African Civilization Revisited: From Antiquity to Modern Times - Softcover

Davidson, Basil

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0865431248 ISBN 13: 9780865431249

Publisher: Africa World Pr, 1990

Synopsis

This Book Is Concerned With the story of Africa from antiquity to modern times, as told in the chronicles and records of chiefs and kings, travellers and merchant-adventures, poets and pirates and priests, soldiers and persons of learning.

Framed and introduced as a continuous narrative based on what was thought and written at the time, African Civilization Revisited is designed to illustrate the drama and variety, challenge and achievement of humankind in Africa's long history.

It is offered as a contribution to the fuller understanding of Africa today, as well as a guide to the Africa of yesterday and of long ago.

About this title

About the Author

Basil Davidson is the dean of today's historians of Africa. Among his many books are the Fortunate Isles: A Study in African Transformation, African History, The African genius, The African Awakening, and Black Star: The Life and Times of Kwame Nkrumah.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Records of Ancient Africa begin with Egypt, yet the Egyptian contribution has been little studied on its African side. A familiar has considered old Egypt merely and strictly in her relationship to the civilizations of Asia and the Mediterranean. We have had, in consequence, a lopsided view of the true position. Egypt's connections with the Middle East have been lit with brilliant clarity; those with the rest of Africa have remained in darkness, rather as though they had never been.

In this aspect, too, a new approach to African history has lately begun to right the balance. The pendulum swings the other way. Egypt's influence on old Africa, and Africa's on old Egypt, are seen to have had a fertile past, even a crucial one: a past, moreover, in which continental Africa's part was certainly the earlier, and Egypt, as part of Africa, the receiver as well as the giver. "Egyptian art," in the words of a famous Egyptologist, "is the product of the soil of Africa, like the rest of Egyptian civilization." If the history of early Africa is unthinkable without Egypt, so too is the history of early Egypt inexplicable without Africa. Ancient Egypt was essentially an African civilization.

It follows that the Ancient Egyptians were Africans even if immigrants also trickled in from Asia and southern Europe. Whether the Ancient Egyptians were as black or as brown in skin color as other Africans may remain an issue of emotive dispute; probably they were both. Their own artistic convention painted them as pink, but pictures on their tombs show that they often married queens shown as entirely black, being from the south (from what a later world knew as Nubia): while the Greek writers reported that they were much like all the other Africans whom the Greeks knew.

None of this rather fruitless argument, as to the skin color of the Ancient Egyptians before the arrival of the Arabs in the seventh century A.D., would have arisen without the eruption of modern European racism during the 1830s. It became important to the racists, then and since, to deny Egypt's African identity, Egypt's black identity, so that they could deny to Africans any capacity to build a great civilization. We should dismiss all that. What one needs to hold in mind is the enormous value and direct relevance of the Pharaonic records. In this I follow as eminent Egyptologist, Professor Jean Leclant, in holding that "African studies may draw to their great advantage on the immense documentation comprised of five thousand years of history; and that perhaps the greatest service Egyptology can offer is to furnish points of departure for the ancient history of Africa."

Four early journeys to the southward are recorded on the tomb of a nobleman of Aswan in the Sixth Dynasty (conjectural opening date: 2340 B.C.); three made under the Pharaoh Mernere and a fourth under Pepi II. "These caravans," writes A.J. Arkell in his History of the Sudan "must have left the Nile at Aswan by the Elephantine road, and one route is likely to have been via the oases of Dunqul and Selima, and so by the Derib al Arba'in to Darfur," the forty Days' Road which a hardy traveller may still use from Asyut on the Middle Nile to El Fasher in the far west of the modern Republic of Sudan. "Harkhuf brought back ebony, ivory and frankincense from Yam. All of these could have been obtained in Darfur; and even if the intervening country was as desert as it is now-and it probably was not-it would be possible to travel today by the donkeys-one hundred carrying goods, one hundred good donkeys-one hundred carrying goods, one hundred forage and one hundred water." Breasted placed Harkhuf among "the earliest known explorers of inner Africa," and Harkhuf's bare descriptions may still be read with the excitement that attends a good report of hidden places and legendary peoples.

Having discovered, the Pharaohs conquered. Here one must imagine a process of two thousand years of enterprise and effort, failure and success. Under many Pharaohs, through many years, expeditions pushed stubbornly to the interior. Settlements were made. Commerce became systematic. And after the traders and raiders there came the armies. Castles were raised, some of them as formidable as any the world has seen. Much of the country of the Middle Nile became vassal to the Pharaohs.

