recent mathematical developments like fractal geometry represented the top of the ladder in most Western thinking. But it's much more useful to think about the development of mathematics as a kind of branching structure and that what blossomed very late on European branches might have bloomed much earlier on the limbs of others. When Europeans first came to Africa, they considered the architecture very disorganized and thus primitive. It never occurred to them that the Africans might have been using a form of mathematics that they hadn't even discovered yet."

The binary numeral system was also widely known through africa before much of the world. It has been theorized that it could have influence western geomancy which would lead to the development of the digital computer.



I found something about ancient trigonometry.

History of trigonometry


quote:

Sumerian astronomers studied angle measure, using a division of circles into 360 degrees. They and later the Babylonians, studied the ratios of the sides of similar triangles and discovered some properties of these ratios, but did not turn that into a systematic method for finding sides and angles of triangles. The ancient Nubians used a similar method. The ancient Greeks transformed trigonometry into an ordered science.



quote:



Classical Greek mathematicians (such as Euclid and Archimedes) studied the properties of chords and inscribed angles in circles, and proved theorems that are equivalent to modern trigonometric formulae, although they presented them geometrically rather than algebraically. Claudius Ptolemy expanded upon Hipparchus' Chords in a Circle in his Almagest. The modern sine function was first defined in the Surya Siddhanta, and its properties were further documented by the 5th century Indian mathematician and astronomer Aryabhata. These Greek and Indian works were translated and expanded by medieval Islamic mathematicians. By the 10th century, Islamic mathematicians were using all six trigonometric functions, had tabulated their values, and were applying them to problems in spherical geometry. At about the same time, Chinese mathematicians developed trigonometry independently, although it was not a major field of study for them. Knowledge of trigonometric functions and methods reached Europe via Latin translations of the works of Persian and Arabic astronomers such as Al Battani and Nasir al-Din al-Tusi. One of the earliest works on trigonometry by a European mathematician is De Triangulis by the 15th century German mathematician Regiomontanus. Trigonometry was still so little known in 16th-century Europe that Nicolaus Copernicus devoted two chapters of De revolutionibus orbium coelestium to explain its basic concepts.


Note-in time this form of greek learning came to ancient nubia and sudan and some other areas in africa.
In the middle ages of course islam and west africans advanced trigonometry and this info spread.
In the other thread i should have said that meroe was known as a african athens and nubian alexandria.

Alexandria is in africa.


Ancient African Math/Science Shatters Stereotypes

quote:



Thousands of books and manuscripts uncovered in what is now Mali, especially around Timbuktu, are just being studied, with stunning results: African scholars in an unfathomably wealthy civilization independently developing sophisticated math, astronomy,and other sciences, even while Europe was still crawling out of the Middle Ages...



From the world's oldest astronomical observatory to Timbuktu scholar Abul Abbas, who commented
in 1723 on much earlier scholars' work in the same city - thus showing they were building an independent body of work (and whose conclusions

show his lack of contact with, hence independence from, Europe),African mathematical and science achievements have heretofore been African mathematical and science achievements have here to fore been largely kept in the dark. All this, and so far only 14 out of more than 18,000 manuscripts have been translated and examined.



quote:



Timbuktu ... was one of the major cities of West Africa from 800 until just over400 years ago.It was very prosperous, and had many learning centers, with people collecting and writing books on law, poetry, astronomy,optics,mathematics. This history of scholarship in Africa extended over large parts of the continent. Ancient manuscripts are found all over West Africa and even in East Africa. They are written in Arabic and in local African languages. ...In Mali alone, there are around 200 private libraries, and literally hundreds of thousands of books.

But most powerful in their refutation of the Eurocentric view of scientific development perhaps
are the Mali manuscripts, some dating back 600 years, including beautifully drawn diagrams of the orbits of the planets in a geocentric universe, which demonstrate complex mathematical calculations and algorithms that were as accurate in some cases as anything we have today. And when as Muslims they needed to accurately determine the location of Timbuktu and Mecca, they surpassed the Greeks by inventing the functions of trigonometry.




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zarahan aka Enrique Cardova
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Some of the info above is not quite accurate. Are
you sure about the following below for example? WHat's your source?

" And when as Muslims they needed to accurately determine the location of Timbuktu and
Mecca, they surpassed the Greeks by inventing the functions of trigonometry."


^^Questionable. The Egyptians can be said to have developed or
at least pioneered trig based on their need for building
pyramids, temples, and other structures. It is
unclear how Muslims invented trig. The Egyptians
had it going on long before Muslims appeared.
QUOTE:


"The Rhind Papyrus, and Egyptian collection of
84 problems in arithmetic, algebra and geometry
dating from about 1800 BCE, contains five problems
dealing with the seked. A close analysis of the
text, with its accompanying figures, reveals
that this word means the slope of an incline- essential
knowledge for huge construction projects such as
the pyramids... This [example] is actually the
"run-to-rise" ratio of the pyramid in question-
in effect, the cotangent of the angle between the
base and the face. It shows that the Egyptians
had at least some knowledge of the numerical
relations in a triangle, a kind of "proto-trigonometry."

