9700 to 5000 BCE · Africanspan
Monotheism was old in Africa before it was new in the Middle East
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The standard account of one God has a fixed shape. The idea appears among the ancient Israelites, the prophets refine it, Christianity and Islam universalise it, and missionaries and empires carry it to everyone else. That places the Levant at the centre and the last three thousand years in the frame. Ehret puts a different set of dates on the table. Between 9700 and 5000 BCE, across the long transition from foraging to farming, monotheistic religion already predominated among the speakers of the Niger-Congo languages and among the speakers of the Nilo-Saharan languages. Between them those two families cover most of the people on the continent. Their belief in a single creator is thousands of years older than anything comparable further east. I keep this on a Haitian timeline because of what happened later to African religion in the Americas. The men who called Vodou a primitive survival were measuring it against a monotheism that Africa had arrived at first.
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