Why didn't the Romans ever explore the west coast of Africa?

Why didn't the Romans ever explore the west coast of Africa?

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The Atlantic Ocean?

Because it was a mix of jungles and deserts? They didn't know about the gold deposits there so they had no reason to explore it.

>We can go to some part of the world we have no contact with
>Or just control areas we can actually extend our influence to and control

Why would they?

What would they trade for they couldn't get much easier closer to home?

My guess would be the thousand miles of nothing but desert.

>east coast
>egyptian goods
>gateway to india
>riches of the levant

>west coast
>angry carthaginians
>desert
>angry african barbarians
>gateway to a watery grave
>riches of sandstorms stripping your bones

gee i wonder

A Roman army may not have went to west Africa, but I bet an individual Roman trader did.

There's literally fuck-all going on the northwest coast of Africa to this day. The Sahara is fuckin big yo.

Why would they?

to get more of those delicious brown wimmins of course

Did the Roman state have secret records.

I bet in Roman history there must have been one Roman traveller who went to west Africa and came back to tell the tale.

Those in power, through reports, would have had at least a picture of west Africa.

Same goes for knowledge of China, Siberia, Scandinavia etc. even America. They found Roman coins didn't they.

It might not have been a Roman they got there knowledge from.
They could have tortured a Phoenician sea captain to find out knowledge of the wider world.

The Roman senatorial archives were never published or survived down to our age what secrets do they hold.

>3

If the Romans knew of the Americas through the Bering Strait, would they have bothered going through Russia out of Siberia? They also heard of mass riches.

Image

Rome kept its knowledge in the senatorial archives.

Did these archives survive. Were they transferred to Constantinople?
Did they come back to Italy after Byzantines fall.

Did rome have its own equivalent of the CIA where they held top secret information like triereme designs, or paranormal shit, or knowledge about other continents.

Carthaginians did iirc.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanno_the_Navigator

They probably did. The Carthaginians definitely did centuries earlier getting as far the equator.

...

Literally everyone thought the far south was just desert leading to a red hot hellscape equivalent of the arctic

How,come India, China and Brazil are not desert if they are on the same latitude as the Sahara and the Middle east.

Because the Phoenicians already did

>Roman senatorial records
>OnThisDayDidPubliusExchangeOneFarmsteadForTwentyHeadOfCattle

They have plenty of Vegetation to hold the soil together and stop soil erosion and desertification.

Also the Gobi Desert in Mongolia is at the same latitudes as Western Europe.

Not even remotely true. The Mediterranean world was aware that there were kingdoms and shit on the other side of the Sahara. They traded with them- as did the Carthaginians and Maures

Boats were kind of shit back in the day. They couldn't really make trips out of the Mediterranean

why does Mauritania exist?

Fun fact: The word "gorilla" comes from the name given to black Africans by an ancient Mediterranean explorer (I forget if he was Greek or Roman).

Ah, he was a Carthaginian

>America
Source please.
Theres no way Roman naval tech was good enough to make it to America.

Nope

Hanno and pals found actual gorillas in Cameroon

They were too aggressive to be shipped to Carthage so they were skinned for their furs

Considering Sardinian bronzetti depicted Sub Saharian animals like Antilopes and Gnus back in 800 bc I don't see why not.

This.

Europeans only started looking to the Atlantic when the Ottomans took Constantinople. Europe was an economic backward until the tail-end of the middle-ages and once they started developing the muslims began to fuck with Christian merchants, forcing them to find direct routes to India and China.

Romans could trade with various intermediaries and had relations with Kushans and Indian states.

The answer is naval technology. They reached as far south as the Canary Islands, but after that you have 2 problems with following the African coast:

- It's the fucking desert for thousands of miles. Good luck going for fresh water and supplies.

>You start to have winds against you, and the closer you get to Guinea you also start to have strong currents against you. You can't make it with roman naval technology.

Even if the age of exploration it was hard af for the portuguese to sail along the african coast past Guinea, and it took them a century to finally get to the southern tip of Africa. Once they got there and had already charter the coasts, ships would actually sail west-south west deep into the Atlantic at about the latitude of Guinea and then turn south and eventually east-south east to get to cape of good hope. That was to use the dominant winds and currents in your favour instead of fighting your way through the Gulf of Guinea.

