I'M SORRY! *sobs hysterically* I did not realize how little access I would have to any computer all week long.
Unless you have a history test coming up, please don't read this. I realize that it needs way more…everything in it. This is currently only for the benefit of history test-takers such as myself, and I WILL FIX IT.
Randomname – That's what it's for (my smiley faces don't work in FanFic!)
SamPD2 – Yeah, PMs would be good. Ummm…can we deal with the visual analogies later? Please? I really suggest you don't read this for anything but history, like I wrote above. It's just dry nonfiction at the moment (for the most part).
Chapter 12: More Empires
"…They rode other animals?" Otulissa was positively dumbstruck.
Kida sighed again. "Yes. For the last time, yes, the Hittites rode horses and it was their war chariots, made of iron and drawn by horses, which allowed them to become the dominant power of Southwest Asia. Can we move on now?"
She took silence as agreement.
"Alright, the last major migration you need to know is that of the Indo-Europeans, who spread through most of Eurasia. They made it from Ireland to India, at least, so that's pretty considerable. An example of this immigration would be how the Aryans pushed the Celts, an Indo-European group, out of east India and forced them to become the first group to enter Europe.
"Now let's move to Africa, 'cause it probably feels neglected right about now. For those who don't know, Africa has the biggest desert in the world, the Sahara, which splits the continent into, whoa, big surprise here, sub-Saharan Africa and North Africa.
"I am not explaining where those areas are located.
"The Sahara wasn't always a desert, though. Africa used to be a steppe land full of grass and freshwater, which was perfect for humans. It's the same story as everywhere else: in 9000 BCE, people in Sudan discovered domestication and raised cattle while cultivating a grain called sorghum. They began building societies, small states with kings, and developed a religion wherein the king was semi-divine, and had to be provided for in the afterlife.
"This comes back to haunt us throughout history.
"Anyway, Africa, nice, green, full of resources, people had dandy lives, and then in 5000 BCE, four thousand years later, the climate began to get hotter and drier, becoming uninhabitable and forcing people to leave.
"Where would they go? Easy: wherever water was. So, huge civilizations formed around the Nile River, which flooded its banks annually and left nice, fertile soil each year, and other major rivers.
"We're talking North Africa here. I'll get to sub-Saharan Africa soon.
"The most famous civilization in North Africa was Ancient Egypt. It was united by Emperor Menes in 3100 BCE, the first emperor of Egypt. He founded the capital, Memphis, which was called the City of Kings, although another political center known as Thebes was already present, and created a centralized government the way so many emperors do.
"So many emperors also ensure their absolute power over their people by claiming to be at least semi-divine. Remember in Sudan and how I said that would come back to haunt? Menes used this idea and began the concept of the 'divine pharaoh,' claiming that the pharaoh was the son of the sun god and thereby giving him absolute power, and I mean ab-so-lute.
"Below him were the other various social classes. Interestingly, Egypt had no noble class, although this isn't very surprising: someone who wants such absolute control wouldn't want to share with underlings. Your class was basically determined by your specialized labor and wealth. For example, peasants and slaves were at the bottom and provided a lot of the hard labor. Another example, scribes had comfortable lives because they had a formal education, something that was hard to get back then, and were therefore valuable to society.
"These scribes used a pictographic system called hieroglyphs that had thousands of characters and was written on temples and monuments. Of course, the huge number of characters made it complicated, so the scribes used a lot of Hieretic, or a shorthand version of hieroglyphics. This was still very complex, so when the Greeks made a phonetic alphabet, everyone rejoiced and adopted this very simple writing system.
"Unfortunately, we don't know much about the first one I mentioned, the hieroglyphics. Thanks to the Rosetta Stone, which was found in the Nile delta, we have a better understanding because it has three languages on it, and we can understand Ancient Greek, so this gives cryptologists hints to hieroglyphics, one of the other languages on the Stone.
"But enough about language. There's one more important thing to know about Egypt's society. Like Mesopotamia, it was patriarchal, but at the same time, women did have more rights, especially if the family's men had died. A woman called Hatshepsut even ruled Egypt at one point (although she wore the traditional pharaoh beard).
"Now for the dry stuff. Ancient Egypt existed from 2660 to 1100 BCE. This time period is divided into three parts. During the Old Kingdom, which lasted five hundred years, the pharaoh was at the height of his power. This was the time when the great pyramids were built for said pharaohs to show their divine status and authority. They were tombs-you know what tombs are, right?"
"No." The answer was unanimous.
"They're graves."
"…"
A sigh. "Humans buried their dead and often put markers on the place where the dead rested. Granted, a pyramid is a bit extreme, but it's the same idea. The Ancient Egyptians were scared of spiritual death and believed in an afterlife. They had a polytheistic religion which claimed Osiris was the god of the underworld, a being that offered immortality for high moral standards. Think 'Voldemort' when you think of the Ancient Egyptians…
"Ahem. Nevermind. To ensure that their leaders would have a good afterlife, the Ancient Egyptians conserved everything for them, even the body. Since I don't think everyone hear is interested in hearing how they used long hooks to pull out the intestines with as little disturbance to the external skin as possible, I'm just going to move on and say that they also put possessions in the tombs for the dead's convenience.
"They really viewed life and death as a cycle, like the crops. You know how plants become dormant during the winter and then revive in the spring?
