Africa-dominant world discussion

Aussey

How would it be possible for Axum to step into Rome's place in the times when both were emerging empires, and to establish an empire from North and Western Africa to say India...eventually braking up after hundreds of years of Axumite rule and miscegenation leaving most of the peoples in southern Hispania, Gaul, Italy, and the Balkans heavily mixed to seem as today's African-Americans, while North Africans, Arabians, and most Persians and Indians are darker, resembling Africans today...this is the situation, say, around 300 when the Axumite Empire falls...

Basically, Europe and Africa switch places, and the knowledge of the ancient Greeks is held by the African successor states of Axum, eventually leading to a post-Axumite nation in northwestern Africa (OTL Morocco,) to discover a "New World," and begin establishing ports along the European coast to capture the "illcoloured peoples," as a slave labor in the African New World?

However, gunpowder, orecasting, etc. should all be discovered in Africa, and the valuable materials in Europe harvested by Africans and taken back to their nations...
 

Nicksplace27

Four words, one book. Guns, Germs, and Steel.

Not enough development, not enough division in northern Africa, also the land is far too arid in Axum. You'd have to get one bad-ass plague to hit Europe but leave Africa unaffected.
 

Nicole

Europe's rise outside of the Mediterranean was relatively recent, though...

What would really be nice would be some sort of POD in near ancient but recent enough to still have Egypt around that brings about a reversal of the Sahara.
 

Aussey

Kidblast said:
Has Meninwhite hijacked Aussey's account? :eek:
Click to expand...

what?!

No, no...Why couldn't the Axumites, Nubians, Ethiopians, someone conquered the Med. Area via Egypt before Rome did, and thus expand throughout Western Africa, giving us a world dominated by peoples of African origin, instead of European...
 

Nicksplace27

Aussey said:
what?!

No, no...Why couldn't the Axumites, Nubians, Ethiopians, someone conquered the Med. Area via Egypt before Rome did, and thus expand throughout Western Africa, giving us a world dominated by peoples of African origin, instead of European...
Click to expand...

simple geography says that it would be really, really hard.
 

Nicole

Hm, actually, one wonders... Egypt was a strong society way before anyone else, but never really got to expand (a large part of the problem was really cultural)... If you somehow change the elements that prevented expansion, Egypt could co-opt Europe...

But one wonders if Egypt really counts as "African", considering how ingrained it is in the Middle Eastern sphere, even though it is technically on the African continent.
 
Hapsburg

Hapsburg

Banned
Though the ethnic Egyptians were a semitic people, they did use black-African Nubians as mercenaries and later as slave-warriors. IIRC, at one point, Egypt was even conquered and ruled by the Nubians.
So, I wonder if the Nubian dynasty managed to stay in control, if they would be more expansionist later on. Conquer and rule the Mediterranean Sea, et al.

On a related note, I remember writing a TL for a map once wherein Rome expanded into deepest, darkest Africa, and ruled much of West Africa. After the fall of Rome, the West-African territories form an independent Empire and establish trade routes, cities, and eventually provinces as far as the Congo basin. I dunno if that'd count, though.
 

Ran Exilis

Gladi said:
Bright day
From what I understand Semitic people are actually from Africa...
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That's odd - I'm pretty sure that it's the other way around, and that both the Semitic peoples
as well as the ancestors of the Egyptians and the Berbers came from Southwest Asia...

@ Hapsburg: the ethnic Egyptians were not a Semitic people.
However,they were quite closely related to the Semites.

But you're right about the Nubian conquests of Egypt, though.
In fact, Nubian conquest of Egypt or the southern parts of Egypt is something that happened several times in history,
and the last time was in the 10th century AD...
 
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Gladi

Ran Exilis said:
That's odd - I'm pretty sure that it's the other way around, and that both the Semitic peoples
as well as the ancestors of the Egyptians and the Berbers came from Southwest Asia...
Click to expand...

It is in the four letter book. It says that semitic languages originated in Africa. Now people and languages may a bit separate, but...
 

Smaug

I've heard the same. The Sahara wasn't always the desrert that it is now. 6 or 7 thousand years ago, maybe a bit more, it was more hospitable for Pastoral peoples to make thier way.
 

Haggis

Umm, are y'all forgetting that Aksum was a multiethnic state? In fact they did exert a certain amount of power in Cush as they called it. The main problem was the Aksum way of going about wars and conquests and tax collecting.

They weren't nearly as centralized as the Romans were so they relied way too heavily on different princes and things in order to go about kicking ass and it was a common practice for a prince to ride around promising amoseh or blocks of salt to whoever helped them out.

Though if Aksum was a bit more centralized it could definitely expand up through Egypt and into the Med. I know everyone thinks Jared Diamond is all knowing on why cultures fail and all that, and he has layed out a great ground work to build off of, it's just that sometimes cultures fail for different reasons.

The main reason for Aksum's fall was that they were just too decentralized.

Though I would hardly say that Aksum's successor state of Ethiopia really failed until European meddling in World War Two.
 

Riain

Banned
Diamond's geographical determinsim has a lot to commend to it, but it is a genral theory which can't be laid against the rise and fall of any empire or dynasty. How productive is Axums agriculture, or perhaps how productive could it be with the worlds best practice used at any one time? If this is comparable with other ancient powers then Axum can sustain an empire.
 
Grey Wolf

Grey Wolf

Donor
I thought that Africans had actually conquered the whole planet ? Aren't we all supposed to originate there and have spread out in migrations ? That being the case, there seems no logical reason why any of the remnant African peoples would not be able to adjust or adapt if they spread out - after all, the descendants of African slaves have adapted equally well to North America and to the British Isles

On the note that Europe's dominant position in Asia is only fairly recent, that's really only if you forget about Alexander The Great, and his successors... I also did some research once in answer to a question and found that Roman traders were visiting Southern India in ancient times

Best Regards
Grey Wolf
 

Alcuin

Banned
Aussey said:
How would it be possible for Axum to step into Rome's place in the times when both were emerging empires, and to establish an empire from North and Western Africa to say India...eventually braking up after hundreds of years of Axumite rule and miscegenation leaving most of the peoples in southern Hispania, Gaul, Italy, and the Balkans heavily mixed to seem as today's African-Americans, while North Africans, Arabians, and most Persians and Indians are darker, resembling Africans today...this is the situation, say, around 300 when the Axumite Empire falls...
Click to expand...

Basically, it's the wrong way for Axum to go. Its natural routes of expansion are: first, across the Red Sea into Arabia and out into the whole of the Ethopian Highlands; second, along the East African coast into Zanj (and perhaps as far as Mozambique as well as across the Ocean to India); and last and (given the situation in Nubia and Egypt) very much least, North along the Nile. Only after all that are they going to expand Westward, and even then, there are Phoenecians and Greeks (and maybe even Persians) to oppose them. A massive Axumite empire would not replace Rome but could well have co-existed with it.

As someone has pointed out, the Sahara was much greener until just before the founding of paleolithic Egypt. There is even evidence of a fishing-based culture around Lake Chad. It disappeared at almost exactly the same time that Egypt began and it is tempting to suggest a link.

For what you want to actually happen, you need that culture to move Westward at the end of the ice age and establish a riverene civilisation along the Niger (much like the later Songhai and Mali empires). Now, if that civilisation grew strong quickly enough, it might well come into contact with the Mediterranean and might have some influence on the development of Western Europe. However, that would only happen if Ancient West African economics was based on something more portable than cows. If you measure wealth in cows, you're not going to start expanding overseas.

Hope this helps. Good luck with your timeline.
 
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