Ancient Africa: A Global History, to 300 CE

by Christopher Ehret

A panoramic narrative that places ancient Africa on the stage of world history

This book brings together archaeological and linguistic evidence to provide a sweeping global history of ancient Africa, tracing how the continent played an important role in the technological, agricultural, and economic transitions of world civilization. Christopher Ehret takes readers from the close of the last Ice Age some ten thousand years ago, when a changing climate allowed for the transition from hunting and gathering to the cultivation of crops and raising of livestock, to the rise of kingdoms and empires in the first centuries of the common era.

Ehret takes up the problem of how we discuss Africa in the context of global history, combining results of multiple disciplines. He sheds light on the rich history of technological innovation by African societies--from advances in ceramics to cotton weaving and iron smelting--highlighting the important contributions of women as inventors and innovators. He shows how Africa helped to usher in an age of agricultural exchange, exporting essential crops as well as new agricultural methods into other regions, and how African traders and merchants led a commercial revolution spanning diverse regions and cultures. Ehret lays out the deeply African foundations of ancient Egyptian culture, beliefs, and institutions and discusses early Christianity in Africa.

A monumental achievement by one of today's eminent scholars, Ancient Africa offers vital new perspectives on our shared past, explaining why we need to reshape our historical frameworks for understanding the ancient world as a whole.

Genres: History, Africa, Nonfiction, Ancient History, World History

224 pages, Hardcover

First published June 20, 2023

About the author

A scholar of African history and African historical linguistics specializing in efforts to correlate linguistic taxonomy and reconstruction with the archeological record, Christopher Ehret was Distinguished Research Professor in History at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he taught from 1968 until his retirement in 2011.

Reviews

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Christopher Ehret was a historian who dedicated his career to the study of Africa’s ancient past at a time when few Americans in his profession did so. Over a career that extended across six decades, he produced a formidable body of material on the early history and historical linguistics of the continent. This book serves as a culmination of his work, providing a concise and highly accessible summary of the scholarship in a field to which he made his own considerable contribution.

Summarizing the early history of Africa in little more than two hundred pages is no easy feat, and like a magician Ehret only makes the feat even more challenging by expanding the scope of his book thousands of years into the prehistoric era. Doing so brings more easily into focus many of the long-term trends that he sees shaping the history not just of Africa but of the world itself. As he notes at the start of his book world history was African history up to that point, with the ancestors of modern humanity setting out less than 50,000 years ago. Whereas most histories of the ancient world let sub-Saharan Africa recede from view after this, Ehret rejects this by describing the ways African populations remained at the forefront of human development, most notably in terms of agricultural and technological innovation that was often in advance of such innovations elsewhere.

Ehret also pushes back against the idea of sub-Saharan Africans being isolated from developments elsewhere by describing the commercial exchanges that have been identified throughout the continent. He even argues that such exchanges contributed to the emergence of ancient Egyptian civilization, seeing it as shaped more by African influences than by ones from the Mediterranean basin. While some may dismiss such claims as a reflection of his passion for his subject – one that shines through on nearly every page – he grounds his arguments in the growing scholarship of his subject. Yet this is far from a dry work of academia, but a sweeping and energetic study of his subject. Anyone seeking to better appreciate the early history of Africa and its contribution to world history would be hard pressed to find a better introduction to the field.

[Bogi Takács]

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Impulse borrow from the new acquisitions shelf of my public library - it's a short read that promises a broad overview of ancient Africa up to 300 CE (sometimes with glimpses further ahead). It also has a chapter specifically focusing on Ancient Egypt, a sort of debunking of the ideas that Egyptians were somehow separate from the rest of Africa. I thought that was a highlight, I especially appreciated how it discussed shifting climate as motivating migrations etc. I also really liked the discussion of ironworking and metalworking more generally, and trade patterns, in other chapters.

I appreciated how the book brought in historical linguistics to support its arguments. I was a bit frustrated that some of the most interesting results either seem to be unpublished or maybe the endnotes would have needed a bit more thorough checking? Either way, I couldn't find a citation for something I really wanted to read (Footnote 16 in Chapter 3), but I did find citations for the rest.

