This has been on my list to read for a while, and I've finally gotten around to reading it. Great work! It's always nice to see more African centered timelines, and yours is really unique. Can't wait for more!
In the Shade of the Baobabs
- Thread starter leopard9
- Start date
Full Bloom (Prelude)
“May you reign as long as the baobabs live.”
The traditional words of coronation as the dying mansa crowns his successor.
250 AD - 360 AD
“May you reign as long as the baobabs live.”
The traditional words of coronation as the dying mansa crowns his successor.
250 AD - 360 AD
After the death of Baturu I in 182 AD, his family took his name as their title in honor of his accomplishments in expanding Ansongo and working to ensure its long term stability and supremacy. Keita, the third mansa, strove to continue his grandfather’s work by establishing diplomatic relations with the burgeoning forest kingdoms to the south of the savannahs Ansongo now claimed as its own, the most notable of those being the Akan-speaking Obuasi. Ansongo’s expansion stopped at the forest’s edge as its famed (and feared) cavalry’s mobility was severely limited by the thick southern forests.
As the third century waned and the fourth century began, Ansongo entered a period that would later be marked by later jalis as its “Full Bloom”, the zenith of its power. Urbanization increased throughout the empire due to innovations in irrigation practices along with consistent rains that boosted agricultural output. To adapt to an increased urban population and also subtly reinforce the power of the Baturus, around 290 AD the first gold and copper coins were minted in the royal city of Bamako and later in Goundam as well. The coinage showed the face of the current mansa on one side and the royal family’s icon, the king cheetah, on the other. This currency would eventually become a strong part of Ansongo’s legacy as the coins would travel to Europe and Asia and even reach the nascent Wyqanos civilization on the eastern African coast. Yet despite the impact the currency would have in communicating Ansongo’s power, in practice only a small part of the population used it in day-to-day life. While government officials were paid solely in currency, common city workers, tanners, blacksmiths, medicine men, and carpenters were paid more often in grain which they would then take home for their wives to cook.
As the population of Ansongo increased, more sophisticated infrastructure was needed to maintain the empire and facilitate the movement of soldiers, goods, and grain. As would be expected in a semi-arid region, the wise management of water was crucial to stability and success. To that end, public wells and reservoirs to contain destructive rain-fed floods and hold the waters of an overflowing Niger were constructed. The central government would command the masters of the provinces that were located next to the Niger to draft young able-bodied men to build the reservoirs and wells and to occasionally deepen parts of the river to make the Niger more navigable for merchants and war parties traveling in their canoes.
Ansongo also began producing glass around 270 AD. Trade with Carthage had brought the product and technology to make it southward which the blacksmiths only gradually adopted. Glass of any kind was still a very rare product in any part of Sub-Saharan Africa, but especially in West Africa which had limited access to the Nile trade. The first native productions of glass were coarse and opaque as all the sand and impurities weren’t separated from the silica needed to make glass. But as the years came and went, the prowess of Ansongo glass smiths, especially those of Goundam, increased culminating in what later be popularly known as “Goundam glass”, a translucent glass with a purple hue. Glass was especially valuable to the southern Nok kingdoms along with the Yoruba states to the south and the Wolof villages to the west that lived along the Senegal River and the Western Ocean and that were largely outside of the trans-Saharan trade nexus. For despite the value of glass, there were always fewer glass smiths than black smiths as glass was a luxury enjoyed by the elite while metals tools and weapons were a necessity of life. Because of this, and the greater prestige blacksmiths garnered, only the youngest (and least favored) sons would find it worthwhile to become glass smiths. But it was the rarity of glass that oftentimes made these glass smiths wealthier than the blacksmith clans they came from.
But by far the most important innovation of Ansongo was the indigenous development of medicine. As population densities increased, urbanization continued and giant elands became a fixture of everyday life, the susceptibility of the empire’s population to disease increased. Indeed, it was considered highly unusual if plagues did not ravage the various quarters of a city each year. The greater frequency of organized warfare between states also increased the need for more sophisticated medicine and was perhaps the main driver of medicinal innovations.
