Midterm Flashcards
Kilwa
- Ibn Battuta traveled there in 1331
- Describes Muslim religion throughout the region
- Customary to greet guests with small boats
- another important East African trade civilization
- Wealthy and powerful city
- 800 B.P.
- Near modern day Tanzania
- Did not survive arrival of Portuguese
- 12,000 people at it’s most prosperous
Bantu Expansion
The widespread expansion of Bantu Languages.
-Occurred around 5000 B.P
-East Bantu spread out of east
-Bantu languages are a subgroup of Niger Congo Family
-Occurred in the forests of Central Africa
-Root cause was farmer power
-Mostly occupied forests by first century C.E.
-Occurred because Bantu farmers needed fertile land and often skipped over the mediocre land made their farming lands around rivers. Farming communities expanded. Bantu speaking farmers moved into new territories and brought diseases such as malaria, killing people.
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Farmer Power
- Any conflict between groups of farmers and foragers was more likely to end in the farmer’s favor.
- This was partially due to population size, farming villages could have been as large as a couple thousand people whereas foraging villages were about 150 people.
- Foragers had little experience with disease, so when farming villages expanded, their diseases would kill entire bands of foragers.
- Farming societies became breeding ground for disease and when new farmers were born, they were born immune to these diseases
- Responsible for steady replacement of foraging societies
What are the geographical challenges the African continent poses for human social, economic, and political development?
- Geography negatively impacts Africa’s wealth.
- Due to lack of roads or poor maintenance of roads, lack of car travel
- poor infrastructure
- Straddles the north-south axis line
- Vast size of continent alone
- Many climate zones, some of which are hostile to humans
- grasslands, deserts, temperate
- Morocco enjoys a tropical climate
- African farming has 10% less production rate due to poor soil
- Rainfall high in some places, droughts in others-cyclical rain fall
- Geologically inactive-soil is old and lacks nutrients- causing farmers to go through intense labor
- High volumes of disease-evolving microbes-malaria
- hard to travel period
- bugs
Khoisan
- Isolated
- Short in stature
- Light chestnut color
- African desert
- Endangered
- Their language uses clicking noises
- South of the equator
- 29 languages
- One of the most ancient language families in the world
- Khoisan and everything else
- Modern: found in Kalahari desert
Glottochronology
- the idea that languages change at a predictable rate
- Allows linguists to determine the order in which languages branched off one another with approximate dates
- Highly criticized
Language Families
- Khoisan
- Niger-Congo
- Nilo-Saharan
- Afro-Asiatic
Niger-Congo
- West and Southern Africa
- Foragers- yams, nuts
Afro-Asiatic
- Occupied much of the Sahara
- Gathered seeds and grasses
- Originated out of Middle east and spread into Africa
- Arabic and Hebrew
Nilo-Saharan
- Live along the middle Nile River
- Little ecological distribution
- Live near swamps, wetlands
- Sahara used to be much wetter, abundance of grasses
- Aquatic tradition
- Unconfirmed candidates to leave Africa
Bab-al-Mandab
The straights between the Horn of Africa and Yemen and Arabian Peninsula.
-Required simple boats
Multi-Regional Model
the idea that H.Erectus migrated out of Africa, they dispersed into regions of Asia, Australasia, and Europe. These groups lived isolated from each other and developed later into modern humans with variations in skin color and physical features “racial characteristics”
describe the single-origin hypothesis:
Homo Erectus left Africa about 1.8 million years ago, but Homo sapiens evolved only in Africa. Homo sapiens left Africa 100-200,000 years ago. They replaced all other species of Homo living outside Africa.
Spread of Islam
-639-1000 CE
-Egypt: 639-642
Increased because of trade with Muslim people
-Connected to trade routes
-Populous and economically productive
-being Islamic showed the status, personal identity, affiliations, and credibility of the people Islamic traders were trading with
-Timing was right
-Population density increased
-Travel dramatically increased between North and South
Periplus of the Erythreaean Sea
- Written in 100 C.E and is considered one of the earliest documents and was used a ‘merchant’s guide’ to market towns.
- In 100 C.E, merchants provided strong commercial economy in a stateless society.
- During the first century, the Roman Empire was expanding into Africa and increased trade. Therefore, a merchant guide would have been highly useful as people identified cities by what was sold and traded by merchants.
- Chiefs were mayors of merchant towns
- Stateless economy
- Strong commercial economics