It is not until the eight century B.C. that we begin to hear the voice of those whom the Pharaohs had placed in tribute. Then the tide of conquest turns upon itself for a while, and sweeps up from the southward. The early kings of Kush, a state whose capital was at Napata (towards the region that had once been Irthet or Wawat for the great Imperial Pharaohs of an already distant past), seized and held the land of Egypt for nearly a century. Kashta began this northern enterprise. After his death in about 751, piankhi continued it. Taharqa completed it. Kush became a world power and Taharqa, by way of the Old Testament, briefly entered the European idea of history. One startling document survives from the Kushite side, though others may yet appear. In the twenty-first year of his reign (conjecturally 731 B.C.), Piankhi put up a granite stela or tablet of stone at Jebel Barkal, not far from his capital, on which the details of his conquest are inscribed.

Some two hundred years later the rulers of Kush moved their capital southward to Meroe, whose ruins lie about a hundred miles to the north of modern Khartoum. Here they presided over a distinctive civilization which flourished for seven hundred years. The Greeks called it Ethiopian. This has confused later understanding of the matter. The Kushites were entirely different from the ancestors of those called Ethiopians today: "Ethiopian," in the Greek texts, simply meant "black," and Ethiopia "the countries of the black peoples."

Not much detailed is at present known of this Meroitic civilization. To begin with it used Egyptian hieroglyphics, and later a pictographic form of writing that was partly hieroglyphic; but later still-at the zenith of its power in about 200 B.C.- the Meroites invented an alphabet of their own. Archaeologists have so far collected nearly one thousand fragmentary texts in this Meroitic script, but nobody has yet succeeded in understanding many of its words. As the mystery of Cretan Linear B was to Mediterranean history until Ventris read it, so now is Meroitic to the story of the ancient Nile.

Early in the fifth century B.C., a memorable Greek of Asia Minor travelled to Upper Egypt, and heard news of Meroe. One of the sorrows of African historiography that this Greek, who was Herodotus, never managed to go any further. Even so, he had a little to say on the subject, and this is still worth repeating. He was profoundly interested in Egypt-and by extension in Kush-because he shared the then universal Greek belief that their own civilization owed many of its origins to Egyptian civilization, especially in religion and mathematics. He also thought, striking once again a very modern note, that continental Africa's influence on Egypt was both wide and deep. On circumcision, for example, "as between the Egyptians and the Ethiopians [that is, the Kushites], I should not like to say which learned from the other..." As to the skin color of the Egyptians, he recalls the story of a dove connected with the Egyptians oracle at Dodona. This bird was said to have been black. Why black? "As to the bird being black," says Herodotus, "they merely signify by this that the woman was an Egyptian." Explaining why the Colchians "are of Egyptian descent," he suggests that they may have descended from Egyptian soldiers who had served under Sesostris, a Pharaoh whose armies had invaded the Near East. But "my own idea on the subject was based first on the fact that they [the Colchians] have black skins and woolly hair (not that amounts to much, as other nations have the same), and secondly, and more especially, on the fact that the Colchians, the Egyptians, and the Ethiopians [the Kushites] are the only races which from ancient times have practised circumcision." In all this, Herodotus was at one with other ancient Greek historians, of his time and later, who were convinced of the supreme importance of Egyptian civilization.

Meroe and its sister-cities declined in the third century after Christ, and perished in the fourth. A final blow was delivered by their old trading rival, Axum in what is now northern Ethiopia. King Ezana of Axum, then a rising power, invaded Kush in about 325, burned towns of straw and ruined towns of stone. But fortunately left a useful inscription on the subject. Extracts from it will be found below. Though often obscure, this remains a key document.

Lastly in this brief section, the reader will find a description and discussion by a modern writer of another kind of old African document. Rock paintings and engraving are scattered throughout the continent from the far north to the far south, often in abundance and of high artistic value. They bear witness to peoples and cultures that have long since disappeared, but as well to those surviving peoples of the Stone Age who continue, here and there, to pursue their life in remote corners of the land. These pictures also belong, if at second remove, to the records of Africa.

Edition details

• Publisher: Africa World Pr
• Publication date: 1990
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0865431248
• ISBN 13: 9780865431249
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 459