I also thought the interactions between gender, culture and linguistics in particular were sometimes overstated - for example, it is very possible to have matrilineal descent and structural misogyny at the same time (indeed this describes one of my own cultures in the present day). Women traders and entrepreneurs are also not a clear sign of a lack of structural misogyny (again, same counterexample). I thought this was a bit simplistically put.

I didn't quite understand why Semitic speakers were sometimes considered culturally more similar to speakers of other branches of Afrasian/Afroasiatic languages and sometimes more different, as was convenient for the argument - for example about gender, Semitic languages were brought as an example of patriarchy and patrilineality, and a contrast to other languages of the Afrasian/Afroasiatic family. I found this especially odd considering e.g., Jews switched to matrilineal descent in the ancient era, AFAICT before the cutoff of the book's time period. This made me a bit hesitant about the other claims in the book, though I still felt like I learned a lot. The author is clear about the limitations of both historical linguistic reconstruction, and archeological evidence - especially when from some regions there's just not enough data.

I felt the tone was sometimes a bit preachy, and specifically preaching to the choir - I don't think people who pick up this book need so much convincing that ancient Africa was important, I'd rather read about specific details. I don't think it's always necessary for authors to explicitly engage with their own positionality, but here I kept on wondering that it would have helped, just to consider how it affects the way these arguments are put.

All in all, this was an interesting book - my criticisms might seem longer, simply because I want to be clear about them, but I overall enjoyed this short volume and was glad that I read it.

_____
Source of the book: Lawrence Public Library

[JRT · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Africans living in the heart of the African continent participated separately and independently in the key technological transitions of ancient world history.” This statement early in historian Christopher Ehret’s “Ancient Africa” book sets the tone for a compelling and concise analysis of various aspects of ancient African history. Ehret does a great job situating ancient African history firmly in the realm of global history more generally, deliberately dispensing with the colonialist Orion that Africa is a continent on the margins of the rest of the world.

Ehret’s primary focus throughout the book is to compare the history of ancient African ingenuity to those from other groups of people throughout the world. In doing so, Ehret not only establishes ancient Africa as a major global actor over thousands and thousands of year, he specifically identifies Africa as the source of numerous independent socioeconomic developments and inventions. Examples include the third and fourth known inventions of ceramics for any people in human history (West Africans and East Africans almost 12kya ago and 9kya ago respectively), metallurgy and ironwork from Africans in the heart of the continent, and carbon steel. All of these developments (and more) were invented independently from the same from people on other parts of the world, and at or near the same time (often times centuries before).

Ehret spent much time detailing the development of agriculture, another invention that Africans independently pioneered. Various regions of ancient African is home to three of the earliest cradles of agricultural civilizations, situated in West and East Africa. Ehret explains how African agricultural innovations were spread to Southern Arabia and India in ancient times, exploding the myth the Africa was only ever an importer of ancient advancements. Further, Ehret details how Africans established and control ancient trade routes, helping to create the first era of global commerce. Much of this commerce consisted of Africans exporting their innovations to peoples outside the continent.

One of the most interesting aspect of the book is the section on the “Africanity of Egypt.” Ehret is just the latest to definitively assert and prove that ancient Egypt’s founders were African people, descendants of persons from the Southern Nile Valley, Central-Eastern Sahara, and the Horn. The book details both the “deep time” and “very deep time” foundations of ancient Egypt, explaining how the linguistic, archeological, and genetic evidence locates the Horn of Africa as the original homeland of the populations and peoples who would eventually populate the Nile Valley (during very deep time—18kya years ago), and the East-Central Sudan (Nubia) as the original homeland of the founders of Dynastic Culture.

This is a great book for anyone interested in African history.

[s · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting and necessary, though it mostly scratches the surface. Just very refreshing to be able to engage with the true universalization of history in concrete terms rather than leaving it as a solemn ethical ideal to be realized in some better world

[Steven Clarke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Christopher Ehret puts together a fantastic antithesis to the western perspective of African History in his explosive "Ancient Africa - A Global History, to 300CE".

The book traverses the continent and demonstrates how African culture, technology and language was simply shaped by European and middle eastern standards but indeed set the trends for the rest of the world. It discusses how ancient techniques for iron work were well under way almost a millennia before regions thought to have developed at a far more rapid pace than Africa.