"Of course you do. That's what they thought life and death was like.
"Another god they had was Amon-Re, the god associated with the sun. He had a temple at Heliopolis, and even a cult. A pharaoh called Akhenaten, who ruled during the future New Kingdom in the 1300s BCE, temporarily made Egypt follow a monotheistic religion that worshiped him as the only god, although this monotheistic religion died with him.
"Moving on, because we've got more dry stuff to learn, the Old Kingdom fell apart because of a civil war, and Lower and Upper Egypt (this is based on the river; Upper Egypt was upstream in the south) were re-stabilized in 2040 BCE. Unfortunately, Egypt was weaker than before, and so it only lasted another five hundred years until 1640, when the Hyksos, not the Hittites, the Hyksos, came.
"Hey, lookee here, they were horse-riding nomads too! Using advanced bronze technology, their horses and chariots, this Semitic group conquered Egypt and ended the Middle Kingdom. They didn't have too much effect, really only improving Egyptian technology and giving them the horse, but it was enough that when the New Kingdom came after a short period of 100 years worth of Hykso rule, it was the highest point of Ancient Egyptian civilization.
"During the New Kingdom, the Egyptians kept a policy called 'the best defense is an offense.' I'm sure you've heard of it. Their conquests were especially successful as they used more bronze, but bronze was expensive, so they eventually moved to iron.
"They also built temples and big public buildings instead of pyramids and made a bureaucracy, a government with many levels instead of one ruler, symbolizing strong imperial power. It even managed to conquer Nubia in the south, which I will be discussing right about now.
"Nubia, in relation to Egypt, was south of it up the Nile River and wasn't quite as powerful; actually, no kingdom in Africa was as powerful as Ancient Egypt. Anyway, it was similar to Egypt partially because it had the same Sudanic roots and mostly because Egypt had a strong influence over it. In summary, Nubia had classes based on wealth same as Egypt even though its women didn't have as many privileges. It had an Upper Nubia, known as Kush, and a Lower Nubia, which was very susceptible to Egyptian control. Its religion was very similar to Egypt's, with a semi-divine king, and it even fused its culture with Egypts by adopting many of Egypt's gods. At the same time, it kept its own deities and it did not mummify its people." Kida shivered here. "Nubia had a writing system called Meriotic writing, which was created in Kush as a way to rebel against Egyptian control, and this one, much like Egypt's hieroglyphs, still has yet to be deciphered. Nubia rebelled later on and its successful split from Egypt contributed to the empire's downfall, especially when Kush turned around and conquered Egypt, giving it a taste of its own medicine. At least, until…you don't really need to know about the Assyrians.
"The most important thing about Nubia, however, is its interaction with Egypt. These two were trade partners. I don't know if y'all have set-ups like this down here, but Egypt was beside Mesopotamia and therefore had access to lots of manufactured products. Nubia was a gateway to sub-Saharan Africa, a place rich with natural resources, especially iron, which replaced Egypt's use of expensive bronze. This control over raw, unrefined products gave Nubia the upperhand over Egypt since you need raw materials to make manufactured ones.
"As for how they traded, the Nile really came in handy. The Egyptians, surrounding a Nile and with the Red Sea to the East and the Mesopotamian Sea to the North, became very handy in the water. The Nubians, on the other hand, had a lot of cataracts on their end of the Nile, so they used the land to travel and carry their cargo, and their waterskills, it should be known, really stank.
"Aaaaaand I think that's it," Kida mused. "Phew, that's a lot, and that's just Northern Africa."
A collective groan met her.
"Oh, don't worry, sub-Saharan Africa has way less. Really. It had little interaction with other cultures because of the Sahara, not like Mesopotamia, Egypt and Nubia, which interacted constantly with each other.
"The most influential people down here were the Bantu, a people who had developed agriculture. Check back to the list and remember that agriculture means more population, and therefore a strain on natural resources. The ones they got from the surrounding nomads for their own manufactured products weren't enough, so their answer was to spread in search of more resources. They were all over sub-Saharan Africa by 1000 CE (wow, that's way ahead there) and as the Bantu people spread, so did their culture. Former hunters and gatherers gained iron and agriculture from the immigrants and intermarried with the newcomers, fusing the cultures and religions.
"This wasn't a united effort, though. The Bantu lived in tribes or familial clans that had chiefs, once again like wolf packs. There were no defined social classes, although there was a personal government, and it didn't have a written language. Instead, it had griotts, storytellers who passed down tales from generation to generation orally. And besides, when they migrated, the Bantus became isolated from each other and split off into hundreds of sectors. Each one made its own language, based on the original Bantu one, granted, but still, different enough. Then again, China had many languages and one writing sys-
"Yeah. Ummm, the Bantu traveled on the waterways in canoes, and like I said earlier, used iron technology…ummm…
"Oh! This is interesting. They were monotheistic. While religions did change as they met each other, everyone believed that everything came from one god. They prayed to multiple spirits, but their religion was still monotheistic. Strange, right? No?
"Well, no worries, because India is up next.
"No, that's not Ethiopia, it's India."
Ugh, I feel like my brain melted.
Once again, yes, I will go back and fix it.
I'm serious, one of my friends accidentally mistook India for Ethiopia. She was looking at the map sideways.
Until next time!