quote:The Yam Zone may have been settled much earlier than Tichitt-Walata.
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?
quote: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.
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.
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.
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
quote:Concrete evidence?
Originally posted by Red,White, and Blue + Christian:
The Kingdom of Wagadu came first. Then Ghana came into existence later around 790 AD.
quote:even more concrete evidence please?
This is the religion of Adam and Eve after the fall
code:
1 --- GARAMANTE
/
| \
HAGGAR 2 3
| \
/ |
/ | TIBESTI
/ |
TICHITT/GHANA / | \
/ | \
/ \ / | \
/ \ / | \
| \
SENEGAL VALLEY MID NIGER VALLEY |
| DARFUR ---- MEROE/'NUBIA'
\ / / |
/ |
BAMBUK FIELD / |
/ |
/
AGISYMBA/TSCHAD
BURE FIELD
quote:Y'all forgive me. I just take stuff from Soninkara.com and put it into English in my own little way.
Originally posted by Mystery Solver:
quote:Concrete evidence?
Originally posted by Red,White, and Blue + Christian:
The Kingdom of Wagadu came first. Then Ghana came into existence later around 790 AD.
quote: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.
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.
quote: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.
Originally posted by Djehuti:
quote: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.
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.
The same old academic biases.
quote: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?
Originally posted by Red,White, and Blue + Christian:
quote:Y'all forgive me. I just take stuff from Soninkara.com and put it into English in my own little way.
Originally posted by Mystery Solver:
quote:Concrete evidence?
Originally posted by Red,White, and Blue + Christian:
The Kingdom of Wagadu came first. Then Ghana came into existence later around 790 AD.
http://www.soninkara.org/histoire-soninkara/wagadou/index.php
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: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.
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.
quote:Thank you for the response Clyde Winters, it's very informative.
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
![[Confused]](confused.gif)
If you are incapable of backing up your claims, then this underachievement reflects badly on 'you'. 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
quote:ANCIENT AFRICAN CIVILIZATIONS TO ca. 1500:
(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.
code:ANCIENT AFRICAN CIVILIZATIONS TO ca. 1500: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.
quote:"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."
Originally posted by Nice Vidadavida *sigh*:
I thought iron smelting went back as far as 2000 bce in Africa?
quote:Uh no, that's like saying Aztecs got the ideas for Pyramids from the Egyptians, diffusion isn't always the answer babe
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?
![[Smile]](smile.gif)
.
quote:who the hell is gassire?
Originally posted by alTakruri:
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!
quote:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gassire's_lute
Gassire's Lute is a West African epic by Alta Jablow that tells the story of a prince that becomes a bard.
quote:is it based on actual oral tradition?
Originally posted by Sundiata:
. Gassire's Lute is a West African epic by Alta Jablow that tells the story of a prince that becomes a bard.
quote:
Originally posted by alTakruri:
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?
quote:I only wish I could present the version from
"All creatures must die,
be buried and rot.
Kings and heroes die,
are buried and rot.
I, too, shall die,
shall be buried and rot.
But the Dausi,
the song of my battles,
shall not die.
It shall be sung again and again
and shall outlive all kings and heroes.
Hoooh, that I might do such deeds!
Hoooh, that I may sing the Dausi!
Wagadu will be lost.
But the Dausi shall endure
and shall live!"
Hoooh! Dierra, Agada, Ganna, Silla! Hoooh! Fasa!
quote:
Originally posted by Djehuti:
It is of upmost importance that the oratures or oral traditions of many Africans, such as the West African one presented here, be written down for safe-keeping since Lord knows that such traditions or customs are threatened and I fear that these interesting and beatiful stories could from times immemorial could be lost forever.
I remember reading some excerpts from a West African author (whose name I forgot) who recorded an epic he learned from the local griots, an epic quite similar in scale to 'Lord of the Rings'. What's funny is that there are many similar stories but not many people outside of their localities know about it.
quote:
The word Garamantes is the Greek plural of Garamas or Garama, which in Africa became Jarama or Jarma.The present Jarma ( also spelled Dierma or Dzarma ) now live by the Niger River in Niger and in the neighboring states of Benin and Burkina Faso, though previously they lived upriver in Mali.
Jan Knappert
quote:No personal reflections on Dr. Winters please. Either
Graves (1980) and Leo Frobenius linked the Garamante to the ancient empire of Ghana (c.300 BC to A.D. 1100). Graves (1980) claims that the term Garamante is the Greek plural for Garama or Garamas. He said that the present Jarama or Jarma are the descendants of the Garamante; and that the Jarama live near the Niger river.
Clyde Winters
THE BLACK GREEKS
http://clyde.winters.tripod.com/chapter6.html
quote:
Originally posted by Sundiata:
Sorry about that.. I have no idea what Alta Jablow's epic is about then. Probably a retelling or elaborative rendition/exaggeration of the original..