Did the Romans/Byzantines ever attempt expansion into Sub-Saharan Africa? Was there ever mention of it?

Did the Romans/Byzantines ever attempt expansion into Sub-Saharan Africa? Was there ever mention of it?

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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amanirenas#Roman_Conflict
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They only conquered places worth conquering

The lower regions of the Nile had areas of gold mining deposits, plus there were numerous tribal peoples employed as mercenaries and scouts in the past. Not to mention Central Africa was ripe with game and farming land, and secure from any powers large enough to threaten Roman sovereignty (ie Persians or Germanic raids).

I would have thought it something the Romans would consider putting resources into.

Probably, but it would have been too strenuous to establish colonies in Central Africa. Rome and Byzantium were in an almost perpetual state of conflict, and putting resources into a very risky colonial expedition that would otherwise go towards a war or bureaucratic effort basically made any arguments towards it null and void.

Well I was just shitposting the first time, but probably because it was so far away and would've cost too much to conquer. In addition disease would've decimated the Romans

>tfw no romanized Ethiopia
Would it kill them to go a bit under Egypt?

Central Africa is dense jungle and has the Sahara to the north.

That is a big pain in the ass to get to, either way you try. Virtually impossible to cross the Sahara, as even 'Egyptians were Chadic niggers' advocates accept.

There was just no incentive to continue south of Egypt, because it would require defending yet another frontier and dealing with yet another foreign people with no civilization.

Conquering worthless lands full of hostile barbarians is what caused most of Rome's grief in the first place.

I once read that Nero levied three legions for an invasion of Ethiopia but the Jewish revolt prevented that.

>Sahara desert in the way
>Nubia provides more than enough gold and ivory
>Ethiopian highlands in the way
>Tsetse flies and mosquitoes kill any and all white men who dare cross into the dark continent
>Humid as fuck, hotter than balls
>Poor farmland

Golly

>ywn be a Roman centurion promoted to colonial governor in Nysaland, with a lovely nubian princess wife soft with speech but great with heart to help you look after your people in the strange land of pink sunsets and grinning crocodiles

The Nile was a pretty famous travel lane into Africa

You still have jungle to traverse when going West, don't you?

And they used the Nile... they just had no reason to deviate from it.

Well they could've created colonies or outposts on the riverbank, maybe in the raised platforms that the natives employed to protect them from floodwater. That way they're still able to travel back to Egypt.

The Nile gets more and more harsh the further south you go.

Below egypt the nile goes through a whole big pile of nothing and ends up in slightly better than nothing but everything kills you

The Nile is a merciless bitch when you get past central sudan

>They can just ride the Nile no biggie
I'll take cataracts for 800 Alex

>white guys building settlements next to massive bodies of water in sub Saharan Africa before the late 19th century

What could possibly go wrong?

*bzzt*

Roman Apocalypse Now when?

The Fang people of Cameroon have a legend about doing battle with iron men dressed in red cloth in the mythical age

Just sayin

Go on....

The story apocalypse now is based on was actually set in africa

I thought that was the Carthaginians?

Yeah I just said Apocalypse Now because of the military aspects

>I adore the smell of Pitch in the Sunrise

I know im just saying apocalypse now works perfectly in africa, since thats where the original story is set

You mean the movie based off of Heart of Darkness was actually based of an obscure Cameroon myth?

Purple

Im not the camroon guy, im just saying that heart of darkness being set in africa makes a roman/nile version of apocalypse now more plausible as an idea

I love these kind of things, the ancient Explorers describing places we didn't even know they acknowledged as actually existing. Like the Phoenicians describing Cornwall as the 'Tin Isles', or the very obscure accounts of interaction between Rome and the Han Dynasty

The clue is in the name.

The Sahara is a big enough natural obstacle to cut the communication lines of an empire quite easily.

Heart of Darkness was all about European imperialism of the 19th century not Roman imperialism of the 1st century.

I think they've probably tried numerous times, but in the pre-industrial age it was VERY hard to establish colonies and civilization in Africa, the place has very aggressive geography, climate and wildlife. So aggressive in fact the people who live there had to adapt to the point where foreigners think them part of that wildlife.

