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.

During the first millennium BCE a new kind of religion took shape, or more precisely a new kind of social ideology backed by religion and carried by teachers and proselytisers. Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism and Judaism belong to the first wave. Christianity, Manicheism and Hinduism follow in the first millennium CE, and Islam arrives in the seventh century. Ehret's wording moves the question from what these systems believed to how they travelled. Written scripture was no novelty, since Egypt had produced sacred texts for two thousand years already, and monotheism was no novelty either. The new thing was scriptural authority combined with organised missionary work, which allowed a whole social and cultural system to be exported rather than a set of beliefs alone. The infrastructure it used was commercial. The roads built to move gold, copper and silk were the roads along which teachers walked and converts were made. Africans were among the architects of the tradition that would travel furthest.