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Unravel the Mysteries of West Africa’s Earliest Known Civilization

By Historian August 12, 2022

Unravel The Mysteries of the Nok Kingdom Of Nigeria

The mysteries of the Nok Kingdom in West Africa has baffled researchers for decades. In the town of Jos in central Nigeria, where he had spent the preceding few years collecting and classifying historic objects discovered on a rough plateau, British archaeologist Bernard Fagg welcomed a visitor in 1943.

The guest was carrying a terracotta head that, according to him, was sitting atop a scarecrow in a nearby field of yams. Fagg grew curious. The object resembled a monkey head made of clay that he had seen a few years before, and none of them matched any known artifacts from an ancient African civilization.

Fagg searched central Nigeria for related relics, he learned that locals had been discovering terracottas in unusual locations for years, including under a hockey field, sitting on top of a rocky hill, and sticking out of piles of gravel released by power hoses in tin mine. He amassed about 200 terracottas. He started up shop in a whitewashed hamlet that is still visible outside the settlement of Nok. The items were dated to around 500 B.C. by soil examination from the locations where they were discovered.

Fagg used the then-new method of radiocarbon dating to determine the dates of plant material found embedded in the terracotta, the results ranged from 440 B.C. to A.D. 200. He later used a technique called thermoluminescence, which determines when baked clay was burned, to date the scarecrow head—now known as the Jemaa Head after the village where it was discovered—to approximately 500 B.C. Fagg and his associates had reportedly uncovered a previously undiscovered culture that he named Nok by a mix of “good fortune, hard effort, and novel dating strategies.”

He discovered 13 of these furnaces, and because terracotta figurines were so closely associated with the furnaces—both inside and outside of them—he theorized that they were religious artifacts used to facilitate forging and melting. Nok has the earliest dates for iron smelting in sub-Saharan Africa up to that point because to carbon dating of the charcoal inside the furnaces, which indicated dates as far back as 280 B.C. He may have discovered evidence of a substantial, settled population, given the large number of smelters and the quantity of terracottas.

Fagg quickly identified several of the main indicators of an advanced civilisation, including sophisticated art, structured religion, metal smelting, and a sizeable enough population to support these practices. But he was aware that such a civilization did not exist in a vacuum.
Scholars are now returning to the scrubby, hilly. Discovering that the Nok survived for longer. They lived from at least 900 B.C. until roughly 200 A.D., making them possibly the first advanced civilization in West Africa. Their clay figurines are now among the most recognizable ancient African artifacts.

Archaeologists move a teaspoon of earth on the Niger for every ton they move on the Nile, according to anthropologist George Murdock’s 1959 observation. The increasing demand for African artifacts among collectors in the US and Europe has fueled a nearly 40-year-long campaign of theft at Nok sites, which has hampered scholarship.

“Nobody kept up with Bernard Fagg’s work. The Nok was victimized bRather than scientific research, foreign art traders and illegal digging were the Nok’s victims. from Frankfurt’s Johann Wolfgang Goethe University stated.

In central Nigeria, approximately two hours’ drive north of the nation’s capital, Abuja, Breunig and his colleague Nicole Rupp are leading a team of German and Nigerian academics, students, and even past looters as they excavate sites over an area of around 150 square miles. The Nok world, which covered more than 30,000 square miles, an area the size of Portugal, is only a microcosm of the study region.

Rupp and her team are working at the crest of a black granite mountain that dominates the savannah. They quickly start to find pieces of red terracotta sculpture, grinding stones, and pottery shards similar to those that Fagg first found. The excavators have collected enough relics in an hour to fill three large Ziploc bags.

A terracotta arm that was severed from a larger statue is one of them. Realistic modeling and its rough, gritty appearance immediately distinguish it as being uniquely Nok. Frank Willett stated that the Nok established Africa’s earliest sculptural tradition outside of Egypt in his seminal overview of African art. Like their contemporaries, the soldier builders of Xian, China, the Nok were adept at terracotta’s practically infinite potential for sculpture.