And that's also how they stumbled upon Brazil, the northeastern tip of Brazil to be more precise.

Nobody knows

Romans could barely survive on the English Channel. They were shit scared of the Atlantic. Dominion of Oceanus, and not Posiden.

They found Roman coins in South America on a ancient ship wreck? How

This is the correct answer. There's a reason that the Portuguese had just as much trouble doing it one thousand years later. Every natural element is working against you on that route.

Interestingly enough, there is good reason to believe that the Phoenicians circumnavigated Africa during the reign of Nechos II of Egypt. The difference, though, is that they started in the Red Seas and went around clockwise, which gives you far more favorable winds (it still took them three years though). Hanno had superior ships when he tried three centuries later, but the geography was against him.

Spanish sailor whose hobby was to collect old coins.

Sauce on the Phoenician stuff?

The main source on this is from The Histories

> As for Libya, we know it to be washed on all sides by the sea, except where it is attached to Asia. This discovery was first made by Necos, the Egyptian king, who on desisting from the canal which he had begun between the Nile and the Arabian gulf (referring to the Red Sea), sent to sea a number of ships manned by Phoenicians, with orders to make for the Pillars of Hercules, and return to Egypt through them, and by the Mediterranean. The Phoenicians took their departure from Egypt by way of the Erythraean sea, and so sailed into the southern ocean. When autumn came, they went ashore, wherever they might happen to be, and having sown a tract of land with corn, waited until the grain was fit to cut. Having reaped it, they again set sail; and thus it came to pass that two whole years went by, and it was not till the third year that they doubled the Pillars of Hercules, and made good their voyage home. On their return, they declared- I for my part do not believe them, but perhaps others may- that in sailing round Libya they had the sun upon their right hand. In this way was the extent of Libya first discovered.

Herodotus, like most Greeks, did not believe that Africa was surrounded by water, but rather attached to a larger southern landmass, hence his disbelief.

It's worth noting that historians are divided as to whether this happened or to what extent, but it is certainly feasible

Yes, that could have been done.

Someone with Roman coins went down in a shipwreck. A lot more likely then the Romans unknowingly not being mediocre sailors.

people forget that sailing on the open ocean is very different from sailing in the Mediterranean

Roman seamanship didn;t really advance all that much after the fall of the Republic and it mostly stagnated

not to mention the "Atlantic" was really spooky and roman writing is full of all sorts of crazy myths about it

the Greeks and Carthaginians likely went beyond Gibraltar and into the open ocean to explore but Romans didn't give a shit about that.


for a long time many Romans didn't even believe Britain existed and wrote about how Pytheas was a hack making shit up

The east coast of africa is hard to sail down because the currents go in the opposite direction iirc. It was still possible though, the Carthaginians sent several expeditions down the coast of africa, one of which allegedly reached as far as the Congo (see hanno the navigator). I think navigation technology would have had to improve to make it profitable; and it was potentially profitable, the canaries and madeira could have produced wine, sub saharan africa could have provided slaves and gold and tropical products such as wood

Roman's thought the "south" was just a giant hellish desert where it kept getting hotter and hotter forever until no life could exist


that or that if you went far enough south you'd reach a "bizarro" Rome where everyone is strange and evil.

>they didn't know about the gold deposits there
That's complete bullshit, they even knew about the gold deposits in Malaysia. Any civilization bordering on the Sahara knew what Sub-Saharan Africa had to trade.

woops i mean to say that it's easy to sail down the coast, but on the return trip you're travelling against the current and so it is very taxing to return.

not to mention we know they traded for Gold with the Africans and Roman caravans went pretty far south through the Sahara to at least reach the populated savanna zones

Etruscan art depicts a fuckload of African animals too.
That doesn't really mean anything since all of them could be found in Egypt and even the Middle East.

not to mention these animals existed in North Africa for a long time and in the Near East/India

Learn into climatology, sea currents and wind patters, you berk. Notice that Brazil is easr coast, yet Atacama is west. Namib is west coast, humid Mozambique is east. China is east coast, the Sahara and Arabic semi-desert is to the west. Sonora and Nevada are west coast, Florids and Georgia are east. Eastern Australia is much more pleasant and humid then most of the western half.

