17. (The Great Empires of Medieval Africa) Overview of Ancient and Medieval Africa

All right, hello there students. The lecture today is on ancient and medieval Africa, right? This is following up on the one we discussed about the Americas, and as I gave you the long preamble about the sort of the reasons why the Americas and Africa get short shrift, in particular in this class, right? The first half of the grand sort of world civilizations. survey, and again, it's mostly a lack of knowledge about the area given the lack of written records. And again, when I say Africa in the context of history, particularly ancient and medieval history, I'm specifically saying sub-Saharan Africa, right? Not the part that's up along the Mediterranean. It's everything down below the Sahara. All right, so much like when we did the Americas, we sort of started with general ideas and sort of you know the parameters of American history we're going to do the same here for Africa and look at the basic parameters of African history. As with the Americas almost everything we know about ancient and medieval Africa comes from archaeology or oral tradition and these sources are limited in what they reveal to us today. Right oral tradition is considered unreliable it is considered more reliable for Africa. Then for the Americas, because Africa does not go through the demographic collapse, right? Africans had been exposed, at least in limited bits, to European diseases, right? Eurasian diseases like smallpox and influenza. So there's no demographic collapse in Africa that traumatizes the people and distorts oral tradition. But oral tradition is still limited in what it can tell us. And then, of course, archaeology can't ask or answer how or why questions. Another general idea about Africa is that Africa is absolutely enormous and it's quite geographically diverse. It's the second largest continent. I don't think most people realize that. We don't really understand how large Africa is in comparison to other places. You know, like the Sudan is like the size of Texas. I mean, it's a very large place. The reason we don't really understand how large it is, is because the typical map. We use our map of the world. If you're thinking of a map of the world right now, just think of one. The one you're thinking of is almost definitely the Mercator projection, which was designed by a German cartographer in the 18th century named Mercator. That's where he gets his name. And Mercator was a racist and a German nationalist. And it was really important to him that when he drew the world, that Germany be as close to the center of the world as possible. So he basically based the entire map on getting Germany as close to the center of the world as he could. The only way he could do this was to distort stuff north of Germany to push Germany south. Because on a normal map of the world, Germany is not very, you know, it's way up in the north, right? It's not near the middle. So he basically had to make the stuff north of Germany extra big, which meant the rest of the world had to be extra small. And so he makes Greenland. for instance, and Norway and Finland, really, really big, way bigger than they are in real life, to push Germany closer, you know, to push Germany south and closer to the center of the world. He had to make up for this distortion somewhere. Again, he's a racist. He doesn't care about African peoples, right? He doesn't care about black or brown people. So he made the global south smaller, right? So in his map, Mexico is only about a third of the size it's supposed to be. India is only about a third of the size it's supposed to be. And more germane to our lecture topic, Africa is about 40% smaller than it should be. And so because that's the map of the world that most people, especially in the U.S. and in Europe, picture. When you say picture map of the world, they picture the Mercator projection. And that map distorts Africa and makes Africa look 40% smaller than it is. And therefore, we don't really have in our heads exactly how big Africa is. Sorry, excuse me. Sorry for the yawn. So Africa is enormous and it's very geographically diverse. And when I say geographically diverse, I mean it has various kinds of geographical regions. So in the north, there's the Sahara Desert, which is a great southern desert as well. So there's desert in both the north and the south. In both north and south, the desert is bordered by a dry plateau. And then in the middle of Africa, there's the savannah, right, the very famous savannah where the lions and elephants and so on play. And then other parts of the center of Africa is rainforest. And there are a few mountains scattered throughout, particularly in the south. One of the things that's probably come through in lectures is that the environment has a lot to do with historical events, particularly things like weather patterns, how much rain, how warm it is, if it's unseasonably warm, if it's unseasonably cold. Those are factors that have mattered a lot in our class. Again, just think back a couple lectures ago, we talked about the crisis of the third century in Rome. One of the reasons for the crisis of the third century in Rome was that it was drier, unusual, and led to crop failure. So the environment matters a lot for a lot, you know, for basically all of world history. It matters more for Africa, right? The environment has a huge determinative effect on African events. And this is mostly because of the extremes of the climate. Again, it's very hot. It's very dry. The rainforest is very wet. And also because of some of the animals that thrive here. So, for instance, in most of Central Africa. the ZZ fly is endemic, right? It's just, it's native. It's part of life in Central Africa. And the ZZ fly makes livestock impossible, right? ZZ flies just carry diseases that kill livestock. So you can't really have horses in the Congo, even today, right? Because the ZZ fly makes it impossible. So that's an environmental factor that nowhere else in the world has to deal with. The Sahara is an uninhabitable desert. It's not like we talked about Arabia. Just a couple of lectures ago, as we were talking about the emergence of Islam, we talked about Arabia has these scattered oases, where these little desert towns will rise up, or there's like a spring and a town will rise up. The Sahara is not like that. You really can't live in the Sahara. It's too dry. There's very few oases. The weather is harsher, so the wind blows a lot more. So the Sahara is like the stereotypical desert with the big shifting dunes. You can't really live there. And rainforests are very difficult to farm. This remains true even today in the 21st century, with 21st century agricultural technology. Sorry. Sorry, I think it's because my posture is causing me to yawn. So rainforests, even in the 21st century, are difficult to farm. Again, even the tractors and high-powered equipment, they were basically impossible to farm in the ancient or medieval periods where the only tools you're allowed to use are tools you can make yourself. So the environment matters a lot there as well. And the coastal areas of Africa, particularly the east coast facing the Indian Ocean, are connected to the world via established sailing and trade routes. Again, particularly Eastern Africa. And then if you want to go above the Sahara, right, and look at Africa along the Mediterranean. So the coastal areas then are much more like global spots, right? Sort of like we talked about when we talked about the Arabian Peninsula, right, and how they're connected to various trade nodes. We'll see this. We'll have a couple examples of like trading centers on the African coast. And our history of Africa today will focus on trade. just because trade generates sort of the most knowledge, right? So the things we know most about in Africa are the trading societies. We know very little about the people who live in the rainforest in the Congo, for instance. But we know quite a bit about people who slay, lived on the eastern coast and are connected to the Indian Ocean trade routes. So again, just to reiterate our history or our geography here, right? So this is the Sahara and it is uninhabitable almost entirely. Then there's a dry plateau on the edge of it. Here's the Kalahari, the southern desert. Again, a dry plateau on the edge of it. The Kalahari is not uninhabitable, only the Sahara. But the Kalahari is very dry. It's a desert. It's more like Arizona, whereas the Sahara is more like the surface of the moon, in terms of what can live there. Most of the scattered mountains are in Ethiopia and Kenya, particularly Ethiopia. You can see the mountain's up as high as 13,000 feet. The rainforest is concentrated in the Congo and also in Benin and Togo. And then the Sahara is in a lot of places. A couple other regions I want you to note just because we'll talk about them. We're going to talk about the island of Kilikasawani, which is here off the coast of Tanzania. And we're going to talk about the Sahel. The Sahel is this region. West Africa beneath the Sahara, the Sahel, and we'll talk about the Great Lakes region. It's here. Modern day Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, the Great Lakes region. Talk about the Great Lakes region and the Sahel mostly today. All right, let's look at Paleolithic and Neolithic Africa. We've actually discussed Paleolithic Africa right way back in our first lecture. This is where humanity emerged. All humanoid species emerge in Africa, including Homo sapiens, which is us. It's also where humans began to flourish. African societies, there's not really a Paleolithic moment, sorry, a Neolithic moment in Africa, right, where the Paleolithic ends and the Neolithic begins, like we saw, say, in Mesopotamia, right, where 10,000 years ago the Mesopotamians become farmers. And Africa... It very much varies from region to region as to when people adopted agriculture. So in certain places, say like Ethiopia, they adopt agriculture very early. And in certain places, say the Congo, they adopt agriculture very, very late. And there are reasons for this that we'll discuss. So in Western and Eastern Africa, they domesticate crops very early for two reasons. One, crops arrived early from Asia and Europe. And two... It's pretty easy to farm in those areas, right? It's as easy to farm in, say, the Sahel or in the Horn of Africa as it is in most of the Middle East or in Europe. And so it made practical sense to become farmers there, and game wasn't quite as abundant, and so hunting and gathering wasn't quite as attractive, and farming was more attractive, and so they farmed. In Central Africa, it takes a much longer time for farming to arrive, and again, the reasons for that... are probably obvious just from the slide, right? Farming is very challenging. In Central Africa, this would also be true on the dry plateaus in Southern Africa and modern day Botswana, modern day North South Africa, they adopt farming very late as well. There are still groups there that have not adopted