Aksum fought across the Red Sea with African elephants

A second large African state took shape in the Ethiopian highlands across the middle and later centuries of the first millennium BCE, southeast of the Napata-Meroe empire and almost as early. The archaeology for it is thin and the inscriptions are few. Its successor is well documented. The empire of Aksum stood at its height from the early first millennium CE to the seventh century, and its wealth came from control of frankincense, myrrh, gold and ivory, the aromatics and luxuries that the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern worlds bought in quantity. Aksum sent armies across the Red Sea to take commercially competing territory in southern Arabia. Those armies used tamed African elephants, as Hannibal's Carthaginian army had. The Persian prophet Mani, writing in the third century CE, named four great empires of his age: Rome, Persia, China and Aksum. He was in a position to know, and the roster he produced is not the one taught now.

The El Convento site on the northern coast of Puerto Rico has produced the earliest radiocarbon assay for the Huecoid, one of the two ceramic traditions present at the opening of the Ceramic Age in the region. The date is a problem for the accepted model, which has these groups moving slowly from east to west along the island's north coast. At Maisabel the sequence points the same way. Huecoid ceramics were found in a sealed layer directly beneath deposits of the Hacienda Grande style, which is Saladoid. Sealed stratification is the strongest evidence archaeology offers, because a layer under an undisturbed layer is older and no argument changes that. Together the two sites suggest the Huecoid were established in parts of Puerto Rico earlier than at eastern sites such as La Hueca, where the tradition was first defined. Migration maps for the first pottery-making societies of the Caribbean are being redrawn around dates like these.

The Council of Nicaea met in 325 CE to settle what Christians were required to believe about the nature of Christ. The argument was carried by Alexander, the Egyptian patriarch of Alexandria, and by his student Athanasius, who between them defeated the position that Christ was a created being. Out of the council came the doctrine of the Trinity and the statement of belief still recited as the Nicene Creed. Every later century of Christian theology in Europe was built on that foundation, and it was fixed in place by two men from Egypt. The other decisive figure of the period was also African. Augustine was born in the fourth century at Hippo, in what is now Algeria, of Amazigh descent, and his writing on sin, grace, predestination and the standing of the church shaped Catholic doctrine for sixteen hundred years and handed the Protestant reformers their arguments as well. He learned his trade inside an African intellectual tradition that had already produced Tertullian and Cyprian.

Herodotus wrote down what Carthaginians told Greek listeners about a coast beyond the Straits of Gibraltar. The ships would land, the crews would set their wares out in a row along the shore and raise smoke. People living there came down when they saw it, left gold beside the goods and withdrew. The Carthaginians came ashore and looked. If the gold matched the value they took it and sailed; if it did not they went back aboard and waited while more was added. Neither side touched what the other had put down until the exchange was settled. The same silent barter appears in much later accounts of the gold trade in the West African interior. The metal most likely came from the alluvial fields of Galam and Bambuk on the upper Niger and Senegal. This is among the earliest written notices of West African gold reaching the outside world.