The healers of this era were far removed from those who had come before them. For the wealthiest, schools were established that would teach those healers to perform rudimentary surgery to address the medical issues of their patients. In 302 AD, Fara, an educated healer gained fame by traveling throughout the empire and observing and consolidating the types of herbs and treatments various tribes used to cure fevers, infections or help alleviate malaria in several papyrus books and bound in eland hides. The books also contained Fara’s observations of the symptoms and course of the diseases in patients he treated during his travels as well as methods on how to extract and appease or banish harmful spirits that were the root cause of the illness. And perhaps most valuable of all, the codices contained a detailed dissection of a male chimpanzee with notes on its musculature, skeletal system, and organs. The wealthiest of families might very well have a personal physician that had been trained in more than one school or even had one of these medical texts in his (and occasionally her) possession. For those of lesser means, local healers with some knowledge of herbs and poultices could be called on to provide a remedy for ailments for a small fee. The majority of Ansongo’s citizens made use of these.
And well that medicine developed as it did, for the savannas of West Africa hosted many perils. While the rise of empires and kingdoms stimulated war on a scale never before seen in Sub-Saharan Africa, at least states had a political capital and strategic locations that could be captured and made to submit, to cease hostilities. Far more troublesome were the nomads that dwelt in the region. Few places in West Africa were as fertile as the river valleys of the Niger, the Gambia, and Senegal and the nomadic lifestyle had dominated in those regions for time immemorial but the advent of the giant eland along with the trans-Saharan trade led to systemic changes. Before the acceleration of the Great Desert trade with the Mediterranean while the river valleys possessed more people, agriculturists and nomads had similar quality of life. Combined with the low people density of both groups and the lack of any kind of mount, the potential for violent relations was limited between the two groups. Both had products the other needed to survive: the farmers had crops and the nomads had animal products but Carthage and the giant eland distorted this dynamic. The river valleys and those located closest to gold supplies experienced a steady increase in their lifestyles while the nomads experienced a much lower rise, but the introduction of camels and taming of giant elands provided them with a method to obtain what they desired. While established polities had the advantage of numbers to defend its borders, nomads drafted a much larger portion of their young men to act as warriors, they held the key advantage of mobility, and unlike those of settled peoples, the nomadic lifestyle led to nomad warriors being far more experienced. There were no cities to capture, no royal families to threaten or marry, and if it seemed that the nomad settlements were in danger of being captured or killed, they could simply flee into the endless savanna to abruptly attack again when their enemies were vulnerable. To safeguard against this, the only course Ansongo had was to expand, first to protect the core territories that lay along the Niger and then to provide a buffer against nomadic attacks. Forts were established along the border that were to be manned by professional soldiers to guard Ansongo. And in times when nomads threatened Ansongo’s existence, a portion of Ansongo’s able bodied men along with their giant elands would be summoned and equipped with light cotton armor, a helm, a war spear, and a long dagger to drive back the invaders. To men with more means, along with the standard equipment, they utilized a sword, and stronger armor for both themselves and their shorter horned elands bred for war. And in this manner Ansongo and the nomads danced in the savanna.
And to this region, a change that would have a deeper impact than any war was making its way to Ansongo and the wider world of Western Africa. The Two God Path, begun centuries ago by the teachings of Meir and expanded upon by Jahan and later converts, had grown strong in the Nile Valley. Alexandria was by now a nexus of the Path where the High Priest of the faith resided. Granted, the Sons of Osiris, a militant offshoot of the Egyptian state religion, were a constant thorn in the side for the Two God’s followers, desecrating temples and harassing believers. But Meirism added more to its number daily, and the authorities were content to let the peasant cult be under the ruling of the new pharaoh. The religion and its followers had steadily spread down the Nile into Meroe and Aksum from 60 – 120 AD but Amanirenas, the Kandake of Meroe, feared the growing influence of the religion among the common folk and the unpleasant implications for the long term survival of the imperial godhood cult. So in 118 AD, when she decreed the Order of Expulsion to all who followed the Path, the second largest group of Meirism followers either began to practice their religion in secret or dispersed to Aksum or Egypt, causing the Meirism following populations of both empires to swell, eventually contributing to the conversion of the negu of Aksum.