farming. They are still hunter-gatherers like they were in the Paleolithic Age. And so the reason why those parts of Africa have been so slow to adopt agriculture are twofold they're related so one farming is very challenging again in central africa the zet z fly make livestock impossible right so you can't use animals to plow or haul things um so you know animals help agriculture a lot right animals provide fertilizer and again they they pull plows they pull carts um and You can't have animals in Central Africa. Plus, Central Africa, again, is rainforest. Rainforest is extremely difficult to farm because it's hard to cut rainforest down. You can slash and burn it, but then that's only a temporary fix. The soil in rainforest tends to be quite poor, and just the amount of insect life and bird life is much larger than it is in other parts, in other ecosystems, and bugs and birds eat. crops and eat seeds, right? So there's lots of barriers to farming in Central Africa, and there aren't, so that's part one, and again, the same would be true sort of on the northern edge of the Kalahari Desert down in southern Africa, right? It's just, it's really hard to farm in those areas, and secondarily, or relatedly, sort of the second reason why farming is so slow to catch on in those areas is hunting and gathering is quite lucrative, right? You can hunt and gather very successfully in Central Africa and in northern southern Africa. It's just a lot of natural forage. The game is usually quite abundant and so societies didn't need to adopt farming because again farming was very difficult in large swaths of Africa. Africans developed their own domesticated crops right much like we talked about with the Americans right the Americans have their own crops the Africans do too. Millet and sorghum in particular to accompany mostly wheat. And because it was difficult to plow a lot of Africa and because Africa was often quite dry, right, in various parts, particularly the dry plateaus were very hard to plow. Again, you would see the same thing in, say, the Dakotas in the U.S., right? The Dakotas or eastern Montana is dry plateau. It's very hard to farm dry plateau, particularly without machinery, because it's very difficult to plow, right? And it barely rains. But you can... practice pastoralism. So pastoralism is animal farming. Horticulture is plant farming, right? So in dry plateaus, pastoralism makes a lot more sense than... horticulture. Again, this is what you'd see again in the US in the northern Great Plains or if you want to put in the Eurasian context, the Eurasian steppe. On the Eurasian steppe, the people are pastoralist, but they're nomadic pastoralists. On the Eurasian steppe, they don't practice horticulture because you can't plow the steppe. It wasn't dry enough. The wind destroyed a lot of stuff because the steppe was wide open. A lot of Africa looks like that too. Pastoralism made a lot more sense. Africans became very famous in the medieval period for their prowess at cattle herding. They were the best cattle herding societies in the world in the medieval period, because the African climate and the weather fit better for cattle than it did for horticulture. So the first society to develop iron in Africa are called the Nok. They lived in the Sahel. The Sahel is the semi-arid region in West Africa along the Sahara. The Nok in particular come from modern-day Nigeria. The Sahel is much bigger than that. The Sahel is like modern-day Nigeria, northern Ghana, northern Benin and Togo, Burkina Faso, Senegal, Mali, parts of Mauritania, The Gambia. There's a lot of countries in the modern-day Sahel. Nigeria is where the Nok are from. and they arose sometime between 1500 and or they sort of arose around 1500 BCE and they lasted about 2,000 years until about 500 CE. They began producing iron tools around 700 BCE. Historians debate whether they developed iron technology on their own or whether they learned it from Phoenicians. So again, Phoenicians kind of float around the edge of our class, but they were master sailors. who were Mediterranean, right? Again, their capital or sort of their original cities would have been in Lebanon, Tyre and Sidon, who we've talked about, right? We talked about Alexander the Great, for instance. We talked about the siege of Tyre. And Carthage is another Phoenician city, state, right? So the Phoenicians start in Tyre and Sidon and Lebanon, and they sort of spread throughout the Mediterranean. And they were the best sailors of the Mediterranean world in the ancient era. and of course Carthage goes to war with Rome, but Phoenicians continue to range around. And so there would have been Phoenicians in, say, like Morocco, along the Atlantic coast. And so historians debate whether Phoenicians sailed down to Nigeria, and that's where the Noc learned iron, or if they developed it on their own. We just don't know. And then the Noc spread iron to neighboring societies, and so much of West Africa enters the Iron Age, again, around 500 BCE. The Nock were farmers, but they really only grew two crops, cow peas and millet. So you can imagine if you only got to eat two things your entire life, it's a pretty grim existence. But they were master artists, and that's what they're most famous for today. They have beautiful terracotta clay sculptures. Here's just a couple of examples. They're really cool. If you're ever near Cincinnati, when I was a kid, I went to the Cincinnati Art Museum, and I got to see the Nock sculptures there. there there's a couple there they're really cool most uh most u.s cities would have one or two in the major art museum um one of the big events uh particularly in ancient africa was called the bantu migrations the bantu is like a people group right it's a it's a language family right so the bantu peoples were people who spoke bantu languages there were multiple Bantu languages, just like we've talked about, say, with, if you look at modern languages, right? So like English, English is a Germanic language, right? And so is Norwegian and Dutch and Swedish and Danish and obviously German, right? Those are all Germanic languages. They're all related. So the Bantu peoples speak Bantu languages, again, multiple languages. So there are several different sort of people groups, tribes, you know. to use modern language nations, right? Because we'd say, you know, the Danish nation is different from the Dutch nation, even though they both speak Germanic languages. Anyway, the Bantu peoples were iron-wielding Sahelian Africans, right? They were West African. They have iron. They speak Bantu languages. And historians, and they go on a wild migration, basically across most of Africa called the Bantu migrations. That's a series of migrations. and historians can track them by following the iron, right, because they'll carry iron working with them. And we can also trace them through linguistic records, right, where are people speaking Bantu languages today? That's places where the Bantu migrated. Much like you could trace how Germanic peoples spread from Germany throughout all the regions where they speak Germanic languages today. The Bantu migrations eventually go from West Africa into the Great Lakes region, which I pointed out on the map. And then from the Great Lakes region, they'll eventually go even farther south. Their iron weapons allow them easy conquest when needed. Again, iron-wielding societies always having an edge over... stone-wielding societies, again with the possible exception of the peoples of the Valley of Mexico who have obsidian, which is a stone, but was as good for weaponry as iron. But in general iron weapons beat stone weapons and so the Bantu peoples, if anyone tried to fight them, the Bantu would win. And they use their iron weapons for good agriculture as well. They live mostly on their cattle, but they also grew cereal grains and bananas. And all of that agriculture allowed their population to grow. Population growth also made them more powerful. And so the Bantu people sort of come to dominate the late, ancient, and early medieval periods in Africa just through sheer numbers and technology. As their population swells, they range farther and farther south, right, out of the Great Lakes region again into modern-day Zambia and Zimbabwe. And they reach Zimbabwe by 800 CE. Zimbabwe is really important because Zimbabwe was well connected to global trade routes in the Indian Ocean. So let's then talk about Zimbabwe, right? So great Zimbabwe in the world system. Around 1075 CE these Bantu people who live in Zimbabwe found a new kingdom, the kingdom of Mapungubwe. I'm 80% sure I'm saying that right, Mapungubwe. If there's any Zimbabweans in the class. please correct me, and Mapungubwe is on the modern day border of basically South Africa and Zimbabwe, and they developed a pretty complex and class stratified society. In other words, there's a lot of wealth inequality, and as far as historians can tell, this is Southern Africa's first class stratified society. Remember, class stratification comes with agriculture, and as I told you, in Southern Africa... The peoples there were slow to adopt agriculture because they just didn't need to. Hunting and gathering was quite lucrative, and farming was really difficult in that part of Africa. The Bantu peoples were master farmers, though, so they did farm. And this gave them an edge over their neighbors because if you're really good at farming, it's better than hunting and gathering because you have more people. But because the Bantu peoples were agricultural, they have class stratification. It turns out that Mapungubwe was a terrible place to build a kingdom, so that one quickly declined, but the people who lived there just moved a little farther north and founded a new capital, which they call Lusvingo, but today it's better known by the name we use today, which is Great Zimbabwe. And Great Zimbabwe was founded in 1220. And this new kingdom completely dominates southern Africa, conquering or making its neighbors into tributary states. and was a major mining and trading powerhouse. And so basically the great Zimbabweans, the basis of their economy beyond farming, was gold and copper mining and collecting ivory. In other words, killing elephants, which presumably they would then eat, but they'd keep the ivory. And then they would trade the gold, copper, and ivory into the Indian Ocean trade networks. So they would move those products across. Africa via caravan to the Indian Ocean coast and trade them to Arabic and Indian merchants right for various Asian and Middle Eastern goods the great Zimbabweans seem to have really liked glass beads on which they couldn't manufacture themselves right so when we were talking about the rise of Islam I mentioned how the Indian Ocean sort of have a very complex trading network right the connected Africa to the Middle East, to Persia, to South Asia. And so there's a lot of people movement back and forth. There'd be a really cool class. One I would love to teach is like on just the Indian Ocean world through the