--Britannica Educational Publishing (2010). The
Britannica Guide to Algebra and Trigonometry. p 203

--------------------
Note: I am not an "Egyptologist" as claimed by some still bitter, defeated, trolls creating fake profiles and posts elsewhere. Hapless losers, you still fail. My output of hard data debunking racist nonsense has actually INCREASED since you began..

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Firewall
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quote:

" And when as Muslims they needed to accurately determine the location of Timbuktu and
Mecca, they surpassed the Greeks by inventing the functions of trigonometry."



Yeah because it shown from the post i posted that nubians, etc.. knew trigonometry.

From the history of trigonometry info i posted above it seems that the nubians invented it on thier own like the chinese.


That quote should be the Muslims and west africans advanced trigonometry further.


Like this one.
quote:

All of the mathematical learning of the Islamic world during the medieval period was available and advanced by Timbuktu scholars: arithmetic, algebra, geometry, and trigonometry.



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the lioness,
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quote:
Originally posted by zarahan- aka Enrique Cardova:


lioness said:
Nubians from after about 400 BC used wheels for spinning pottery and as water wheels.[9] It is thought that Nubian waterwheels may have been ox-driven[10] It is also known that Nubians used horse-driven chariots imported from Egypt.

Keep in mind that Nubians are the closest cousin of Egyptians and were involved
in Egypt since pre-dynastic times. Limiting "Nubia" to 400 BC is probelmatic,



the quote is specific to the horse drawn chariot in Nubia.
For examples of other wheeled vehicles used by Nubian prior to that you need evidence


quote:
Originally posted by zarahan- aka Enrique Cardova:
for Egyptians were deploying wheeled vehicles long before then.

"Interestingly, the earliest representation of
wheeled vehicle from Egypt (tomb of Sebeknekht at
El Kab, Dynasty XIII) shows sledges, mounted on
four disk wheels rather than rollers."

-- Wheeled vehicles and ridden animals in the
ancient Near East (1997), By M. A. Littauer, J.
H. Crouwel. p14
--------------------------------------------------------
"Little is known about the raising of loads using ropes,
but stone grooves and pulleys, around which ropes
would have passed, are preserved from the 4th Dynasty,
and wooden wheels for simple rope pulleys existed from
the Middle Kingdom onwards."



"Much earlier forerunners are shown in tomb paintings of the late
Old Kingdom and the 11th Dynasty showing siege towers with
wheels; depictions of movable siege towers exist from the 6th
Dynasty onwards.) This indicates that the wheel was used in the
transport of heavy loads more frequently than assumed..
The use of wheeled equipment in building is not yet attested
to but may have been fairly common. The soft surface of the
desert sand and the mud of the cultivation may have been a
serious obstacle for heavy carriages but not so much for sledges."


--The encyclopaedia of ancient Egyptian architecture
By Dieter Arnold. 2002. p 195


"In all probability wheels would have been of little practical use,
for the building blocks used were far too large and too heavy to
be carried on a wooden-wheeled cart. The relative scarcity of
wood in ancient Egypt would have made the building of such
carts difficult and overcoming the practical and technical difficulties
of building carts to carry and move great weights would have probably
proved impossible.

Wheels would have been, in any event, a far from practical method
of transport on either agricultural land or the desert where they would
have become quickly bogged down in either mud or sand."


--R. Partridge. (1996) Transport in ancient Egypt. p76



The noble family, of which the above-mentioned Sebeknekht was a member, managed to make itself extremely powerful during the Hyksos rule.
The Hyksos first appeared in Egypt c.1800 BC, during the Eleventh Dynasty, and began their climb to power in the Thirteenth Dynasty, coming out of the second intermediate period in control of Avaris and the Delta. By the Fifteenth Dynasty, they ruled Lower Egypt, and at the end of the Seventeenth Dynasty, they were expelled (c. 1560 BC).
The Hyksos introduced the horse drawn chariot to Egypt.

The Egyptians used wheels for rope and pulley systems and on siege towers

 - [/url]

apart from this there's no evidence wheels were in common use until they were used in chariot warfare but were not used for non-military use like carts. Scarcity of wood ? maybe.
Sand too soft? The chariots worked

off topic: Do you live in Uganda currently or have lived in Uganda?

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zarahan aka Enrique Cardova
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apart from this there's no evidence wheels were in common use until they were used in chariot warfare but were not used for non-military use like carts.