It celebrates the role that Egypt played on the world stage but also does a remarkably good job at decentering Egypt from the conversation as it was used as a colonial and European tool of separating civilisation from Africa. See the above passage for the authors thoughts. It presents Egypt as a result of African progress rather than an outlier - how historians from the west have traditionally gone about discussing the two.

Finally the book does a teriffic job at unpacking the incredible role women played throughout the entirety of ancient Africa.

They were prominent figures within society and technological advancements in the Nilo-Saharan regions and beyond. The domestication of the donkey (one of the most important animal-human interactions ever has also been linked to women primarily.

[Bella Nicole Persephone Radant · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a great overview of the deep history of Africa and Africans as well as their role in global history. The author does have a strong linguistic bias and occasionally makes some claims that I think require more support, but as an overview is a great starting point and covers a lot of ideas that are often unfairly overlooked regarding african history. It's not comprehensive by any means, but it's leaving me excited to and with a reasonable foundation to, learn more about the continent's history

[Jaime Borneman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great way to get introduced to general ancient african history. Loved the incorporation of prior biases within the field and how that affects current perceptions of history.

[Daggry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Short as this book is, it was a challenge to get through, at least for this non-historian. But it never claims to be compulsively readable narrative non-fiction. Instead, it’s a scholarly demonstration of Africa’s key role in ancient world history. Most often, sub-Saharan Africa is relegated to the periphery of ancient history. An entire continent is reduced to Egypt, which is then framed as not truly African anyway.

This book draws on lexical and archeological evidence, comparative linguistics and ethnography, and even climatology—all of which can be at times quite technical and dry, but also fascinating! It shows that technological and economic innovation (such as ceramics-making, ironworking, weaving, rise of towns and commerce and states, etc.) arose independently, sometimes in multiple places, deep within the African continent as early as and often earlier than elsewhere in the world. It also shows that Egypt is genetically and culturally African: the place to which peoples, innovations, and cultures flowed from further south.

I appreciated seeing how historians can track the spread of an innovation by the changing terminology that ripples outward--and how that evidence can be compared against physical, archeological evidence. E.g., the implements found in the Ethiopian highlands in layers dating to 16,000 BCE (!) bear distinctive markings that appear when those implements are used on grain. All of this can be held up against what we know of the cultures, and eventually a picture takes shape. Here is where an innovation first arose. Here is how it spread and affected the languages, social structures, etc. of the places that adopted it.

African advances weren’t disconnected from the rest of human development, no matter how consistently they’re left out of world histories. For a few example(s)… agricultural ways of life that developed in Africa played a key role in the rise of complex society in India. It was Africans who domesticated the donkey, and in so doing profoundly influenced the global history of trade and even transport more generally. The West African Commercial Revolution (the rise of towns and trade around the second millennium BCE) was not a response to long-distance traders from the northeast but rather was already established by the time those traders responded to the opportunities on offer.

The role of women particularly interested me; what’s found here is a counterweight to presumptions of gender roles across history. Women were queens and co-rulers, lead innovators (such in the development of ceramic technologies), and members of influential merchant guilds and secret societies. In some places there are thousands of years of matrilineal descent. As the author points out, this should change our understanding of world history.

While it’s disturbing that world histories will talk about the “earliest empires,” arising in the first millennium BCE, but exclude eastern Africa’s Merotic Empire (750BCE was its high point but it was a key power for another 900 years), I was most interested in what the author had to say about deemphasizing “civilizations.”

Histories that emphasize monarchs and wars and the great monuments to them are focusing on the most stratified, unequal, and oppressive societies. These are referred to as “civilizations,” and their ability to build great monuments arises not from greater intelligence or skill but from a greater concentration of wealth and power. What would happen if we instead placed our emphasis on cultures and societies—on the material, technological, and social responses to humanity’s challenges?

tl;dr A fascinating book that was nevertheless a slog for a tired non-historian brain. I will forget most details but will retain the sense of how we piece together our pictures of the past and how the exclusion of Africa from ancient histories leads to a foolish (as well as unjust) distortion of humanity's journey.