ages, right? To start the ancient, move all the way to the modern period and just focus on the people groups and the trade and politics in the Indian Ocean because there's a lot going on there. For instance, there's even settlers who moved from Ethiopia to India. And so they created an Ethiopian society in India for about a century before it collapsed. And so there's a lot of stuff going on sort of in the late medieval period and early modern period in this Indian Ocean world. But Great Zimbabwe plays a very important role. They were sort of the southernmost point in this Indian Ocean system. And again, it was worthwhile for Arabic and Indian sailors to sail down to Great Zimbabwe because they could get... gold and ivory which were high value items that were hard to find elsewhere. So you know just again trying to paint a picture for you here of an Indian Ocean world that's really alive and vital and interesting. Most of the merchants who sail down the Great Zimbabwe operate on a little island called Kila Kisilani. So we're sort of doing a grand tour of Africa here and we're following the trade routes. So next we'll go up to kill a Kisilani but first let's look at pictures of Great Zimbabwe. So this is the ruins of Great Zimbabwe. Apparently you can still visit them today. I've never been to Africa period let alone Zimbabwe. I'd love to go. At least 10,000 people lived in Lusvingo when it was at its peak about 700 years ago. This is the Great Enclosure. It's the largest ancient structure south of the Sahara Desert in Africa. The wall there is about 35 feet high, and the full course of the walls is over 800 feet. And you see these other settlements. The entire city is more than 1,800 acres in size, and it declined. It basically ceased to exist completely around 1450 for unknown reasons. There are theories mostly related to climate collapse that made farming impossible. Maybe there's a disease outbreak. Doesn't seem to be an increase in warfare or violence. So they probably weren't conquered. All right, so the traders who are picking up the gold and ivory in Zimbabwe and then trading it to the rest of the Indian Ocean world are operating out of Kila Kisilwani, which becomes something of a global trade center in the late medieval period. It's just a small island off the coast of eastern Africa in modern-day Tanzania. I don't know if you know any Africans. Most Africans don't say Tanzania, by the way. They say Tanzania, which is way cooler, and I don't know why we adopted the pronunciation of Tanzania, because Tanzania is objectively better. Anyway, Kilikisawani was crucial for all trade in the region, in the southwestern Indian Ocean, because of the wind conditions. Basically, wind conditions in the Indian Ocean. are predicated on the monsoon, right? There's monsoon winds, and about half the year, they blow very strong from west to east, and the other half the year, they blow very strong from east to west, and this is what made the Indian Ocean, sort of, that Indian Ocean world, is what really made it come together, right? It was pretty easy to sail in the Indian Ocean. The Indian Ocean doesn't have the same storms that you would get in the Atlantic or the Pacific, and the winds were very predictable, and... navigation wasn't difficult because you couldn't really get blown off course as long as you knew what the winds were going to do right so the wind makes um trade in the Indian Ocean possible but it puts severe limits on it and basically uh you know if you're on the east side you're going to have to wait for the wind to change to get to the west side and vice versa right because again the wind blows in one direction half the year and the other direction the other half the year and so if you're on the sort of on the far western end and the wind was against you, you would just have to stay and kill a Kisilani, right? So this was sort of the crucial stopping point, again, on the west end of the Indian Ocean, where you would just stay until the wind changed and you'd get back over to the east side, right? So it sort of develops as this major trading hub. The society that developed and killed Kisilani was founded by Swahili-speaking Africans. So Swahili is another language group. in Africa, right? So it's not Bantu, Swahili. The Swahili languages today are based in Kenya and the Great Lakes regions, right? So Rwanda, Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya, they would all speak Swahili languages. And Swahili speakers founded a society on Kilwa Kisilani around 800 CE. Again, it was thriving already by this point with trade, and then it just got better and better. The entire island was purchased by a Shiite Persian. around 1000 CE and fairly quickly converted to Islam. And then Kilwa-Kisilwani expands from there by 1200, the city. So Kilwa-Kisilwani is both an island and the name of the city, right? Much like Manhattan Island today in New York, right? Manhattan is the name of the city. It's also the name of the island. or Vancouver, right? So Kilwa-Kisilani is like that. It's a city and an island. It's the same name. Anyway, by 1200, the city was the capital of an entire sort of political grouping called the Kilwa Sultanate, right? Which was technically part of the Abbasid Caliphate, but not really. And the Kilwa Sultanate dominated the African coast of the Indian Ocean. It's that very lucrative Indian Ocean trade. And this is a trend that you'll see a lot. in old world trade networks, right? So non-American trade networks that develop in the late medieval or early modern periods is it'll be dominated by Muslims, right? And the reason for that was something I alluded to in the lecture on the Americas. It's for trust, right? If you're conducting long-term trade, then you have to trust strangers who you'll never know, right? And whose culture and ways of doing things and language is far different from your own. That's just part of long-term. or of long-distance trade, again, even today. And so what would often happen is in these late medieval and early modern trade routes, they were dominated by, or sort of initiated, and sort of the people who were running them at first were Muslims from the Abbasid Caliphate, right? Again, this is the golden age of the Abbasid Caliphate, the Islamic golden age. Baghdad is the most... advanced city in the world scientifically probably the most advanced city in the world culturally they have all those advances in shipbuilding that i alluded to in the lectures on islam and so it's only natural then they would be the best sailors and the best traders in the world right and they were um but what they were really good at doing was they wanted to build trust with people they were trading with on the far end and so in the very ends of the various muslim trade networks It's over in, say, the Spice Islands of Indonesia or down here in Kilwa, Kisawani. We're here in a couple of slides. We'll go back to the Sahel, right, West Africa. And those will all be trade networks that are sort of they're dominated by, again, Abbasid Caliphate-era Muslims. And so what the Abbasid Caliphate does, or what those traders from the Abbasid Caliphate do, rather, is at the end of their trade networks, they try to convert the people there to Islam. to foster trust, right? I can't really trust a stranger, but a Muslim's not really a stranger, right? And so because the Kilwa Sultanate is Muslim, they dominate the trade in Africa because all the Muslim traders from the Middle East and from India who want to trade in Africa prefer to trade with Muslims because they can trust a co-religionist, right? A Muslim wouldn't cheat a Muslim, right? Was sort of the idea. And so it's a really cool... sort of side effect of these fairly complex late medieval and early modern trade networks that most of the people involved convert to Islam, right? The one exception would be in China and Japan, where they just refuse, they just blanket refuse. I mean, there's a few scattered Muslims about, obviously, but in general, those societies don't convert, right? But anywhere where the Abbasid Caliphate was the chief trade partner, the people on the other end of the trade network were also eventually converted to Islam. Again, just because it builds trust. All right, so we're going to continue our tour, and we're going to be carried by a man called Ibn Battuta. So Ibn Battuta visits Kilwa Qisawani in 1330. So let's talk about Ibn Battuta. He is probably the greatest world traveler in recorded history. I mean, there are people who have traveled longer distances in the 20th century, but we have airplanes and trains, so that's cheating. Ibn Battuta traveled a crazy amount, considering that all he had was horses and boats and his own two feet. And he also serves as a great historical source. In fact, probably the best source of information we have about medieval Africa comes from travel writers, people who were passing through the region, usually for trade reasons. But ultimately, once the Europeans come to the Americas, we'd get the same thing. One of the best sources for the history of the Americas, and say the first two centuries after the Europeans arrived, so from 1500 to 1700, are missionaries. Because missionaries are literate and they're traveling in places that no one else is. But the travel writing is a great historical source, particularly in areas that when the traveler got there, they were preliterate. So... Africa is preliterate, but Ibn Battuta is not. He's a very well-educated man, a Moroccan. 