Craig10e ch05 ppt_ops_final

Copyright © 2016, 2011, 2009 Pearson Education, Inc. All Rights Reserved
The Heritage of World Civilizations
Tenth Edition
Chapter 5
Africa: Early History
to 1000 C.E.

Rock Art from Tassili n’Ajjer National Park
in Algeria

Learning Objectives (1 of 2)
5.1 Issues of Interpretation, Sources, and Disciplines
• Analyze the issues and problems in the study of African history.
5.2 Physical Description of the Continent
• Describe the major types of African landscapes and the
continent’s seven major regions.
5.3 African Peoples
• Discuss the development and diffusion of cultures, languages, and
peoples in Africa, with some attention to the concept of “race.”
5.4 The Sahara and the Sudan to the Beginning of the Common Era
• Trace the development of early cultures in the Sahara and Sudan,
and the spread of iron smelting.

Learning Objectives (2 of 2)
5.5 Nilotic Africa and the Ethiopian Highlands
• Summarize the history of the Kushite kingdoms and the Aksumite
Empire.
5.6 The Western and Central Sudan
• Discuss the development of agriculture and trade in the western
and central Sudan, and the formation of Sudanic kingdoms in the
first millennium.
5.7 Central, Southern, and East Africa
• Describe Bantu expansion and diffusion, the Khoisan and Twa
peoples, and the history of pre-Islamic coastal East Africa.

Introduction
• Africa, the world’s second largest continent,
had ancient civilizations of its own.
• East Africa is the original home of the human
species.
• The Bantu expansion is one of the great
migrations of human history.

Global Perspective: “Traditional” Peoples
and Nontraditional Histories (1 of 2)
• Early African societies lacked writing systems.
• African histories were transmitted in songs,
poems, dances, and rituals.
• Historians, who give primacy to written sources,
face special challenges in studying Africa’s past.
• Historians of Africa draw on anthropology,
linguistics, and other disciplines to reconstruct
Africa’s past.
• Previous assumptions about Africa’s “primitive”
cultures is now being questioned.

Global Perspective: “Traditional” Peoples
and Nontraditional Histories (2 of 2)
1. What are the advantages and disadvantages of using
written texts as primary sources for history?
2. Think about the histories of other regions you have
studied. Have you noticed historians using sources
other than documents in these histories? If so, what
kinds of sources?
3. For histories of what other regions, peoples, or topics
(e.g., history of science, art history, history of religion)
can scholars make good use of nonwritten sources?

5.1 Issues of Interpretation, Sources, and
Disciplines
Learning Objective:
Analyze the issues and problems in the
study of African history.

5.1.1 The Question of “Civilization”
• The term “civilization” is associated more
broadly with the sophistication of a people’s
intellectual, cultural, and artistic traditions.
• Most African societies down to recent times
may not have been civilizations in the narrow
sense, but they were civilized in a broader
sense.

5.1.2 Source Issues
• Stateless societies, common in sub-Saharan
Africa, left few historical records.
• Oral traditions, archaeology, and reports of
outside observers provide valuable sources of
information for studying Africa’s past.

5.1.3 History and Disciplinary Boundaries
• Historians have recently begun collaborating
with anthropologists and scholars in other
disciplines.

(1 of 4)
Learning Objective:
Describe the major types of African
landscapes and the continent’s seven
major regions.

(2 of 4)
• Africa is second only to Asia in total area.
• Africa has few navigable rivers (only the
Nile below its cataracts) and sharp physical
variations.
• These include high mountains to
swamplands, tropical forests, savannas, and
deserts.
• The semidesert is Sahel, and the deserts
include the Sahara and Kalahari.

(3 of 4)
• The climate is mostly tropical and hot.
• Soils across Africa lack humus and are
easily leached of minerals or nutrients.
• Water is scarce in most of Africa.
• Crop pests and insects have slowed
farming and pastoralism in Africa.