^^Not quite. While the siege towers attract more attention,
some Egyptologists note that wheeled vehicles exist as far back as the Old Kingdom
like 4 wheeled carts or carriages used to move coffins or
religious regalia (a bark or ship for a particular god for example)
during his festival processions.
FOr example:

"The solid wooden wheel existed from the Old Kingdom,
but it was too heavy for regular transport use over rough
ground surfaces and was only employed on four wheeled carriages,
which sometimes carried coffins or the god's sacred bark during
his festival procession."

--Rosalie David 1999. HANDBOOK TO LIFE IN ANCIENT EGYPT. p260

And of course, the wheel was also used in pottery,
in pulleys and in lathes in the Nile Valley. Heavy
deployment for transport duty was no doubt limited
by the primary loads to be moved- like 20 ton blocks -
for which water transport, ramps, and sleds were better.


It is also known that Nubians used horse-driven chariots imported from Egypt.[1

They did, but there is also some evidence that some
chariots themselves were manufactured in Nubia. Indeed
Nubian mercenaries were sometimes key agents in
the dissemination of new war tech in the Nile Valley.

"Nubia, too, must have benefited from the international
arms trade. Although battle scenes show Nubian
enemies conventionally as bowmen with relatively
little equipment, other sources show the use of
chariots by the elite, and the "tribute" scenes
show weaponry and armor that was manufactured in
Nubia... the inclusion of chariots as part of the
Kushite tribute to Egypt suggests that they,
too, were eventually being manufactured in Nubia
itself".

--R. Morkot 2003. Historical Dictionary of Ancient Egyptian Warfare p26

------------------------------------------------------------

PS: I love Uganda [Smile]

--------------------
Note: I am not an "Egyptologist" as claimed by some still bitter, defeated, trolls creating fake profiles and posts elsewhere. Hapless losers, you still fail. My output of hard data debunking racist nonsense has actually INCREASED since you began..

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the lioness,
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why do you love Uganda?
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zarahan aka Enrique Cardova
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Why do you love pretending to be a "black" woman?

--------------------
Note: I am not an "Egyptologist" as claimed by some still bitter, defeated, trolls creating fake profiles and posts elsewhere. Hapless losers, you still fail. My output of hard data debunking racist nonsense has actually INCREASED since you began..

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the lioness,
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SOLID WHEEL CARTS


 -
detail of the "Standard of Ur", ca. 2500 BC.
Sumerian 2500 BC

.
 -
Hand-propelled wheel cart, Indus Valley Civilization (3000–1500 BCE). Housed at the National Museum, New Delhi.

.
 -
Cart Pulled by a Bull (Niuche). Terra Cotta. Sui Dynasty (581 – 618).. China


 -
Greece 1903

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Ish Geber
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quote:
Originally posted by PreColonialAfrica13:
Yeah, should've mentioned that.

By akan writing do you mean the symbols they put on their cloth patterns? I considered that too but wasn't sure what it meant.

Wheeled Transport in Pre-Colonial West Africa
Robin Law
Africa: Journal of the International African Institute
Vol. 50, No. 3 (1980), pp. 249-262
Published by: Cambridge University Press


 -


http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/1159117?uid=3738736&uid=2460338175&uid=2460337935&uid=2&uid=4&uid=83&uid=63&sid=21102907863413

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Ish Geber
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"Africa is assailed for not inventing the wheel as if (to imply that) it were a European invention. The fact remains, though, that Greek and Roman wheeled vehicles and chariots are the directs heirs of Mesopotamian ingenuity. Moreover, African Saharan rock paintings reveal chariots and wheeled vehicles of great antiquity."
--Gloria Emeagwali, Professor of History, History Department, CCSU


http://www.africahistory.net/eurocentrism.htm


quote:
Originally posted by zarahan- aka Enrique Cardova:
Why do you love pretending to be a "black" woman?

lol. Too funny.


Google these,


General History of Africa: Ancient civilizations of Africa

By G. Mokhtar,Unesco. International Scientific Committee for the Drafting of a General History of Africa

Page 263




An Economic History of West Africa by A. G. Hopkins
George Dalton

African Economic History
No. 1 (Spring, 1976)

Page 63

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the lioness,
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 -
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the lioness,
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quote:
Originally posted by Troll Patrol aka Ish Gebor:
quote:
Originally posted by PreColonialAfrica13:
Yeah, should've mentioned that.

By akan writing do you mean the symbols they put on their cloth patterns? I considered that too but wasn't sure what it meant.