14th century Moroccan. One of the great travelers in the history of the world. He traveled more than 65,000 miles in his life. Again, with horses, ships, and his own two feet. 65,000 miles is around the earth at the equator two and three quarters times for perspective. He went to every single corner of the Islamic world, right? And India and China. And he'd been all over Indonesia, all over India. all over the modern-day Middle East, Central Asia, Spain, Morocco, and he traveled all over Africa. And just before he died, once he'd finished traveling, he recorded all of his travels in a book. And again, so it's great. That book is a great source for us about medieval African history. Some of the travelers are liars and some aren't, right? So Ibn Battuta, he probably exaggerates a little bit every now and then, but he's not a liar. He's considered a quite reliable source, right? Someone who's traveling around the same time as Ibn Battuta, about 100 years earlier, was an Italian from the city-state of Venice, who we'll talk about in a couple lectures from now, called Marco Polo. Marco Polo travels from Venice to China, but he lies a lot. He talked about rooks. I don't know if you know what a rook is, but R-U-K-H. And it's a mythical animal in Muslim traditions. It's kind of a... Like, it's like the Muslim version of a dragon, basically. I mean, Muslims have dragons too, right? But a rook is like a gigantic bird, like a bird, it's basically the size of a 747, and people could, like, sit on them and ride. And Marco Polo said that, you know, he was having dinner in China with all these, like, travelers and dignitaries, and they were telling him about some place called Madagascar that obviously Marco Polo had never heard of. And down there they have rooks. And so Marco Polo goes on for 50 pages talking about rooks. So when I say travel writers are a good source of information, that is true. They are. But they also lie. Or they get fed false information. Marco Polo doesn't know a thing about Madagascar. For all he knows, rooks really do exist. And so he just writes about them as if they exist. But obviously we know that they don't. We've never seen one or skeletons or any indication that one ever existed. Basically birds the size of airplanes. We haven't seen those. So you have to be careful with travel writers. If you're really interested in medieval travel writing, I never recommend podcasts, but I would recommend this one. It's called Medieval Circus. Medieval Circus. And it's all about travel writing in the medieval world. It's really fun. Anyway, Ibn Battuta writes a travel book. On his travels, he passed down the eastern coast of Africa in the 1320s and 1330s. In other words, he passed through Kila Kisilani. And so he wrote about it. That's how we know a lot about it. He also, on his last voyage, he went overland from his native Morocco south through the Sahara Desert and into the Sahel in the 1350s. And that's what we're going to talk about now. So this is a little... We're going to follow Ibn Battuta. So from Kilikisawani, we're going to talk about the Trans-Saharan trade. So when Ibn Battuta ventured through the Sahara in the 1350s, he did it as part of a camel caravan. He reported the average size of a caravan was a thousand camels. By the time that Ibn Battuta made his journey, these trade routes were very long established. They were sort of old hat to the people who did them. They were people who spent their whole life running camels. through the Sahara, but they've been doing it since the 800s. And the way the trade worked, it's really cool. There would basically be like advanced scouts of the caravan. So you got a caravan of a thousand camels, and then there'd be like advanced scouts who are just like, you know, natives to the area and who know the Sahara like the back of their hand. And they would ride one day ahead of the rest of the caravan, and they would place water for the whole caravan because there wasn't enough water in the desert. And the caravans travel slow. I don't know if you ever traveled in a long group, right? Like go hiking by yourself and then go hiking with five people. You'll go much slower with five people, five other people than you will by yourself. Right. So if you're in a caravan of a thousand camels, you're going to move really slowly. And so these guys who are running ahead with the water can move much faster because there's only like eight or ten of them. But they would drop water for the whole caravan. to make sure that everyone could stay hydrated because again the Sahara there's not it's not like the Arabian desert We talked about a couple lectures ago where there are scattered springs and oases most of the Sahara is as dry as dry can be The main trade goods is salt from the north and gold from the south. So salt is absolutely essential for human life. You cannot live without salt. No animal can, in fact, especially mammals. It's absolutely crucial for mammal life to have salt. I grew up on a horse and cattle farm. We had to make sure they had access to salt or they would have died. And in the Sahel... there wasn't a good natural source of salt. So the people had a major salt deficiency. But the Sahel had all kinds, it was probably the most gold-rich region in the world. And so they had all kinds of gold and no salt, so they would trade gold for salt. So the caravaneers would come from the north with salt, and they'd go through the Sahara, get to the, and there's a lot of salt on the edge of deserts, all deserts, on the edge of deserts, there's always a lot of salt. Anyway, so they would... carry the salt down through the Sahara. They would arrive in the Sahel. They would unload the salt, load the camels back up with gold. Everyone would kind of rest for a day or two, right? And then they'd take the gold back north, right? And then when they got on the north side of the Sahara, they would take the gold to the coast, right, to the Mediterranean coast, and then the gold could be traded throughout Europe and Asia. As we talked about with the Silk Road, More than just trade goods travel these routes. Oh, there were other trade goods as well, including slaves. And then here in a couple of slides, we'll get to a famous example of books. Anyway, as with the Silk Road, on these established overland trade routes, more than just trade goods travel, right? Things like technology and ideas travel, most particularly Islam in this case. And so most of the Sahel today, particularly the parts of the Sahel that were connected to North Africa via the Trans-Saharan trade, Those parts are still Muslim today, right? So Islam spread into and throughout West Africa via the trade. Again, I've alluded to the reasons before, right? So the fact that a shared religion builds trust among strangers. As trade networks were set up, more and more Muslims from the Abbasid Caliphate moved into the Sahel and West Africa generally just because they liked it. And Islam also promotes learning Arabic. And if everyone knows Arabic, having a shared language also facilitates better trade. It's easier for me to trade with someone who speaks English than it is for someone to trade with someone who speaks Korean, because I can't speak Korean. If I'm just going to the grocery store and buying fruit, it's nice if the cashier can speak a bit of English, because it's easier for me to deal with someone who speaks my language. And again, Islam spreads Arabic as much as it spreads its own belief system. So here's a map of some of the prominent trade routes. So this is the one that Ibn Battuta did. This empire in Mali is about to be important. And here is Timbuktu, who we'll also talk about. So we're going to talk about Mali and Timbuktu next. The Mali Empire was created... by the great warrior prince Sundiata Keita. Again, one of the great names in history, Sundiata Keita. It's just fun to say. It's fun to spell. Sounds nice when someone else says it, Sundiata Keita, right? Just what a great name. Anyway, he was a great warrior prince. He led his people in a war against the Soso Empire. He wins the war in 1235, establishes his own empire called the Mali Empire, and then... The Mali Empire dominates the southern end of the Trans-Saharan trade route for several centuries. In other words, they become very rich. The Mali Empire basically is just made of gold. Like almost literally their buildings are made of gold. And Keita and his people are Muslim. And we know of their early history because there's a great Arab chronicler who lived there. In other words, a guy born in the Abbasid Caliphate who just moved to the Mali Empire because he liked it. And he was a historian, so he wrote everything down. His name is... Ibn Khaldun. So we know a lot about the Mali Empire thanks to Ibn Khaldun. The Mali Empire reaches its peak in 1307 when Mansa Musa, who was the current ruler at the time, conquered Timbuktu, which is one of the greatest, richest cities in the world. Timbuktu, of course, is still famous today. Mansa Musa, by the way, is a cool guy. When he converted, when he completed his Hajj, and remember a Hajj is the pilgrimage that a Muslim is supposed to make at least once in his or her lifetime to Mecca. So Mansa Musa in the 14th century goes from the Sahel to Mecca. You know, so he goes via caravan across the Sahara and then via boat. across the Mediterranean to Medina, and then from Medina to Mecca on foot. That's the traditional Hajj route. And he was so wealthy, and he had so much gold that he gave away gold along his Hajj. And he gave away so much gold for charitable donations, but also paying people who were providing him services, that the value of gold worldwide plummeted for like 50 years. There's just so much. He literally flooded the world market with gold all by himself. If you know anything about commodities markets, it's a crazy story. By 1300, Mali produced about half of the gold in all of the old world. Now, when the Spanish will discover Mexico, Mexico also has a lot of gold. So Mali's importance will decline a lot by 1500, because Mexico will begin to provide Europe with gold as well, Europe and Asia. In the late medieval period, Mali produces more than half of all the gold in the world. So let's talk a little bit about Timbuktu as a global Islamic center. So the Mali Empire declined after several civil wars in the early modern period, the 15 and 1600s. Timbuktu, however, continued as a major cultural and religious center. The buildings look like this. Yes, it is that cool. It remained a central trade node, bringing West African gold into Europe and the Middle East, even up until, say, 1800 or so. In the 16th century, Muslim scholars founded the University of Timbuktu. At the time, the city had a population of over 50,000, which is quite stunning if you think about it, because it's just in the middle of the desert, really. And with the university, Timbuktu became the center of the world's largest book trade. Because the people who live there are just full of gold, right? They're among the wealthiest population in the world, right? The population of Timbuktu because of all the gold in Timbuktu. But they don't need gold, right? They want books, right? And so they were willing to pay anything you wanted to get books. And so basically all of Eurasia trips over themselves to get books to Timbuktu because the Timbuktuans... would trade gold for the books. And so Timbuktu is very famous in the early modern period, again say 1500 to 1700 for the book trade. And all of this was done with Europeans far away, right, because no European reaches Timbuktu until 1826. And so Europeans might have been giving the books to Arab traders. were African traders, but it was Arab and African traders who took the books across the Sahara to Timbuktu and grabbed the gold. Europeans didn't come. And so Timbuktu takes on sort of mythological proportions in Europe. If you read like 18th century European literature, they're always talking about Timbuktu and they're wondering what it must be like because when I hear Timbuktu, they just think of gold, but no European had ever been there. So there's our whirlwind tour of Africa. Again, we focused on trade and sort of the way that trade currents move technology and religious ideas right throughout the continent. And we discussed sort of the broad themes of African history, right? Why are they so slow to adopt agriculture? Why is it so hard to study medieval Africa? That sort of thing. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed that lecture. It's always a fun one for me. And I will see you next time. Bye.