(4 of 4)
• Abundant animal life has always made hunting
and fishing important for survival in most of
Africa.
• There are seven major regions in Africa: North
Africa, Nilotic Africa, the Sudan, West Africa,
East Africa, Central Africa, and Southern
Africa.

Map 5-1: Africa: Physical Features and
Early Sites

5.3 African Peoples
Learning Objective:
Discuss the development and diffusion
of cultures, languages, and peoples in
Africa, with some attention to the
concept of “race.”

5.3.1 Africa and Early Human Culture
• Sometime before 100,000 B.C.E., modern
humans emerged in Africa and spread across
the world.
• African goods circulated for centuries through
Indian Ocean and Mediterranean trade.
• There was a substantial internal movement of
trade goods within the continent in ancient
times.

Great Rift Valley

5.3.2 Diffusion of Languages and Peoples
• Between 1,000 and 3,000 languages are found
in Africa.
• Languages can be divided into six families:
Afro-Asiatic, Nilo-Saharan, Niger-Kongo,
Khoisan, Austronesian, and Indo-European.
• The Bantu language subgroup spread into the
equatorial forestlands, the rain forests of
Central Africa, and later the eastern and
southern savannas.

Map 5–2: Ancient African Kingdoms
and Empires

5.3.3 “Race” and Physiological Variation
• Attempts to relate color or racial differences
to the development and spread of culture and
technology in Africa are all untenable.

San Hunting Party, Southern Africa

5.4 The Sahara and the Sudan and the
Beginning of the Common Era
Learning Objective:
Trace the development of early
cultures in the Sahara and Sudan, and
the spread of iron smelting.

5.4.1 Early Saharan Cultures
• From about 2500 B.C.E., climatic changes
caused the Sahara to undergo a relatively
rapid desiccation.
• Regular contacts between sub-Saharan Africa
and the Mediterranean continued through
north-south trade routes.

5.4.2 Neolithic Sudanic Cultures
• From the first millennium B.C.E., complex
agricultural communities were found of the
sub-Saharan Sudan.
• Their agricultural communities spread and
helped transform sub-Sahara Africa.

5.4.3 The Early Iron Age and Nok Culture
• Smelting was introduced to Africa from the
Near East via Egypt but was also
independently invented at multiple sites.
• Archaeological digs have revealed evidence of
an Iron Age people labeled the Nok culture.
• The Nok people were the earliest Iron Age
culture of West Africa.

A Terra-Cotta Head

5.5 Nilotic Africa and
the Ethiopian Highlands
Learning Objective:
Summarize the history of the Kushite
kingdoms and the Aksumite Empire.

5.5.1 The Kingdom of Kush
• An Egyptianized segment of Nubians built the
earliest known literate and politically unified
civilization in Africa after pharaohic Egypt, the
kingdom Kush.
• The Kushite kingdom was a wealthy and
prosperous kingdom that reached its zenith
between the Middle and New Kingdoms of
Egypt.

5.5.2 The Napatan Empire
• Napata became the center of a new Nubian
state and culture that flourished from the
tenth to the seventh century B.C.E.
• A new Kushite empire centered first at Napata
survived from the fourth century B.C.E. until
the fourth century C.E.

5.5.3 The Meroitic Empire
• The Kushite Napatan kingdom moved its capital
to the prosperous city of Meroe in 591 B.C.E.
• The Meroitic Empire lasted from the mid–third
century B.C.E. to the first century C.E.
• The empire was a “middleman” for varied African
goods in demand in the Mediterranean and Near
East.
• By the second century B.C.E., a woman had
become sole monarch, initiating a long line of
queens.

Document: Herodotus on Carthaginian
Trade and the City of Meroe
• What can we infer from the two passages
about trade and interregional contacts in
Africa in the fifth century B.C.E.?

