Why didn't rome just take all of Africa? Did they fear the black warrior?

Egyptians did use some Kush mercs though. So they would technically be fighting blacks.

Sage.

Well one Roman legion was sent to discover the source of the Nile. They had to go back because it turns out black Africa is a difficult terrain.

WE

>going for the subtle we wuz

Look at a map of North Africa, notice all that yellow sand texture and the proximity to the equator. So given an option between invading Gaul and Ethiopia, the former will be picked most times.

>not rowing across vast dunes to victory

1) nothing but sand and mountains out there
2) the Empire was already stretched to it's limits, there's no way the romans could have projected their power over africa without sacrificing their power projection elsewhere
3) given that the east was known to be richer and had enemies that were always waiting for Rome's moment of weakness, devoting masses of men to conquer africa would be strategically retarded when you can fight Parthians or Sassanids instead.

Why? This is a good thread.

WUZ

Why would they try to colonize literal no mans land, its not like there was any infrastructure or treasures for the taking.

same reason they fucked off from Germany, no advantage from extending. They's just be spread even thinner than they already were. Also weather, terriotory and enemies that they weren't adapted to.

Niggers aren't capable of doing civilization. Nubia doesn't count.

Why would you invade the Sahara?

They conquered what was useful. Past a certain point northward was lacking urban wealth and full of dense forests. Past a certain point southward was lacking urban wealth and then there's also the goddamn Sahara. Mong.
Literal nonsense desu. Somalia was a trade hub for many different peoples.There was never an invasion of the Roman sort.

The Greeks said the Egyptians were black.

no they didn't.....

where exactly did they ever fight the Nubians

>Citation Needed

Protip: Black doesn't mean Nigger. Unless Georgia and Jews who aren't Ethiopian count as Black.

>“For the fact is as I soon came to realise myself, and then heard from others later, that the Colchians are obviously Egyptian. When the notion occurred to me, I asked both the Colchians and the Egyptians about it, and found that the Colchians had better recall of the Egyptians than the Egyptians did of them. Some Egyptians said that they thought the Colchians originated with Sesostris’ army, but I myself guessed their Egyptian origin not only because the Colchians are dark-skinned and curly-haired (which does not count for much by itself , because these features are common in others too) but more importantly because Colchians, Egyptians and Ethiopians are the only peoples in the world who practise circumcision and who have always done so.

>Source, The histories By Herodotus, Robin Waterfield, Carolyn Dewald

Also:

>The appearance of the inhabitants is also not very different in India and Ethiopia: the southern Indians are rather more like Ethiopians as they are black to look on, and their hair is black; only they are not so snub-nosed or woolly-haired as the Ethiopians; the northern Indians are most like the Egyptians physically.

>Arrian, Indica 6.9

We Wuz Indians N Shieet.

ROMANS

>t. Laqueesha Smith

Buddy, they were swarthier than greeks for sure but not Sub-saharan true black stock. Nubians ruled Egypt for a while, but even they were not "real" black in the American sense of the word. "real" black is west african, who NEVER controlled egypt. Nubians had higher North African admixture and their skull structures were similar to Caucasian skulls (skinnier noses and faces, etc.). This is why Somalis look so distinct from the rest of Africans. There would be no Egyptian empire if that were true.

So was Egypt RULED by blacks (nubians) for a while? yeah. But the vast majority of Egypt's history is made up of Egyptians ruling Egyptians, a group of people with varying shades of tan-brown skin. Egyptians were not black to the disappointment of hoodrat women and were not "Nordic" to the dismay of stormfaggots.

>Egyptians being black

The Ancient Egyptians were like this with modern Copts.

I do remember reading about a temporary Roman fort that was found as far south as Nigeria, so they managed to traverse the Sahara (very likely much more hospitable then) but logistically it probably wasn't possible to realistically conquer it

rome was already so bloated it couldn't deal with itself without trying to take a whole additional continent.

>why didn't Rome conquer a barren desert the size of the continental United States?
>why didn't Rome conquer a humid, sweltering, infertile continent 3-1/2x the size of Europe?
>why didn't the Romans want to die en masse of malaria, sleeping sickness, and yellow fever?
>why didn't romans conquer a place known as the White Man's Grave?

And here are Copts.

Expand /how/?
Bar going down the Nile, which is full of disease and plague, the only other ways are 1)Using boats that didn't exist yet
2)Wander into the sands and die.

There was fuck all reason or ways to invade the rest of the continent.

They were already overextended, and it was much easier to manage land which was near the Mediterranean coast than land way out in the Saharan desert.

This. Pretty much the same reason they never conquered Caledonia or Germania. Not worth the cost.
>inb4 Varus
Nigger please. Rome's strength is not in not losing but in coming back from major defeats.

Ever heard of that funny thing that used to be called Roman disease? You know, malaria. It was called Roman disease for a reason, as it btfo them.

The Romans were concerned with conquering human beings. Not retarded animals aka niggers.

Somalis are Romans

Somalis aren't really Niggers. They're mutts.

>overextension
>malaria

Bump

It would be a logistical nightmare supporting troops in Africa for little gain since the land was very lightly populated and the tribes difficult to control

...you DO realize not even the Semites and Berbers could expand into black Africa until the arrival of the camel in the 3rd century, right?

And that reliable routes wouldn't exist until the 7th century?

Damn I hate this board.

Why didn't he descend through arabia and crossed to ethiopia by yemen then?

WHITEY BTFO

An Assyrian king circumnavigated the continent by boat, from Egypt, back to Egypt.
Herodotus wrote about it.
He even mentioned of their report of the change in position of the sun at the southern tip of Africa (which corresponds to what one would expect that far down south).

