Unlike the Atlantic slave trade, the transportation of slaves from Africa to Asia and the Mediterranean was of great antiquity. The earliest evidence of the trade comes from a carving in stone from 2900 bce at the Second Cataract depicting a boat on the Nile packed with Nubian captives for enslavement in Egypt. Over the next five thousand years, slaves captured in war and raids or purchased in the market were marched down the Nile, across the Sahara Desert to the Mediterranean, or transported over the Red Sea and from the East African coast to Asia. The dynastic Egyptians also took slaves from the Red Sea region and the Horn of Africa, known to them as Punt. Phoenician settlers along the North African littoral enslaved the peoples of the immediate hinterland. The Greek and the Roman rulers of Egypt continued the practice of raids into Nubia, and sent military expeditions from their cities along the southern Mediterranean shore, which returned with slaves from the Fezzan and the highlands of the Sahara. African slaves, like those from Europe, were used in the households, fields, mines, and armies of Mediterranean and Asian empires, but Africans were only a modest portion of the Roman slave community because the abundant supply of slaves from Asia Minor and Europe was more than adequate for the economic and military needs of the empire. Not surprisingly, African slaves were more numerous in the Roman cities of the Mediterranean littoral.

There can be no precise estimate of the number of slaves exported from Africa to the Mediterranean basin, the Middle East, and the Indian Ocean before the arrival of the Arabs in Africa during the seventh century. Between 800 and 1600, the quantity of evidence for the estimated volume of slaves improves slightly. Until the seventeenth century, the evidence is derived mostly from accounts of travelers and descriptions of slave markets in the commercial towns of North Africa, from which only maximum and minimum numbers at best can be extrapolated, given the paucity of direct data. There is, however, a considerable amount of indirect evidence from accounts of the trade, and evidence of strong demand for slaves for military service, from which general estimates of the Asian slave trade can be proposed.