The Xenophile Historian

Chapter 4: AFRICA IN THE CLASSICAL ERA

664 B.C. to 641 A.D.

	Egypt: The Late Period
	The Ptolemaic Era
	The Queen of Kings
	Kush: The Meroitic Phase
	The End of Pharaonic Egypt
	Roman Africa
	North African Christianity
	Axum
	The Vandal Kingdom
	Meanwhile, Below the Sahara
	Africa's Population In Ancient Times
	Ancient African Explorers
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The reason for this success was that Psammetich understood, perhaps better than any pharaoh before him, that the marketplace can be a source of power. He invited Syrians, Jews, Ionian Greeks, and other foreigners to move to Egypt and help him with whatever tasks they excelled at. Phoenicians sailed Egypt's ships; Syrians and Greeks conducted her overseas business; Jews built a thriving colony on Elephantine, an island at the first cataract⁽¹⁾; Greeks made crafts from bronze and iron, and fought as mercenaries. Near Sais, Psammetich's birthplace and capital, a Greek city named Naukratis was founded as a home for these useful immigrants. At the same time Egypt became the Mediterranean basin's leading exporter of grain, causing future emperors (Persians, Greeks, Romans and Arabs) to make the conquest of Egypt their key to ruling the known world.

Another Greek colony was founded at Cyrene in Libya, on a spot with good farmland, something which was always in short supply back in Greece. The initial colonists came from the overcrowded island of Thera, around 630 B.C., and were later joined by colonists from other parts of Greece. The Egyptian pharaoh Amasis (568-525) married the daughter of Cyrene's King Battus III, and for most of the classical era, whoever ruled Egypt held Cyrene as well. Even after the Persians took over, Greek colonists continued coming to Libya, and eventually they founded four more cities: Apollonia, Euesperides (modern Benghazi), Taucheira (Tocra), and Barca. The presence of these five cities explains why scholars sometimes call Cyrenaica by another name, the Libyan Pentapolis. In a similar fashion, the name we use for western Libya, Tripolitania, comes from Tri-polis, a reference to the three Phoenician colonies planted there (Leptis Magna, Oea, and Sabrata). In neither case did the newcomers settle the hinterland or attempt to civilize the scattered nomads who roamed in Libya's third district, the Fezzan. This split between cities and farmers along the coast and indigenous "barbarian" pastoralists in the interior has been a feature of North Africa west of Egypt, right to this day.

Psammetich ruled for 54 years, and was succeeded by an equally ambitious son, Necho II (610-595). Necho shared his father's interest in making Egypt rich--he started digging a canal from the Nile to the Red Sea, and sponsored the first expedition to sail around Africa--but that was all he could do. The next king, Psammetich II (595-589), faced a threat from the Nubians. The current king of Kush, Anlamani, moved an army between the First and Second Cataracts; Psammetich waited until a new king, Aspelta (593-568) succeeded Anlamani, and then sent an expedition up the Nile in 590 that sacked Napata.⁽²⁾ As a result, Aspelta moved his capital to Meroë, beyond the fifth cataract, and there it stayed for the rest of Kush's history. In 560 B.C. Cyprus became a vassal state, yet even during this "Indian summer" Egypt was too weak to effectively challenge the current ruler of the Middle East, the Babylonian Empire.

The Babylonian Empire was eventually absorbed into the even larger Persian Empire, which at its peak held everything between the Balkans, Ethiopia and India. In 525 B.C. Egypt's flickering flame was snuffed out, as the half-mad Persian king Cambyses conquered the Nile valley. He tried to follow this up with a sea expedition to conquer Carthage, but the crew of the Persian navy, being Phoenicians, refused to attack the city of their cousins. When the navy went on strike, he sent the army west without it; a sandstorm engulfed the army in the Libyan desert, and it wasn't seen again until 1983 A.D. Then he tried to conquer Nubia, but this army ran out of supplies before it got there and was forced to turn back. In the end, Persia's only positive accomplishment in Africa was that the next important king, Darius I, completed Necho's canal.

A civil war in the Libyan Pentapolis allowed Darius I to take over Cyrenaica. Those cities had been poorly managed in the mid-sixth century, to the point that when Battus III (ca. 550-530, also called Battus the Lame) came to power in Cyrene, his subjects sent representatives to the greatest advice-giver in Greece, the Oracle at Delphi, to ask how they could get a better government. The Oracle told them to hire a professional administrator, and the one they brought in, Demonax of Mantinea, divided Cyrene's population into three groups for easier management purposes, and gave back to the people some special lands and jobs that the kings had kept for themselves. Upon the death of Battus, however, his son Arcesilaus tried to take back the offices and privileges his ancestors had enjoyed, and the population rose up in revolt, forcing him and his mother Pheretima to flee. Arcesilaus went to the island of Samos, to recruit mercenaries to regain his throne. Pheretima tried to do the same thing on Cyprus, but the Cypriot ruler would give her anything but soldiers; when she insisted, he gave her a golden spindle and distaff with wool on it, saying that these were more appropriate gifts for a woman.

Once Arcesilaus had his army, he went to the Oracle at Delphi to find out if his counter-coup would be successful. He was told by the Oracle to be merciful, and if he doesn't show mercy, he must not go into any city with a view of the sea, or he will die. Instead, he captured and killed some opponents on the journey home, and back in Cyrene, when some more members of the political opposition shut themselves in a tower, he had the tower burned down. Then he realized his mistake, and ran away to Barca, which was an inland city, but too late; he was killed there.

Pheretima was back in Cyrene by this time, and when she heard of her son's death, she fled again, this time to Egypt, to remind the Persian satrap (governor) that Arcesilaus had been a friend of Persia. The satrap was happy to help, but before he committed his forces, he sent a herald to Barca to ask who had murdered Arcesilaus. The people of Barca defiantly answered that they all killed him, for all felt they had been wronged by him. That did it, and the satrap sent all the troops and ships he could spare for the march west. Cyrene surrendered without a fight, and the Persians went on to Barca, besieging it for nine months, until some sneaky diplomacy on the part of the Persians got the city to surrender (514 B.C.). Pheretima had a number of prominent Barcans impaled on stakes, with the breasts of their wives, and let the Persians enslave the rest of the survivors. Then she retired to Egypt, but according to Herodotus, the gods didn't let her rest easy; in one of the most horrible deaths on record, her body bred worms and they literally ate her alive.

Egypt was the Persian Empire's most unruly province, for reasons covered in Chapter 5 of my Near Eastern history. Rebellions occurred frequently; one under a leader named Inaros lasted for six years and engulfed all of Lower Egypt (460-454 B.C.). Finally in 404 B.C., the Persians were driven out completely, and a series of native pharaohs ruled for sixty-two years (dynasties XXVIII-XXX). Then the Persians regained control, only to fall to Alexander the Great. Ancient Egyptian civilization lingered on through the Greek and into the Roman era, but Egypt would be a pawn, under foreign rulers, for the next 2,300 years.

The Ptolemaic Era

Upon Alexander's death in 323 B.C., his generals divided the empire. The African portion of it went to another Macedonian, Ptolemy Lagus Soter. Forty years of war between the generals began when Ptolemy went to Syria, supposedly to pay homage to the corpse of Alexander as it was transported to Macedonia for burial. Actually he planned more than that; his army seized control of the gleaming carriage and coffin and brought them back to Egypt. According to legend, Alexander's body was sealed in a sarcophagus full of honey and buried in Alexandria; his tomb has never been found, though.⁽³⁾ In 301 B.C. Ptolemy's most dangerous opponent, Antigonus I, was killed at the battle of Ipsus, and Ptolemy used the occasion to annex Israel, Lebanon and Cyprus. After that, Ptolemy wisely chose to sit out the rest of the wars, building up Egypt's strength and becoming one of the few leaders during this time who died peacefully. When the fighting ended, around 280 B.C., most of Alexander's Asian empire was in the hands of another general, Seleucus. Both Seleucus and Ptolemy founded dynasties that lasted more than two hundred years, much of which was spent in ineffective battles over the land between them, now that Seleucus was based in Syria.

Egypt was the richest and most stable province of Alexander's empire; its new rulers were hardheaded businessmen who ran it like a corporation. Being Greeks themselves, the Ptolemies brought in more Greeks to help run the land: soldiers to maintain order, land experts to increase agricultural production, and civil servants to staff the administration. To get more revenue from the land, the Ptolemies claimed a large portion of it for themselves, launched a reclamation project to bring more acres under the plow, and dragged the native farmers into the Iron Age (they had only used stone and bronze tools previously). In the end they succeeded in producing greater harvests than the pharaohs ever had. To handle commerce on the Indian Ocean, Ptolemy II (285-246, also called Ptolemy Philadelphus) built Berenice (modern Barnis), a seaport on the Red Sea coast at the same latitude as Aswan. As trade routes to India and Arabia opened up, merchants came to prefer going between those places and the Mediterranean basin via Berenice, since sea travel was more cost-effective than land travel. In fact, during the Middle Ages, when spices from the Far East entered the trade, the Red Sea traffic brought in profits rivaling those of the more famous Silk Road in Central Asia, and this replaced local industries as Egypt's main source of income.

All this activity required tight supervision, so the Ptolemies also set up the most far-reaching bureaucracy that the world had seen so far. In one of the surviving documents from this era, an official declared that "no one has the right to do what he wants to do, but everything is regulated for the best."⁽⁴⁾ Government workers kept enough records to know what most of their subjects were doing, and how wealthy they were, until they got swamped in their own statistics.

In 288 Ptolemy I bribed the Macedonian fleet to join him; that gave him a decided military advantage over his rivals as well. Henceforth, whenever there was trouble with Macedonia, he could send gold-laden diplomats to stir up rebellion in Greece; whenever there was trouble with the Seleucids, he could send his navy to threaten their communications. Consequently, during the third century B.C. the Ptolemaic fleet dominated the eastern Mediterranean and occupied the Cyclades islands in the Aegean; most of the cities of Ionia and Cilicia (in Asia Minor) also fell under Egyptian rule. In the century following Alexander, three wars (274-271, 260-255, and 246-241 B.C., called the Syrian Wars) were fought between the Ptolemies and the Seleucids, and the Ptolemies usually came out best.⁽⁵⁾

Though their main interest was economics, the Ptolemies, being good Greeks, felt they had to sponsor activities for the mind. They enlarged the city until it held about 500,000 people, making it the action center of the Hellenistic (Greek-speaking) world. Ptolemy II built the Pharos, the world's largest lighthouse, and the famous Alexandria Library. As was hoped, the world's leading scholars, scientists, poets and artists gathered here. It was in Alexandria that Euclid wrote his Elements, that Eratosthenes measured the size of the earth, and that Herophilus began the study of anatomy. It was also in Alexandria that the Old Testament was translated from Hebrew to Greek; we call this text the Septuagint ("seventy") because tradition states that 72 Jewish scribes completed it in 72 days.

A room in the Alexandria Library.

Alexandria grew rapidly because the Ptolemies concentrated most of their creative energy within its city limits. Except for Berenice and Ptolemais (modern El-Manshah), an administrative center for managing Upper Egypt, they built no other Greek cities. Some native Egyptians managed to gain high posts, but most were treated as second-class citizens. The fellahin (peasants) had to work harder than their ancestors did, and the dynasty taxed them as meticulously as possible. By 217 B.C. a series of peasant strikes forced the Ptolemies to make concessions, but the passive cooperation of the fellahin in most cases was the regime's greatest asset. The policy of the Ptolemies toward their non-Greek subjects was the opposite of that followed by the Seleucids; instead of trying to make them become Greeks, the dynasty practiced a form of apartheid, to keep the Egyptians away from the influence of Greek ideas like freedom. Greeks often spoke of traveling from "Alexandria to Egypt"; the Egyptians insisted on calling Alexandria Rakote, the name of the fishing village that occupied the site before Alexander came along. While Alexandria's university and library became the ultimate symbol of Greek learning, in most of the country the only buildings raised were Egyptian-style temples. A new god named Serapis appeared, who combined the attributes of Zeus and Amen, but otherwise the Egyptians were allowed to worship the gods of a simpler past.