They used it to make figures that represented disease, conflict, love, and music. For instance, Rupp and Breunig’s team discovered a sculpture of a man and woman bowing before one another and wrapping their arms around one another in a passionate embrace, as well as numerous prisoners who had ropes around their necks and waists. Breunig and Rupp discovered 1,700 pieces of terracotta in about 450 square yards at one location, which suggests a sizable population.

Carbon dating on charcoal that Breunig obtained from a Nok iron smelter at the place known as Intini revealed a time period between 519 and 410 B.C., proving that iron technology existed earlier than previous researchers, including Fagg, had thought. However, these smelters might not be the oldest in sub-Saharan Africa.

However, critics point out that the wood used for dating could have been centuries old, a problem that dogs carbon dating, especially in very arid places like Niger where the wood desiccates and lasts longer. French archaeologists have discovered evidence of iron-smelting in the Termit Hills of Niger from as early as 1400 B.C. Breunig admits that the issue might also affect the Intini furnace’s dates. However, he has a crucial piece of evidence:

Nok pottery, which was discovered inside the furnace next to the charcoal, indicates that they were likely added there at the same time. Breunig’s research has allowed him to pinpoint a period of time when iron and stone tools coexisted. Iron tools are frequently discovered around Nok stone axes, indicating that they were used in the same communities, possibly even the same homes.

Breunig’s findings further support the consensus among archaeologists that ancient West Africans switched from stone to iron without going through a copper period. Few other regions of the world seem to have made that leap.

The debate over whether iron technology originated in West Africa or was brought across the Sahara is now raging among academics. Those who oppose autonomous development are accused of disparaging the technological advances made in Africa, while those who support it are accused of lacking concrete evidence.

The legacy left by Nok to the following cultures is even more perplexing. Art historians have long viewed Nok as an isolated event and a magnificent artifact that is incompatible with the timeline of African art over the following two millennia. Art historians are investigating more precisely what Nok might have contributed to later civilizations in southern Nigeria that possessed sophisticated metalworking abilities and a legacy of naturalistic portraiture.

Where did Nok culture originate from, and where did it go? It was a question that Bernard Fagg struggled with. He recognized that there was no indication that the inhabitants of Ife had ever seen Nok terracottas while writing about the “striking similarities of style and subject matter” between Nok and Ife.

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Six Astonishing African History Facts That Made Us Reevaluate Our History Lessons

By Historian August 11, 2022

African history is an amazing thing. And here are the six African history facts you should know:

6. The Witwatersrand Basin in South Africa is where nearly half of all the gold ever mined in history was found.

Due to its abundant natural resources, Africa has drawn the attention of both former colonial powers and modern-day countries seeking to increase their GDP through trade agreements.

Africa has been uniquely gifted with goods that other people crave, from rare metals to sugar.

Consider the Witwatersrand Basin in South Africa as an example. The world’s greatest gold discovery sparked a gold rush in 1886 that resulted in the establishment of Johannesburg. Despite being found only 132 years ago, Witwatersrand has produced over half of all gold extracted worldwide.

Here are some more facts after you’ve raised your jaw off the floor. Since 1886, Witwatersrand has produced more than 2 billion ounces of gold, with an estimated 1.161 billion ounces still in the deposit. Mine shafts have been dug 3,900 meters below the surface of the ground in an extraordinarily risky effort to extract the remaining supply. Even if the geologists’ forecasts come true, it is difficult to estimate how long the rest will last, but it will undoubtedly be much shorter than the hundreds of millions of years it took for the gold to be created.

5. Africa is where the world’s oldest art was created.

Of course, you immediately think of the ancient carvings on European cave walls when you consider the oldest art ever created. Wrong. The Blombos Cave in South Africa’s Blomboschfontein Nature Reserve is home to the earliest piece of art ever discovered. There, archaeologists discovered an ochre fragment that was at least 77, 000 years old and was inscribed with an intricate pattern of crossed lines. The rock is “a good sign of a capacity to think in the abstract, to think in terms of the past, present, and the future, and that’s one of the trademarks of modern behavior,” according to the excavation’s director, Christopher Henshilwood.