Shit land.

They were more likely, and would have been better off small poxing and settling North America.

Whew, imagine a Roman Empire that held the east coast of the U.S. in 200. Would be pretty crazy.

The iron men were said to be pale, immortal, and always in conflict with the legendary Oku clan

The saga of the Oku clan follows their attempts to gain the potion of immortality from the iron men

Then it gets all trippy with both sides riding gigantic elephants made of iron and shooting rainbows, fireballs, and other shit at each other. Battles of magic where thousands got killed. Flying around and building underground forts and shit.

It was at one point we were wizards and shit.

>Thinking Heart of Darkness is in any way reliant on its setting
Conrad would be disappoint.

>Romans
>using elephants
So you're saying they fought Carthage

The colonies would have rebelled and branched off into their own weird Roman-American culture. Rome couldn't even keep itself together consistently in its history within Europe, never mind beyond it.

I don't, that's why I said imagine a Roman Apocalypse Now

Who knows

Augustus tried to invade Ethiopia, got his ass kicked, told everyone he won anyway because it's not like anyone was going to check.

FFS i'm just a roman version of the story would be cool

maybe it was vagabond Romans and Carthaginians who were expelled from their respective civilizations, so they banded together and tried to make their fortune where no one could punish them

Kek

>we wuz fighting romanz n shiet

Keep it 300

I don't know about the Romans, but the Byzantines would never have been able to do it. They could barely hold onto what possessions they already had, never mind colonizing jungles.

Adding to this, I think the only pre-colonial Empire that could have feasibly colonized the lands below the sixth cataract would have been the Ottomans

Sassanids and their Achaemenids fore-bearers certainly did to a small extent. Dunno about the Romans or Byzantines, though. I know that Cambyses compelled the Nubians and Aethopians to accept Persian vassalage.

Don't you mean the Kang people.

>Why didn't two massively overextended empires with limited population and resources not expand into sparsely populated regions they knew little about.
Gee OP, I have no clue.

They're a village people in Botswana actually

Didn't stop them going into Northern Europe and Crimea

>Battles of magic where thousands got killed
Are you sure this isn't a Wewuzian account of the Hyperwar?
Rome used elephants early on.

>Are you sure this isn't a Wewuzian account of the Hyperwar?
Most mythical conflicts from around the world are corrupted memories of the Hyperwar, this has been thoroughly established in the literature

And they got punished for it severely.

Crimea was conquered by Caesar's Pontic allies and became a client kingdom. And the Romans never established control over Northern Europe.

True, but they still made the attempt

Maybe romans just didnt like nigs?

They were allies with the Ethiopians so there wasn't really any point. They did come into conflict with Nubia but they worked out some peace treaty and generally got along fine after that, and then after the conversion of Nubia to Christianity I assume they were relatively friendly.

The rest of Africa had no real connection with the Roman world at the time.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amanirenas#Roman_Conflict

>Did the Romans/Byzantines ever attempt expansion into Sub-Saharan Africa? Was there ever mention of it?
Yes. Nero sent an expedition up the Nile but it failed because the water hyacinths clogged up the river denying nero's vessels passage to the Sud of Nubia

Romans thought Africans were superior to Celts and other northern Barbarian peoples

Isnt that referring to north africans though?

The main Roman trading port in the Red Sea was Berenice which was already far enough from central control. The Nile is a bitch to explore on foot or by sailing upstream and the Romans were more concerned with lucrative trade with India and Eastern African nations than conquest. The majority of the merchant ships in the Indian Ocean were from South Asia.

Crimea was easily reached by ship and its Greek population had traded wheat and slaves with Greece proper for centuries before the Romans arrived. Once the center of power moved to Constantinople it was even closer to the capital.

Even with Roman road building techniques, marching into the interior of a continent was always slow compared to travel by ship.

No, referring to the Aethiopians who were revered by the Greeks prior to Romans.

read Soldier of Sidon, it's sorta got what you're wanting

By chance, aren't the Cameroonian guys the same niggers with R1b "Western Indo-European" Y haplogroup just so happened to be in large quantities in a region its very distant ancestors left many tens of thousands of years ago?