"'What a mob!' [the Greek poet Theocritus has a Greek woman in Alexandria say to her friend], 'They're like ants, no one can count them. Ptolemy, you've done many good things . . . No more hoods creep up on you nowadays and do you in--an old Egyptian habit. The tricks those scoundrels used to play! They're all alike--dirty, lazy, good-for-nothings!'"⁽⁶⁾

The Ptolemaic bureaucratic system only worked while better than average men, possessed with exceptional drive, occupied the throne. That ended with the death of Ptolemy III Euergetes (246-222). The story of the Ptolemies after this was one of constant bickerings and murders among the ruling family. Inbreeding may be one of the reasons for this--they took up the old pharaonic custom of marrying relatives--but it didn't affect the sexes the same way; while the women seemed to get smarter with each generation, the men grew repulsive and stupid. Since all of the men had the same name, we often use their nicknames to tell them apart, like Philadelphus and Euergetes.

When the crown passed to Ptolemy IV Philopator (222-204 B.C.), he faced a young Seleucid king, Antiochus III. Things must have looked bad for Antiochus at first; he controlled little besides Syria, because his governors in Asia Minor, Media and Persia were in revolt. Even more humiliating, his second largest city, Seleucia on the Tigris River, was in the hands of the governor of Media, while his main Syrian port, also named Seleucia, had been held by the Ptolemies since the last war. Nevertheless, he was the most energetic warrior of the Seleucid dynasty, and because Egypt was dealing with serious peasant unrest, he saw opportunities to the south. First he put down the rebellions in Iran and Iraq; then in 219 B.C. he launched the Fourth Syrian War. Antiochus quickly recaptured the western Seleucia, and though Ptolemy IV defeated him in the most important battle (217, at Raphia), the peace treaty that followed let Antiochus keep Seleucia.⁽⁷⁾

Antiochus meddled in Egyptian affairs again in 200, when he allied himself with Macedonia's Philip V against Ptolemy V Epiphanes (204-181). Meanwhile, Egypt was in revolt; two Egyptians, Harwennefer and Ankhwennefer, ruled all of Upper Egypt from 207 to 187, with some help from the Nubians. Because of this trouble in Ptolemy's backyard, the Fifth Syrian War was a total victory for the Seleucids. The battle of Panias (198) turned the Holy Land into a province of the northern kingdom. The next year saw Antiochus march along Asia minor's south coast, receiving the surrender of all the towns that had previously been under Egyptian rule. Thus he proved that the Seleucid policy of Greek immigration was better than the Ptolemaic policy of separation.⁽⁸⁾ The Ptolemies ran out of Greek manpower before the Seleucids did; except at Raphia, the Egyptians recruited to fill out the army were no match for Antiochus' Greeks.

As part of the treaty ending the Fifth Syrian War, Antiochus gave his daughter, Cleopatra I, in marriage to Ptolemy. She was the first of several queens by that name who would play a major role in politics, culminating with the Cleopatra you've all heard of. Also worth noting is that Ptolemy V was the first king of the dynasty to have himself crowned pharaoh in Memphis. Eventually he put down the rebellion in Upper Egypt, and savage repression followed. His death by poison left a six-year-old on the throne, and Cleopatra "the Syrian" ruled as regent for Ptolemy VI Philometor (181-145).

By this time the Greek kingdoms were all in decline, and one by one they were swallowed up by the great new power of the Mediterranean--Rome. Egypt was the last to go, holding out until 30 B.C., because it submitted to Rome, rather than fight the western republic. In fact, Ptolemy VI probably would have been the last king if Egypt had not become a Roman protectorate. In 170 his ministers made a move to recover the lost Asian territories. Retaliation was quick; Antiochus IV invaded Egypt and had himself crowned king of the Nile valley at Memphis, but troubles at home forced him to leave before he finished the job. In 168 he returned, captured Ptolemy VI, and was about to take Alexandria when a Roman ambassador, Popillius Laenas, ordered him to stop. Just the threat was enough; the Romans had beaten the Seleucids and Macedonians in previous wars, so Antiochus gave Egypt back.

After this the Ptolemies were under Roman domination, and whenever a new one got the throne he would seek Rome's approval. While Ptolemy VI was a prisoner Alexandria crowned his brother, Ptolemy Physcon ("Potbelly"). Afterwards Physcon refused to step down quietly, causing a long feud between the brothers. In 164 B.C. Ptolemy VI moved to Rome; as he expected, Physcon's sole rule became intolerable and soon the people of Alexandria begged him to come back. The Roman Senate resolved this by putting Philometor on the throne and giving Cyrenaica to Physcon. When Ptolemy VI died, Physcon returned to Egypt, killed his nephew (Ptolemy VII), and became King Ptolemy VIII. Then the family tree really got tangled; Cleopatra II (the daughter of Cleo I) and Cleopatra III (the sister of Cleo I) both married Potbelly and agreed to rule as joint queens. Meanwhile the country's social and economic problems got worse. Rounds of inflation caused everyone to suffer, and now that Egyptian workers realized that they couldn't get better treatment through strikes and revolts, many of them ran away, making it harder for farms to produce a harvest. Ptolemy VIII responded with a decree in 118 that ordered amnesties, lighter burdens, tax exemptions, and called for officials to act with moderation. Unfortunately it did not stop the state's collapse, but only postponed it. Moreover, the Romans did nothing to help; their protection of Egypt did not mean they would let it get strong enough to become a future enemy.

Contemporary sources describe Physcon as a cruel, self-indulgent monster, hence the nickname. Three sons outlasted him: Ptolemy Apion, Ptolemy IX Soter Lathyrus ("Chickpea"), and Ptolemy X Alexander. Upon Ptolemy VIII's death in 116 B.C., he bequeathed Cyrenaica to Ptolemy Apion, and Egypt to Cleopatra III and whichever of her sons she liked best. She preferred Alexander, but the Alexandrians wanted Chickpea, so Ptolemy IX took the throne, while Alexander became governor of Cyprus. The two didn't get along well at all. First Cleopatra annulled the marriage between Ptolemy IX and his sister, Cleopatra IV; the younger Cleopatra went to Cyprus and raised an army, hoping to marry Alexander. When this failed, she defected to Syria and married the current Seleucid king, Antiochus IX, with her army as a dowry. Back in Alexandria, Cleopatra III accused Chickpea of trying to murder her and ran him out of town (107 B.C.). Ptolemy X moved in to take his place. As for Ptolemy Apion, he was childless, so he followed the example of the last king of Pergamun, bequeathing Cyrenaica to Rome (96 B.C.).

By crowning and marrying her other son, Ptolemy X, Cleopatra III went from bad to worse. Whereas some of the previous Ptolemies had been fat, this one could barely walk. Before long Cleopatra got tired of him as well, but he outsmarted her and had her assassinated (101 B.C.). Some time after that he sold the gold coffin of Alexander the Great to raise money, and the people forced him to flee Egypt. He then produced a will that left his entire kingdom to Rome; the Roman Senate ignored it (they probably thought it was a forgery), but it prompted some moneylenders in Rome to finance a fleet for him. With this fleet Ptolemy X returned in 88 B.C., and was killed in a battle off Cyprus. Meanwhile, Chickpea returned to resume his reign in Egypt, ruling until his death in 80 B.C.

Cleopatra Berenice, the middle-aged daughter of Ptolemy IX, briefly ruled until word arrived that the Romans wanted Ptolemy XI Alexander II, the son of Ptolemy X, on the throne. She was very popular, and did not want to give up power after sharing it with the two previous kings, so she married the boy-king. It was a fatal mistake; just nineteen days later Ptolemy XI killed her, and the mob of Alexandria tore him to pieces. Next the crown passed to an illegitimate son of Ptolemy IX, Ptolemy XII Auletes ("Oboe Player"). A dissolute character and puppet of the Roman dictator Sulla, Auletes' main claim to fame is that he was the father of the Cleopatra, Cleopatra VII.

In 65 B.C. the issue of Ptolemy X's will came up again, when the richest man in Rome, Marcus Licinius Crassus, called for Egypt's annexation (probably for his own gain). Then when Crassus got together with Pompey and Julius Caesar to form the First Triumvirate, Auletes gave a heavy bribe to Caesar, hoping that would make his throne secure. Caesar responded by giving him the title of "friend and ally" of Rome, but this did not endear him to his own people. One year later the Romans annexed Cyprus (58 B.C.), and Auletes did nothing to stop it, though his brother was governor of that island. The Alexandrians threw him out; his wife Cleopatra VI Tryphaena and his eldest daughter Berenice IV ruled in his place. Cleopatra died a year later, and Auletes used another bribe, to get Roman support for his return. In 55 he came back with a large military unit, led by Aulus Gabinius (the governor of Syria) and Mark Antony, and had Berenice put to death. Now with a Roman legion backing him up, Auletes held the throne until his death in 51 B.C..

The Queen of Kings

Fourth, I don't believe that she ever dissolved a pearl the size of an olive in vinegar, and drank it in front of Mark Antony to show how much money she could waste. Pearls do not dissolve in vinegar, but the ancients seemed to think it was a powerful corrosive agent; Livy claimed that Hannibal used vinegar to split a path through the Alps for his elephants.

Anyway, Ptolemy XII left four children to succeed him: Cleopatra VII⁽⁹⁾, a daughter named Arsinoe, and two more Ptolemies. Cleopatra was immediately married off to Ptolemy XIII Philopator Philadelphus; she was eighteen years old, he was ten. True to family tradition, instead of settling down they tried to kill each other. Ptolemy won the first round, forcing Cleopatra to flee to Syria. She got her chance to return, though, when the Roman civil war between Caesar and Pompey spilled into Egypt. Pompey fled there in 48 B.C., after Caesar defeated his army in Greece; anxious to be on the side of the winner, Ptolemy had Pompey murdered. Caesar arrived not long after that, and Cleopatra got an audience with him by having herself rolled up in a carpet and carried to him by a rug merchant. One year later Ptolemy XIII died, possibly on her orders, and though she was forced by custom to marry her youngest brother, eleven-year-old Ptolemy XIV Philopator II, she also became Caesar's mistress, and soon had a son by him, Ptolemy XV Caesarion. Before Caesarion arrived, Caesar had to leave to deal with revolts from allies of Pompey. When peace finally came, Cleopatra and Caesarion moved to Rome so they could share Caesar's triumphs. With them went coiners to show the Romans how to make Greek-style coins, and astronomers to help Caesar design a more accurate calendar. However, their pleasant stay only lasted twenty months, before Caesar was assassinated (44 B.C.).

If there was any talk about little Caesarion inheriting both the Roman and Egyptian empires, it ended abruptly now. Cleopatra returned to Egypt, poisoned Ptolemy XIV and made Caesarion her co-regent. A new power struggle broke out in Rome, and Cleopatra watched on the sidelines at first, until Mark Antony, the new ruler of the east, summoned her to explain her conduct. She went to meet him at Tarsus with a splendid fleet, decorated with gold, jewels, slaves and horses. This was meant to convince Antony that Egypt was a wealthy and useful ally. However, he also fell in love with her, followed her back to Alexandria, and obligingly put her rival sister Arsinoe to death. After living with Cleopatra for some time, Antony was compelled by politics to return to Rome, where he married Octavia, a sister of Caesar's heir Octavian. While Antony was away, Cleopatra bore him twins, Alexander Helios and Cleopatra Selene.

Antony came back to the east in 36 B.C., nearly four years after he left. This time he was leading an expedition against the Parthians, the semi-civilized rulers of Iran and Iraq who had invaded Syria and Israel a few years earlier. Cleopatra came to meet him at Antioch, and extracted from him an agreement to return to Egypt all the Roman provinces that Egypt had ruled in the past. Then they got married, and a third child was born, Ptolemy Philadelphus. The war with the Parthians was a disaster, though, and Cleopatra's forces had to rescue those Roman soldiers who were lucky enough to make it back to the Syrian coast. After that, Antony started drinking heavily, and Cleopatra had to talk him out of going back to the Parthians for a rematch--Octavian was the more dangerous enemy now.

