Can anyone point me in the direction or give me a rundown of the kingdoms and various civilizations outside of China/Parts of Asia and Europe prior to the discovery of the New World? We usually only learn about history from the European perspective, why do we never hear about Africa beyond it's Northern regions prior to the development of actual colonial Empires. How were they relative to Europe in power, society and culture in the likes of the middle ages? Are there any notable African Kingdoms or Empires, and if so did they function in any similar way to what we know from Asia or Europe? Do we have accounts or stories from people who travelled beyond North Africa and returned? Or was a journey of that magnitude simply impossible before a certain period?
Don't tell me the /pol/ images are actually 100 accurate and Blacks actually did nothing?
There's the Zulu Kingdom, there's the Mali Empire and I think there was a Kingdom in the Congo, I'm assuming you're talking about Sub Saharan Africans here, there's more Kingdoms/Empires/States in Northern Africa and in the Horn of Africa
Jaxson Adams
They got roughly to the iron age, but most of the cultures were preliterate, except for Arab traders.
There's evidence of a lot of tribal confederations and so-called "cattle kingdoms" but not state centralization to the extent that developed in Mesopotamia.
Ryder Campbell
About 1/3 of precolonial sub-Saharan Africans lived in autonomous villages. Typically they would be Village democracies or republics with male elders being the primary voters. The other 2/3 were typically some form of monarchy. Some were more authoritarian like in Dahomey which was an absolute monarchy. Others were elected monarchs from a royal clan who could be deposed if his governers were very pissed off at him. And some were theocracies on some level such as in the Sokoto Caliphate or Asanteman. Africa is fucking huge bro.
t. Yoruba
Christian Davis
The ones in America definitely weren't.
They got to that position because organized African societies like pic related, the Benin, sold defeated iFrican tribes to Europeans.
The ones in Africa were Kings. The ones in America definitely weren't.
Carson Ortiz
Ethiopia recorded things,their written language is ge'ez.Im not sure about the rest of SS Africa though.
Jonathan Roberts
I honestly believe that all these recently discovered/shilled black african civilizations/kingdoms are a fabrication. This is done for political reasons.
To add fuel to the fire I also believe that any theoretical ruins in black Africa are remnants of extinct peoples unrelated to blacks.
Zachary Perez
>Were blacks actually kings? Some were, but not the people claiming their ancestors were.
Lincoln Young
The Yoruba of present day Nigeria was a vast kingdom at one time as was Benin. The Fang further down the coast from present day Cameroon to Gabon was yet another.
Wyatt Collins
Why are people here so obsessed with Hoteps?
Jacob Price
hol up
Cooper Hall
OP is the same Australian faggot who shitposts about Africa every day because he has no life
Pity him
Ian Powell
Cool you can believe whatever you want buddy
Grayson Jackson
>Recently discovered. I know we're in Veeky Forums and historians use "recently" to refer to shit that's like 100/200 years old. But 1500s/1600s is a bit of a stretch.
Joshua Ward
I'll give this image credit, the pyramids in the background are actually the nubian-style ones and not the ones people usually associate with egypt
Colton Nelson
Thats like two huge open ended questions and four smaller ones. What is this thread I dont even...
Sebastian Phillips
I honestly believe you are a dweeb.
Brody Allen
>somehow there’s a global revisionist conspiracy that invents evidence of African civilizations with the master plan of giving modern day blacks some arrogance So this.................. is the power........................... of /pol/................
Daniel Cruz
West africa had loads, mali, sokoto, songhai, benin, etc etc also the kongo kingdom and a bunch around the great lakes
Thing is africa was about 3000 years behind the fertile crescent in developing agriculture, and since civilizations tend to advance exponentially it meant they got completely outpaced
A good way to think about it is that africa was to europe in 1800bc what northern europe was to greece/rome in 300ad
Josiah Kelly
Yep, some blacks were, in fact, kings.
/thread.
Gavin Turner
In East Africa (with the exception of the Ethiopian states) you had many seafaring sultanates and city-states along the coast, all the way down to central Mozambique. How Arabized/Persianized they were is up for debate, but the rulers of the city states such as Pate and Zanzibar were definitely Arab with a large amount of Bantu admixture. It wasn't until the late 1700s that the coastal states started exploring more into Tanganyika and Congo (mainly to grab slaves).
In west africa, most of the contact (especially trade) between nations was done by land and not sea, but West African kingdoms tended to be more sprawling than their eastern counterparts - with the exception of the coastal Nigerian states (so you had larger nations in the west such as Mali, Songhai, Sokoto, Ashanti, Kanem). Whatever kingdoms there were in coastal west africa were also much more isolated from the rest of the world than coastal east Africa until the 1600s.
Christopher White
Actually a lot of american slaves were former elite or high castes and there are many examples of that mostly amongst the records of literate enslaved Americans.
Michael Martinez
Give me a week and 12 strong lads and ill show you a stack of bricks twice that high
It all started in Ethiopia. That's where the garden of Eden story originates, and they are the most ancient civilized peoples in the world. They eventually moved up the Nile, and the ethnic and cultural clash created ancient Egypt as we understand it. After sometime an ethnic group known as the Bantu emerged in central Africa. They were largely the descendants of slaves in Egypt. They spread throughout africa, but their populations remained small and inconsequential. Eventually Islamized Berbers connected with them and kingdoms based on the slave trade emerged. Bantu slaves were used largely as mercenaries and concubines. After the reconquista of Spain Europeans were finally granted access to the african markets. Because of the Bantus disease resistance and overall hardiness, they were essential in the early agricultural development of the new world. And here we are today.
Joseph Turner
The Medieval Ethiopians despite having a written language rarely ever wrote about diplomatic encounters or important events. 90% of the time they wrote about biblical stories or just certain verses from the Bible. This is one of the main reasons why Ethiopian history is hardly discussed by much more famous historians.
