The three powers of Cyrenaica, Egypt and Carthage were eventually supplanted by the Romans. After centuries of rivalry with Rome, Carthage finally fell in BC. Within little more than a century Egypt and Cyrene had become incorporated in the Roman empire. Under Rome the settled portions of the country were very prosperous, and a Latin strain was introduced into the land.
Though Fezzan was occupied by them, the Romans elsewhere found the Sahara an impassable barrier. Nubia and Ethiopia were reached, but an expedition sent by the emperor Nero to discover the source of the Nile ended in failure. The utmost extent of Mediterranean geographical knowledge of the continent is shown in the writings of Ptolemy 2nd century , who knew of or guessed the existence of the great lake reservoirs of the Nile, of trading posts along the shores of the Indian Ocean as far south as Rhapta in modern Tanzania , and had heard of the river Niger.
Interaction between Asia, Europe and North Africa during this period was significant, major effects include the spread of classical culture around the shores of the Mediterranean; the continual struggle between Rome and the Berber tribes; the introduction of Christianity throughout the region, and the cultural effects of the churches in Tunisia, Egypt and Ethiopia.
The classical era drew to a close with the invasion and conquest of Rome's African provinces by the Vandals in the 5th century. Power passed back in the following century to the Byzantine Empire.
Ethiopia had centralized rule for many millennia and the Aksumite Kingdom , which developed there, had created a powerful regional merchant empire with trade routes going as far as India. According to the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea , merchant communities in northern Somalia that had already been present by the 1st century were also trading frankincense and other items with the inhabitants of the Arabian Peninsula as well as with then Roman -controlled Egypt through such ports as Zeila and Berbera.
Historically, the Swahili could be found as far north as northern Kenya, and as far south as Rovuma River in Mozambique. Although once believed to be the descendants of Persian colonists, the ancient Swahili are now recognized by most historians, historical linguists, and archaeologists as a Bantu people who had sustained and important interactions with Muslim merchants beginning in the late 7th and early 8th century AD.
Middle Age Swahili Kingdoms are known to have had trade port islands and trade routes [ 15 ] with the Islamic world and Asia and were described by Greek historians are "metropolises". From the 7th century onward Islamic religious and cultural influence replaced that of Christianity across much of northern Africa.
Only in Egypt under Arab rule, and where independence was maintained in Ethiopia , did Christianity survive in any strength. In this period Islamic influence spread slowly south toward sub-saharan kingdoms like the Songhai Empire , and along the Indian Ocean coast, although it never penetrated the Benin Empire or the other civilisations of the forest-belt south of the savannah.
Muslim Arabs conquered northern Africa from the Red Sea to the Atlantic and continued into Spain beginning with the invasion of Egypt in the 7th century. Throughout North Africa Christianity nearly disappeared, except in Egypt where the Coptic Church remained strong partly because of the influence of Ethiopia. Some argue that when the Arabs had converted Egypt they attempted to wipe out the Copts, Ethiopia , who also practiced Coptic Christianity, warned the Muslims that if they attempted to wipe out the Copts, Ethiopia would decrease the flow of water from Lake Tana into the Blue Nile which flows into the greater Nile.
This is speculated to be one of the reasons that the Coptic minorities still exist today. The first Arab immigrants had recognized the authority of the caliphs of Baghdad , and the Aghlabite dynasty-founded by Aghlab , one of Haroun al-Raschid 's generals, at the close of the 8th century-ruled as vassals of the caliphate. However, early in the 10th century the Fatimid dynasty established itself in Egypt, where Cairo had been founded AD , and from there ruled as far west as the Atlantic.
Later still arose other dynasties such as the Almoravides and Almohades. Eventually the Turks , who had conquered Constantinople in , and had seized Egypt in , established the regencies of Algeria , Tunisia and Tripoli between and , Morocco remaining an independent Arabized Berber state under the Sharifan dynasty , which had its beginnings at the end of the 13th century. In the 11th century there was a sizable Arab immigration to North Africa, resulting in a large absorption of Berber culture.