Beautiful map.
So when getting from the centre to the outermost point by fastest way possible became longer than 1 month, the Empire stopped caring.
Gives an insight why Romans abandoned Dacia and Britania even with all the gold, silver and tin deposits - too far to get orders and revenue from.

Same with conquering Nubia and Ethiopia - too far to extract value from, too little value to care in the first place.

So basically Romans using ballistae?

Do you people really not know anything?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cataracts_of_the_Nile

>posts long after everything is cleared

good job dumb cunt

That's why no European saw its source till the 19th century, right?

R1b's from Central Asia and relatively new to Western Europe and Africa.

Three hundred bitches in a toga

>And the Romans never established control over Northern Europe.
the Romans(and greeks btw.) came from northern Europe you twat

can't build civilisation without Germanic genes.

Source?

here's your reply

Other way around, Africans expanded into Rome. That's why Italians look the way they do.

>can't build mud huts without Germanic genes.
Fixed

They conquered Britain you baka.

I think the Sahara got in their way of the rest of Africa past the North

Malaria btfo people who don't have a copy of the sickle cell genes (aka malaria resistance genes)

The Fang tribe is from south Cameroon

And in Heart of Darkness, while riding up the Thames, the protagonist muses the experiences of Romans venturing into barbaric Britannium must have been very similar to his own.

I'm sure Coppola must have considered that with Americans going up the Mekong.

Interesting thing about sickle cell. Nowadays it's commonly associated with West Africans and their descendants. That's due to the widespread malaria in those regions, it confers resistance.

But there was a Nature paper, maybe 15 years old now? They traced the evolution of the sickle cell gene, it's not limited to West African populations. In fact, what the geneticists discovered is that the gene is only about 2300 years old, the earliest "patient zero" was probably in the region of ancient Greece. Then, within the span of a single generation, it had traveled into Asia Minor, Persia, northern Africa, and as far away as India.

So they conjecture that the original carrier of the gene must have been a soldier in Alexander the Great's army. It was just a mutant gene. At first conferred on benefit. Spread around, at first due to this massive conquest. And then established itself in places with high frequencies of malaria and remained there.

>riding elephants
Sounds carthaginian
>shooting rainbows, fireballs
Sounds like Greek Fire

That's not true. He made peace with the Kushites when they threatened him again. They said

"The Candace sends you these Golden arrows. If you want peace they are a token of her friendship and warmth. If you want war, you are going to need them."

I suposse this map considers time travel using trains and no sleep at all because arriving to southeast asia in less than 40 days before airplane, literally how

The Romans had control of the Atlas mountains which is crammed with mineral resources. And they could always get gold from sub-Saharan Africa from caravan trade.

>Romans get a headstart on coffee

THINK OF THE POSSIBILITIES

Conquering Axum would have been a waste of time when there was more money to be made through trade with them.

A lot of comments arguing Roman reluctance because of logistical/resource reasons, which is poppycock. The Romans simply didn't conquer sub-saharan Africa because they couldn't, if they were capable they would have sent Legions almost certainly.

Just like how the Romans couldn't conquer Germania, right?

Exactly

Germanicus had plenty of success, he was just fucked over from internal politics.

Same thing happened with campaigns that could have, and were in the process of, taking all of Caledonia.

Nigga water hyacinths are not native to Africa
Chadic R1b is older than the neolithic revolution, it's an old backcross migration that is probably as old as Ethio-Somali and true native North African populations

Roman's fought as far south as Garamantia but made not of their travels further south. They also knew of Rhapta and did trading along the Indian littoral.

Could they conquer say any subtropical region in Sahelian or Forest Africa? No, they'd die of disease and malnutrition and would probably be easy pickings to the herding and farming peoples.

Romans did expeditions to Senegal, Lake Chad and Northern Uganda during the dry season for commercial reasons though about 2k years ago

>romans did expeditions to senegal, lake chad and northern uganda
Source on this?

There is still quite a differencein distances

>Nigga water hyacinths are not native to Africa
It's a line from a song. Still the river did get clogged as far as I know, the Sudd is really hard to penetrate