A better question would be why didn't they invade Hibernia?

Nero wanted to find out the source of the Nile. It's likely that there was some Roman exploration of Africa, but it'd be lost to history.

Egypt was the gem of Africa, and anything not near the Mediterranean was a long ways away.

The Romans didn't have medieval-quality ships to go long distances into the Atlantic.

inb4 "muh dark ages"

Likewise, it's not obvious that the Romans had any problems getting Asian goods.

cambyses sent a persian army to cross the sahara after conquering ethiopia.
they turned back 20% of the way through, forced to resort to cannibalism for lack of supplies.

The Romans actually sent a legion down to Yemen but lost.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ma'rib
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aelius_Gallus

the only correct anwser in this whole shit thread

They got the most important places down, the ''black warrior'' would have nothing of value to them beyond a certain point, also, distances. Long distances to get your supply are a bother.

Sauce?

Lmao WE.

Literally look like American street niggers.

>wanting all of africa
>needing all of africa
>sustaining all of africa

They just didn't give us enough time.

His ass

>eu4
>photo of screen
>phone

You cant really call Africa an infertile continent can you?

>It doesn't count because I say so

WHITEY LITERALLY BTFO

Sub Saharan Africa has too many jungles which are annoying as shit to trek through and even build civlizations in if you didnt evolve in it like the South East Asians, the Pacific Islanders, or the Central and South American natives.

Skimming the thread because it looks fucking stupid but basically it boils down to the fact that real life is not like Civilization and nations cannot just expand indefinitely. Yeah there were specific events/mishaps that halted the Romans' expansion into Africa but in general, they didn't "conquer Africa" because they already had a very large empire and past a certain point grabbing more territory just means a larger drain on your resources and an administrative nightmare, so why would they have.

This is also why alt history timelines where the Roman Empire survives and just keeps expanding, taking over all of Europe and pushing into India and eventually facing off against China are so stupid. Unfortunately, there are a lot of those timelines.

no point, anything valuable would be brought North for trade by peoples who know how to navigate the hazardous route

desert

Why not just sail around it?

>oh boy, after braving these tropical storms in rickety Mediterranean fishing boats I can't wait to climb a sheer 1000ft cliff to get on land

Giant fucking desert. Niggers living in huts with fucking nothing of value.

Hot places are a fucking pain to invade, there were jungles and THE SAHARA FUCKING DESERT. No one has time for that shit.

Earlier groups of Greeks and Persians tried to fight Ethiopians but they peppered them full of poisoned arrows.

Similar reason why Southeast Asia remains independent.

pix is a roman fort in the desert in Tunisia

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agisymba
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaius_Suetonius_Paulinus
the general who fucked Boudica in Britain explored the Sahara too

and btw Arabs didn't conquered the Sahara despite coming from sandlands too

wrong pix

The food output is shit with that times farming tech. No one has the time and luxury of learning indigenous farming knowledge nor the resources and time/luxury to waste years figuring it out on your own.

Not to mention Egypt and North Africa provided Rome with plenty of grain and olives. Why would they bother traversing hundreds of miles of unforgiving desert? The caravan trade would provide them with gold and other useful goods from sub-Saharan Africa.

>Did they fear the black warrior?

What the fuck is this? They had no reason to take africa.

same reason they didn't conquer scotland. not worth the investment.

because there is a huge fucking desert in the way

This has probably already been covered, but back then getting through the Sahara was practically impossible. Second of all, they took all the useful parts. Remember, quality is always more useful than quantity. Ruling a massive desert is not as good as owning many trade ports

Gold, animal skins, ebony,

Less fertile than Europe, East Asia, and India.

>Indica 6.9

Dank stuff my man

Once you get past the desert in east africa doesnt the tsetse fly take over and basically make it really hard to have cattle and horses?

Retard American detected

enlighten me then

He's right though

Nubia

>fucked by Persians in the East
>fucked by Germans in the North
>surprisingly nothing in the South (except those damn Egyptians)

that's probably why

They almost seem Latin Americans

Disdained.

Idiot

if they built a wall in the south of scotland because they didn't want to fight bellicose retards in wattle and daub huts, why do you think they would send legions into the trackless wastes of the sahara or the ethiopian highlands to fight bellicose retards in wattle and daub huts.

neither caledonians nor sub saharan africans possessed anything the empire wanted and couldn't get via trade.

>Libya is washed on all sides by the sea except where it joins Asia, as was first demonstrated, so far as our knowledge goes, by the Egyptian king Necho, who, after calling off the construction of the canal between the Nile and the Arabian gulf, sent out a fleet manned by a Phoenician crew with orders to sail west about and return to Egypt and the Mediterranean by way of the Straits of Gibraltar. The Phoenicians sailed from the Arabian gulf into the southern ocean, and every autumn put in at some convenient spot on the Libyan coast, sowed a patch of ground, and waited for next year's harvest. Then, having got in their grain, they put to sea again, and after two full years rounded the Pillars of Heracles in the course of the third, and returned to Egypt. These men made a statement which I do not myself believe, though others may, to the effect that as they sailed on a westerly course round the southern end of Libya, they had the sun on their right - to northward of them. This is how Libya was first discovered by sea.[Herodotus, Histories 4.42; tr.Aubrey de Sélincourt.]

Bump

>What is egypt

The nile has cataracts which fuck upstream progress (remember the nile flows out TO the mediterranean not out of it). The sahara is too effective a barrier for an iron age society. Going by sea isn't profitable/carries high risk of failure.