Even before this the Berbers had generally adopted the speech and religion of their conquerors. Arab influence and the Islamic religion thus became indelibly stamped on northern Africa. Together they spread southward across the Sahara. They also became firmly established along the eastern seaboard, where Arabs, Persians and Indians planted flourishing colonies, such as Mombasa , Malindi and Sofala. In this they played a maritime and commercial role analogous to that filled in earlier centuries by the Carthaginians on the northern seaboard.
Until the 14th century, Europe and the Arabs of North Africa were both ignorant of these eastern cities and states. Under the early Arab dynasties, Moorish culture had attained a high degree of sophistication, while the spirit of adventure and the proselytizing zeal of the followers of Islam led to a considerable extension of their knowledge of the continent.
The camel , first introduced into Africa by the Persian conquerors of Egypt in BC, enabled the Arabs to traverse the desert more easily. In this way Senegambia and the middle Niger regions were drawn into the Islamic sphere of influence, becoming key centres of the trans-Saharan trade and for the exchange of ideas. For a time the African Muslim conquests in southern Europe had virtually made of the Mediterranean a Muslim lake, but the expulsion in the 11th century of the Saracens from Sicily and southern Italy by the Normans was followed by European attacks on Tunisia and Tripoli.
Somewhat later a busy trade with the African coastlands, and especially with Egypt, was developed by Venice , Pisa , Genoa and other cities of North Italy. By the end of the 15th century Spain had expelled its Muslim rulers, but even while the Moors remained in Granada , Portugal was strong enough to carry the war into Africa.
In a Portuguese force captured the citadel of Ceuta on the Moorish coast. From that time onward Portugal repeatedly interfered in the affairs of Morocco, while Spain acquired ports in Algeria and Tunisia.
Portugal, however, suffered a crushing defeat in at al Kasr al Kebir. The Barbary states , under the influence of Moors expelled from Spain, degenerated into communities of pirates , and under Turkish influence civilization and commerce declined. The story of these states from the beginning of the 16th century to the third decade of the 19th century, is largely made up of piratical exploits on the one hand and of ineffectual reprisals on the other.
By the 9th century AD a string of dynastic states, including the earliest Hausa states, stretched across the sub-saharan savannah from the western coast to central Sudan. Ghana declined in the 11th century but was succeeded by the Mali Empire which consolidated much of western Sudan in the 13th century. Kanem accepted Islam in the 11th century.
Islam then spread through the interior of West Africa , as the religion of the mansas of the Mali Empire c. Following the fabled hajj of Kankan Musa I , Timbuktu became renowned as a centre of Islamic scholarship and as the location of sub-Saharan Africa's first university. That city had been reached in by the great Arab traveler Ibn Battuta , whose journey to Mombasa and Quiloa Kilwa provided the first accurate knowledge of those flourishing Muslim cities of the Swahili on the east African seaboards.
Following the breakup of Mali a local leader named Sonni Ali founded the Songhai Empire in the region of middle Niger and the western Sudan and took control of the trans-Saharan trade. Sonni Ali seized Timbuktu in and Jenne in , building his regime on trade revenues and the cooperation of Muslim merchants.
His successor Askiya Mohammad Ture - made Islam the official religion, built mosques, and brought Muslim scholars, including al-Maghili d. Until the 15th century these small states were on the periphery of the major Sudanic empires of the era, paying tribute to Songhai to the west and Kanem-Borno to the east. The rain forest cut them off from knowledge of the Guinea coast and of all Africa beyond.
One of the regions which was the last to come under Arab rule was that of Nubia, which had been controlled by Christians up to the 14th century.
In the forested regions of the West African coast, independent kingdoms grew up with little influence from the Muslim north. Ife , historically the first of these Yoruba city-states, established government under a priestly king, or Oni. Ife was noted as the religious and cultural centre of the region, and for its unique naturalistic tradition of bronze sculpture.