There was a species of elephant that is now extinct but that lived in Tunisia, the Etruscans didn't have to go far to see "exotic" animals.

And remember too that lions lived in Greece up until the Mycenaean era

>Myceneaen era

Far, far later than that. More like 200 BC.

Also in some Greek myths the Ethiopians lived in cities made of gold and had the gods dine with them every night.

I meant west coast of Africa fugg

>yfw portuguese kept navigational charts and all that to themselves for a full century.

>ONTHISDAYDIDPVBLIVSEXCHANGEONEFARMSTEADFORTWENTYHEADOFCATTLE
Fixed

>the greeks
Lol absolutely no

Bizarro Rome would be good actually

Cause they didnt want and couldnt get far away from the Mediterranean which allowed for relatively fast travel in a large empire that has no cars trains and aircraft.

I'm pretty sure they think it was chimpanzees he found. In either case, he thought they were a hairy tribe of savage men.

Did these people not ever think about spacing?

>cost
>desert
Leave your basement once in a while bruh.

It's a buffer between sand niggers and nigger niggers

No. It was introduced during the Carolingian Renaissance.

> if you went far enough south you'd reach a "bizarro" Rome where everyone is strange and evil
I don't know why I find this so amusing

These lyrics from the 1982 Toto hit, Africa, may offer a clue. I'm still studying them.

It's gonna take a lot to take me away from you
There's nothing that a hundred men or more could ever do
I bless the rains down in Africa
Gonna take some time to do the things we never had

>you'll never be a roman explorer encountering the uncanny realm of "Remo" where the slaves rule the plebs who rule the patricians and where gay sex is forbidden and cunnilingus is encouraged and war is seen as evil and a waste of life.

Why would they? They were conquerers and builders, not explorers. It's not just cultural. There are sound economic reasons for not investing in exploration: it's often risky, it doesn't always pay off, people may become too imaginative, wanting to live a life beyond the reach of the state, and also debases hte state monopoly on scientific truth. Coincidentally that las may be the reason why the catholic church tried to prevent oceanic exploration for so many centuries. Have you seen those medieval maps full of sea monsters?

>Have you seen those medieval maps full of sea monsters?

yes, yes I have

>where the slaves rule the plebs who rule the patricians and where gay sex is forbidden
>you'll never be a roman explorer encountering the uncanny realm of "Remo" by accidentally entering a wormhole into Soviet Russia

Nice. Art induced fear of the unknown had a curious role on preserving state and church resources, and also in keeping vertical structures of power intact.

>the Greeks and Carthaginians likely went beyond Gibraltar and into the open ocean to explore but Romans didn't give a shit about that.

The Carthaginians definitely did. It's where we get the term "Gorilla"

>Hanno the Navigator[1] was a Carthaginian explorer of the sixth or fifth century BC,[2] best known for his naval exploration of the western coast of Africa. The only source of his voyage is a Greek periplus. According to some modern analyses of his route, Hanno's expedition could have reached as far south as Gabon.
>At the terminus of Hanno's voyage, the explorer found an island heavily populated with what were described as hirsute and savage people. Attempts to capture the males failed, but three of the females were taken. These were so ferocious that they were killed, and their skins preserved for transport home to Carthage. The skins were kept in the Temple of Tannit on Hanno's return and, according to Pliny the Elder, survived until the Roman destruction of Carthage in 146 BC, some 350 years after Hanno's expedition.[4] The interpreters travelling with Hanno called the people Gorillai (in the Greek text Γόριλλαι).

Bump

Why would you want Africa when you control all of Europe, the Mediterranean and the Levant?

>Rome
>control all of Europe

only the good parts ;)

why are carthaginians always named with an "h" for the first letter of their names

Maharbal? Mago?

>they had the sun upon their right hand
What did he mean by this?

i assume you were replying to me. ok so it's two letter now

mind is blown, i did not know that. Thanks for enlightening me user