[Ed Stoddard · Rating 5 out of 5]

A splendid overview of ancient Africa and its often over-looked role on the stage of global history. Ehret sees "... no value in the artificial" separation of "pre-history" from "history", which does not begin and end with the written word.
In a concise and readable narrative, he charts Africa's contribution to ancient history, including the invention of ceramics - which revolutionised human food preparation with major significance for diet and health - and the invention of iron working. Africa's menacing menageries also produced one beast of burden that could be domesticated and had a profound influence on ancient travel and trade networks: the donkey.
The throwing spear was also invented in Africa and Ehret notes how, armed with this technology, early humans after they left Africa would go on to wipe out most of the large mammals on a global scale. My own view is that this would have a massive impact on the subsequent course of human history and the global environment, including leaving Africa burdened with beasts that would hobble its subsequent development. (Stay tuned I am working on an essay on this issue).
Overall an eloquent and thought-provoking look at ancient Africa's often overlooked role on the stage of global history. Highly recommended ...

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating book, highly recommended for those who want a better understanding of the importance of Africa to world history. Also very good on what the author calls the "deep background" of human history, and how the standard histories we grew up on have distorted our understandings of world history, and really need correcting. Some of the content is a bit beyond me (historical linguistics), but most of the book is accessible and is also very compelling. (I'm sure the linguistics is very compelling, too, it's just over my head.)

Lots of good stuff here, such as role of women in technological invention and innovation, the many things we owe to Africa, the ways the world has always been connected, and the "Africanity" of ancient Egypt. The racist history of the past doesn't mean we have to continue to believe nonsense, and this volume is useful for the deep background it provides in a very condensed package. A better grasp of the ancient past can only help with reorienting our present perceptions.

[Justin Evans · Rating 3 out of 5]

A worthy project, but perhaps the product of a zealous editorial department rather than an author? It's not clear to me why 'who first domesticated the donkey?' is a topic in a book like this, nor 'ancient Egypt was African, not...' I don't know what else it would have been. That African peoples have made crucial contributions to human existence is good to repeat, but I can't imagine many people picking up this book and disagreeing with its 'arguments' (if you disagree with the idea that African peoples have made crucial contributions, you're unlikely to read an academic book outlining those contributions), so the arguments just get in the way. Otherwise, I suspect this will be far too technical for most people, and they'd be better served with other recent books on the topic. Once you've read all of those, this might be a useful addition. Basically, I was hoping for one step up from the Golden Rhinoceros, and what I got was a collection of academic papers strung together on a thin, but worthy, line.

[Zack Whitley · Rating 3 out of 5]

This slender book taught me some things about ancient Africa that I didn't know - mostly from the archaeological record or educated guesses made from linguistic studies - and the author, Christopher Ehret makes some good points, particularly at the end of the book when discussing "civilization" and its oppressive tendencies. I can't say that Ehret is a natural storyteller and this book isn't likely to have broad appeal for that reason. History appeals to me because there is usually a story there, but one didn't really emerge from this book. The emphasis is not on a linear story but rather on methods of piecing ancient African history together and I think, while scholarly, it doesn't make for fun reading.

I think the Ehret does a good job of showing how ancient African history should take a more prominent role in world history. He also goes into some depth when discussing the horn of Africa and the surrounding part of northeast Africa. I assume this is his area of specialty as it gets far more treatment in the book than other parts of the continent.

[Ernest Spoon · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a slim volume just chock-a-block full of information, much new to me. New to me, a septuagenarian, is because this is the first book I've ever read dealing with the subject, with the exception of Egypt.

This book is also boring, but in a good way. You will not find accounts of great conqueror kings or messianic prophets. My best guess to describe this book is that of a broad cultural history, touching upon the spread of agricultural practices and language groups across broad geographical areas.

I suspect this might be required reading for a university history course. Whatever it is doing on the shelf of our neighborhood branch library I'll never know. It is a fascinating, short read.

[Deke Moulton · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an extremely academic, but very important early history of Africa. I should almost say that this is more of a rewriting of history, as the author goes to great lengths to show that Africa has always been part of world history and should not be delegated to a separate study.