The Ife model of government was adapted at Oyo , where a member of its ruling dynasty controlled several smaller city-states. By the 15th century the Oyo Empire had cut off the mother city from the savanna. Yorubaland established a community in the Edo-speaking area east of Ife at the beginning of the 14th century. This developed into the Benin Empire. By the 15th century Benin had become an independent trading power, blocking Ife's access to the coastal ports.
Benin, which may have housed , inhabitants at its height, spread over twenty-five square kilometres, and was enclosed by three concentric rings of earthworks. By the late 15th century Benin was in contact with Portugal. At its apogee in the 16th and 17th centuries, Benin encompassed parts of southeastern Yorubaland and the western Igbo. Monomotapa was a medieval kingdom c. It enjoys great fame for the ruins at its old capital of Great Zimbabwe.
In , Bartolomeu Dias became the first European to reach the southernmost tip of Africa. Under his inspiration and direction Portuguese navigators began a series of voyages of exploration which resulted in the circumnavigation of Africa and the establishment of Portuguese sovereignty over large areas of the coastlands.
Portuguese ships rounded Cape Bojador in , Cape Verde in , and by the whole Guinea coast was known to the Portuguese. Portugal claimed sovereign rights wherever its navigators landed, but these were not exercised in the extreme south of the continent.
The Guinea coast, as the nearest to Europe, was first exploited. The chief commodities dealt in were slaves , gold , ivory and spices. The European discovery of America was followed by a great development of the slave trade , which, before the Portuguese era, had been an overland trade almost exclusively confined to Muslim Africa.
The lucrative nature of this trade and the large quantities of alluvial gold obtained by the Portuguese drew other nations to the Guinea coast. English mariners went there as early as , and they were followed by Spaniards, Dutch , French , Danish and other adventurers. Colonial supremacy along the coast passed in the 17th century from Portugal to the Netherlands and from the Dutch in the 18th and 19th centuries to France and Britain. The whole coast from Senegal to Lagos was dotted with forts and " factories " of rival European powers, and this international patchwork persisted into the 20th century although all the West African hinterland had become either French or British territory.
Southward from the mouth of the Congo to the region of Damaraland in what is present-day Namibia , the Portuguese, from onward, acquired influence over the inhabitants, and in the early part of the 16th century through their efforts Christianity was largely adopted in the Kongo Empire. Before Angolan independence in , the sovereignty of Portugal over this coastal region, except for the mouth of the Congo, had been only once challenged by a European power, the Dutch, from to in which Portugal lost control of the seaports.
The earliest external African slave trade was trans-Saharan. Although there had long been some trading along the Nile River and very limited trading across the western desert, the transportation of large numbers of slaves did not become viable until camels were introduced from Arabia in the 10th century.
At this point, a trans-Saharan trading network came into being to transport slaves north. Unlike the Americas, slaves in North Africa were mainly servants rather than labourers, and an equal or greater number of females than males were taken, who were often employed as chambermaids to the women of northern harems.
It was also not uncommon to turn male slaves into eunuchs. The Atlantic slave trade was a later development, but would eventually become far greater and have a much bigger impact. Workers were needed for agriculture, mining and other tasks.
To meet this new demand, a trans-Atlantic slave trade developed. Powerful African kings on the Bight of Biafra might sell their captives internally or exchange them with European slave traders for trade goods such as firearms, rum, fabrics and seed grain. It should be noted that European traders also conducted their own, quite independent, slave raids.
For most of the 17th and 18th centuries, the slowly-expanding settlement was a Dutch possession. Great Britain seized the Cape of Good Hope area in ostensibly to stop it falling into the hands of the French, but also seeking to use Cape Town in particular as a stop on the route to Australia and India. It was later returned to the Dutch in , but soon afterwards the Dutch East India Company declared bankruptcy, and the British annexed the Cape Colony in Although the Napoleonic Wars distracted the attention of Europe from the exploration of Africa, there were nevertheless significant developments.
