Summarizing the early history of Africa in a concise format is no easy task. Ehret expands the scope of his book thousands of years into the prehistoric era. As he notes at the start of his book, world history was African history up to that point, with the ancestors of modern humanity setting out less than 50,000 years ago.
Ehret rejects the idea of sub-Saharan Africa receding from view after this point. He describes the ways African populations remained at the forefront of human development, most notably in terms of agricultural and technological innovation that was often in advance of such innovations elsewhere. Ehret also pushes back against the idea of sub-Saharan Africans being isolated from developments elsewhere by describing the commercial exchanges that have been identified throughout the continent.
Ancient African Trade Routes
He even argues that such exchanges contributed to the emergence of ancient Egyptian civilization, seeing it as shaped more by African influences than by ones from the Mediterranean basin. He grounds his arguments in the growing scholarship of his subject. It also has a chapter specifically focusing on Ancient Egypt, a sort of debunking of the ideas that Egyptians were somehow separate from the rest of Africa. I thought that was a highlight, I especially appreciated how it discussed shifting climate as motivating migrations etc. I also really liked the discussion of ironworking and metalworking more generally, and trade patterns, in other chapters.
Africa's Role in Global History
“Africans living in the heart of the African continent participated separately and independently in the key technological transitions of ancient world history.” This statement early in historian Christopher Ehret’s “Ancient Africa” book sets the tone for a compelling and concise analysis of various aspects of ancient African history. Ehret does a great job situating ancient African history firmly in the realm of global history more generally, deliberately dispensing with the colonialist Orion that Africa is a continent on the margins of the rest of the world.
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Ehret’s primary focus throughout the book is to compare the history of ancient African ingenuity to those from other groups of people throughout the world. In doing so, Ehret not only establishes ancient Africa as a major global actor over thousands and thousands of year, he specifically identifies Africa as the source of numerous independent socioeconomic developments and inventions. Examples include the third and fourth known inventions of ceramics for any people in human history (West Africans and East Africans almost 12kya ago and 9kya ago respectively), metallurgy and ironwork from Africans in the heart of the continent, and carbon steel.
All of these developments (and more) were invented independently from the same from people on other parts of the world, and at or near the same time (often times centuries before). Ehret spent much time detailing the development of agriculture, another invention that Africans independently pioneered. Various regions of ancient African is home to three of the earliest cradles of agricultural civilizations, situated in West and East Africa.
Ehret explains how African agricultural innovations were spread to Southern Arabia and India in ancient times, exploding the myth the Africa was only ever an importer of ancient advancements. Further, Ehret details how Africans established and control ancient trade routes, helping to create the first era of global commerce. Much of this commerce consisted of Africans exporting their innovations to peoples outside the continent.
The Africanity of Ancient Egypt
One of the most interesting aspect of the book is the section on the “Africanity of Egypt.” Ehret is just the latest to definitively assert and prove that ancient Egypt’s founders were African people, descendants of persons from the Southern Nile Valley, Central-Eastern Sahara, and the Horn. The book details both the “deep time” and “very deep time” foundations of ancient Egypt, explaining how the linguistic, archeological, and genetic evidence locates the Horn of Africa as the original homeland of the populations and peoples who would eventually populate the Nile Valley (during very deep time-18kya years ago), and the East-Central Sudan (Nubia) as the original homeland of the founders of Dynastic Culture.
The African Origins of Ancient Egypt
Technological and Economic Innovations
Short as this book is, it was a challenge to get through, at least for this non-historian. But it never claims to be compulsively readable narrative non-fiction. Instead, it’s a scholarly demonstration of Africa’s key role in ancient world history. Most often, sub-Saharan Africa is relegated to the periphery of ancient history. An entire continent is reduced to Egypt, which is then framed as not truly African anyway.
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This book draws on lexical and archeological evidence, comparative linguistics and ethnography, and even climatology-all of which can be at times quite technical and dry, but also fascinating! It shows that technological and economic innovation (such as ceramics-making, ironworking, weaving, rise of towns and commerce and states, etc.) arose independently, sometimes in multiple places, deep within the African continent as early as and often earlier than elsewhere in the world. It also shows that Egypt is genetically and culturally African: the place to which peoples, innovations, and cultures flowed from further south.