Wheeled Transport in Pre-Colonial West Africa
Robin Law
Africa: Journal of the International African Institute
Vol. 50, No. 3 (1980), pp. 249-262
Published by: Cambridge University Press

 -


http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/1159117?uid=3738736&uid=2460338175&uid=2460337935&uid=2&uid=4&uid=83&uid=63&sid=21102907863413

I would like to read the rest of this. It's a $30 article
can one of yall help a sistah out?

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Son of Ra
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@PreColonialAfrica

You should check this thread out. It touches base on the Bassa script.
http://www.egyptsearch.com/forums/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=8;t=008618

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PreColonialAfrica13
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Is it the Bassa script a lefit pre-colonial script though? I've heard otherwise.
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Ish Geber
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quote:
Originally posted by the lioness,:
quote:
Originally posted by Troll Patrol aka Ish Gebor:
quote:
Originally posted by PreColonialAfrica13:
Yeah, should've mentioned that.

By akan writing do you mean the symbols they put on their cloth patterns? I considered that too but wasn't sure what it meant.

Wheeled Transport in Pre-Colonial West Africa
Robin Law
Africa: Journal of the International African Institute
Vol. 50, No. 3 (1980), pp. 249-262
Published by: Cambridge University Press

 -


http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/1159117?uid=3738736&uid=2460338175&uid=2460337935&uid=2&uid=4&uid=83&uid=63&sid=21102907863413

I would like to read the rest of this. It's a $30 article
can one of yall help a sistah out?

I could help out, if you were truly a sistah.


But since you are an impostor black woman, I'll pass and say nope.


http://fc07.deviantart.net/fs50/i/2009/295/0/9/Tara_The_Lioness_by_kazecat.jpg

Posts: 22234 | From: האם אינכם כילדי הכרית אלי בני ישראל | Registered: Nov 2010  |  IP: Logged | Report this post to a Moderator
PreColonialAfrica13
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Sorry meant legit*

Also, what's up with the lioness, I've been hearing some pretty crazy things about her.

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the lioness,
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quote:
Originally posted by PreColonialAfrica13:
Sorry meant legit*

Also, what's up with the lioness, I've been hearing some pretty crazy things about her.

don't believe the hype- Chuck D
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the lioness,
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quote:
Originally posted by Troll Patrol aka Ish Gebor:
I could help out, if you were truly a sistah.



thats what that other brutha told me and I looked in his wallet and there was nothing in it and an expired credit card
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alTakruri
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5th Dynasty Old Kingdom wheels on a scaffold.

 -


A fuller view of the wheeled device depicted in Kaemheset's tomb appears
to be a builder's scaffold rather than a war machine. Note the men on
it have contractor's tools not weapons. Also nothing going on on the
four floors inside the building remotely suggest a siege is happening,

 -  -


12th Dynasty Middle Kingdom potters' wheels

 -

How old is the myth about Khnum sculpting
freshly conceived children on a turntable.

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Clyde Winters
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^^ Super post!

.

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

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the lioness,
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quote:
Originally posted by alTakruri:
[QB] 5th Dynasty Old Kingdom wheels on a scaffold.

 -  -


A fuller view of the wheeled device depicted in Kaemheset's tomb appears
to be a builder's scaffold rather than a war machine. Note the men on
it have contractor's tools not weapons. Also nothing going on on the
four floors inside the building remotely suggest a siege is happening,


you would think the peasanst would have had carts used to move moderate loads, sacks of grain, crops, etc. but they seem not to be in the art, just this ladder thing, chariots and zarahan said coffin wheels. Need to see if in some other piece of Egyptian art there's a mobile seige tower with wheels as written about
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alTakruri
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quote:
Originally posted by Clyde Winters:
^^ Super post!

.

Asante sana ndugu.

It's a blast from the past
in response to something
Ausar posted here.

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the lioness,
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[QB]
quote:
Originally posted by alTakruri:
[QB] 5th Dynasty Old Kingdom wheels on a scaffold.

 -  -


A fuller view of the wheeled device depicted in Kaemheset's tomb appears
to be a builder's scaffold rather than a war machine. Note the men on
it have contractor's tools not weapons. Also nothing going on on the
four floors inside the building remotely suggest a siege is happening,


 -
Warfare in the Ancient Near East to 1600 BC: Holy Warriors at the Dawn of ...
By William J. Hamblin

http://books.google.com/books?id=h5IQQir5eFEC&pg=PA448&dq=egyptian+wheels



 -
Ancient and Medieval Siege Weapons: A Fully Illustrated Guide to Siege ...
By Konstantin Nossov
 -

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the lioness,
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(^same as above)
A watercolor copy of a scene from the tomb of Intef at Thebes, 11th Dynasty (2nd half of the Dynasty, during the Middle Kingdom). Defenders are Asiatic: beards, long hair with fillets, colorful kilts

 -
___________________^^^ curve here supposed to be a wheel

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