A king's bells could speak a sentence his subjects already knew

Along the trade routes of the Congo basin, and especially where routes met, chiefdoms and small states began to form during the first millennium BCE and the first millennium CE. Commerce produced them. Smiths supplied their rulers with a particular emblem, the flange welded double bell. The two bells were tuned to different pitches, one high and one low. Bantu languages are generally tonal, so any set phrase carries a fixed sequence of high and low tones through its words. The man carrying the bells for a chief could strike them in that sequence and play a saying that asserted political or ritual authority, and everyone within earshot, knowing the phrase, would hear which one it was. Jan Vansina showed from linguistic and archaeological evidence that the double bells were already widespread across the Congo basin during the first millennium CE, and that by the early second millennium they had reached the Zambezi and the country that became Great Zimbabwe.

By about 1200 the societies of the Greater Antilles were building stone lined ball courts, and the courts are how archaeologists mark the arrival of what they call the Formative age. A ball court is a permanent public work. It has to be sited, cleared, lined with worked stone and then maintained, and it exists only where somebody can command labour for a project that grows no food. What happened in these courts was the political and religious life of a chiefdom: games between communities, ceremonies, the settling of rank and obligation in front of an audience. The chiefdoms the Spanish met on Hispaniola three centuries later, with paramount caciques, tribute and inherited standing, were the mature form of this arrangement. Those institutions had been under construction here for three hundred years before any European described them, and the ball courts are what remains of the places where people gathered to watch them work.

The Latin speaking church of north Africa, the church of Cyprian and of Augustine of Hippo, survived the Arab conquest of Carthage in 698 and then shrank for five centuries into a small and largely urban body. By the later eleventh century it had a single bishop left. At that point a Muslim ruler, al-Nasir, wrote to Pope Gregory VII asking him to consecrate a second one, a man named Servandus. Gregory did so in 1076 and replied to al-Nasir in warm terms. It is an odd and generous moment in a long decline. A hundred years later the Almohad dynasty offered the Jews and Christians of the region a choice between conversion and death, and an Arab commentator recorded that some became Muslim and the rest were killed. What remained of that church afterwards was its books, carried across the Mediterranean, where Augustine became foundational for Catholic and Protestant Europe alike.

Christianity had been seeping into Nubia on a small scale for some time, but the formal conversion of the rulers and, soon after, of most of the population came in the middle of the sixth century with missionaries from Byzantium. Julian, a Monophysite encouraged by the empress Theodora, went south in 543. The rival Melkite mission never got there in time. Theodora persuaded or ordered the governor of the Thebaid to hold it up in Upper Egypt while Julian travelled on. The doctrinal quarrel of a Byzantine court decided which form of Christianity took root on the middle Nile. The kingdom that grew from it kept a literate culture with Byzantine and Coptic colouring, its own line of bishops at Faras, and a cathedral there that the fifth bishop, Paulos, rebuilt in 707, recorded on two foundation stones, one in Greek and one in Coptic.