Although I found the author’s emphasis on linguistic similarities a little dry and repetitive, there is a lot of excellent information in this book. Particularly the first in the last chapters I think I underlined something in just about every paragraph.

Especially an important read for those who wish to teach ancient history, but good for just about anybody who wants to do more to remember that Africa has always contributed to world civilizations.

[Mary · Rating 3 out of 5]

I saw this on the "new books" table at my public library and picked it up because I knew absolutely nothing about ancient Africa. I found this book to be a mostly accessible and interesting introduction; I found the sections on textiles and agriculture particularly fascinating. The linguistic evidence was a bit harder to wade through as a novice in this field.

[Yamir · Rating 4 out of 5]

Can get repetitive at parts but brings a lot of value and perspective to how i think about world history. Also enjoyed his comments on genetics and to be cautious of their use for historical claims.

[Kimberly Brooks · Rating 1 out of 5]

The book has some interesting information, but it was written in the most boring way possible. I literally fell asleep every time I tried to read this. Luckily it was short and had several maps, photos, and charts that made it even shorter.

[Carly Miller · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a pretty good read. Definitely textbook-like but not too dense, I learned a lot about Africa and reading it made me want to continue to learn more. The analysis of Egypt as the only “relevant” part of Africa in Western education was particularly interesting.

[DaniPhantom · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very thorough recap of ancient Africa

[Tunde · Rating 4 out of 5]

🤔👏🏾👏🏾

[Basma Aal]

Couldn't completely finish it but read 90% of it

[Maximilian Itsikson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Felt like I read the same thing two times

[Nancy · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5⭐

[Richard Seltzer · Rating 3 out of 5]

This "history" doesn't tell a story. It's an assemblage of generalizations that doesn't illuminate who we are and what we came from.
Disappointing.

[Gary Reger · Rating 4 out of 5]

Christopher Ehret's Ancient Africa. A Global History, to 300 CE presents a passionate argument against the still-prevalent view of Africa as a continent without a history, a space lacking technological innovation and complex societies. Instead, Ehret shows, conclusively, that Africa was the home not only of Homo sapiens but the cradle of multiple inventions, including agriculture, iron metallurgy, ceramics, long-distance commerce, urbanization, and other achievements typically attributed to Mesopotamia--and that these inventions preceded the same in other regions. He also shows that African roots of Egypt through the tracing of movement of peoples from what is now Sudan into what is now Egypt and the centrality to the emergence of ancient Egyptian civilization of the Qustal kingdom, which occupied what Ehret calls the Middle Nile Culture Area in present-day Sudan and South Sudan. No reader will come away from this volume still adhering to the outdated--and, frankly, racist--idea of Africa as a backwater of human civilization.

My only reservation has to do with language. Ehret is a major advocate of the reconstruction of a Nilo-Saharan language family (see his Figure 3.3 at p. 56). Ehret treats his own reconstruction as established--he published his case in A Historical-Comparative Reconstruction of Nilo-Saharan (2001)--while ignoring the criticism his views have attracted and other proposals, most recently those of George Starostin ("The Nilo-Saharan Hypothesis Tested through Lexicostatistic. The Current State of Affairs" [online only]) and Gerrit J. Dimmendaal ("On Stable and Unstable Features of Nilo-Saharan," University of Nairobi Journal of Language and Linguistics [2016]).

That minor quibble aside, Ancient Africa is excellent and to be recommended to anyone who wants a better understanding of the continent's role in the emergence and development of the world we live in.

[Sam Nicholes · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not an introductory book. Provides a panoramic view of ancient African history. Leans heavy of linguistic anthropology. Sentences are super long and convey multiple ideas at once.

[James Hodge · Rating 1 out of 5]

Swerve this One

If you have thought about reading this, don’t. The author tries hard to convince that everything starts in East Africa. But the premises don’t hold up and the arguments are weak. This is a collection of wishes, even ravings, not fact. A lot more work is needed if Ancient Africa is to become a subject worth serious study rather than a selection of myths. As for the arguments, so called, based on linguistics, the less said about those the better…

[M P · Rating 5 out of 5]

Important and readable