I appreciated seeing how historians can track the spread of an innovation by the changing terminology that ripples outward--and how that evidence can be compared against physical, archeological evidence. E.g., the implements found in the Ethiopian highlands in layers dating to 16,000 BCE (!) bear distinctive markings that appear when those implements are used on grain. All of this can be held up against what we know of the cultures, and eventually a picture takes shape. Here is where an innovation first arose. Here is how it spread and affected the languages, social structures, etc. of the places that adopted it.
African advances weren’t disconnected from the rest of human development, no matter how consistently they’re left out of world histories. For a few example(s)… agricultural ways of life that developed in Africa played a key role in the rise of complex society in India. It was Africans who domesticated the donkey, and in so doing profoundly influenced the global history of trade and even transport more generally.
The West African Commercial Revolution (the rise of towns and trade around the second millennium BCE) was not a response to long-distance traders from the northeast but rather was already established by the time those traders responded to the opportunities on offer. The role of women particularly interested me; what’s found here is a counterweight to presumptions of gender roles across history. Women were queens and co-rulers, lead innovators (such in the development of ceramic technologies), and members of influential merchant guilds and secret societies. In some places there are thousands of years of matrilineal descent. As the author points out, this should change our understanding of world history.
While it’s disturbing that world histories will talk about the “earliest empires,” arising in the first millennium BCE, but exclude eastern Africa’s Merotic Empire (750BCE was its high point but it was a key power for another 900 years), I was most interested in what the author had to say about deemphasizing “civilizations.” Histories that emphasize monarchs and wars and the great monuments to them are focusing on the most stratified, unequal, and oppressive societies. These are referred to as “civilizations,” and their ability to build great monuments arises not from greater intelligence or skill but from a greater concentration of wealth and power. What would happen if we instead placed our emphasis on cultures and societies-on the material, technological, and social responses to humanity’s challenges?
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Africa's Contributions to Ancient History
A splendid overview of ancient Africa and its often over-looked role on the stage of global history. Ehret sees "... no value in the artificial" separation of "pre-history" from "history", which does not begin and end with the written word. In a concise and readable narrative, he charts Africa's contribution to ancient history, including the invention of ceramics - which revolutionised human food preparation with major significance for diet and health - and the invention of iron working.
Africa's menacing menageries also produced one beast of burden that could be domesticated and had a profound influence on ancient travel and trade networks: the donkey. The throwing spear was also invented in Africa and Ehret notes how, armed with this technology, early humans after they left Africa would go on to wipe out most of the large mammals on a global scale.
Fascinating book, highly recommended for those who want a better understanding of the importance of Africa to world history. Also very good on what the author calls the "deep background" of human history, and how the standard histories we grew up on have distorted our understandings of world history, and really need correcting.
Lots of good stuff here, such as role of women in technological invention and innovation, the many things we owe to Africa, the ways the world has always been connected, and the "Africanity" of ancient Egypt. The racist history of the past doesn't mean we have to continue to believe nonsense, and this volume is useful for the deep b... My exposure to ancient Africa has, until now, consisted of the cultures along the southern Mediterranean coast and down the Nile valley, such as the Garamantes, Egypt, and Kush.
Ehret begins with a discussion on why studies on ancient Africa are so marginal compared to other areas of study. Firstly, there is the perceived lack of historical sources. However, as Ehret points out, there is not a lack of historical sources, but “a lack of engagement with the full sweep of that body of information” (p. 2) that pertains to Africa. Indeed, the only evidence that is truly lacking for ancient Africa is literary sources. Instead, studies of ancient Africa utilise archaeological, historical linguistic, oral traditional, and comparative ethnographic evidence, areas that are largely unused by historians of other cultures.
Secondly, another hurdle to a more widespread study of ancient Africa is that “the horrific rationalizations of slavers and slave owners and all the others who benefitted from slavery … live on even today, unexamined” (p. 2). As Ehret effectively demonstrates in an easily accessible manner, Africa was very much connected to global trends, while also being home to many independent and important technological innovations.