Around this time, Antony announced a major reorganization of the east, handing over most of it to Cleopatra and her children. According to his proposal, Cleopatra and Caesarion would become the joint rulers of both Egypt and Cyprus; Alexander Helios would have Armenia, Media and Parthia (territories Antony did not rule, mind you); Cleopatra Selene would get all of Libya; Ptolemy Philadelphus would receive Syria and Cilicia. This arrangement would have transformed Egypt from a desperately weak kingdom into an empire more powerful than it had been during the peak years of the Ptolemies.

However, it never went into effect. In 32 B.C. Antony divorced Octavia, and Octavian declared war. The fleets of both sides met at Actium, near Greece. Today we have a lot of unanswered questions about this crucial battle: why Antony chose to use his navy, when he had a larger army than Octavian; why Cleopatra and her sixty ships returned to Egypt before the battle was decided, thereby making sure Octavian would win; or why Antony sailed away with Cleopatra, leaving his legions behind. Octavian followed, and captured them in Alexandria; Antony fell on his sword to avoid a humiliating execution. According to romantic legend, he died in Cleopatra's arms, and shortly after that she committed suicide with an asp (Egyptian cobra) smuggled in a basket of figs (30 B.C.). Egypt now fell to Octavian, soon to be renamed Augustus, and he treated the Nile valley as his conquered estate, forbidding even senators to visit there without his permission.

What became of Cleopatra's children? Octavia raised the children of Antony and Cleopatra as her own, while Augustus executed Caesarion. Alexander Helios and the last Ptolemy didn't amount to much, and in 17 B.C. they mysteriously disappeared. This happened about the time that Israel's King Herod, an old enemy of the Ptolemies, visited Rome, and Cleopatra Selene wrote letters to her friends accusing Herod of ordering the deaths of her brothers; because of Herod's bloody record at home, there is little doubt that he would have tried to commit such an act. Cleopatra Selene was the luckiest; we'll hear more from her in the section on Roman Africa.

Kush: The Meroitic Phase

The pyramids of Meroë.

Security may have been the reason why the capital was moved from Napata to Meroë, but economics helped make sure the capital stayed there. Unlike Napata, Meroë was rich in iron deposits and timber; archaeologists found so many slag heaps there that one of them, A. H. Sayce, called Meroë "the Birmingham of ancient Africa." In addition, overgrazing was beginning to affect the Dongola Reach, so the fields around the sixth cataract were becoming a better place to grow crops and herd cattle. However, the new capital was off the beaten path for foreigners, so very few visitors from other civilizations got to see it. Herodotus, for example, never came any closer than Aswan, though he had more to say about the land he called "Ethiopia" than anyone else did for the next two thousand years. To him Kush was the most marvelous country on earth, a land where people lived to be as old as 120, where the tallest man became king, where the poor were fed daily in a field called the "Table of the Sun," and where the dead were covered with plaster, painted to look like they did in life, and encased in tubes of hollowed-out crystal. Of course most of this was merely hearsay, but while the "Ethiopians" themselves were a fairly common sight in the Greco-Roman world, they don't seem to have done anything to dispel the myths about their homeland. Elsewhere they also traveled widely; they traded with Arabia and India, and evidence of their presence has been found as far away as the borders of Uganda to the south, and Lake Chad to the west.⁽¹⁰⁾

Despite the government's relocation, Napata continued to serve as the main religious center. Up until Nastasen, all Kushite kings were buried in pyramids at Napata's cemetery. Nearby, Gebel Barkal was regarded as the birthplace of the god Amen, possibly because a 320-foot-high butte, jutting out from the main mountain at the site, resembled a cobra wearing a crown (the cobra was a royal symbol in Egypt, remember). Whenever the time came to choose a new king, all eligible candidates were taken to a temple at the foot of the butte and displayed before an image of the god. Somehow, the statue spoke to express the god's choice and the chosen one was crowned on the spot, but according to Diodorus Siculus, a Roman historian, the statue could also order the death of the king, who was expected to commit suicide when he received the command. Eventually the clergy of Amen became too overbearing, because Diodorus tells us that Ergamenes (270-260 B.C.) ordered the priests put to the sword and "thereafter ordered affairs after his own will."

Around this time, perhaps because of the clean sweep done by Ergamenes, another god became nearly as important as Amen. This was Apedemak, a composite figure with the head of a lion, the torso of a man, and the tail of a serpent. However, Apedemak's temples were much smaller, with a only a single chamber inside an imposing pylon gate. Like other Africans, the Nubians gave animals an important role in their religion, since they played such an important role in everyday life. The temple at Musawwarat es-Sufra, located south of Meroë, was apparently in the middle of cattle country, since its walls were covered with relief sculptures showing cattle, and an enormous walled structure at the site, one of the largest Kushite buildings found to date, may have been a corral for the training and breeding of elephants.⁽¹¹⁾

Another unique feature of the Kushite kingdom was the strength of its queens; often they governed in their own right, and could act as militant as any male leader. The queen's official title was kandake; foreign authors incorrectly thought that was the queen's name, and thus called her "Candace."⁽¹²⁾ Two of them, Amanishakheto and Amanitore, had reliefs portraying them in the same heroic pose that the pharaohs once used, grasping a bunch of enemies by the hair with one muscular hand, and raising a weapon with the other. They also had ritual scars on their faces, still a common practice in some parts of present-day Africa; these weren't the delicate beauties that one sees so often in Egyptian art!

One kandake, Amanirenas, was bold enough to challenge the Roman Empire for control of Egypt. The Greek geographer at the time, Strabo, described her as "a very masculine sort of woman, and blind in one eye." In 25 B.C., five years after the Romans conquered Egypt, Aelius Gallus, the prefect of Egypt, launched an attack on Arabia Felix, the wealthy part of the Arabian peninsula we now call Yemen. It failed, because a country that hard to reach can't be taken with poor planning. Amanirenas saw the Roman distraction as an opportunity, and in the following year she sent an army north, occupied Lower Nubia and Aswan, and pillaged Philae, the southernmost Egyptian temple, because it contained statues of the Roman emperor, Caesar Augustus. However, the Romans were experienced in dealing with such intruders, and the next prefect, Caius Petronius, sent a punitive expedition up the Nile to Napata and sacked it. Soon after, Rome and Kush signed a permanent peace treaty that put the new border in Lower Nubia, and the Romans patrolled it with a 400-man garrison based at the aforementioned Qasr Ibrim.

Rome and Kush got along well after that, and both sides earned a profit from the trade that passed between them. Luxuries from the Roman Empire, such as metalwork, ceramics, glass and jewelry, were often buried with wealthy Nubians in the first and second century A.D. After 200 A.D., however, the imports stopped, and the tombs grew smaller and less sturdy, telling us that the people had become impoverished. Likewise, the kingdom as a whole suffered a definite decline; no more great temples or monuments were built. The main reason for this was nomad incursions. Two warrior tribes had taken Lower Nubia for themselves, the Nobades on the west bank and the Blemmyes⁽¹³⁾ on the east bank, and their raids on Egypt and Kush persuaded merchants to steer clear of Nubia if their goods were destined for a market somewhere else. During the reign of the Roman emperor Probus (276-282), the Blemmyes even supported an anti-Roman rebellion in the Upper Egyptian cities of Ptolemais and Coptos. Another revolt, under Domitius Domitianus and his lieutenant, Aurelius Achilleus, engulfed Egypt for much of 295 and 296. This persuaded the emperor at this time, Diocletian, that he would have to get out of Nubia to hold onto Egypt, so in 298 he abandoned Qasr Ibrim, pulling its troops back to Aswan. Then he invited the Nobades to settle the rest of Lower Nubia on condition that they keep the Blemmyes out, and paid a subsidy to the Blemmyes. When Rome and Ethiopia (in this case the real Ethiopia, not Nubia) converted to Christianity, the Nobades and Blemmyes responded by embracing the ancient Egyptian religion more strongly, so the Romans kept the peace on this frontier by letting the tribesmen make pilgrimages to Philae.

The last royal tomb built at Meroë dates to 320 A.D., though the kingdom itself lasted a few years longer, to 355. The end apparently came when Ezana, the king of Axum, got involved, attacking the nomads because they were giving his merchants and agents too much trouble. We don't know, however, who finished off Meroë. By 375 the Nobades had established a kingdom of their own, called Nobatia, with its two main communities, Ballana and Qustul, facing one another across the Nile near the second cataract. Archaeologists excavating these sites noted some similarities to the pre-Kushite cultures of Nubia, and call this culture the X-Group. In the fifth century, two more kingdoms were set up where Kush used to be, Makuria in the Dongola Reach, and Alodia in the neighborhood of Meroë. Both of them were apparently populated by a combination of ex-nomads and descendants of Kushites.

A map of Nubia, from the TourEgypt site. Meroë is not shown, being just off the bottom edge of the map.

The End of Pharaonic Egypt

One of these new religions wasn't really new if you were an Egyptian. The age-old myth of Osiris, Isis and Horus was introduced to the rest of the Roman Empire, and its emphasis on love, faithfulness, and victory over death appealed everywhere. Temples and devotees to this Egyptian trinity sprang up all over the Empire, from the Middle East to Britain.

Despite its success, the "Isis cult" collapsed in the fourth century, for in neighboring Israel there was a new creed with a more powerful message: Christianity. Since Egypt was next to the Holy Land, the first Christians could not fail to notice it, and many of their early missionaries, especially the Apostle Matthew, concentrated their activities there, since Egypt had lots of spiritually hungry people. By the end of the first century Cyrene had a church, too, though we don't know whether Simon of Cyrene (the man who helped carry the cross of Jesus), one of the Apostles, or somebody else was responsible for this congregation. Gradually a group of Christian thinkers arose in Alexandria, and through them the ancient and exhausted land helped to develop Christian theology. Three of them--Origen, Athanasius and Cyril of Alexandria--are now considered important early Church fathers. In the third and fourth centuries monasticism got started in Egypt, and the monk's custom of shaving the head is a carryover from the practices of ancient Egyptian priests; to the Egyptians being bald just seemed natural for clergymen.

Because it was a Greek city, Alexandria also produced stormy intellectual controversies. The most serious of these, the Arian heresy, denied the divinity of Jesus, divided Christians for three hundred years and caused considerable violence. Arius, the clergyman who started it all, came from Alexandria, but so did Athanasius, the bishop who defended the doctrine of the Trinity; after all, in the past the Egyptians had viewed God and their king as the same person, so why should they feel differently about Jesus? After it was settled another one arose, this time over the personality of Jesus (Monophysitism). Again the Egyptians took the uncompromising view, insisting that Jesus was 100 percent divine. This prompted Egyptian monks--many of them wild-eyed and illiterate--to come out of the desert and argue the issues in the towns with fists and clubs. It also alienated Egypt from the rest of the Empire when the emperor, now based in Constantinople, accepted an opposing viewpoint, and regarded those who disagreed with him as disloyal. The nastiest episode in the whole controversy took place in 415 when a mob of Christian fanatics went after a pagan philosopher named Hypatia, who was famous for her beauty and her skill in mathematics, and tore her limb from limb.

Sometimes the early Christians chose to recycle pre-Christian places of worship, rather than build new ones. At El Sibu in Lower Nubia, for example, they converted a temple built by Ramses II into a church. As part of the remodeling job, they removed an idol from its niche in the wall, and painted a picture of St. Peter in the empty space, but they left the paintings of Ramses holding bouquets on each side of the niche, so now it looked like the mighty pharaoh was offering flowers to the Apostle! The last holy place for the old-time paganism, the temple of Isis at Philae, was closed by order of Emperor Justinian in 535.⁽¹⁵⁾

Egypt's involvement with Christianity ended in 641, when it was conquered in the first wave of invasions out of Arabia by the successors of Mohammed. Arabic became the official language, and the original Egyptian, now written with Greek letters, was relegated to liturgies in the Coptic Church. The Nile grain and Nubian gold that once went to Rome and Constantinople now went to support the cause of Islam. The Arabs ruled Egypt for most of the next six centuries, during which they completely transformed the land into part of the Arab world. They were succeeded in turn by non-Arab rulers converted to Islam; the Kurdish family of the famous Saladin, the slave dynasty of the Mamelukes, the Ottoman Turks, and finally Mohammed Ali, a soldier of fortune from the Balkans who founded a dynasty that lasted until 1952. In the nineteenth century Egypt went broke and went to one of its creditors--Great Britain--by default. Not until Gamal Abdel Nasser took over, in the mid-twentieth century, did the Egyptians regain their long-lost independence under a native.

