Ancient Africa & African empires timeline

New Crisis, The, Jan/Feb 2000 by Agatucci, Cora

AFRICAN EMPIRES

300-700 C.E

Rise of Axum or Aksum (Ethiopia) and conversion to Christianity. (By C.E. 1st century, Rome had conquered Egypt, Carthage, and other North African areas; which became the granaries of the Roman Empire, and the majority of the population converted to Christianity). Axum spent its religious zeal carving out churches from rocks, and writing and interpreting religious texts.

ca. 600-1000

Bantu migration extends to southern Africa; Bantu languages will predominate in central and southern Africa. Emergence of southeastern African societies, to become the stone city-states of Zimbabwe, DhloDhlo, Kilwa, and Sofala, which flourish through 1600.

610

Beginning of Islam.

639-641

Khalif Omar conquers Egypt with Islamic troups.

700-800

Islam sweeps across North Africa; the Islamic faith eventually extended into many areas of sub-Saharan Africa (to ca. 1500).

740

Islamicized Africans (Moors) invade Spain, and rule it for almost 800 years. The Moors brought agriculture, engineering, mining, industry, manufacturing, architecture, and scholarship, developing Spain into the center for culture and learning throughout Europe until the fall of Granada in 1492.

800 -1100

Growth of trans-Sahara gold trade across the sahel (Arabic for "shore" or "coast") at southern boundary of the Sahara Desert, which was likened to a sea. The desert was not an impossible barrier; many trade routes cross it from early times. The sahel was the intensive point of contact and trade between sub-Saharan Africa (Africa south of the Sahara Desert), and North Africa and the world beyond, along with contact and trade along Atlantic and Indian Ocean seacoasts. In western Africa a number of black kingdoms emerge whose economic base lay in their control of traps-Saharan trade routes. Gold, kola nuts, and slaves were sent north in exchange for cloth, utensils, and salt. This trade enabled the rise of the great empires Ghana, Mali, and Songhai of the savanna (the term "savanna" refers to a treeless or sparsely forested plain).

ca. 1000

Ghana Empire of Soninke peoples (in what is now S.E. Mauritania) at height of power. The earliest of the 3 great West African states (emerging ca. 300 C.E.), Ghana equipped its armies with iron weapons and became master of the trade in salt and gold, controlling routes extending from present-day Morocco in the north, Lake Chad and Nubia/Egypt in the east, and the coastal forests of western Africa in the south. By the early 11th century, Muslim advisers were at the court of Ghana.

1076

Berber army from Morocco, led by militant religious reformers called Almoravids, attacked Ghana, and led it into a period of internal conflicts and disorganization. By 1087, the Almoravids lost control of the empire to the Saninkes, but the empire disintegrated into smaller states. One of these was Kangaba out of which the empire of Mali arose.

13th c.

Rise of the Mali Empire of the Mande (or Mandinka) peoples in West Africa; the Mali Empire was strategically located near gold mines and the agriculturally rich interior floodplain of the Niger River. This region had been under the domination of the Ghana Empire until the middle of the 11th century. As Ghana declined, several shortlived kingdoms vied for influence over the western Sudan region.