The fact that the art is 30, 000 years older than the Lebombo Bone’s tally marks implies that Homo sapiens, the species that created the ochre artifact and baboon fibula, had a fundamental understanding of aesthetic experience. Long before the ochre carving, Blombos Cave also appears to have been a center of prehistoric art. Two ochre-processing kits, including bone, charcoal, ochre, grindstones, and hammer stones, were discovered in 2008. The ochre that was created was discovered kept in sea snail shells. The age of these kits was estimated to be 100,000 years ago. The birthplace of art is undoubtedly Blombos Cave.

4. The oldest continuously operating university in the world is the University of Al Quaraouiyine in Fez.

It comes as no surprise, given Africa’s tradition of creativity and education, that Morocco is home to the oldest continuously operating university in the world. Fatima al-Fihri, a Tunisian lady, established the University of Al Quaraouiyine in Fez way back in 859 AD. Al-Fihri used her large inheritance in the construction of a massive mosque and a nearby school (madrasa).

The university is still operating today, in large part thanks to the generosity of some extremely affluent people over the years. The mosque, which can accommodate 22, 000 worshippers, is still the largest in Africa.

Because of its reputation for having strong academic standards, the university attracted investment. Sultan Abu Inan Faris built a library in 1349 and used donations from wealthy patrons to assemble a sizable collection of manuscripts.

Leading figures from outside the Islamic world have long been drawn to the institution because of its skill in secular fields including rhetoric, grammar, mathematics, and astronomy. There, in the late 10th century, the future pope Sylvester II studied, and a century later, the Jewish scholar Maimonides, in a setting of religious tolerance and openness that we would do well to emulate today.

3. The Carthaginian General Hannibal crossed the Alps on elephants and dominated Italy for 15 years.

Hannibal, the famous Carthaginian general’s son, demonstrated such excellence as an army officer that, at the age of just 26, he was appointed supreme leader of the whole Carthaginian force. Unfortunately for Rome, Hannibal took extremely seriously the oath he had taken as a young man in Spain, promising to always be hostile to the Republic. He quickly broke a peace agreement with Rome.

Hannibal started the Second Punic War by marching across Gaul with 90,000 troops and, most famously, 37 elephants after capturing areas of Spain that Carthage had agreed to avoid in the truce. Amazingly, the majority of the animals made it into Italy despite numerous ambushes and the chilly weather.

He achieved numerous surprising triumphs there through a series of brilliant military maneuvers, and for the following 15 years, he dominated the majority of the nation. After being betrayed and forced to return to defend Carthage against Roman onslaught, Hannibal resolutely poisoned himself rather than be taken.

2. Around 3100BC, the Ancient Egyptians began writing.

Around 3400 BC, the Ancient Sumerian civilisation in the Middle East developed writing, and a few hundred years later, the Egyptians did the same. It is possible that the Egyptians developed their symbol system independently of Sumeria, but this is impossible to say. Nonetheless, Hieroglyphics are a fascinating topic in and of themselves, as well as a tremendous feat. Hieroglyphics were pictorial representations of words, concepts, and sounds that served a variety of functions. The earliest examples of hieroglyphic writing can be found in important tombs from the end of the fourth millennium BC, carved into pottery and ivory.

Those who could write Hieroglyphics began training at the age of six and enjoyed a very privileged position in society, avoiding taxes and military conscription. Hieroglyphics as a writing system worked very differently than modern scripts: a single picture could mean an entire word or part of another, and some were phonetic, meaning that a picture of an animal could be a homonym. We can only decipher Hieroglyphics with some accuracy because of the Rosetta Stone, an ancient crib-sheet that contains the Ancient Greek for both religious and secular Hieroglyphics.