The first two appearances of ceramic-making technology, for example, appeared in East Asia, first in the Yangtze valley before spreading to Korea and Japan, but the third earliest appearance was in western Africa, vastly disconnected to East Asia, making this an independent appearance. Ceramics, in turn, facilitated the development of iron working technology - the earliest evidence for iron working in the world comes from central Africa, ca. 1800 BC.
Ceramics also contributed to the development of agriculture, as foods could be effectively stored. This, in turn, reveals how connected much of Africa was with the rest of the world, as agricultural products, such as cowpeas and sorghum, first cultivated in western Africa, spread to India and China, “apparently without first passing through the Middle East” (p. 59), likely passing through Oman, which also had a trading relationship with Dilmun (modern Bahrain) and Mesopotamia.
Agriculture also allowed the development of urban communities, and “archaeologists have identified several hundred probable and possible town sites, spread across the nearly 2,000 kilometers of the western and central Sudan belt” (pp. 71-2), connected in an intricate chain of mercantile relations facilitated by the domestication of the donkey.
Ehret already includes an appendix cautioning historians from making sweeping conclusions from inherently restricted genetic studies. That said, this work is meant, first and foremost, to be a general overview of ancient African history, introducing the reader to this underexplored topic, and highlighting to the general reader that Africa is not a blank space of historical evidence, rather than a deep dive into the evidence behind the trends and developments Ehret highlights. Indeed, in this regard, Ehret certainly succeeds.
Review of "Ancient Africa"
Using an erudite mix of linguistic analysis, genetics, and archaeological evidence, Ehret crafts a fascinating assessment of the technological and religious innovations of early African societies. Countering the view that Africans have always depended on the rest of the world for progress, he masterfully synthesizes a large literature to argue that Africans independently made key early advances in the development of ceramics, iron smelting, crop and livestock breeding, and weaving.
For instance, he points to two sites in present-day Cameroon and the Central African Republic, where people smelted iron as early as 2200 BC, some 400 years before such technology was developed in the Middle East. Similarly, he argues that Africans probably devised the first religious doctrine of monotheism as early as 900 BC. In addition to telling a fascinating story of early African invention, Ehret’s book deserves to be read because of its nimble approach to history, using deduction and an accumulation of evidence from very different sources to build a convincing account of early technological advancement.
This book brings together archaeological and linguistic evidence to provide a sweeping global history of ancient Africa, tracing how the continent played an important role in the technological, agricultural, and economic transitions of world civilization. Christopher Ehret takes readers from the close of the last Ice Age some ten thousand years ago, when a changing climate allowed for the transition from hunting and gathering to the cultivation of crops and raising of livestock, to the rise of kingdoms and empires in the first centuries of the common era.
Ehret takes up the problem of how we discuss Africa in the context of global history, combining results of multiple disciplines. He sheds light on the rich history of technological innovation by African societies-from advances in ceramics to cotton weaving and iron smelting-highlighting the important contributions of women as inventors and innovators. He shows how Africa helped to usher in an age of agricultural exchange, exporting essential crops as well as new agricultural methods into other regions, and how African traders and merchants led a commercial revolution spanning diverse regions and cultures.
| Innovation/Development | Approximate Time Period | Region | Significance |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ceramics | ~12,000 years ago (West Africa), ~9,000 years ago (East Africa) | West and East Africa | Revolutionized food preparation, storage, and contributed to other technologies like iron working. |
| Metallurgy and Ironwork | ~1800 BC | Central Africa | Earliest evidence of iron working, leading to new tools and technologies. |
| Agriculture | 9th-7th millennia BCE | West and East Africa | Independent development of agricultural civilizations; export of crops to Eurasia. |
| Domestication of Donkey | Ancient Times | Africa | Revolutionized trade and transport networks. |
| Towns and Long-Distance Commerce | 2nd-1st millennia BCE | Sudan and Congo Basin | Development of new trading systems and a merchant class. |
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