Roman Africa

In 118 B.C. the king of Numidia died, and he willed that the kingdom be inherited by both of his sons. A nephew of the late king, Jugurtha, had one of the princes assassinated, and when the other, Adherbal, fled to Rome and came back with an army to enforce his claim, Jugurtha killed him too, after defeating his Roman benefactors. This marked the beginning of the Jugurthine War, and it dragged on for six years (112-106) because Roman leadership was incompetent for most of it, and because Jugurtha used guerrilla warfare, wasting the villages and forts under Roman control; this was the type of warfare the Romans least understood. Finally, an able commander, Gaius Marius, took charge of the Roman army; Jugurtha's father-in-law, the king of Mauretania, treacherously handed over the Numidian to the Romans, and Marius went home in triumph with Jugurtha as his prisoner. A son of Adherbal now became king and returned Numidia to its protectorate status.

We already saw that Rome got its second African territory, Cyrenaica, when the Egyptian prince Ptolemy Apion bequeathed it in 96 B.C. This brought the land between Tunisia and Cyrenaica, Tripolitania, into the Roman sphere of influence, but because the Romans were slow to act, it went to Numidia first. The Romans got it in 46 B.C., when Numidia's King Juba I backed the wrong side in the civil war between Julius Caesar and Pompey. Juba had teamed up with Quintus Metellus Scipio Marcus Portius Cato, one of Pompey's generals, presumably because people had come to believe that a Scipio could not be beaten in Africa (e.g., the battle of Zama in 202 B.C. and the siege of Carthage in 146). Caesar defeated him anyway, and annexed half of Numidia, adding it to the province of Africa. The king's son, six-year-old Juba II, was taken to Rome to be displayed in Caesar's triumph, but fortunately was spared; the Romans would find a use for him before long. As he grew up, Juba became a close friend of Octavian/Augustus, and went with him on his military campaigns. Shortly before his assassination in 44 B.C., Caesar ordered Carthage rebuilt, as part of his program to resettle Rome's surplus population outside of Italy.

Caesar left Mauretania alone because its king, Baccus II, supported him, and when Baccus died in 33 B.C. he willed his kingdom to Rome. However, the Romans weren't ready to take on a territory that large, so when Augustus was finished with the task of annexing Egypt, he gave Mauretania to Cleopatra VII's daughter, Cleopatra Selene. Then in 25 B.C. Juba II inherited the throne of Numidia. Five years later he married Cleopatra Selene, thereby uniting Numidia and Mauretania. However, Juba was also a Roman citizen, so the Numidians rioted, feeling that their king was no longer one of them. Juba and Cleopatra abandoned the rest of Numidia to the Romans, who subsequently annexed it, and built a new capital for themselves on the site of the Carthaginian city of Iol, calling it Caesarea (modern Cherchel in Algeria). From there they jointly ruled Mauretania and lived together happily until Cleopatra Selene's death in 9 A.D., a remarkably quiet end for a dynasty whose motto seems to have been, "When in doubt, snuff them out."

In 17 A.D., Tacfarinas, a Numidian who had served in the Roman army, launched a revolt that seriously threatened Roman rule in Africa because of its location, in southern Tunisia. To his cause he won over a Berber tribe called the Mauri, from which we get both the names of Mauretania and the Moors. Against this the Romans only had one legion on the scene, and though it won the first set battle, Tacfarinas prolonged the rebellion by resorting to guerrilla warfare, as Jugurtha had done. Finally the Romans brought in a second legion from Spain, and after some more defeats, Tacfarinas committed suicide in 24.

Juba and Cleopatra had a son named Ptolemy, and he succeeded Juba in 24 A.D. Sixteen years later the Roman emperor Caligula invited Ptolemy to visit Rome, but on the journey he was treacherously seized and executed, and the annexation of his kingdom announced. The people of Mauretania reacted predictably, and it took two years of fighting (40-42) before the new province could be declared pacified. That completed the Roman conquest of North Africa, and behind the legions now came the civilizing agents that would tie the North African provinces to the rest of the empire. Some new cities were built, like Timgad in Algeria and Volubilis in Morocco, while existing ones were revamped to include all the elements of Roman life (aqueducts, streets in a grid pattern, forums, basilicas, temples, bathouses, and amphitheaters). In addition, the famous Roman roads went between the cities, ships transported raw materials and manufactured goods across the Mediterranean, and the Latin language and Roman system of currency were introduced. Under this onslaught, the indigenous cultures all but disappeared, and the typical Roman could travel to any city in the provinces with the confidence that his destination would look like, as one Roman wrote, "a small image and copy of Rome."

Augustus set the European and Asian frontiers of the Roman Empire on three rivers--the Rhine, Danube and Euphrates--and few of his successors ventured beyond them. It was a similar story in Africa, where the Sahara Desert became the empire's southern frontier, and for that matter, the southern frontier of the classical world, since the only way to get through the desert at this stage was by following the Nile valley. Augustus did send a military expedition to the Fezzan oases, but like the expedition that he sent to Nubia, it didn't find anything that was worth the trouble to keep, so he left the desert to local tribes like the Mauri and the Garamantes.

The empire's Saharan frontier proved to be the most stable; in fact, it didn't change much until the Vandals arrived in the fifth century A.D. It also was the easiest to defend, requiring about a tenth of the Roman army. Augustus stationed three legions in Africa, basing them in Egypt, Cyrenaica and the Maghreb. One hundred years later, when Emperor Trajan conquered the nearest part of Arabia, he transferred the Cyrenaican legion there, to guard the more dangerous Asian frontier, leaving only two for Africa. Nevertheless, Africa was critical to the Empire, because Egypt provided, as we noted earlier, the largest and most reliable harvest in the known world. Egyptian farms were given the task of keeping the city of Rome fed, and if the grain ships were delayed or kept from sailing for any reason, the farms of the Maghreb, which produced half as many bushels, had the job of filling up the granaries.

The system carefully worked out by Augustus, called the Principate and the Pax Roman, ran smoothly for him and his immediate successors, but started coming undone in the last years of the second century A.D. In 193 Septimius Severus, a native of Leptis Magna in Tripolitania, became emperor, founding a dynasty that would last until 235. Because he was an ethnic Carthaginian, you could say that the ruled now became the rulers.⁽¹⁶⁾

Africa played a part in the Roman drama again just a couple of years after the end of the Severan dynasty, when Maximinus, the first of the "Soldier Emperors," put a seventy-eight-year-old official, Gordian I, in charge of the province of Africa, giving him the job of collecting an oppressive new tax. The previous governor had been lynched by the local nobility when they refused to pay the tax, and soon they persuaded Gordian that if he knew what was good for him, he would try to become emperor instead of collecting the money. However, Gordian was too old to lead the rebellion himself, so his son (Gordian II) took charge of the troops. To most Romans, Gordian I looked like a more acceptable candidate for the throne, because he was a respectable aristocrat, while Maximinus was a Thracian soldier of obscure birth with no government experience, so most of the provinces switched their allegiance from Maximinus to Gordian, with the exceptions of Pannonia, Dacia, Spain, and most importantly, Numidia. Numidia's governor controlled the closest legion to Carthage, and the hastily recruited Carthaginian militia of the Gordians was no match for it; Gordian II was killed in the resulting battle, and Gordian I hanged himself around the same time. Together they had reigned for only twenty-two days (238).

Meanwhile in Italy, soldiers killed Maximinus and the two senators who tried to succeed him. Thus, 238 became the year in which five emperors died violently. There was one other candidate for the throne living in Rome--a nephew of Gordian II and the grandson of Gordian I--so both the soldiers and the Senate proclaimed him emperor. However, this Gordian (III) was only thirteen years old, meaning that he could not rule with adult supervision, so although his six-year reign was longer than most in the mid-third century, he didn't do it alone. One of his first acts was to disband the North African legion, since it could no longer be trusted; henceforth the emperors would rely on diplomacy and treaties to keep the Berber tribes peaceful. In 243 Gordian III and his best advisor, Gaius Furius Sabinus Aquila Timestheus, went east to deal with an invasion from Shapur I, the vigorous new king of Persia. They won the war, but Timestheus died on the front, and a year later Gordian also died. Shapur claimed that he had killed Gordian in battle, but he gained nothing beyond the city of Hatra, so we now believe that both Timestheus and Gordian were done in by the Roman general on the spot, Marcus Julius Philippus, better known to us as Philip the Arab, so that he could become the next emperor.

More emperors rose and fell, barbarian attacks grew stronger and more frequent, and the Empire nearly collapsed. The low point came in the 260s, when Gaul and Britain were under a rebel leader named Posthumous, and the eastern provinces were under another, the Arab Queen Zenobia. Most of the African provinces remained loyal to the emperor in Rome (except Egypt, which briefly fell to Zenobia), but they were nearly defenseless; in 257 a raiding party of Vandals came across the Straits of Gibraltar, while Mauri raids from the desert became a serious problem. Finally order returned when Diocletian seized power in 284. A year later Roman soldiers and administrators abandoned Volubilis; it remained a Roman town for at least another century, but henceforth the only part of Mauretania/Morocco that the Romans tried to defend was the Mediterranean coast.

Diocletian also divided the Roman Empire in two. At this point it was for administrative purposes; though the Empire was divided more often than not after this, Romans still saw themselves as citizens of one state. The Eastern Roman Empire got Egypt and Cyrenaica, while the Western Roman Empire got Tripolitania and the Maghreb. The Egyptian breadbasket made the East richer than the West, guaranteeing that when the barbarians attacked the Empire after that, the West would go down and the East would weather the storm.

Late in the fourth century, North Africa was destabilized for a generation by a strange conflict involving a group of brothers, sometimes called the Gildonic War. Their father was Nubel, a Mauri prince who happened to be both a Roman military officer and a Christian. When Nubel died in 371 or 372, one of the sons, Zammac, inherited Nubel's estate, and his half brother Firmus killed him. Firmus had a better claim to the property because Zammac was illegitimate, but Zammac was also preferred by Romanus, the comes Africae (field commander of Africa). What's more, Romanus had a reputation for being corrupt; he had refused to defend Tripolitania against raids from the desert because its cities, especially Leptis Magna, didn't send him enough "protection money." When the Tripolitanians complained to the current emperor, Valentinian I, Romanus used his connections to transfer the blame, resulting in the execution of many prominent Africans.

Firmus raised the banner of revolt, and Valentinian sent his magister militium Theodosius the Elder (the father of the future emperor Theodosius I) to investigate. Upon arrival in Africa, he arrested Romanus. That ended the reason for the revolt, and Firmus offered peace to the newcomer three times, going so far as to send Christian priests as his envoys. But Firmus had already been proclaimed emperor by the troops under him, and had begun wearing a purple cloak and a neck chain as symbols of his new status (the chain acted as a substitute for a crown), so Theodosius saw him as a traitor, and refused to negotiate. By sending his brothers Mascezel and Dius and his sister Cyria to the tribes of Mauretania, Firmus was able to recruit an army many times larger than the one Theodosius had. When the two sides met in battle, Theodosius was forced to withdraw, but in the end Firmus was betrayed and captured by Igmazen, a chieftain who sided with the central authority. Not wanting to fall into the hands of Theodosius, Firmus committed suicide.

