Istwa Nou

From the first millennium BCE horses spread almost everywhere the climate would carry them, reaching as far south in Africa as the highlands of Ethiopia and the open grassland of the Sudan belt. A horse moves people, equipment and messages at a speed that changes what a government can do. Campaigns reach further, and orders arrive while they still matter. Horses came into West Africa along trade routes that already crossed the Sahara, carried from Carthage into the western Sudan belt by the middle of the first millennium BCE. At first the wealthy kept them for prestige. During the later first millennium CE they became the basis of cavalry in the emerging Sudanic states, Wagadu above all, the power later known as Ghana. Hundreds of kilometres of open grassland between the Niger bend and the Atlantic had been an obstacle to holding territory together. Mounted men made the same ground a corridor, and Wagadu, Mali, Songhay and Kanem-Bornu were built across it.

The age of empires arrives at the same moment as a widening of trade: more kinds of goods, longer routes, more places connected. The two are joined in a particular way. Empires generally expanded into regions where complex trade relations already existed. The Neo-Assyrians took the Levant, which was already the crossroads of Middle Eastern commerce. Rome took the whole rim of the Mediterranean, the sea along which everything moved. Aksum went the other way and took producing country, seizing the sources of frankincense, myrrh, gold and ivory. In each case an army was used to capture revenue that trade was already generating, to hold the choke points, or to own the supply. Africa was central to this. It furnished the gold, ivory and aromatics the ancient world wanted, and it produced states whose rulers understood as clearly as any in Rome or Nineveh that whoever controls commerce can pay for an army.

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.