Chapter Three

1
Chapter Three

• Early African Civilizations

2
Transitions

• Hunter-gatherer groups
• Agricultural villages
• Small states
• Large complex societies

3
Agriculture

• Began in Sudan (between Sahara and tropical rain
  forest)
• Spread to Nile River Valley
• By late centuries BCE all of Africa except
  densely forested areas and deserts were
  practicing agriculture.

4
Sudan area

• After 5000 BCE we see
• Small kingdoms
• Divine or semi-divine monarchs
• Based on agriculture and herding

5
Early Religion of Sudan

• Concepts of the sacred
• Different spirits who were forms of one spirit.
• The one spirit was impersonal, causing good and
  evil, associated with rain.
• Forms included sun, wind, rain, trees, rivers,
  and other natural forces.
• Monarch was divine or semi-divine

6
Belief in afterlife

• Upon death of the king, servants were killed and
  buried with him in order to serve him in the
  afterlife.

7
Buntu Speaking Peoples

• Original homeland in the Niger-Congo area around
  4000 BCE
• Semi-nomadic cultivators and herders
• Migrated south and southwest.
• By 1000 BCE Bantu people and languages spread
  throughout sub-Saharan Africa.

8
Societies before 1000 CE

• Stateless societies
• Governed themselves through family and kinship
  group
• Villages of about 100
• Male heads of family constituted village council
• Chiefs represented the village to neighboring
  villages
• A group of villages constituted a district.
• No chief or governor for the district.
• Individual villages and families disciplined
  their own.

9
Early Religion

• Conception of the Sacred
• Nyamba Creator who established natural and moral
  order.
• Ancestors
• Territorial spirits

10
Ritual Life

• Ceremonies to mark stages of life birth,
  puberty, marriage, death.
• Prayers to ancestors and spirits
• Sacrifices

11
Ritual specialists

• Called upon to explain why problems arose in the
  society and to offer remedies.

12
Compare Sudanic and Bantu religions

• Can you see any relation between religious
  beliefs and practices and the structure of the
  society?
• How do different conceptions of the sacred
  correspond to social realities?
• Can you offer a theory of why both societies were
  monotheistic?

13
Egypt and Nubia

• After 4000 BCE small kingdoms arise in Nubia and
  southern Egypt.
• By 3300 BCE small kingdoms throughout Egypt and
  Nubia
• Competition for resources led to conflict.
• Though Nubia had a period of expansion, Egypt
  became stronger power. Why?

14
Egypt

• Rulers of different Egyptian kingdoms united
  around 3100 BCE.
• Centralized state ruled by a pharaoh.
• Pharaohs most powerful during first period of
  Egyptian history

15
Periods of Egyptian

• Archaic period 3100-2600 BCE
• Old Kingdom (2660-2160 BCE)Pyramids
• Period of decline of Pharoahs power and rise of
  regional powers (2160-2040 BCE)
• Middle Kingdom (2040-1640 BCE) ended with
  invasion of nomadic Hyksos from Southwest Asia.
• New Kingdom (1550-1070 BCE) in the Nile Delta.
  Expelled Hyksos.

16
New Kingdom (1550-1070 BCE)

• Prosperous
• Perhaps 4 million people
• Well organized bureaucracy.
• Pharaohs did not build pyramids, but temples and
  monuments.
• Imperial expansion into Nubia and southwest Asia
  met with a backlash.
• Mid seventh century BCE Assyria conquered Egypt.

17
Social structure

• Pharaoh supreme ruler
• Priests
• No inherited nobility as in Mesopotamia but
  possibility of rise in status possible.
• Professional class military and administrative
• Commoners crafts, trade, agriculture
• Peasants
• Slaves

18
Divine kingship

• Early pharaohs claimed to be deities.
• At death servants entombed with them.
• The notion is believed to have come from Sudanic
  peoples who migrated to Egypt.
• Absolute rulers possessing of the land.

19
Lords of the heavens

• Early pharaohs associated with Horus, the sky
  deity.
• Later pharaohs associated with Amon, the sun
  deity.
• Regarded as sons of the sun.
• As (father) sun supervised wider cosmos, pharaoh
  (son) attended to the earth.
• After death the pharaoh was believed to merge
  with the Amon.

20
Most exalted deity

• Amon Deity of Thebes (administrative center of
  Upper Egypt)
• Re Deity of Heliopolis
• Amon-Re Two gods merged
• Most believed that Amon-Re was one god among many
  in the world, but the idea emerged that Amon-Re
  was a universal deity.
• Aten Worshipped as one and only god.

21
Other Deities

• Osiris Lord of the afterlife, judge of the dead.
• Hapi the Nile
• Many others