That wasn't the end of the matter because a few years later, Theodosius I became the Eastern Roman emperor, while Magnus Maximus, an officer who had served under Theodosius the Elder in Africa, was proclaimed emperor of the West by his troops. To command the soldiers in Africa, Magnus chose Gildo, a brother of Firmus who had fought on the side of Rome in the recent rebellion, as the new comes Africae. Then in 395 Theodosius I died, and each half of the Empire went to one of his sons. Gildo was technically under the new ruler of the West, Honorius, but he thought he might have more independence under the emperor of the East, Arcadius. The Western Empire couldn't accept the loss of its African territory, with its vital granaries, so when Gildo ordered African ships to stop sailing to Rome in 397, Honorius took this as a declaration of war.

It was Stilicho the Vandal, Honorius' general, who saved the day for the West. He arranged an alternate food supply to get the Western Empire through the winter and persuaded the Senate to raise an army of 10,000, under the command of the last son of Nubel, Mascezel. Against this Gildo had 70,000 men, but they put up little resistance, so Gildo tried to escape, only to be caught and killed.

North African Christianity

North Africa saw much spiritual turmoil after Christianity arrived. Manicheism, a new Persian religion, was introduced in the late third century, and despite being banned in 297, it gained many converts because it resembled Gnosticism; even Augustine subscribed to it at an early stage of his career. The last great persecution of the Church under Diocletian hit Africa particularly hard; for example, in Abitna, a town southwest of Carthage, all forty-seven Christians were martyred. This led to a radical movement among those remaining; they took a hard line against Christians who had compromised in order to survive. They excommunicated all lapsed and gross offenders, asserted that the effectiveness of the sacraments (baptism and the Lord's supper) depended on the worthiness of the one who gave them, and like the Novatians in Rome, they even re-baptized Christians who left mainstream churches to join theirs. Martyrs were seen as ideal Christians, and the North African Church emphasized purity to the point that many of its members forgot they were reformed sinners.

In 311 Carthage got a new bishop, Caecilian; the radicals rejected him because he was too moderate for their tastes, and because he had been ordained by a bishop accused of traditio, the handing over or "betrayal" of Holy Scriptures to the authorities during Diocletian's persecution. Then 70 bishops, led by the primate of Numidia, got together and elected one of their own, Majorius, and when he died soon after, they elected Donatus of Casae Nigrae; he led the radical movement long enough (313-355) to give his name to it. Thus, Carthage had two bishops, and the North African Church split even as the Roman emperor Constantine legalized it.

Constantine got involved because he saw Church schismatics as rebels against the state, and he didn't want to bring down the wrath of God on himself and the people entrusted to his care. An investigation found the bishop who ordained Caecilian innocent of the traditio charge, and Constantine sided with Caecilian's faction. The Donatists refused to accept this ruling and those of the subsequent Church councils, so Constantine threatened to go to Africa and set things right himself:

"I am going to make plain to them what kind of worship is to be offered to God . . . What higher duty have I as emperor than to destroy error and repress rash indiscretions, and so cause all to offer to Almighty God true religion, honest concord and due worship?"

Constantine didn't go, but he declared Donatism a heresy, and ordered their churches to be confiscated and their leaders exiled. The result was a round of anti-Donatist persecution, which stopped when Constantine realized that it was only making the Donatists even more intransigent. His successor Constans also tried to destroy the Donatists by force, prompting this famous quote from Donatus: "Quid est imperatori cum ecclesia?" (What has the emperor to do with the church?) Then they got a reprieve in the 360s when Julian, the last pagan emperor, restored the Donatist churches and reinstated their bishops, because his enemies were the same as their enemies. The sect peaked in the last years of the fourth century; at a council in 394 the Donatists assembled 310 bishops.

By that time, however, the Catholics had Aurelius of Carthage and Augustine of Hippo, two leaders who were a match for the Donatists. In 405 Emperor Honorius issued an edict commanding the Donatists, under the severest penalties, to return to the Catholic church. When this didn't work, Augustine arranged for a great conference between the Donatists and the orthodox, which was held at Carthage in 411; 286 Catholic and 279 Donatist bishops attended the affair. Augustine took part in the discussions, maintaining a moderate view that unworthy members should be allowed to remain in the church, as tares among wheat, until God's final judgment. In the end, the Catholics had their way: Donatism was classified as a heresy against the one true Church. The bishop of Carthage was demoted--henceforth no Church patriarchs would come from there. In addition, Donatists were fined according to their rank and station, they were deprived of all civil rights in 414, and their buildings became the property of the Catholic Church. One year later, their assemblies were banned under penalty of death. Whole communities of bishops and laymen returned to the official Church, but a few extremists remained, so the movement didn't disappear completely. For the rest of the fifth and sixth centuries, Donatism gathered up the most discontented folks in society without becoming a nationalist or revolutionary movement, allowing it to survive until the Moslems arrived and eliminated all sides in the doctrinal dispute.

Axum

Two Arabian tribes, the Banu Habesh and the Banu Ag'azi, were involved in the migration to the highlands, and both of them lent their names to the place where they settled. From the Banu Habesh we get the name of Abyssinia, applied both to the country as a whole and the mountains where they lived, the Abyssinian Massif. The name of the Banu Ag'azi comes down to us as Ge'ez, the name of the ancient language used by the Ethiopian church; modern Amharic and Tigrinya, also Semitic languages, are derived from Ge'ez.

Ge'ez (also known as Ethiopic) did not have a written script until the fourth century A.D., so we can't be sure about what the Ethiopians were doing before that time. However, the Ethiopians themselves are confident about their origins, and will tell you that their kings are descended from Israel's Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. According to them, the king and queen didn't simply exchange questions and gifts, as the Bible tells us. The Queen of Sheba (called Makeda by the Ethiopians) was so impressed by what she saw that she converted to Judaism, while Solomon was charmed by her beauty and intelligence, and plotted a trap to get her into his bed. When a banquet was held in her honor, Solomon told her to enjoy herself, but she must not take anything without his permission. However, much of the food served was spicy, and before going to bed after the meal, she went to get a drink of water; Solomon accused her of breaking his rule, and demanded that she spend the night with him as payment. As a result, she went home preganant with a son, Menelik I.

The legend goes on to state that when Menelik grew up, he came to Israel to study the Torah and Judaism. Among the gifts Solomon gave him for his trip back to Ethiopia was the Ark of the Covenant. Today in Axum (also spelled Aksum), the oldest inhabited city of Ethiopia, visitors can see the tomb of Menelik, and the locals assert that the Ark is hidden in Axum's Church of St. Mary of Zion, though no one is allowed to see it except for the monk who keeps vigil there, night and day. Whenever a new king was crowned, he would go to Axum for the coronation, and under a Coptic cross he would declare, "I am the son of David and Solomon, and Ibna Hakim (Menelik)." The late Haile Selassie was the last king to do this, in 1930.

The above story comes from the Kebra Negast, or Glory of the Kings, a book compiled by an Ethiopian monk named Yetshak in the early fourteenth century. How much of it really happened is almost impossible to verify. Skeptics suggest that the story was compiled sometime after Abyssinia became Christian, to give its kings a more glorious lineage. Most Bible scholars will tell you that Sheba is another name for Saba, which would put the queen's home in Yemen. The possibility of an African origin for the queen, however, won't go away; Josephus, for example, in his Antiquities of the Jews, insisted on calling her "the Queen of Egypt and Ethiopia." Perhaps in the tenth century B.C. there was a kingdom that controlled both shores of the Red Sea, the way Abyssinia would in the sixth century A.D.; that would resolve the geography issue. The author has seen a list of early Ethiopian kings, drawn from the Kebra Negast, that records seven generations of otherwise unknown kings after Menelik, before reaching Piankhy and his XXV dynasty successors. Thus, if any part of the legend is true, it means that the Kushites, and not today's Ethiopians, are the Queen of Sheba's descendants. At any rate, the dynasty that ended with Haile Selassie can be traced as far back as the fourth century A.D., so whether or not there is a Solomonic connection, it is one of the world's oldest royal families, at least as old as the Yamato family of Japan.

Dates for the founding of Axum range from 300 B.C. to 100 A.D. An older community named Yeha, with a temple to Almaqah, the Sabaean moon-god of pre-Moslem Arabia, once existed between Axum and Adwa (Adowa) in Tigre province; we don't know if its abandonment was directly related to the founding of Axum. In the early days, Ptolemaic Egypt sometimes formed an alliance with the Abyssinians, to check the power of the Nubians in-between. By 200 A.D., if not earlier, the kingdom of Abyssinia was fully established, using the port of Adulis to trade its agricultural products, gold and ivory for Roman and Indian goods. Ethiopian literature lists the names of seven kings from the third century, and then comes a king we know something about, Ezana II (ca. 303-356). At Axum he left an inscription describing his campaign against the Nobades, who he calls the Red Noba and the Black Noba. According to this, the tribesmen were interfering with the king's agents and messengers, and had broken a treaty by fighting among themselves. Ezana marched to the junction of the Nile and Atbara Rivers, which put him a few miles downstream from Meroë, and there he defeated the nomads. Then he pursued them for another twenty-three days, reached the "towns of masonry" of the Kushites, pillaged them, and did the same when he got to the Noba "towns of straw." Whether or not he was the one who destroyed the kingdom of Kush, he didn't stay to occupy the territory. Another inscription states that he brought back to Axum 3,112 head of cattle and 6,224 sheep. Then he started a tradition that would be followed by his successors, by constructing a forest of obelisks in Axum; the largest stood 78 feet high and weighed 517 tons. In Chapter 8, footnote #10, you will see how this obelisk became a bone of contention between modern Ethiopia and Italy.

Ezana's other important achievement was his conversion to Christianity in 330. The rest of the kingdom quickly followed, making Abyssinia the third Christian nation, after Armenia and the Roman Empire. The first archbishop of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church (also called the Coptic Church because of its connections to Egypt) was Frumentius, a Syrian who had lived at the Ethiopian court for some time and was sent to Alexandria by Ezana to ask for a bishop; tradition asserts that St. Athanasius, the patriarch of Alexandria in the mid-fourth century, appointed Frumentius, figuring that he was the best man for the job (ca. 340). After that the Ethiopian Church was officially under the authority of the Egyptian Church, but because of the distances involved, Alexandria had no direct control over the Ethiopians, aside from choosing who would lead their clergy. Alexandria's influence also made sure that Greek would be widely used at the Abyssinian king's court, at least until the Bible could be translated into Ge'ez. When Islam conquered Egypt, the tenuous connection with the Ethiopian Church was broken, and not until the twelfth century could Alexandria make appointments again. Without exception, Alexandria always selected an Egyptian monk; not until 1945 did an Ethiopian get the top ecclesiastical job.

Once Egypt and Abyssinia were converted, pressure increased to bring salvation to the Nubians, but as we noted before, they were reluctant to adopt any form of monotheism if it meant compromising their independence. The first reported missionary to Nubia was a monk named Julian; he went there in 543, and his activities were written down by another monk, John of Ephesus. Julian found his biggest challenge to be one that all visitors to Africa have to deal with--the heat. John wrote that Julian "used to say that from nine o'clock until four in the afternoon he was obliged to take refuge in caves full of water, where he sat undressed except for a linen garment such as people in the country wear."⁽¹⁸⁾ There seems to have been a competition of sorts between the Orthodox Church of Constantinople and the Monophysite Churches of Alexandria and Axum, with each trying to convert as many Nubians as possible. In the end the Nubians finally came around; by 600 the inhabitants of Nobatia and Alodia were Monophysites, while those of Makuria were Orthodox. This was the beginning of the Christian Nubian culture that would produce many glorious works of art in the Middle Ages.

While missionaries were active on Abyssinia's western frontier, the king's soldiers were active in the east. In 523 news came from Arabia that Dhu Nuwas, the Jewish king of Himyar (Yemen), was inclined to massacre Arab Christians. The Eastern Roman Empire was too far away to intervene on behalf of the Christians, so it asked the king of Abyssinia to do it; he obliged by sending an army across the Red Sea. This army drove out Dhu Nuwas by 525, and its commanding general became the puppet king of Himyar; in 533 he was succeeded by another pro-Abyssinian Christian, Abraha.