survey, and again, it's mostly a lack of knowledge about the area given the lack of written records. And again, when I say Africa in the context of history, particularly ancient and medieval history, I'm specifically saying sub-Saharan Africa, right? Not the part that's up along the Mediterranean.

It's everything down below the Sahara. All right, so much like when we did the Americas, we sort of started with general ideas and sort of you know the parameters of American history we're going to do the same here for Africa and look at the basic parameters of African history. As with the Americas almost everything we know about ancient and medieval Africa comes from archaeology or oral tradition and these sources are limited in what they reveal to us today.

Right oral tradition is considered unreliable it is considered more reliable for Africa. Then for the Americas, because Africa does not go through the demographic collapse, right? Africans had been exposed, at least in limited bits, to European diseases, right? Eurasian diseases like smallpox and influenza.

So there's no demographic collapse in Africa that traumatizes the people and distorts oral tradition. But oral tradition is still limited in what it can tell us. And then, of course, archaeology can't ask or answer how or why questions.

Another general idea about Africa is that Africa is absolutely enormous and it's quite geographically diverse. It's the second largest continent. I don't think most people realize that. We don't really understand how large Africa is in comparison to other places.

You know, like the Sudan is like the size of Texas. I mean, it's a very large place. The reason we don't really understand how large it is, is because the typical map.

We use our map of the world. If you're thinking of a map of the world right now, just think of one. The one you're thinking of is almost definitely the Mercator projection, which was designed by a German cartographer in the 18th century named Mercator.

That's where he gets his name. And Mercator was a racist and a German nationalist. And it was really important to him that when he drew the world, that Germany be as close to the center of the world as possible. So he basically based the entire map on getting Germany as close to the center of the world as he could. The only way he could do this was to distort stuff north of Germany to push Germany south.

Because on a normal map of the world, Germany is not very, you know, it's way up in the north, right? It's not near the middle. So he basically had to make the stuff north of Germany extra big, which meant the rest of the world had to be extra small. And so he makes Greenland. for instance, and Norway and Finland, really, really big, way bigger than they are in real life, to push Germany closer, you know, to push Germany south and closer to the center of the world.

He had to make up for this distortion somewhere. Again, he's a racist. He doesn't care about African peoples, right? He doesn't care about black or brown people.

So he made the global south smaller, right? So in his map, Mexico is only about a third of the size it's supposed to be. India is only about a third of the size it's supposed to be.

And more germane to our lecture topic, Africa is about 40% smaller than it should be. And so because that's the map of the world that most people, especially in the U.S. and in Europe, picture. When you say picture map of the world, they picture the Mercator projection.

And that map distorts Africa and makes Africa look 40% smaller than it is. And therefore, we don't really have in our heads exactly how big Africa is. Sorry, excuse me. Sorry for the yawn. So Africa is enormous and it's very geographically diverse.

And when I say geographically diverse, I mean it has various kinds of geographical regions. So in the north, there's the Sahara Desert, which is a great southern desert as well. So there's desert in both the north and the south. In both north and south, the desert is bordered by a dry plateau.

And then in the middle of Africa, there's the savannah, right, the very famous savannah where the lions and elephants and so on play. And then other parts of the center of Africa is rainforest. And there are a few mountains scattered throughout, particularly in the south.

One of the things that's probably come through in lectures is that the environment has a lot to do with historical events, particularly things like weather patterns, how much rain, how warm it is, if it's unseasonably warm, if it's unseasonably cold. Those are factors that have mattered a lot in our class. Again, just think back a couple lectures ago, we talked about the crisis of the third century in Rome. One of the reasons for the crisis of the third century in Rome was that it was drier, unusual, and led to crop failure.

So the environment matters a lot for a lot, you know, for basically all of world history. It matters more for Africa, right? The environment has a huge determinative effect on African events.

And this is mostly because of the extremes of the climate. Again, it's very hot. It's very dry.

The rainforest is very wet. And also because of some of the animals that thrive here. So, for instance, in most of Central Africa. the ZZ fly is endemic, right?

It's just, it's native. It's part of life in Central Africa. And the ZZ fly makes livestock impossible, right? ZZ flies just carry diseases that kill livestock. So you can't really have horses in the Congo, even today, right?

Because the ZZ fly makes it impossible. So that's an environmental factor that nowhere else in the world has to deal with. The Sahara is an uninhabitable desert. It's not like we talked about Arabia.

Just a couple of lectures ago, as we were talking about the emergence of Islam, we talked about Arabia has these scattered oases, where these little desert towns will rise up, or there's like a spring and a town will rise up. The Sahara is not like that. You really can't live in the Sahara. It's too dry.

There's very few oases. The weather is harsher, so the wind blows a lot more. So the Sahara is like the stereotypical desert with the big shifting dunes. You can't really live there.

And rainforests are very difficult to farm. This remains true even today in the 21st century, with 21st century agricultural technology. Sorry.

Sorry, I think it's because my posture is causing me to yawn. So rainforests, even in the 21st century, are difficult to farm. Again, even the tractors and high-powered equipment, they were basically impossible to farm in the ancient or medieval periods where the only tools you're allowed to use are tools you can make yourself. So the environment matters a lot there as well.

And the coastal areas of Africa, particularly the east coast facing the Indian Ocean, are connected to the world via established sailing and trade routes. Again, particularly Eastern Africa. And then if you want to go above the Sahara, right, and look at Africa along the Mediterranean. So the coastal areas then are much more like global spots, right? Sort of like we talked about when we talked about the Arabian Peninsula, right, and how they're connected to various trade nodes.

We'll see this. We'll have a couple examples of like trading centers on the African coast. And our history of Africa today will focus on trade. just because trade generates sort of the most knowledge, right?

So the things we know most about in Africa are the trading societies. We know very little about the people who live in the rainforest in the Congo, for instance. But we know quite a bit about people who slay, lived on the eastern coast and are connected to the Indian Ocean trade routes.

So again, just to reiterate our history or our geography here, right? So this is the Sahara and it is uninhabitable almost entirely. Then there's a dry plateau on the edge of it.

Here's the Kalahari, the southern desert. Again, a dry plateau on the edge of it. The Kalahari is not uninhabitable, only the Sahara.

But the Kalahari is very dry. It's a desert. It's more like Arizona, whereas the Sahara is more like the surface of the moon, in terms of what can live there. Most of the scattered mountains are in Ethiopia and Kenya, particularly Ethiopia. You can see the mountain's up as high as 13,000 feet.

The rainforest is concentrated in the Congo and also in Benin and Togo. And then the Sahara is in a lot of places. A couple other regions I want you to note just because we'll talk about them. We're going to talk about the island of Kilikasawani, which is here off the coast of Tanzania. And we're going to talk about the Sahel.

The Sahel is this region. West Africa beneath the Sahara, the Sahel, and we'll talk about the Great Lakes region. It's here.

Modern day Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, the Great Lakes region. Talk about the Great Lakes region and the Sahel mostly today. All right, let's look at Paleolithic and Neolithic Africa.

We've actually discussed Paleolithic Africa right way back in our first lecture. This is where humanity emerged. All humanoid species emerge in Africa, including Homo sapiens, which is us.

It's also where humans began to flourish. African societies, there's not really a Paleolithic moment, sorry, a Neolithic moment in Africa, right, where the Paleolithic ends and the Neolithic begins, like we saw, say, in Mesopotamia, right, where 10,000 years ago the Mesopotamians become farmers. And Africa... It very much varies from region to region as to when people adopted agriculture. So in certain places, say like Ethiopia, they adopt agriculture very early.

And in certain places, say the Congo, they adopt agriculture very, very late. And there are reasons for this that we'll discuss. So in Western and Eastern Africa, they domesticate crops very early for two reasons.

One, crops arrived early from Asia and Europe. And two... It's pretty easy to farm in those areas, right?

It's as easy to farm in, say, the Sahel or in the Horn of Africa as it is in most of the Middle East or in Europe. And so it made practical sense to become farmers there, and game wasn't quite as abundant, and so hunting and gathering wasn't quite as attractive, and farming was more attractive, and so they farmed. In Central Africa, it takes a much longer time for farming to arrive, and again, the reasons for that... are probably obvious just from the slide, right?

Farming is very challenging. In Central Africa, this would also be true on the dry plateaus in Southern Africa and modern day Botswana, modern day North South Africa, they adopt farming very late as well. There are still groups there that have not adopted farming.

They are still hunter-gatherers like they were in the Paleolithic Age. And so the reason why those parts of Africa have been so slow to adopt agriculture are twofold they're related so one farming is very challenging again in central africa the zet z fly make livestock impossible right so you can't use animals to plow or haul things um so you know animals help agriculture a lot right animals provide fertilizer and again they they pull plows they pull carts um and You can't have animals in Central Africa. Plus, Central Africa, again, is rainforest. Rainforest is extremely difficult to farm because it's hard to cut rainforest down.