1. Mansa Musa, Mali’s Emperor, was the wealthiest man in history.

Because of its gold deposits, bounty of salt (once more valuable than gold in Africa), and heavy taxation on West African trade, the great Mali Empire (c. 1235–1670) became extremely wealthy. Mali was ruled by the world’s wealthiest man, Mansa Musa I (c. 1280–c. 1337), at the height of its size and wealth. The aforementioned image serves as proof that Mansa Musa’s wealth was well known in Europe. In 1324, he led a caravan of 60,000 men (including 12,000 personal slaves) to Mecca.

He had 80 camels in his baggage train for this journey, each carrying 300 pounds of gold, which he had his attendants casually distribute to the underprivileged as they passed by. This benevolence had a mixed effect in Cairo, where the price of gold fell and took years to rise again.

Arab historians who saw this amazing procession reported that Mansa Musa even put the African sun to shame. Mansa Musa was a very devout Muslim who was extremely wealthy, but in his zeal to get to Mecca and pay his homage, he made a number of diplomatic mistakes.

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These pharaohs’ passionate letters explain how politics worked 3.3 millennia ago.

By Historian August 11, 2022

The Amarna Letters provide a behind-the-scenes glimpse at Egyptian diplomacy, showing how pharaohs were flattered, alliances were formed, and power brokers maneuvered.

Archaeologists occasionally come upon an entire trove of documents rather than just one or a few, which completely alters their perception of a bygone era and whose interesting details throw that distant time into sharp relief. The Amarna Letters, a collection of 382 clay tablets said to be the earliest diplomatic records ever discovered, are without a doubt the collection that revolutionized Egyptology.

Written in the 14th century B.C., they include letters from puppet rulers under Egyptian power as well as correspondence between the pharaohs and its enemy kings, the Babylonians, Assyrians, Hittites, and Mitanni. The archive covers Amenhotep III’s (1390–1353 B.C. ), Egypt’s legendary builder monarch, as well as Akhenaten’s (1353–1336 B.C. ), whose religious revolution shook ancient Egypt for a generation.

The letters provide a thorough look at the eastern Mediterranean and Middle East during the Late Bronze Age, when Egypt was cementing its influence and Assyria was emerging as a new regional force. They also provide a window into the 18th dynasty of Egypt.

The letters, which expose the flattery, haughtiness, resentment, and groveling of the writers, also shed light on the growing complexity of international diplomacy. A system of laws was required as a result of the expansion of powerful empires vying for dominance, and the Amarna communiqués offer historians unmatched insights into how these early laws functioned.

Pharaoh’s City of the sun

Pharaoh Akhenaten relocated his court to a remote area further north, almost equidistant from Thebes (his previous capital) and Memphis, around 1348 B.C. The relocation was a component of the pharaoh’s ambitious plan to elevate Aten, the solar disc, to the position of practically only Egyptian deity.

The name Akhetaten, which translates to “horizon of Aten,” was given to Akhenaten’s new city on the east bank of the Nile, presumably in reference to the neighboring hills’ ability to frame the rising sun.

Tell el Amarna, which is used interchangeably with the site of Akhetaten, is the name of the location in modern times. It is also the name of the extraordinary culture that flourished for a brief period of time when the pharaoh’s Aten cult was in upheaval and a radical shift in art, known as the Amarna style.

But the reign of Akhenaten wasn’t simply about revolutions in the arts and in religion.
His father, Amenhotep III, had left him a kingdom with enormous strength and standing in the region, and he proceeded to further Egyptian interests, particularly in mineral-rich Nubia to the south.

Egypt’s capital was a thriving city full of residences, barracks, temples, and government structures until King Akhenaten passed away in 1336 B.C. The latter was home to the ongoing collection of diplomatic correspondence that Amenhotep III and Queen Tiye started. (King Tut’s grandparents were a prominent royal couple in Egypt.)

When Akhetaten’s boundary stone was discovered at Amarna in the late 1700s, the ancient city was identified. After a string of fortunate discoveries, the letters were discovered in the 1880s.
As word of their presence spread, the location unexpectedly gained enormous archaeological significance.

