Ancient Africa: A Global History, to 300 CE offers a comprehensive study of the significant contributions of Africa to ancient world history from 68,000 BCE to 300 CE. Ancient Africa challenges historians, even African historians, to reevaluate African contributions to world history in the ancient era. Dr Christopher Ehret is the foremost historian of early African history, and his extensive research on ancient history of the world has placed him in a unique situation to contest historical narratives that often either minimize Africa’s role or exclude it. As Ehret reminds us, about 50,000 years ago, the primary ancestors of all humans alive today resided in East Africa. Some began to migrate away from the continent, yet many remained and their history continued as it did for the rest of humanity. Ehret challenges the concept behind the term “prehistory”, which is often used to describe historical eras for people outside the Western world and implies some lower rung of the “civilization ladder”. It has often been applied to societies without written languages, and, consequently, supports a Eurocentric view of history, which implies that people do not make history if they cannot write about it.
Ancient Africa is an excellent resource for teaching early world history that accurately includes African contributions. For those teaching African history it will be an essential text to aid students in contextualizing Africa within world history. Ehret is a historical linguist who, in addition to linguistics, uses archeology, oral tradition, comparative ethnography, and genetics to write early histories of Africa. This text is an excellent introduction to the study of both early African and world histories, because Ehret presents clear themes, accessible examples, and informative charts. For some, the linguistic evidence may be a bit complicated, but it does introduce students to the use of linguistic and other historical methodologies as a way to recapture early history.
Chapter One is an introduction to the structure of the book and the historical themes that are covered. Here, Ehret argues that, since all modern humanity began in Africa, it is essential to include Africa in world history because it has always been an important component of the human story. Chapter Two examines early technological innovations in the world with an emphasis on Africa. The three major technologies and innovations centered in this text are ceramics, metallurgy, and weaving. Pottery and ceramics were an important part in the transition from forgers to farmers since the discovery of pottery meant that grains and other foods could be cooked, thus dramatically increasing the variety of the human diet. The first pots were made along the Yangtze River in China almost 20,000 years ago. While Africa was not the first to innovate ceramic technology, by 9500 BCE, people in West Africa were already making and firing pots. Around the same time, an independent invention of pottery emerged in the eastern Sahara. African women played a central role, not only in these early innovations but also as the primary producers of ceramic items throughout history.
Iron and other type of metallurgy are much more recent technologies and are primarily produced by mature males. It was believed that iron production in Africa was a borrowed technology from South Arabia, but linguistic and archeological evidence now shows that, in fact, iron smelting was independently innovated in at least three different regions of Africa. The archeological excavations in Africa keep showing earlier and earlier dates, and how quickly the technologies spread. Significantly, African technology was so advanced that using traditional techniques and simply moderating the oxygen flow, iron workers were able to produce steel long before it was developed elsewhere in the world.
The final technology discussed in Chapter Two is what Ehret calls “mechanical inventions”, which are the weaving of cloth. One type of cotton was domesticated independently in Peru and Central America and another in Africa and Asia. The earliest weaving on looms is documented in Nubia around 5000 BCE, which is 1000 years before India and 2000 years before Peru. Africans also wove cloth from raffia palm fronds and this type of weaving can be dated to 3000 BCE. In more recent times, Raffia cloth has been used for both clothing and currency.
Chapter Three examines the agricultural innovations in ancient Africa that women historically discovered and perfected. Even in modern times, it is mainly women who possess and control the technological knowledge of farming. Major African grains, such as pearl millet, sorghum, finger millet, and cowpeas (black eyed peas), were being farmed as early as 7500 BCE. Sorghum reached northern China between 3000 BCE and 1000 BCE where it became a key grain source. African grains were grown in India around 1000 BCE. While women innovated and refined agriculture, men are believed to have been the first to domesticate livestock. Around 10,000 years ago, Africans domesticated their own type of cattle and later domesticated donkeys, which were the main beasts of burden in regions without TseTse flies.
Ehret discusses long-distance commerce in Chapter Four of Ancient Africa. Archeological evidence shows that cities and major long-distance trade had developed in West Africa between 2000 BCE to 1500 BCE. The Sahara Desert was no longer lush and green and was a barrier to the Levant, thus the long-distance commerce was innovated by Africans south of the desert. The Congo Basin of Central Africa took advantage of the numerous rivers to transport long-distance commerce as early as 1000 BCE. Currency was another important aspect of the commercial revolution. In West Africa, it was gold dust and, later, cowry shells; in the Congo Basin, it was often iron products, copper crosses, and raffia. Africans, like all peoples in the ancient world, had different approaches to the commercial revolution based on environment and historical social institutions.
In Chapter Five, Ehret confronts all the ahistorical assumptions that Ancient Egypt was not African. For most of the twentieth century, scholars believed that Ancient Egypt was a mythical Middle Eastern culture, plopped onto the African continent. Ehret presents evidence to prove that Ancient Egypt was an African polity. Archeology and linguistics have shown that Egyptian culture and economics were based on earlier societies both in the Horn of Africa and Nubia. Linguistically, Ancient Egyptians spoke an Afroasiatic or, as Ehret writes, an Afroasian language. These are part of a massive African language family in which only a small branch – the semitic languages, such as Arabic, Hebrew and Aramaic – are spoken outside of Africa. Another key piece of evidence that Ancient Egypt was African is that, as the Green Sahara dried up, the people who had lived there moved west to West Africa, south to Central Africa, and east to the Nile Valley. No one is questioning the Africanity of West Africans or Central Africans. It is sad that the colonial division of the world and the ideology of Social Darwinism have so distorted the history of Ancient Egypt.
In Chapter Six, Ehret sums up global history from 20,000 BCE to 300 CE. The innovation of agriculture happened during a time when the earth was warmer, 9700 BCE to 5000 BCE. This is when agriculture developed everywhere, except Europe. The Green Sahara was where Africans domesticated cattle and grain crops. Ehret, unlike most who write about world history, includes discussions about the role of gender within the economic, social, and political transformations. He argues that, in many regions of the world, such as Africa, Native America, and Oceania, women were not necessarily subordinate to men. Women, especially older women, were important in community decision-making. Centralization or social stratification in Africa did not mean that women automatically became a subordinate gender. In many parts of Africa, from Nubia to Nigeria and Namibia to Tanzania, there were many queens, queen mothers, and other powerful women, usually mothers or grandmothers. A key aspect of their maintenance of authority, according to Ehret, was that women as wives remained part of their extended birth families, and, even in Muslim areas, wives were not economically (or emotionally) dependent on their husbands.
Ehret concludes the book by signaling that the word “civilization” was never used in his text. Generally, the history of civilizations has meant studying societies that had centralized power and a way to enforce it, as well as large building and monuments. The term “civilization” has been used in recent times by historians in the West to denigrate and dismiss any society they wanted to vilify or conquer. Africa is often viewed as peripheral to world history because historians, even those of Africa who originate outside of the continent “have not performed the informative necessary exercise, metaphorically, of planting their feet in the middle of the African continent and looking outward from there at the long-term courses of human history”.
While economic historical innovations are discussed in detail, the social and cultural roles of Africans and others examined in this text allow readers to view a more complete analysis of ancient history. For undergraduate students, this text presents easily understood themes and conclusions, but Ehret also teaches how to recapture history beyond archives or written documents, and this will broaden students' approach to historical studies in general. Ehret’s bold analysis of ancient world history challenges all of us to look beyond accepted narratives.