To the north of Yemen, the city of Mecca was a trading rival, and the home of the Kaaba, Arabia's greatest pagan temple, so both God and Mammon gave Abraha compelling reasons to take it out. First, he built a cathedral to compete with Mecca's religious traffic, in the hope that pilgrims would visit Yemen instead. Then in 570, he sent an army against Mecca; Abyssinia helped by contributing a war elephant. The leader of Mecca, Abdul Muttalib, tried to negotiate with the Christians, and Abraha told his representatives that he had come to destroy the Kaaba; the only way the Meccans could save themselves and their city was by getting out of the way. Abdul Muttalib didn't think he could defend the Kaaba, so he prepared to evacuate Mecca, but the invaders never arrived. Arab legend claims that a flock of birds dropped stones on the army, until only one soldier was left alive; it's more likely that an epidemic stopped the troops, since outbreaks of disease were a major problem in sixth-century cities. The fate of the elephant is unknown. Abraha died very soon after that, and in 575 the Persians conquered Yemen, bringing an end to Abyssinia's Arabian adventure. 570 went down in Arab history as "the Year of the Elephant," but it was for reasons that had nothing to do with the invasion; later in the same year Abdul Muttalib became a grandfather, when the future prophet Mohammed was born.

The Vandal Kingdom

King Gunderic fell in battle with the Franks in 428, and the merged Vandal-Alan tribe elected Gunderic's illegitimate half-brother, Gaiseric (also spelled Genseric), to succeed him. In an age when leaders were known for their treachery, Gaiseric proved to be the cleverest, most treacherous leader of all. Once in charge, he convinced his subjects that they ought to abandon Spain for Mauretania. Roman politics made this possible; Boniface, the governor of Carthage, invited them because he needed allies. Aetius, the commander of the Roman army, was plotting against him from Italy, so Boniface offered to provide transport for the Vandals across the Straits of Gibraltar. To find out how many boats were needed, Gaiseric counted his people just before the crossing; they numbered 80,000.

Coming ashore at Tingis (modern Tangiers) in 429, the Vandals found that Mauretania was a less appealing piece of real estate than the one they had just left, so they moved east. This made Mauretania an abandoned province, because the Romans couldn't administer it with the Vandals blocking the way; like Britain in Europe, it saw its provincial government devolve into a confederation of native tribes and chiefs. In 430 the Vandals took Caesarea, followed by Hippo Regius; the latter was the home of St. Augustine, and he died of a fever during the fourteen-month-long siege before that city fell. Boniface couldn't stop the Vandals, and ended up signing a treaty with them in 435, which recognized Vandal rule over everything west of Carthage. However, Gaiseric only kept the treaty while he regrouped and consolidated his gains, and in 438 he advanced on Carthage again. The second largest city of the Western Roman Empire finally fell on October 19, 439. Gaiseric was now master of the western Mediterranean's largest fleet and its only reliable source of surplus grain; with these he could blackmail the Romans at will, because they would be doomed if anything cut off Rome's grain supply. To keep the grain coming in, the Romans allowed Gaiseric to exchange Mauretania and Numidia for Tunisia, which was definitely a province worth keeping.

Whereas the Vandals had made their name a byword for destruction in western Europe, they did not act like "Vandals" in North Africa. Here they left the Roman farms, orchards, and infrastructure intact, simply putting themselves in charge of everything as the new aristocrats. Still, their arrival was bad news for everybody, because in the fourth century the Vandals had converted to the Christian heresy known as Arianism, making them enemies of both the Catholics and the Donatists. Churches were razed and assemblies by Catholics forbidden; priests and bishops were rounded up, deported, and replaced by Arian clergymen. This went on until 449, when the Roman emperor, Valentinian III, made a plea for tolerance, and Gaiseric responded by allowing a bishop in Carthage and relaxing the persecution.

Besides making Carthage his capital, Gaiseric also followed Carthaginian tradition by building a fleet, the greatest in the western Mediterranean. However, he didn't use it for trade; every year for the rest of his reign, the Vandal fleet brought back plunder and/or ransom money from the coastal cities of both the Western and Eastern Roman Empires. When Valentinian III was assassinated in 455, a Vandal force went to Italy and plundered Rome for fourteen days, only stopping when Pope Leo I personally implored Gaiseric to spare the city from further acts of murder and arson. When the bishop of Carthage died in 458, Gaiseric left the office vacant (it wasn't filled until 481) and resumed the persecution of non-Arian Christians.

By now it was clear to everyone that the Western Roman Empire was on its last legs. In 460, the Vandals destroyed the Roman fleet off Cartagena, confirming their mastery of the Mediterranean. The Western Roman emperor found himself signing a treaty that handed over the entire Maghreb (not just Tunisia) to the Vandals. By 462 they had also captured all the islands in the western Mediterranean (besides the Balearics, this amounted to Corsica, Sardinia and Sicily). Then they started raiding Dalmatia and Greece, threatening even Constantinople, the Eastern Roman capital. At this point both emperors (Leo I in the East and Anthemius in the West), agreed to pool together their forces for a counterattack against the Vandals. A fleet of 1,000 ships, financed by the East, set sail in 468 to capture Carthage, but the three-pronged attack launched by Leo's brother-in-law, the incompetent Basiliscus, was poorly coordinated and ended in an embarrassing and costly withdrawal. In 474 the new Eastern emperor, Zeno, negotiated a peace treaty with Gaiseric to prevent further raids. Two years later, Gaiseric sold eastern Sicily to Odoacer, the new king of Italy who had just deposed the last Western emperor, since fighting other barbarians promised far less profit than fighting Romans.

Gaiseric's death in 477 ended the glory years for the Vandals. His successors proved that competence isn't a hereditary trait. The first, his eldest son Huneric (477-484), listened too much to his Arian bishops. Huneric called a conference the kingdom's Catholic bishops, made them listen to pro-Arian arguments, and when they refused to convert, he decreed that the Roman laws against heresy would be applied to the Catholics who made up the majority of his subjects. The bishops were then exiled to work in the timberlands on Corsica or on farms in the interior of Africa; other Catholics had to show certificates of conformity before being allowed to hold a job. More cruel martyrdoms and apostasies resulted.

The last Vandal kings got even less done; Gunthamund (484-496) left the churches alone, while Thrasamund (496-523) exiled Catholic bishops to Sardinia. By this time the Vandals were no longer vigorous and warlike, having become soft from the easy Mediterranean life and preoccupied with religious and political issues. Then came Hilderic (523-530), who was the son of Huneric and a captive daughter of the former Emperor Valentinian III; he promptly ended the persecutions, recalled the bishops and restored the churches. This, along with an alliance with the Eastern Roman Empire, alienated most of the Vandal nobility and military; they detroned and arrested Hilderic, and installed his heir Gelimer in his place.

In Constantinople, Justinian was now the Eastern Roman emperor, and he had a dream to reconquer the lost western portion of the Empire; the coup which replaced the pro-Roman Hilderic with the anti-Roman Gelimer gave him the excuse he needed to get started. In September 533 Justinian's best general, Belisarius, sailed to Africa with 500 ships and 16,000 men, defeated the half of the Vandal army that was defending Carthage, and captured the city. It went so easily because recent Mauri raids had weakened the Vandal kingdom, and because Gelimer was away with the rest of the army on Sardinia. Three months later Gelimer and his soldiers came back, and Belisarius engaged them ten miles south of Carthage; it ended in a Roman victory when Ammatas, the brother of Gelimer, was killed, and the Vandal army disintegrated as it fled. Gelimer fled to Numidia, was pursued and captured there in 534, and taken to Constantinople; he eventually was settled in the Asian province of Galatia. Another year of mopping up ended all revolts, and the Vandals, never more than 5 percent of North Africa's population, quickly disappeared as a distinct people.

In 535 Justinian captured the Moroccan ports of Tangiers and Ceuta, to gain control over the Straits of Gibraltar. Still, the restored African provinces had lost much of their population, and were smaller and poorer than the provinces of pre-Vandal North Africa. In the years following Justinian's death, raids from Visigoths, Lombards, Avars, Slavs and Persians wasted the European and Asian provinces of the Empire, and the African provinces were too far away to send much help, either in food, money or men. On the other hand, North Africa was left untouched in those conflicts, so one could argue that this was the safest place to live in the late sixth-early seventh century. What North Africa did provide was the person who saved the Empire--Heraclius, the son of the governor of Carthage. When Constantinople came under siege from both the Avars and the Persians in the 620s, Heraclius considered moving the capital to Carthage, and probably would have done so if it looked like Constantinople's defenses weren't going to hold out. For details on the civil war that brought him to power, his war against the Persians, and his overhauling of the imperial government, see Chapter 6 of my European history.

Justinian's reconquest of North Africa gave the non-Arian Christians a new lease on life, but this time they didn't quarrel. Instead, both the Catholics and the Donatists opposed Monophysitism in Egypt, as well as the emperor's attempt to impose a compromise doctrine (Monotheletism). Time and mutual exhaustion had given a "live and let live" attitude to North African Christians, just as later on, Catholics and Protestants would learn to accept each other's existence after they wore themselves out from fighting. In fact, Pope Gregory I (590-604) repeatedly rebuked the African bishops for too much slackness in opposing the Donatists; what a change from the day when North African Christians were the strictest members of the Church!

Meanwhile, Below the Sahara

When they excavate the sites of ancient civilizations, archaeologists use a relative dating system involving styles of pottery and the material used to make tools. From the latter we get the terms "stone age," "bronze age," and "iron age" to describe how advanced the people were at any given site.⁽¹⁹⁾ This system works fine for sites in Europe and much of Asia, but not so well in Africa. First, a rating system for artifacts only looks at one aspect of a culture--technology. The Egyptians were technologically behind Mesopotamia, for example, but their art and literature were at least as good and their political system was superior, in that it produced a larger state and fewer wars. Second, the only people in Africa who had a bronze age at all were the residents of the Nile valley, and possibly the tribes around Lake Chad. Elsewhere cultures went straight from the stone age to the iron age, without somebody introducing bronze at an intermediate date.

We noted earlier that the Egyptians were familiar with iron at least as far back as the New Kingdom, but didn't have many opportunites to use it. The Nubians learned ironmongery from the Assyrians, in the seventh century B.C. South of the Sahara, the first people to use iron are called the Nok culture, after the name of the present-day village where their artifacts were first discovered. Dating from 900 B.C. to 200 A.D., the Nok people lived on the Jos plateau in central Nigeria, just north of the junction of the Niger and Benue Rivers. Their oldest known iron-smelting furnace has been dated to the fourth century B.C., and we believe the Nubians taught them the secrets of iron production, when they traveled along the Sahel corridor to reach West Africa. Alternative theories are less realistic; few people, if anybody, crossed the Sahara Desert at this early date, so the Nok people couldn't have learned about iron from the Carthaginians, and it would be a remarkable coincidence if they developed the techniques on their own, right when the Nubians arrived on their doorstep.

Aside from ironworks, the Nok left us finely crafted terra cotta sculptures, which compare favorably with African-style works in any museum of modern art. Then they disappeared, and except for the founding of Kano in the seventh century A.D., we won't hear any more from Nigeria until the first millennium A.D. is almost over. Some scholars have noted similarites between Nok and Yoruba art, and have suggested that the Yoruba are present-day descendants of the Nok.

With the introduction of iron, the inhabitants of the upper Niger also began to climb toward civilization. Around 250 B.C., they founded West Africa's first city, Jenné-jeno, near modern Jenné in Mali. This community was discovered in the mid-1970s by Roderick and Susan McIntosh, two graduate students from Rice University, and they have been excavating it since. Its location on the Niger's inland delta provided plenty of fish and waterfowl, and a floodplain suitable for farming, so it could support a large population. From the beginning there was an iron-smelting industry here, even before mud-brick buildings replaced huts on the site. However, iron ore was not available locally, so the blacksmiths probably got it from Benedougou, fifty miles to the southeast, trading their surplus food for the raw material.