Wallis Budge, the curator of the British Museum, purchased a group of 82 items. The Egyptian Museum in Cairo and the Staatliche Museum in Berlin both received a sizable number of tablets via the antiquities market.

The first significant excavation at Amarna, under the direction of British Egyptologist William Flinders Petrie, soon yielded more tablets from the Akhenaten era.
Petrie unearthed a structure during his first campaign that had the words “Bureau of Correspondence of Pharaoh” stamped on its bricks.

Petrie was a careful archaeologist who also had a knack for getting attention.
He was aware that the Amarna Letters would help raise money for the dig.
His analyses of the letter’s documentary wealth and the ancient capital’s archaeological ruins greatly advanced knowledge of this dynasty and the New Kingdom.

Not every letter was discovered at once. When the Norwegian linguist Jrgen Alexander Knudtzon arranged them chronologically within geographic groups in the early 1900s, there were 358. The remaining 24 were found over the course of the 20th century and added to Knudtzon’s numbering scheme, which is still in use by academics today. What the Armana Letters tell us about ancient pirates is as follows:.

The letters are written in Akkadian, a language that was extensively used in ancient Mesopotamia. They are not written in ancient Egyptian. Similar to how English is used in international relations today, Akkadian spread throughout the entire region in the second millennium B.C. It is written in cuneiform, a wedge-shaped writing style.

The majority of tablets discovered so far are letters that the Egyptians received. The majority of tablets discovered so far are letters that the Egyptians received. The pharaohs’ letters were only preserved in a few copies.

Written By Puppets

The Amarna Letters have been classified into two main categories by scholars.
Both the rulers of the other major, independent regional powers wrote letters to the pharaoh, one from the heads of the kingdoms Egypt controlled and the other from his equals (or, as he would have perceived them, his near equals).

Dispatches from puppet rulers, the first group, come from Canaan, which is now Israel and Lebanon. Under Thutmose III, Egypt had taken possession of Canaan as an imperial trophy a century earlier. Along with prestige, the new acquisition brought Egypt troubles. Its rulers had to deal with a group known as the Habiru, who some historians believe to be the Hebrews, though this is still up for debate.

Evidently, there was a strong temptation for puppet leaders to strike deals with the neighborhood Habiru. The ruler of Tyre laments that the Habiru have destroyed the area in an Amarna dispatch to Akhenaten (Letter 148), but notes that another local ruler, that of Hazor (modern-day northern Israel), who was supposedly loyal to Egypt, “has aligned himself with the Habiru… [and] has turned over the king’s land to the Habiru.” abandoned 3,700 years ago, a Canaanite palace.
(Archaeologists now understand the cause.)

These letters frequently include language that is extremely demeaning. To the monarch, my lord, my god, my Sun, the Sun of heaven: Message of Yapahu, your servant, the dirt at your feet, wrote the puppet ruler of Gezer in modern-day Israel.

Brides and Bridegrooms

The rulers of the major regional powers, who were the pharaoh’s equals, wrote letters instead, and they took care to show their equality at the appropriate times. The “Great Powers Club” refers to the major regional powers of the time, which included Egypt, Babylonia, Assyria, Mitanni (located in modern-day southeastern Turkey), and “Hatti,” the Hittite empire.

The island of Cyprus, Alashiya, was another club member. Despite its modest size in terms of geography, the island country had a robust economy because of its copper resources. (Egypt was on edge due to the quick war chariots of the Hittites.)

A couple of the letters were written during the time of Amenhotep III and Tiye, who was also Akhenaten’s mother and was a notable royal wife. When Amenhotep’s son assumed the kingdom after his death, his widow remained influential. As a record of Egypt’s diplomatic interactions with allies and vassal kingdoms, Akhenaten brought his father’s archives with him to the new capital.

The exchange of royal princesses for brides is discussed in some of the Amarna archive. A rare example of an Amarna message that the pharaoh actually wrote is Letter 5 from Amenhotep III to the Babylonian king Kadasman-Enlil I. The letter, which is only 30 lines long, covers the three main topics of royal correspondence: extravagant well-wishes, the delivery of pricey gifts, and the pharaoh’s hopes of obtaining a Babylonian princess for his harem. (View inside one of the largest royal weddings in Egypt.)