The invasion of Egypt — first by France and then by Great Britain resulted in an effort by Turkey to regain direct control over that country, followed in by the establishment under Mehemet Ali of an almost independent state, and the extension of Egyptian rule over the eastern Sudan from onward.
In South Africa the struggle with Napoleon led the United Kingdom to seize Dutch settlements at the Cape, and in Cape Colony , which had been continuously occupied by British troops since , was formally ceded to the British crown. The Police chief Troy Finner revealed that officers had interviewed the guard who claimed he was hit in the head, fell unconscious and woke up in a medical tent. The initial allegation…. Alec Baldwin is being sued by a crew member over the fatal shooting on the set of his movie Rust that led to the death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins last month.
The negligence suit also names armourer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, whose legal representatives had claimed that she was being "framed" for the death of Halyna Hutchins. In the…. The apology was included in Associated Newspapers appeal against a High Court ruling that it had encroached the Duchess of Sussex's privacy by publishing parts of a letter she…. As the yuletide dawns upon us, ace Nigerian producer, Oladipupo Olugbemi, better known as QueBeats, has released a new party groove dubbed, Bamboo Riddim.
The DJ…. British singer Adele has debuted a new song Hold On off her highly anticipated album 30 in a nostalgic Amazon holiday commercial. She then goes…. The definition of providence; it seems like it accurately describes the nature of my specific career. It will be quite a struggle for anyone to fill in the shoes of the multi-talented music maestro, Victor Uwaifo. Squid Game creator and director Hwang Dong-hyuk has confirmed that the Netflix TV series would be back for a highly-demanded second season.
Dong-hyuk revealed this in an interview at an event for the series. He also hinted a major plot twist for the second season. The Insider reports that Dong-hyuk hinted a significant plot…. Nigeria has reportedly joined the list of countries to ban the screening of the new Marvel superhero film Eternals as the film slated to premiere over the weekend was yanked from cinema schedules. Following the removal of Eternals from cinema schedules, it appears that Nigeria has joined the list of countries to ban the superhero film over a same-sex….
The superhero film written and directed by Oscar-winning director Chloe Zhao has received some of the worst reviews of any Marvel film. Despite being the first Marvel movie to receive a "rotten" rating on…. How Diamond Okechi made Nollywood his oyster of success. One of Nigeria's top actors, Diamond Okechi, has described Nollywood as the best job God has given him, as he does not see himself doing any other work apart from acting.
However, the theories below shed some light on how this second largest continent with the second largest population acquired its befitting name. Some scholars believe that the word originated from the Romans. According to this school of thought, the Romans discovered a land opposite the Mediterranean and named it after the Berber tribe residing within the Carnage area, presently referred to as Tunisia.
The tribe's name was Afri, and the Romans gave the name Africa meaning the land of the Afri. Some believe that the name was coiled from the continent's climate. According to this theory, the word is a derivation aphrike, a Greek word that means a land free from cold and horror. Alternatively, it could be a variation of the Roman word aprica, which means sunny, or even the Phoenician word afar, which means dust.
There is a suggestion that the name came far afield. It was brought by the Indian traders, who entered the continent through the Horn of Africa. In Hindi, the word apara means comes after. Geographically, this can be interpreted to mean a place to the west. Another fundamental theory claims that the continent derived its name from Africus. Africus is a Yemenite chieftain who invaded the northern part in the second millennium BC. It is argued that he settled on his conquered land and named it Afrikyah.
Because of his insatiable desire for immortality, he ordered the world continent to be named after him. Another school of thought suggests that the name is derived from two Phoenician words friqi and pharika. The words mean corns and fruits when translated. Hypothetically, the Phoenician christened the continent as the land of corns and fruits. There is little or no certainty on the source or meaning of the continent's name.
Several scholars have tried to explain the origin of the word, but none is convincingly correct. However, the original name of Africa was Alkebulan. We would love to hear what you think about the content on Pulse. Welcome to the Pulse Community!
0コメント