To West African farmers, iron was more valuable than gold, because you can't make strong tools with gold. Consequently, at places like Jenné-jeno, the techniques used to extract and shape iron were well-guarded secrets, and blacksmiths occupied a very important place in West African society. Tribes living in the area have often credited the blacksmith with the power to see the future, and West African blacksmiths have been known to act as political advisors to kings, or as judges over village disputes. Sometimes they were even doctors, performing circumcisions and successfully vaccinating patients against smallpox--using the tip of a red-hot poker, dipped in a sample of the live virus--at least a millennium before European doctors tried their own innoculations.

Jenné-jeno peaked between 800 and 1000 A.D., when it had 50,000 residents, and then began to decline. Part of the reason for harder times was competition from other trade centers, but Islam was also a factor, because Moslems did not rate their blacksmiths so highly. The city was abandoned in the fourteenth century, its final residents moving a few miles away to build Jenné, thereby making a clean break with their pagan past.

Still more evidence of West Africa's development comes from hundreds of burial mounds in Mali and Senegal, dating from 500 to 900 A.D. The contents of these tombs contain grave goods made from gold, copper and iron--and also sacrificial victims. Evidently these were important individuals, buried with much ceremony, hinting at increasing wealth and the rise of powerful kings. It was around such figures that the great mercantile states of the next chapter, such as Ghana and Mali, would arise.

Once the tribes of West Africa had both iron and agriculture, they were able to begin their expansion into the rest of the sub-Saharan portion of the continent. The first phase of the Bantu migration got started by 1 A.D., and involved crossing the Cameroon mts. to enter the Congo basin. From there they spread out, heading south along the Atlantic coast, and east until they reached the mountains and lakes at the headwaters of the Nile. This region--modern Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi--was more fertile than surrounding areas, and consequently became more densely populated.

East of the lakes were open plains dotted with trees--the savanna that appears so often in movies featuring African wildlife. At a glance this place would seem perfect for the Nilotic tribes, which were closer than the Bantu and lived by herding, but thanks to the tsetse fly, the Nilotics had to leave most of East Africa to the Bantus, only moving there in limited numbers after they gained some immunity to the sleeping sickness (see Chapter 6).

By the third century the Bantus around the lakes had the strength and numbers to move again. They reached the east coast around 220 A.D., at Bombo Kaburi in Tanzania. Other iron age sites which mark the path of the Bantu migration are Urewe on Lake Victoria (270); Ndora, Kalumba and Urinza, around Lake Tanganyika (250-450); Phopo Hill, Kamnama and Nkope Bay, all in Malawi (300); Ziwo in Mozambique (300); and Kansanshi and Kapwirimbe in Zambia (400-450). Against this, all the indigenous races could do was retreat; the pygmies withdrew to the deepest jungles of the Congo basin, while the Bushmen were forced southwards. The Bantus, with their crops, iron weapons and professional warriors, operated at a higher tech level than the Pygmies and Bushmen, who were simply too primitive and too few in numbers to resist. However, in the end they fared better than those native American tribes who encountered a similarly advanced enemy in the conquistadors from Spain; neither was hunted to near-extinction. The Pygmies managed to survive with their new neighbors after they learned Bantu languages, while with the Bushmen, the language-borrowing went in the other direction--the southernmost Bantu group, the Nguni, added clicking sounds to their vocabulary. By the end of the period covered in this chapter, the Bantus had pushed as far as Angola on the west coast, and Mozambique in the east; the Kalahari desert and surrounding areas (modern Namibia, Botswana and South Africa) were left to the Bushmen for the time being.

Africa's population In Ancient Times

By 200 A.D. world population had climbed to 190 million. More than half of this lived in India and China, where census takers counted about 50 million in each. In the West, population was divided almost equally between Europe (18 million, mostly in the Roman-ruled portion) and the Middle East (16 million). Africa had an estimated 20.25 million, meaning its portion of the world total had fallen from 20% to just under 11%.

After 1000 B.C. the arrival of first the Phoenicians and later the Romans brought the rest of North Africa into the pale of civilization, meaning that now the population of the Maghreb could also rise to respectable levels. As a result, by 200 A.D. there were as many people between Libya and Morocco as there were in Egypt--a balance that has been approximately maintained ever since--and Egypt & the Maghreb together contained about half the African total. However, that was the crossover point, for though the harsh climate and primitive lifestyle caused it to get off to a sluggish start, Black Africa was now growing, too. This began with the introduction of agriculture to Ethiopia and, more importantly, to West Africa, in the first millennium B.C.; the subsequent Bantu migrations meant that someday the rest of sub-Saharan Africa would also be involved in the process.

World population growth leveled off after 200 A.D. Overall, it continued to grow, but very slowly; in the main civilized zone it actually declined. There was not one culprit behind this slump but several: politics (the collapse of the Roman, Persian, Kushan, Gupta and Chinese empires), some really bad epidemics in the second, third and sixth centuries, and a possible climate change. Egypt was probably one of the first areas to suffer, due to Roman exploitation, while bad land management (see Chapter 1, Footnote #5) caused similar results in the Maghreb. In both areas nomadic expansion became a visible sign that the Roman emperors weren't as competent as they used to be. During the Pax Romana (27 B.C. to 180 A.D.), desert nomads were on the periphery of the known world, restricted to land that no city-dweller or peasant wanted, and making virtually no contribution to civilization. However, that situation changed as the amount of land that could be cultivated (and the population it could support) decreased; when life got tougher for the farmer, the nomad's standing improved. In the late Roman Empire, military tactics switched from a reliance on infantry to cavalry, and because traveling and fighting while riding horses and camels was already second nature to them, the nomads gained even more of an advantage. After the battle of Adrianople (378 A.D.), the nomads who used to wait for peasants to abandon their fields began to actively drive them off, and the farms became pastureland for their animals. Thus, the provinces of the Roman Empire that had once required the least amount of attention from the emperors were steadily whittled down, first by Saharan tribes like the Blemmyes, then by the Vandals, and finally by the Arabs.

What all this means is that between 200 and 650 A.D., the population of North Africa shrank from approximately ten to eight million (four million in Egypt, four million in the Maghreb). Because most of Black Africa did not yet have contact with the outside world, it escaped the influences that were contracting other communities, so its population would have continued to grow; an increase from ten to fifteen million is as good an estimate as any. However, there was an exception at the East African port of Rhapta (see below), which was depopulated and abandoned for a while. Here the culprit was bubonic plague, the first outbreak on record, which somehow got out the equatorial jungle in 536 A.D.; unfortunately we don't know if the original disease carriers were humans wandering into the plague zone from Rhapta, or infected rodents coming out of the area. Traders took the plague bacillus to Egypt in 541, and eventually it spread to Europe and Asia, where it would cause "Justinian's Plague" in sixth-century Europe, and the more devastating Black Death of the fourteenth century.

The above figures do not include the Pygmies and the Bushmen, whose numbers never increased past 200,000 for each group, because they were still stone-age food-gatherers. Total for the continent: probably 23.5 million when the warriors of Islam arrived.

Ancient African Explorers

In the tenth century B.C. Phoenician merchantmen, known as "ships of Tarshish" in the Old Testament, started sailing in the Red Sea. Their home port was Ezion-Gebir, modern Aqaba, and they were hired by King Solomon to handle his Indian Ocean commerce. Usually they went to a mysterious place the Bible calls "Ophir," and they brought back such luxury items as gold, ivory, apes and peacocks. Modern scholars cannot agree on where Ophir was; conservatives call it some place in Arabia, most locate it in India or East Africa, and a few bold spirits put it as far away as Australia! The last ships of Tarshish were sunk in a storm nearly a century after Solomon's death, and the Arabs took up the slack from there. We do have a good idea of how far the Arabs went; the ivory they traded in came from a place called Rhapta, twenty-three days sailing south of Cape Gardafui. Rhapta probably was modern Zanzibar, which has been an ivory trading post ever since.

Some wondered if it was possible to sail all the way around Africa. According to the Greek historian Herodotus, one who thought so was the Pharaoh Necho II; around 600 B.C. he hired a Phoenician ship & crew and sent them down the Red Sea. Three years later they returned through the Pillars of Hercules. Herodotus didn't believe the story because the sailors claimed they had the sun on the starboard side of their ship, everywhere they sailed, meaning that on the westward leg of their journey, the sun was shining from the north. Ironically, this may be the best evidence that the story is true; such an occurrence would have only happened if the explorers crossed the Tropic of Capricorn.⁽²¹⁾ Whether or not the trip took place, it was too long to be practical, and it was not followed up.

Herodotus also told about an expedition that went the other way. At some point between 485 and 465 B.C., a Persian prince named Sataspes was charged with rape, a crime punishable by death. The mother of Sataspes appealed to King Xerxes, and persuaded him to modify the sentence: now he would earn a pardon if he sailed all the way around Africa, going out through the Straits of Gibraltar and coming back by the Red Sea. Sataspes went ahead and tried it, first going to Egypt to hire a vessel and a crew; since the Egyptians didn't sail much these days, it's a safe guess that the crew was Phoenician. Unfortunately for us, Herodotus preserved no details of the expedition for us; the only thing we know for sure is that Sataspes made it past the southern edge of the Sahara. At his last landfall he saw Pygmies wearing clothes made out of palm trees; they abandoned their villages and ran to the hills when the crew came ashore. Then he turned around and went home. When he got back to the Persian Empire he defended his behavior by claiming that he had reached a point where his ship was brought to a standstill and could not make any headway (the equatorial doldrums?). Xerxes didn't buy the story, and imposed the original sentence, by having the prince impaled.

Around 450 B.C., the city of Carthage decided to explore and colonize the continent's Atlantic coast. The expedition took about 30,000 colonists, was escorted by sixty warships, and led by a Carthaginian named Hanno. As he went down the coast of Morocco and Mauretania, Hanno dropped off batches of colonists who founded half a dozen settlements. Then he kept going until provisions ran out and forced his return. Along the way he recorded the sorts of things that became commonplace in the reports of later African explorers: the jungle, the beating of drums, natives practicing slash-and-burn agriculture, and some wild animals he called gorillas.⁽²²⁾ But how far did he get? Once again we have scholars arguing: most believe he stopped at Sierra Leone; some assert he went as far as Cameroon or even Gabon. Afterwards an account of Hanno's voyage⁽²³⁾ was inscribed on a bronze tablet in the middle of Carthage, and an inquisitive Greek made a copy which has come down to us. Hanno's colonies are mentioned as late as 350 B.C. and then they disappear from history, their final fate unknown to us today. At this time, the furthest Phoenician/Carthaginian settlement that we have located was at Essaouira, on the Moroccan coast near Marrakesh.

The Greek contribution to the exploration of Africa came from Eudoxus of Cyzicus, the first European to sail across an ocean. One day in 120 B.C., a half-drowned sailor was found on Egypt's Red Sea shore, and brought to the court of King Ptolemy VIII in Alexandria. After he was nursed back to health and taught Greek, the sailor told his rescuers that he was an Indian, the sole survivor of his crew, and offered to prove it by guiding another ship to his home. Eudoxus got the honor of escorting him, and the voyage was an easy one, since the Indian knew how to sail with the monsoon winds (something Europeans didn't learn until the 15th century). The homeward leg of the trip was more exciting because Eudoxus got carried farther south than expected and ended up at a place he named Cape Prasum (Cape Delgado on the Tanzania-Mozambique border?), which was even south of Zanzibar. Here he met a local tribe and made friends with them by giving them strange delicacies (bread, wine and dried figs) before turning north again. Finally he got back to Egypt, only to see Ptolemy's customs agents confiscate his entire cargo of spices, perfumes and gems. He went to his Greek home and planned a follow-up voyage that would avoid Egyptian meddling; this time he would sail all the way around Africa from west to east and thus avoid Egypt. He took everything a sailor could ask for, even dancing girls (we don't know whether the girls were intended for an Indian rajah, or to while away the long hours at sea). He only got as far as Morocco before a mutiny forced his return. Undiscouraged, he equipped one more expedition just as carefully, shoved off into the Atlantic, and vanished without a trace.