You can slash and burn it, but then that's only a temporary fix. The soil in rainforest tends to be quite poor, and just the amount of insect life and bird life is much larger than it is in other parts, in other ecosystems, and bugs and birds eat. crops and eat seeds, right? So there's lots of barriers to farming in Central Africa, and there aren't, so that's part one, and again, the same would be true sort of on the northern edge of the Kalahari Desert down in southern Africa, right? It's just, it's really hard to farm in those areas, and secondarily, or relatedly, sort of the second reason why farming is so slow to catch on in those areas is hunting and gathering is quite lucrative, right?

You can hunt and gather very successfully in Central Africa and in northern southern Africa. It's just a lot of natural forage. The game is usually quite abundant and so societies didn't need to adopt farming because again farming was very difficult in large swaths of Africa.

Africans developed their own domesticated crops right much like we talked about with the Americans right the Americans have their own crops the Africans do too. Millet and sorghum in particular to accompany mostly wheat. And because it was difficult to plow a lot of Africa and because Africa was often quite dry, right, in various parts, particularly the dry plateaus were very hard to plow.

Again, you would see the same thing in, say, the Dakotas in the U.S., right? The Dakotas or eastern Montana is dry plateau. It's very hard to farm dry plateau, particularly without machinery, because it's very difficult to plow, right?

And it barely rains. But you can... practice pastoralism. So pastoralism is animal farming.

Horticulture is plant farming, right? So in dry plateaus, pastoralism makes a lot more sense than... horticulture.

Again, this is what you'd see again in the US in the northern Great Plains or if you want to put in the Eurasian context, the Eurasian steppe. On the Eurasian steppe, the people are pastoralist, but they're nomadic pastoralists. On the Eurasian steppe, they don't practice horticulture because you can't plow the steppe. It wasn't dry enough.

The wind destroyed a lot of stuff because the steppe was wide open. A lot of Africa looks like that too. Pastoralism made a lot more sense. Africans became very famous in the medieval period for their prowess at cattle herding. They were the best cattle herding societies in the world in the medieval period, because the African climate and the weather fit better for cattle than it did for horticulture.

So the first society to develop iron in Africa are called the Nok. They lived in the Sahel. The Sahel is the semi-arid region in West Africa along the Sahara. The Nok in particular come from modern-day Nigeria.

The Sahel is much bigger than that. The Sahel is like modern-day Nigeria, northern Ghana, northern Benin and Togo, Burkina Faso, Senegal, Mali, parts of Mauritania, The Gambia. There's a lot of countries in the modern-day Sahel.

Nigeria is where the Nok are from. and they arose sometime between 1500 and or they sort of arose around 1500 BCE and they lasted about 2,000 years until about 500 CE. They began producing iron tools around 700 BCE.

Historians debate whether they developed iron technology on their own or whether they learned it from Phoenicians. So again, Phoenicians kind of float around the edge of our class, but they were master sailors. who were Mediterranean, right? Again, their capital or sort of their original cities would have been in Lebanon, Tyre and Sidon, who we've talked about, right?

We talked about Alexander the Great, for instance. We talked about the siege of Tyre. And Carthage is another Phoenician city, state, right? So the Phoenicians start in Tyre and Sidon and Lebanon, and they sort of spread throughout the Mediterranean. And they were the best sailors of the Mediterranean world in the ancient era.

and of course Carthage goes to war with Rome, but Phoenicians continue to range around. And so there would have been Phoenicians in, say, like Morocco, along the Atlantic coast. And so historians debate whether Phoenicians sailed down to Nigeria, and that's where the Noc learned iron, or if they developed it on their own. We just don't know.

And then the Noc spread iron to neighboring societies, and so much of West Africa enters the Iron Age, again, around 500 BCE. The Nock were farmers, but they really only grew two crops, cow peas and millet. So you can imagine if you only got to eat two things your entire life, it's a pretty grim existence.

But they were master artists, and that's what they're most famous for today. They have beautiful terracotta clay sculptures. Here's just a couple of examples. They're really cool. If you're ever near Cincinnati, when I was a kid, I went to the Cincinnati Art Museum, and I got to see the Nock sculptures there.

there there's a couple there they're really cool most uh most u.s cities would have one or two in the major art museum um one of the big events uh particularly in ancient africa was called the bantu migrations the bantu is like a people group right it's a it's a language family right so the bantu peoples were people who spoke bantu languages there were multiple Bantu languages, just like we've talked about, say, with, if you look at modern languages, right? So like English, English is a Germanic language, right? And so is Norwegian and Dutch and Swedish and Danish and obviously German, right?

Those are all Germanic languages. They're all related. So the Bantu peoples speak Bantu languages, again, multiple languages. So there are several different sort of people groups, tribes, you know. to use modern language nations, right?

Because we'd say, you know, the Danish nation is different from the Dutch nation, even though they both speak Germanic languages. Anyway, the Bantu peoples were iron-wielding Sahelian Africans, right? They were West African.

They have iron. They speak Bantu languages. And historians, and they go on a wild migration, basically across most of Africa called the Bantu migrations.

That's a series of migrations. and historians can track them by following the iron, right, because they'll carry iron working with them. And we can also trace them through linguistic records, right, where are people speaking Bantu languages today?

That's places where the Bantu migrated. Much like you could trace how Germanic peoples spread from Germany throughout all the regions where they speak Germanic languages today. The Bantu migrations eventually go from West Africa into the Great Lakes region, which I pointed out on the map.

And then from the Great Lakes region, they'll eventually go even farther south. Their iron weapons allow them easy conquest when needed. Again, iron-wielding societies always having an edge over...

stone-wielding societies, again with the possible exception of the peoples of the Valley of Mexico who have obsidian, which is a stone, but was as good for weaponry as iron. But in general iron weapons beat stone weapons and so the Bantu peoples, if anyone tried to fight them, the Bantu would win. And they use their iron weapons for good agriculture as well. They live mostly on their cattle, but they also grew cereal grains and bananas. And all of that agriculture allowed their population to grow.

Population growth also made them more powerful. And so the Bantu people sort of come to dominate the late, ancient, and early medieval periods in Africa just through sheer numbers and technology. As their population swells, they range farther and farther south, right, out of the Great Lakes region again into modern-day Zambia and Zimbabwe.

And they reach Zimbabwe by 800 CE. Zimbabwe is really important because Zimbabwe was well connected to global trade routes in the Indian Ocean. So let's then talk about Zimbabwe, right? So great Zimbabwe in the world system.

Around 1075 CE these Bantu people who live in Zimbabwe found a new kingdom, the kingdom of Mapungubwe. I'm 80% sure I'm saying that right, Mapungubwe. If there's any Zimbabweans in the class.

please correct me, and Mapungubwe is on the modern day border of basically South Africa and Zimbabwe, and they developed a pretty complex and class stratified society. In other words, there's a lot of wealth inequality, and as far as historians can tell, this is Southern Africa's first class stratified society. Remember, class stratification comes with agriculture, and as I told you, in Southern Africa... The peoples there were slow to adopt agriculture because they just didn't need to. Hunting and gathering was quite lucrative, and farming was really difficult in that part of Africa.

The Bantu peoples were master farmers, though, so they did farm. And this gave them an edge over their neighbors because if you're really good at farming, it's better than hunting and gathering because you have more people. But because the Bantu peoples were agricultural, they have class stratification. It turns out that Mapungubwe was a terrible place to build a kingdom, so that one quickly declined, but the people who lived there just moved a little farther north and founded a new capital, which they call Lusvingo, but today it's better known by the name we use today, which is Great Zimbabwe.

And Great Zimbabwe was founded in 1220. And this new kingdom completely dominates southern Africa, conquering or making its neighbors into tributary states. and was a major mining and trading powerhouse. And so basically the great Zimbabweans, the basis of their economy beyond farming, was gold and copper mining and collecting ivory. In other words, killing elephants, which presumably they would then eat, but they'd keep the ivory. And then they would trade the gold, copper, and ivory into the Indian Ocean trade networks.

So they would move those products across. Africa via caravan to the Indian Ocean coast and trade them to Arabic and Indian merchants right for various Asian and Middle Eastern goods the great Zimbabweans seem to have really liked glass beads on which they couldn't manufacture themselves right so when we were talking about the rise of Islam I mentioned how the Indian Ocean sort of have a very complex trading network right the connected Africa to the Middle East, to Persia, to South Asia. And so there's a lot of people movement back and forth.

There'd be a really cool class. One I would love to teach is like on just the Indian Ocean world through the ages, right? To start the ancient, move all the way to the modern period and just focus on the people groups and the trade and politics in the Indian Ocean because there's a lot going on there.

For instance, there's even settlers who moved from Ethiopia to India. And so they created an Ethiopian society in India for about a century before it collapsed. And so there's a lot of stuff going on sort of in the late medieval period and early modern period in this Indian Ocean world.