Meroitic Culture

5.5.4 The Aksumite Empire (1 of 2)
• The Meriotic Empire was defeated around 330
C.E. by the Christianized state of Aksum.
• The Aksumites location on the Red Sea placed
them along important trade routes.
• Aksum was one of the most impressive states
of its age by the third century C.E.

5.5.4 The Aksumite Empire (2 of 2)
• In the fourth century, the Askumite Empire
converted to Christianity, leading to the
creation of the Ethiopic Christian church.
• The church later became Monophysite.

5.5.5 Isolation of Christian Ethiopia
• Aksumite power was eclipsed by Arab Islamic
power.
• Aksum became increasingly isolated,
developing a unique Christian culture while
surrounded by Muslim peoples and states.

A Giant Stele at Aksum

Chronology: Early African Civilizations

5.6 The Western Central Sudan
Learning Objective:
Discuss the development of agriculture and
trade in the western and central Sudan,
and the formation of Sudanic kingdoms in
the first millennium.

5.6.1 Agriculture, Trade, and
the Rise of Urban Centers (1 of 2)
• African rain forests were inhospitable to cows
and horses because of animals’ inability to
survive trypanosomiasis carried by tsetse
flies.
• Agriculture and iron tools became the way of
life of most inhabitants of the western Sudan
by the first or second century C.E.
• Trade also promoted the rise of larger states in
western and central Sudan.

5.6.1 Agriculture, Trade, and
the Rise of Urban Centers (2 of 2)
• By the latter first millennium B.C.E., urban
settlements emerged, such as Gao, Kumbi,
and Jenne.
• The introduction of the domesticated camel
around the beginning of the Common Era
increased trans-Saharan trade.

Map 5–3: Africa: Early Trade Routes and Early
States of the Western and Central Sudan

A Camel Caravan Crossing the Sahara

5.6.2 Formation of Sudanic Kingdoms in
the First Millennium
• The growth of population and the expansion
of trade coincided with the rise of large states
in the western and central Sudan.
• The most important states were Takrur,
Ghana, Gao, and Kanem.

Chronology: The Western and
Central Sudan

5.7 Central, Southern, and East Africa
Learning Objective:
Describe Bantu expansion and
diffusion, the Khoisan and Twa
peoples, and the history of pre-Islamic
coastal East Africa.

5.7.1 Bantu Expansion and Diffusion
• Through the first century C.E., Bantu-speaking
peoples migrated south into the lower Congo
basin and east to the areas surrounding the lakes
of highland East Africa.
• Later migrations dispersed Bantu peoples more
widely, into south-central Africa, coastal East
Africa, and southern Africa.
• Bantu cultures became fully interwoven with
those of the peoples among whom they settled.

A Closer Look: Four Rock Art Paintings from
Tassili n’Ajjer (4000–2000 B.C.E.)

Bantu Languages and Group Distribution

Cave Painting from Namibia

5.7.2 The Khoisan and Twa Peoples
• In southern Africa, a minority who speak
“Khoisan” lived alongside the Bantu-speaking
majority.
• The two principal peoples that constitute the
Khoisan speakers are the San and the
Khoikhoi.
• In the Central African rain forests, the Twa
people speak Bantu languages but show other
links to the Khoisan.

5.7.3 East Africa
• Coastal East Africa was in contact with India,
Arabia, and the Mediterranean via the Indian
Ocean and Red Sea trade routes from at least the
second century B.C.E.
• Long before the coming of Islam, trade was
apparently handled largely by Arabs.
• The slave trade was important.
• Due to extensive migration, inland East Africa has
become a melting pot of Kushitic, Nilotic, Bantu,
and Khoisan groups.

Document: A Tenth-Century Arab
Description of the East African Coast
• In what ways does this Muslim observer seem
to be critical, and in what ways laudatory, of
the East Africans?

Chronology: Movement and Contact of Peoples
in Central, Southern, and East Africa

Manyatta

Craig10e ch05 ppt_ops_final

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