The pharaoh could have expected to get a wife in return, but his continuous reluctance to do so was an indication of Egypt’s dominance. Kadasman-Enlil I complained to Amenhotep in an earlier letter (Letter 4) that “from the earliest times no daughter of the ruler of Egypt has ever been offered in marriage.” “Why are you teaching me such things? “, the Babylonian king demands of the edict. You are in charge. Do whatever you want.

Who could object if you wanted to give me your daughter in marriage? Other kings in the archive share his annoyance, which exposes the true nature of regional power: Egypt could make all the decisions.

Royal Protocol

The letters written by Tushratta, king of Mitanni, whose expanding empire shared a southern border with Egypt’s northernmost possessions in Lebanon, are some of the most illuminating texts regarding royalty and power. Tushratta starts each of his letters with a standard salutation that the Great Powers established to confirm the sender’s identity.

The format of Letter 27 is a complex pattern of congratulations. He addresses the pharaoh as “brother” because the king of Mitanni is an equal and begins with these words: Say to Naphurreya [Akhenaten], the king of Egypt, my brother, my son-in-law, whom I love and whom loves me: Thus Tushratta, Great King, the king of Mitanni, your father-in-law, who loves you, your brother. For me all goes well. For you may all go well. For Tiye, your mother, may all go well. For Tadu-Heba, my daughter, your wife, for the rest of your wives . . . may all go very, very well.

Akhenaten’s father, Amenhotep III, had married Tadu-Heba, the daughter Tushratta mentions. After his passing, she married Akhenaten. The Mitanni, who were frequently harassed by the Hittites to their north, required a strong alliance with Egypt, hence, this alliance was essential to Tushratta. (Get to know the three queens that successfully defended Egypt against Hyksos invaders.)

The prior letter, Letter 26, written to Queen Tiye rather than Akhenaten, explains an underlying conflict in this one. Tushratta laments to the late pharaoh’s mother that two gold statues were among the presents that her late husband, Amenhotep III, had promised to Tushratta (and which are described in Letter 19). Upon arrival, it was determined that these were “gold-plated sculptures of wood.

Experts disagree about whether the less expensive statues were a deliberate slight against Tushratta and a sign of Mitanni’s declining standing in Egypt. The weaker party in this situation was Tushratta, yet he had to uphold his reputation. The argument is continued in Letter 28, where Tushratta argues that Akhenaten has imprisoned Egypt’s messengers just as he did with his own.

The Assyrian Ashuruballit I, Tushratta’s former vassal king, was about to vanquish him. Power in the Mitanni empire declined as Assyria began to rise. In his first letter to Akhenaten (Letter 15), Ashuruballit I does not yet refer to himself as a brother, but it is a bold assertion that Assyria has joined the “Club”:The “splendid chariot, horses, and a date-stone of real lapis lazuli” were his gifts, but he demanded respect in exchange.

The unexpected rise of Assyria infuriated other countries, especially Babylon, whose monarch addressed Letter 9 to Akhenaten. After the customary greetings and gifts, he queries, “Why have the Assyrian envoys of my vassal [i.e., Ashuruballit I] come to your nation on their own authority? They won’t do any business at all if you love me. Send them to me without anything. To the realities of power, however, such objections were insignificant. Egypt, under Akhenaten, remained the dominant force in the area as Assyria expanded. (These antiquated relics pay tribute to Egypt’s strong queens.)

However, Akhenaten’s new Aten worship would not succeed in Egypt. The final documents in the Amarna archive were written during the reign of Tutankhamun, his son and eventual successor, during whose rule the Amarna reforms were undone and references to Akhenaten’s name were removed.

The capital of Akhenaten was abandoned for the desert to consume. The diplomatic tablets had to have been placed in two tiny pits beneath the administrative building’s floor by a civil servant at some point during its abandonment. They were found there more than 3,000 years later, during another era of power.

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