But Great Zimbabwe plays a very important role. They were sort of the southernmost point in this Indian Ocean system. And again, it was worthwhile for Arabic and Indian sailors to sail down to Great Zimbabwe because they could get... gold and ivory which were high value items that were hard to find elsewhere.

So you know just again trying to paint a picture for you here of an Indian Ocean world that's really alive and vital and interesting. Most of the merchants who sail down the Great Zimbabwe operate on a little island called Kila Kisilani. So we're sort of doing a grand tour of Africa here and we're following the trade routes. So next we'll go up to kill a Kisilani but first let's look at pictures of Great Zimbabwe.

So this is the ruins of Great Zimbabwe. Apparently you can still visit them today. I've never been to Africa period let alone Zimbabwe. I'd love to go. At least 10,000 people lived in Lusvingo when it was at its peak about 700 years ago.

This is the Great Enclosure. It's the largest ancient structure south of the Sahara Desert in Africa. The wall there is about 35 feet high, and the full course of the walls is over 800 feet. And you see these other settlements. The entire city is more than 1,800 acres in size, and it declined.

It basically ceased to exist completely around 1450 for unknown reasons. There are theories mostly related to climate collapse that made farming impossible. Maybe there's a disease outbreak. Doesn't seem to be an increase in warfare or violence. So they probably weren't conquered.

All right, so the traders who are picking up the gold and ivory in Zimbabwe and then trading it to the rest of the Indian Ocean world are operating out of Kila Kisilwani, which becomes something of a global trade center in the late medieval period. It's just a small island off the coast of eastern Africa in modern-day Tanzania. I don't know if you know any Africans. Most Africans don't say Tanzania, by the way. They say Tanzania, which is way cooler, and I don't know why we adopted the pronunciation of Tanzania, because Tanzania is objectively better.

Anyway, Kilikisawani was crucial for all trade in the region, in the southwestern Indian Ocean, because of the wind conditions. Basically, wind conditions in the Indian Ocean. are predicated on the monsoon, right? There's monsoon winds, and about half the year, they blow very strong from west to east, and the other half the year, they blow very strong from east to west, and this is what made the Indian Ocean, sort of, that Indian Ocean world, is what really made it come together, right? It was pretty easy to sail in the Indian Ocean.

The Indian Ocean doesn't have the same storms that you would get in the Atlantic or the Pacific, and the winds were very predictable, and... navigation wasn't difficult because you couldn't really get blown off course as long as you knew what the winds were going to do right so the wind makes um trade in the Indian Ocean possible but it puts severe limits on it and basically uh you know if you're on the east side you're going to have to wait for the wind to change to get to the west side and vice versa right because again the wind blows in one direction half the year and the other direction the other half the year and so if you're on the sort of on the far western end and the wind was against you, you would just have to stay and kill a Kisilani, right? So this was sort of the crucial stopping point, again, on the west end of the Indian Ocean, where you would just stay until the wind changed and you'd get back over to the east side, right?

So it sort of develops as this major trading hub. The society that developed and killed Kisilani was founded by Swahili-speaking Africans. So Swahili is another language group. in Africa, right?

So it's not Bantu, Swahili. The Swahili languages today are based in Kenya and the Great Lakes regions, right? So Rwanda, Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya, they would all speak Swahili languages. And Swahili speakers founded a society on Kilwa Kisilani around 800 CE.

Again, it was thriving already by this point with trade, and then it just got better and better. The entire island was purchased by a Shiite Persian. around 1000 CE and fairly quickly converted to Islam.

And then Kilwa-Kisilwani expands from there by 1200, the city. So Kilwa-Kisilwani is both an island and the name of the city, right? Much like Manhattan Island today in New York, right? Manhattan is the name of the city. It's also the name of the island.

or Vancouver, right? So Kilwa-Kisilani is like that. It's a city and an island.

It's the same name. Anyway, by 1200, the city was the capital of an entire sort of political grouping called the Kilwa Sultanate, right? Which was technically part of the Abbasid Caliphate, but not really. And the Kilwa Sultanate dominated the African coast of the Indian Ocean. It's that very lucrative Indian Ocean trade.

And this is a trend that you'll see a lot. in old world trade networks, right? So non-American trade networks that develop in the late medieval or early modern periods is it'll be dominated by Muslims, right?

And the reason for that was something I alluded to in the lecture on the Americas. It's for trust, right? If you're conducting long-term trade, then you have to trust strangers who you'll never know, right? And whose culture and ways of doing things and language is far different from your own.

That's just part of long-term. or of long-distance trade, again, even today. And so what would often happen is in these late medieval and early modern trade routes, they were dominated by, or sort of initiated, and sort of the people who were running them at first were Muslims from the Abbasid Caliphate, right?

Again, this is the golden age of the Abbasid Caliphate, the Islamic golden age. Baghdad is the most... advanced city in the world scientifically probably the most advanced city in the world culturally they have all those advances in shipbuilding that i alluded to in the lectures on islam and so it's only natural then they would be the best sailors and the best traders in the world right and they were um but what they were really good at doing was they wanted to build trust with people they were trading with on the far end and so in the very ends of the various muslim trade networks It's over in, say, the Spice Islands of Indonesia or down here in Kilwa, Kisawani.

We're here in a couple of slides. We'll go back to the Sahel, right, West Africa. And those will all be trade networks that are sort of they're dominated by, again, Abbasid Caliphate-era Muslims.

And so what the Abbasid Caliphate does, or what those traders from the Abbasid Caliphate do, rather, is at the end of their trade networks, they try to convert the people there to Islam. to foster trust, right? I can't really trust a stranger, but a Muslim's not really a stranger, right?

And so because the Kilwa Sultanate is Muslim, they dominate the trade in Africa because all the Muslim traders from the Middle East and from India who want to trade in Africa prefer to trade with Muslims because they can trust a co-religionist, right? A Muslim wouldn't cheat a Muslim, right? Was sort of the idea. And so it's a really cool... sort of side effect of these fairly complex late medieval and early modern trade networks that most of the people involved convert to Islam, right?

The one exception would be in China and Japan, where they just refuse, they just blanket refuse. I mean, there's a few scattered Muslims about, obviously, but in general, those societies don't convert, right? But anywhere where the Abbasid Caliphate was the chief trade partner, the people on the other end of the trade network were also eventually converted to Islam.

Again, just because it builds trust. All right, so we're going to continue our tour, and we're going to be carried by a man called Ibn Battuta. So Ibn Battuta visits Kilwa Qisawani in 1330. So let's talk about Ibn Battuta.

He is probably the greatest world traveler in recorded history. I mean, there are people who have traveled longer distances in the 20th century, but we have airplanes and trains, so that's cheating. Ibn Battuta traveled a crazy amount, considering that all he had was horses and boats and his own two feet.

And he also serves as a great historical source. In fact, probably the best source of information we have about medieval Africa comes from travel writers, people who were passing through the region, usually for trade reasons. But ultimately, once the Europeans come to the Americas, we'd get the same thing.

One of the best sources for the history of the Americas, and say the first two centuries after the Europeans arrived, so from 1500 to 1700, are missionaries. Because missionaries are literate and they're traveling in places that no one else is. But the travel writing is a great historical source, particularly in areas that when the traveler got there, they were preliterate.

So... Africa is preliterate, but Ibn Battuta is not. He's a very well-educated man, a Moroccan.

14th century Moroccan. One of the great travelers in the history of the world. He traveled more than 65,000 miles in his life.

Again, with horses, ships, and his own two feet. 65,000 miles is around the earth at the equator two and three quarters times for perspective. He went to every single corner of the Islamic world, right?

And India and China. And he'd been all over Indonesia, all over India. all over the modern-day Middle East, Central Asia, Spain, Morocco, and he traveled all over Africa.

And just before he died, once he'd finished traveling, he recorded all of his travels in a book. And again, so it's great. That book is a great source for us about medieval African history.

Some of the travelers are liars and some aren't, right? So Ibn Battuta, he probably exaggerates a little bit every now and then, but he's not a liar. He's considered a quite reliable source, right? Someone who's traveling around the same time as Ibn Battuta, about 100 years earlier, was an Italian from the city-state of Venice, who we'll talk about in a couple lectures from now, called Marco Polo.

Marco Polo travels from Venice to China, but he lies a lot. He talked about rooks. I don't know if you know what a rook is, but R-U-K-H.

And it's a mythical animal in Muslim traditions. It's kind of a... Like, it's like the Muslim version of a dragon, basically.

I mean, Muslims have dragons too, right? But a rook is like a gigantic bird, like a bird, it's basically the size of a 747, and people could, like, sit on them and ride. And Marco Polo said that, you know, he was having dinner in China with all these, like, travelers and dignitaries, and they were telling him about some place called Madagascar that obviously Marco Polo had never heard of.

And down there they have rooks. And so Marco Polo goes on for 50 pages talking about rooks. So when I say travel writers are a good source of information, that is true. They are.