The heirs to Greek civilization, the Romans, never had it in them to go exploring. What little exploring of Africa that they did was by land; the Roman navy went to seed after Carthage was destroyed. In addition, their explorers were also soldiers; in a previous section we mentioned the expeditions Augustus sent to Napata and the Fezzan oases, and how both turned back for the same reasons that the pharaohs did--the inhabitants were too poor and too few and communications were too difficult. Likewise, in 42 A.D. Suetonius Paulinus headed due south from the neighborhood of modern Melilla, in Morocco, and crossed the Atlas mts., but all he found on the other side was more desert, so this lead wasn't followed up.

In the course of their explorations the Phoenicians and Carthaginians visited the Canary Islands, but they only established outposts there, and these were abandoned by the time the Romans found out about the place. At first the Romans called this archipelago Fortunatae Insulae, the Fortunate Isles. Juba II, the king of Mauretania, sent an expedition that completely explored the islands in the first century A.D., and shortly after that, a Berber tribe, the Guanche, moved in from the mainland. The Roman scholar Pliny the Elder described the islands as the home of many wild dogs (canes), and thus named the place Canaria; from that we get the old saying about there being no canaries in the Canary Islands. Because the Romans didn't try to colonize the islands, and because we never hear them talk about anything beyond them, it's safe to say that to the classical mind, the Canary Islands marked the southwest corner of the known world.

In 62 or 66 A.D., Emperor Nero sent two centurions to see if Kush was worth conquering. They reported that it wasn't, and they also tried to find the source of the Nile, something the Egyptians had never discovered, despite millennia of attention given to that river. Their conclusion was that the source was the swamp we call the Sudd (see Chapter 1). Claudius Ptolemy included this information when he wrote his Geography, and since no white man got through the Sudd before 1842 A.D., Ptolemy made a remarkably accurate guess as to where the waters of the Sudd came from. His map showed streams beginning in a central African mountain range, which he called the Mountains of the Moon (the modern Ruwenzori?), and they collected into two large lakes; out of those lakes came two north-flowing rivers, which joined together to form one river, the White Nile, before entering the Sudd. Presumably this was what Arab traders had heard about Lakes Victoria and Albert, combined with Ptolemy's imagination.

The boldest explorers of ancient times were the unnamed Malayo-Polynesian sailors who crossed the Pacific, trusting in things of nature like birds, ocean currents and stars to guide them across the open sea. At an uncertain date between 1 and 500 A.D., one or more outrigger canoes left Southeast Asia (most likely from Borneo, as their language and DNA most resembles that of the Malagasy), crossed the Indian Ocean and landed on Madagascar. These Malays brought with them rice, root crops, spices, and the knowledge needed to build outrigger canoes. Of course they did not know where they were going, and because they also brought their families, it's safe to say that they didn't expect to return. After 1000 A.D., they did some trading with the mainland, and some Bantus came to Madagascar, so today's Malagasy are half Asian and half Black African.⁽²⁴⁾

1. Those Jews were refugees, who fled to Egypt after Nebuchadnezzar destroyed Jerusalem. Later on many of them moved upstream, where they intermarried and made converts among the Nubians, creating the Falasha community of black Ethiopian Jews.

2. A Greek officer stopped at Abu Simbel and carved a record of his unit's exploits on a leg of one of Ramses II's colossal statues. This is one of the oldest examples of a disrespectful custom still practiced today--graffiti.

3. Honey does in fact kill bacteria, and is the longest-lasting foodstuff; edible samples more than 2,500 years old have turned up in Egyptian tombs. The Egyptians seem to have known this because it was a common ingredient in their medicines, and occasionally they put a corpse in a large jar of it, but honey never replaced mummification. To find out why, the medical historian Guido Majno experimented by immersing pieces of rodent meat in honey. He wrote: "Very small pieces might be preserved indefinitely, but with larger pieces, deep down where the honey cannot reach, putrefaction is rampant, gas develops, and the result is a terrible waste of work." He concluded that whoever the ancients embalmed in honey must have been buried in a hurry!

4. B.P. Grenfell, A.S. Hunt, etc. (editors), Tebtunis Papyri, III, 703, 230.

5. A delightful story has come to us from the Third Syrian War. This conflict took Ptolemy III all the way to Babylon, and his queen, Berenice II, was so concerned for his safety that she cut off her long blond hair, and presented it as an offering to the temple of Aphrodite. Her prayers were answered and Ptolemy came home, but when the reunited couple visited the temple, the hair was missing. A clever astronomer saved the day by pointing to a star cluster; he said that the hair had not been stolen, and the gods appreciated the offering so much that they put it in the sky as a new constellation. The constellation in question, now called Coma Berenices, is one of the dimmest in the spring sky, so it must have been a really good night for stargazing.

6. Theocritus, Idyl 15, trans. Nels Bailkey.

7. Ptolemy IV had a passion for grandeur that drove him to improve his elite navy by building two enormous ships. The first was a royal barge, 300 feet long and 45 feet wide. Rising 50 feet above the deck was a two-story colonnade that contained a lavish banquet hall, decorated with gold, ivory, cedar, and statues of the gods (which by Egyptian definition included Ptolemy himself). The whole structure was so huge that it couldn't maneuver by itself; it drifted with the current unless dozens of regular sized galleys towed it. The other was a colossal warship that stretched 420 feet from its four battering rams to a 79-foot-high stern. This leviathan could transport catapult crews and more than 3,000 soldiers, and its 150 oars required 4,000 oarsmen. Unfortunately, it was also dangerously unbalanced, making it unseaworthy, so like the barge, it was only useful for showing off.

8. Because of the separation policy, the Jews were allowed to practice their ancient monotheism while the Ptolemies ruled Jerusalem. That changed just a few years after the Seleucids took over, as described in Chapter 6 of my Near Eastern history.
According to Josephus (Wars of the Jews, Book 7, Chapter 10, 2-4), when the Seleucids started persecuting the Jews, Onias, the former Jewish high priest, fled to Egypt, and Ptolemy VI granted him a plot of land in Heliopolis for a new place of worship. There Onias built a fortress, and tried to pass it off as a substitute for the Temple in Jerusalem, claiming he had fulfilled a prophecy that Egypt would some day have an altar to the Lord (Isaiah 19:19). However, a few years later the Maccabees liberated the first Temple, eliminating the need for a second one. Still, the Egyptian fortress/temple remained in business until right after the Jewish-Roman War (66-73 A.D.), when the Roman governor of Alexandria closed it.

9. For you trivia buffs, Cleopatra's full name was Cleopatra VII Philadelphus Philopator Philopatris.

10. The Chadic peoples have a legend that asserts they learned the secrets of metallurgy from a race of tall wise men, who settled in their land. Presumably these were Kushites, 1,200 miles from Meroë. They cast bronze using the lost-wax method, a process already known in the Nile valley.
The "lost-wax" process involves making a wax model of the object you want to cast, and encasing it in clay. When this lump is heated by fire, the clay hardens and the wax melts; the clay thus becomes a perfect mold. Then the wax is poured out through a hole in the mold, and molten metal is poured in. After the metal cools, the mold is struck away, revealing the finished work. Very intricate metal pieces, like the Igbo pot pictured in the next chapter, can be made this way.

11. The Western world discovered war elephants when Alexander the Great encountered them in two battles, at Gaugamela in Iraq and at the Hydaspes (Jhelum) River in India. He defeated them both times, but his Hellenistic successors felt that their armies wouldn't be complete without a few elephants to awe the masses. The Ptolemies got their elephants from Nubia and Eritrea; they did not employ elephants from central and southern Africa, because those were too large to tame. The Seleucids always used Indian elephants, while Hannibal's famous alp-climbing pachyderms came from a North African breed that was later hunted to extinction by the Romans.

12. We see Amanitore called by that name in the New Testament, when the Apostle Philip met and converted a Kushite official: "And he arose and went: and, behold, a man of Ethiopia, a eunuch of great authority under Candace queen of the Ethiopians, who had the charge of all her treasure, and had come to Jerusalem for to worship . . ."--Acts 8:27

13. The Blemmyes are descended from the Medjay who lived in the time of the pharaohs; their Arabic name is Beja. Some texts refer to the Nobades as simply the Noba.

14. In 1999 Egypt's leading archaeologist, Zahi Hawass, reported the discovery of a vast cemetery at the Bahiriya oasis, containing an estimated 10,000 mummies, buried during the Roman era (30 B.C.-395 A.D.). Many were richly decorated, the main feature being the so-called mummy portraits, strikingly realistic paintings on the bandages that show what the deceased looked like when alive. Other Greco-Roman decorations appear on the mummy wrappings, but Egyptian artistic styles are more common, a silent testimony to how the people at this remote oasis tried to hang onto the old customs that were dying out elsewhere. Since the Egyptians stopped practicing mummification when they became Christians, these are some of the last mummies they made.

15. I experienced a confrontation of sorts between Christianity and paganism, when I visited Egypt in 1979. One of the stops our tour group made was the Church of St. Sargios, built on the traditional site where Mary, Joseph and Jesus stayed while they were in Egypt. No service was taking place at the time, so we sat in the pews while our guide stood in the central aisle and talked about the architecture of the building. Unknown to her, but visible to the tourists, a little black and white cat came into the sanctuary and sat down behind the guide, where it could watch everybody, with its tail wrapped around its body. I recalled a picture of an Egyptian statue in the Louvre that represented the cat goddess, in exactly the same position, and I had the eerie feeling that I was looking at Bastet herself.

16. For more details about the Roman Empire in its latter days, read Chapter 5 of my European history.
Ironically, Leptis Magna has some of the best-preserved ruins from the Roman era, because Libya has largely been off-limits to tourists since Muammar el-Gaddafi seized power (see Chapter 9). Much of the ancient city has not yet been excavated.

17. At least three bishops of Rome were natives of Africa: Victor I (189-199), Miltiades (311-314) and Gelasius I (492-496). Gelasius was also the first on record to be called "Pope," the Roman bishop's present-day title.

18. John of Ephesus had been to Africa before. In 531 the Eastern Roman emperor, Justinian, sent him to Axum with a trade proposal. Justinian wanted to cut his Persian rivals out of the lucrative east-west trade network, by sending ships from Adulis directly across the Indian Ocean to India and the Far East, rather than send caravans through the Persian Empire. Although the idea made sense, Constantinople and Axum never got around to carrying it out. Later on, however, Asian spices would be brought to Europe that way.

19. Biblical Archaeology Review made fun of this dating technique with a cartoon in the July/August 1988 issue, which showed an ancient potter at work, and a friend says to him, "Hey, Sam, why are you still making those Late Bronze II B storage jars? Don't you know it's now Iron I?"

20. The Egyptians also ventured out to the lands of the traders; we hear of them visiting Lebanon as early as the III Dynasty, and Crete in the IX.

21. Either Claudius Ptolemy didn't hear the story of Necho's expedition, or he didn't believe it. When he drew his map of the world in the second century A.D., he had the Malay peninsula stretch along the bottom of the world to join with southern Africa, making the Indian Ocean a big enclosed lake.

22. Hanno brought back the skins of three female gorillas to show off at home. Modern scholars believe, however, that he was talking about a smaller primate; baboons or chimpanzees, perhaps. It seems unlikely that a short Semite could have handled even the female version of Tarzan's companions!

23. It was a deliberately partial account--several important details, like mileage, were left out to keep the competition from discovering any trade secrets.

24. East Africans have legends about a tribe named the Waqwaq, which used to live on the Kenyan or Tanzanian coast. Their description of the Waqwaq sounds very much like the Malagasy, suggesting that the Malay explorers first landed on the mainland, and stayed there for a while before sailing south to Madagascar. If this is true, all they left behind on the mainland were their root vegetables.
The Malagasy themselves claim that more than 2,000 years ago, a people called the Vazimba lived on their island. They describe them as "white pygmies," and act with extraordinary care when near a very old tomb, out of fear of what the spirits of the Vazimba might do. Unfortunately it's not clear if the Vazimba are Madagascar's first Malayo-Polynesian settlers, or an indigenous race that lived there until the outriggers arrived (Homo Floresiensis, anyone?).

© Copyright 2004 Charles Kimball