User:OnBeyondZebrax/sandbox/African history
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This is not a Wikipedia article: It is an individual user's work-in-progress page, and may be incomplete and/or unreliable. For guidance on developing this draft, see Wikipedia:So you made a userspace draft. Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL |
The first known hominids evolved in Africa. Around 16,000 BCE, from the Red Sea hills to the northern Ethiopian Highlands, nuts, grasses and tubers were being collected for food. By 13,000 to 11,000 BCE, people began collecting wild grains. This spread to Western Asia, which domesticated its wild grains, wheat and barley. Copper was smelted in Egypt during the predynastic period, and bronze came into use not long after 3000 BC at the latest[1] in Egypt and Nubia. The ancient history of North Africa is inextricably linked to that of the Ancient Near East. After the desertification of the Sahara, settlement became concentrated in the Nile Valley. After the fourth millennium BCE, Egypt started to extend direct military and political control over her southern and western neighbors. Around 3500 BCE, one of the first sacral kingdoms to arise in the Nile was Ta-Seti, located in northern Nubia. In 814 BCE, Phoenicians from Tyre established the city of Carthage. By 600 BCE, Carthage had become a major trading entity and power in the Mediterranean, largely through trade with tropical Africa. Christianity gained a foothold in Africa at Alexandria in the 1st century CE and spread to northwest Africa. By 313 CE, with the Edict of Milan, all of Roman North Africa was Christian.
The Sao civilization flourished from ca. the sixth century BCE to as late as the sixteenth century CE in Middle Africa. The Kanem Empire was centered in the Chad Basin. It was known as the Kanem Empire from the 9th century CE onward and lasted as the independent kingdom of Bornu until 1900. By the late 16th century the Bornu empire had expanded and during the 18th century, it became a center of Islamic learning. The Shilluk Kingdom was centered in South Sudan from the 15th century from along a strip of land along the White Nile, from Lake No to about 12° north latitude. The Kingdom of Baguirmi existed as an independent state during the 16th and 17th centuries southeast of Lake Chad in what is now the country of Chad. The Wadai Empire was centered on Chad and the Central African Republic from the 17th century. The Tunjur people founded the Wadai Kingdom to the east of Bornu in the 16th century. In the 17th century there was a revolt of the Maba people who established a Muslim dynasty. Between 1300 to 1400 CE, Kongolo Mwamba (Nkongolo) from the Balopwe clan unified the various Luba peoples, near Lake Kisale. In the 1450s, a Luba from the royal family Ilunga Tshibinda married Lunda queen Rweej and united all Lunda peoples. By the 15th century CE, the farming Bakongo people (ba being the plural prefix) were unified as the Kingdom of Kongo under a ruler called the manikongo.
In the 16th century, many ships from the Kingdom of Cambaya in modern-day India sailed to Mogadishu with cloth and spices, for which they in return received gold, wax, and ivory. In the 1140s, Abd al-Mu'min declared jihad on the Almoravids, charging them with decadence and corruption. He united the northern Berbers against the Almoravids, overthrowing them and forming the Almohad Empire. During this period, the Maghreb became thoroughly Islamised and saw the spread of literacy, the development of algebra, and the use of the number zero and decimals. By the 13th century, the Almohad states had split into three rival states. Muslim states were largely extinguished in Spain by the Christian kingdoms of Castile, Aragon, and Portugal. Around 1415, Portugal engaged in a reconquista of North Africa by capturing Ceuta, and in later centuries Spain and Portugal acquired other ports on the North African coast. In 1492, Spain defeated Muslims in Granada, effectively ending eight centuries of Muslim domination in southern Iberia.[2]
Portugal and Spain took the ports of Tangiers, Algiers, Tripoli, and Tunis. This put them in direct competition with the Ottoman Empire, which re-took the ports using Turkish corsairs (pirates and privateers). The Turkish corsairs would use the ports for raiding Christian ships, a major source of booty for the towns. Technically, North Africa was under the control of the Ottoman Empire, but only the coastal towns were fully under Istanbul's control. Tripoli benefited from trade with Borno. The pashas of Tripoli traded horses, firearms, and armor via Fez with the sultans of the Bornu Empire for slaves.[3]
In the 16th century, an Arab nomad tribe that claimed descent from Muhammad's daughter, the Saadis, conquered and united Morocco. They prevented the Ottoman Empire from reaching to the Atlantic and expelled Portugal from Morocco's western coast. Ahmad al-Mansur brought the state to the height of its power. He invaded Songhay in 1591, to control the gold trade, which had been diverted to the western coast of Africa for European ships and to the east, to Tunis. Morocco's hold on Songhay diminished in the 17th century. In 1603, after Ahmad's death, the kingdom split into the two sultanates of Fes and Marrakesh. Later it was reunited by Moulay al-Rashid, founder of the Alaouite Dynasty (1672–1727). His brother and successor, Ismail ibn Sharif(1672–1727), strengthen the unity of the country by importing slaves from the Sudan to build up the military.[4]