But they also lie. Or they get fed false information. Marco Polo doesn't know a thing about Madagascar.

For all he knows, rooks really do exist. And so he just writes about them as if they exist. But obviously we know that they don't. We've never seen one or skeletons or any indication that one ever existed.

Basically birds the size of airplanes. We haven't seen those. So you have to be careful with travel writers. If you're really interested in medieval travel writing, I never recommend podcasts, but I would recommend this one.

It's called Medieval Circus. Medieval Circus. And it's all about travel writing in the medieval world. It's really fun. Anyway, Ibn Battuta writes a travel book.

On his travels, he passed down the eastern coast of Africa in the 1320s and 1330s. In other words, he passed through Kila Kisilani. And so he wrote about it. That's how we know a lot about it.

He also, on his last voyage, he went overland from his native Morocco south through the Sahara Desert and into the Sahel in the 1350s. And that's what we're going to talk about now. So this is a little... We're going to follow Ibn Battuta. So from Kilikisawani, we're going to talk about the Trans-Saharan trade.

So when Ibn Battuta ventured through the Sahara in the 1350s, he did it as part of a camel caravan. He reported the average size of a caravan was a thousand camels. By the time that Ibn Battuta made his journey, these trade routes were very long established. They were sort of old hat to the people who did them. They were people who spent their whole life running camels.

through the Sahara, but they've been doing it since the 800s. And the way the trade worked, it's really cool. There would basically be like advanced scouts of the caravan. So you got a caravan of a thousand camels, and then there'd be like advanced scouts who are just like, you know, natives to the area and who know the Sahara like the back of their hand.

And they would ride one day ahead of the rest of the caravan, and they would place water for the whole caravan because there wasn't enough water in the desert. And the caravans travel slow. I don't know if you ever traveled in a long group, right?

Like go hiking by yourself and then go hiking with five people. You'll go much slower with five people, five other people than you will by yourself. Right.

So if you're in a caravan of a thousand camels, you're going to move really slowly. And so these guys who are running ahead with the water can move much faster because there's only like eight or ten of them. But they would drop water for the whole caravan.

to make sure that everyone could stay hydrated because again the Sahara there's not it's not like the Arabian desert We talked about a couple lectures ago where there are scattered springs and oases most of the Sahara is as dry as dry can be The main trade goods is salt from the north and gold from the south. So salt is absolutely essential for human life. You cannot live without salt.

No animal can, in fact, especially mammals. It's absolutely crucial for mammal life to have salt. I grew up on a horse and cattle farm. We had to make sure they had access to salt or they would have died. And in the Sahel...

there wasn't a good natural source of salt. So the people had a major salt deficiency. But the Sahel had all kinds, it was probably the most gold-rich region in the world.

And so they had all kinds of gold and no salt, so they would trade gold for salt. So the caravaneers would come from the north with salt, and they'd go through the Sahara, get to the, and there's a lot of salt on the edge of deserts, all deserts, on the edge of deserts, there's always a lot of salt. Anyway, so they would... carry the salt down through the Sahara.

They would arrive in the Sahel. They would unload the salt, load the camels back up with gold. Everyone would kind of rest for a day or two, right?

And then they'd take the gold back north, right? And then when they got on the north side of the Sahara, they would take the gold to the coast, right, to the Mediterranean coast, and then the gold could be traded throughout Europe and Asia. As we talked about with the Silk Road, More than just trade goods travel these routes. Oh, there were other trade goods as well, including slaves.

And then here in a couple of slides, we'll get to a famous example of books. Anyway, as with the Silk Road, on these established overland trade routes, more than just trade goods travel, right? Things like technology and ideas travel, most particularly Islam in this case.

And so most of the Sahel today, particularly the parts of the Sahel that were connected to North Africa via the Trans-Saharan trade, Those parts are still Muslim today, right? So Islam spread into and throughout West Africa via the trade. Again, I've alluded to the reasons before, right?

So the fact that a shared religion builds trust among strangers. As trade networks were set up, more and more Muslims from the Abbasid Caliphate moved into the Sahel and West Africa generally just because they liked it. And Islam also promotes learning Arabic.

And if everyone knows Arabic, having a shared language also facilitates better trade. It's easier for me to trade with someone who speaks English than it is for someone to trade with someone who speaks Korean, because I can't speak Korean. If I'm just going to the grocery store and buying fruit, it's nice if the cashier can speak a bit of English, because it's easier for me to deal with someone who speaks my language.

And again, Islam spreads Arabic as much as it spreads its own belief system. So here's a map of some of the prominent trade routes. So this is the one that Ibn Battuta did. This empire in Mali is about to be important.

And here is Timbuktu, who we'll also talk about. So we're going to talk about Mali and Timbuktu next. The Mali Empire was created... by the great warrior prince Sundiata Keita. Again, one of the great names in history, Sundiata Keita.

It's just fun to say. It's fun to spell. Sounds nice when someone else says it, Sundiata Keita, right?

Just what a great name. Anyway, he was a great warrior prince. He led his people in a war against the Soso Empire.

He wins the war in 1235, establishes his own empire called the Mali Empire, and then... The Mali Empire dominates the southern end of the Trans-Saharan trade route for several centuries. In other words, they become very rich. The Mali Empire basically is just made of gold.

Like almost literally their buildings are made of gold. And Keita and his people are Muslim. And we know of their early history because there's a great Arab chronicler who lived there.

In other words, a guy born in the Abbasid Caliphate who just moved to the Mali Empire because he liked it. And he was a historian, so he wrote everything down. His name is... Ibn Khaldun.

So we know a lot about the Mali Empire thanks to Ibn Khaldun. The Mali Empire reaches its peak in 1307 when Mansa Musa, who was the current ruler at the time, conquered Timbuktu, which is one of the greatest, richest cities in the world. Timbuktu, of course, is still famous today.

Mansa Musa, by the way, is a cool guy. When he converted, when he completed his Hajj, and remember a Hajj is the pilgrimage that a Muslim is supposed to make at least once in his or her lifetime to Mecca. So Mansa Musa in the 14th century goes from the Sahel to Mecca. You know, so he goes via caravan across the Sahara and then via boat.

across the Mediterranean to Medina, and then from Medina to Mecca on foot. That's the traditional Hajj route. And he was so wealthy, and he had so much gold that he gave away gold along his Hajj. And he gave away so much gold for charitable donations, but also paying people who were providing him services, that the value of gold worldwide plummeted for like 50 years.

There's just so much. He literally flooded the world market with gold all by himself. If you know anything about commodities markets, it's a crazy story. By 1300, Mali produced about half of the gold in all of the old world. Now, when the Spanish will discover Mexico, Mexico also has a lot of gold.

So Mali's importance will decline a lot by 1500, because Mexico will begin to provide Europe with gold as well, Europe and Asia. In the late medieval period, Mali produces more than half of all the gold in the world. So let's talk a little bit about Timbuktu as a global Islamic center. So the Mali Empire declined after several civil wars in the early modern period, the 15 and 1600s. Timbuktu, however, continued as a major cultural and religious center.

The buildings look like this. Yes, it is that cool. It remained a central trade node, bringing West African gold into Europe and the Middle East, even up until, say, 1800 or so.

In the 16th century, Muslim scholars founded the University of Timbuktu. At the time, the city had a population of over 50,000, which is quite stunning if you think about it, because it's just in the middle of the desert, really. And with the university, Timbuktu became the center of the world's largest book trade.

Because the people who live there are just full of gold, right? They're among the wealthiest population in the world, right? The population of Timbuktu because of all the gold in Timbuktu. But they don't need gold, right?

They want books, right? And so they were willing to pay anything you wanted to get books. And so basically all of Eurasia trips over themselves to get books to Timbuktu because the Timbuktuans...

would trade gold for the books. And so Timbuktu is very famous in the early modern period, again say 1500 to 1700 for the book trade. And all of this was done with Europeans far away, right, because no European reaches Timbuktu until 1826. And so Europeans might have been giving the books to Arab traders. were African traders, but it was Arab and African traders who took the books across the Sahara to Timbuktu and grabbed the gold. Europeans didn't come.

And so Timbuktu takes on sort of mythological proportions in Europe. If you read like 18th century European literature, they're always talking about Timbuktu and they're wondering what it must be like because when I hear Timbuktu, they just think of gold, but no European had ever been there. So there's our whirlwind tour of Africa.

Again, we focused on trade and sort of the way that trade currents move technology and religious ideas right throughout the continent. And we discussed sort of the broad themes of African history, right? Why are they so slow to adopt agriculture? Why is it so hard to study medieval Africa?

That sort of thing. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed that lecture. It's always a fun one for me.

And I will see you next time. Bye.

Transcript for:17. (The Great Empires of Medieval Africa) Overview of Ancient and Medieval Africa

Transcript for:
17. (The Great Empires of Medieval Africa) Overview of Ancient and Medieval Africa