And yet despite its success in the Nile region, Meirism was unable to replicate its spread within the Punic Sea. While the Two God Path had initially spread into Carthage, it came relatively late compared to the Nile Valley. Observing the social upheaval the religion caused and seeing their main rivals the Egyptians converting as well as facing an ever increasing Germanic onslaught from the north, the Carthaginians became more determined to resist the incursion of any new gods into their pantheon. To that end, the oligarch-dominated government worked with the priests to standardize the Punic pantheon as well as create a sanctioned book of the faith to combat Meirism. And so Meirism gained small footholds in the Punic Sea, especially among the Sicilians and Libyan chiefs, but was largely shut out from the region.
When Ansongo contacted Aksum and the Nile Valley in 280 AD, mercantile converts from the three empires were the first to spread the Path of the Two Gods from the Nile Valley. As trade increased between the West and the Nile, Nile merchants spent more time in Mao and Ansongo and thus erected temples to worship and pray to the Two Gods, Tahres and Olabisi. And as merchants were oftentimes at least semi-literate, the Tome eventually made its way to the West as well. There the Two Gods appealed to the poor and marginalized of Ansongo as it tended to do in every society it touched, but it also could count many merchants among its ranks, which lent it a certain prestige in the West. In Ansongoan society merchants, who were seen as the bringers of wealth and foreign knowledge, along with their families were some of the earliest converts as noted in the Ansongoan histories written by the jalis. While the mansa was seen as having both spiritual and earthly duties and the Mandinka pantheon was the primary religious force, the common folk had their own regional spirits they called to, leaving sufficient theological space for the Two God Path to make inroads.
And as the decades came and went through Ansongo’s Full Bloom, the Baturu dynasty enjoyed unrivaled supremacy in the politics of Ansongo and indeed Western Africa. The noble families competed to marry off their sons and daughters to the Baturus to have a familial link to the imperial clan while foreign governments attempted to curry favor through tribute with the Niger River empire. But with few legal limits to their power, the later mansas tended toward corruption, demanding an ever growing percentage of profits from the trade with Carthage, Aksum, Egypt, and the Niger delta kingdoms, much to the chagrin of the merchants who made the at times perilous journeys to the far-off civilizations south down the Niger, north through the Great Desert or east along the Western Road. They also began to accrue even more political power, reducing the province-masters to little more than figureheads depending on the whim of the mansa, while leaving ever more of the actual governance of the empire to the imperial jalis that had faithfully served the mansa since the days of Baturu I. Most damningly, the increased taxes they took from the citizens of Ansongo weren’t used for public works projects or military campaigns, but were instead used solely for the advancement of the royal family, to construct ever more elaborate palaces and furnishings and to buy more land. And because of these actions, the citizenry of Ansongo began to suffer.
The Baturus took advantage of their wealth to purchase slaves that they used to work the land and perform domestic tasks. Now nearly every wealthy individual that could afford slaves owned at least a few, but the overwhelming wealth of the royal family allowed them to own many more. The males were used agricultural work and the females were given the task of serving girl or concubine. This allowed the Baturus to produce cash crops at cheaper prices than peasants could, leading many to poverty and eventually bondage, fueling an insidious cycle. And with less money and time spent of the vital waterworks needed to ease life, even those of means began to see their living standards deteriorate. And while the Baturus increased in wealth and power, there were many even within the courts of Bamako that muttered of a need to curtail their expansion, lest they all become slaves.
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It lives, hooray!
Good update. It will be interesting to see what rises out of Ansongo's decline.
Good update. It will be interesting to see what rises out of Ansongo's decline.
twovultures
Donor
Very interesting update. Out of curiosity, do you know yet what this standardized Punnic pantheon would look like? I'd be very curious to know.
Sounds like a popular revolt is brewing in Ansongo, that will be interesting to see.
Sounds like a popular revolt is brewing in Ansongo, that will be interesting to see.
Such a Punic pantheon would include Ba'al and his consort Tanit. Tanit would be more heavily worshiped just as she was IOTL. There would also be Asherah, Astarte, basically all the Phoenician gods of the pantheon. The pantheon might be purged of any gods that seemed to have foreign influence. The Punics are going through a scary time right now. The Germanic migrations are relentless and stronger than they were IOTL because there's no Roman Empire to hamper their westward trek. And while the Punics have plenty of gold, what the Germanics really want is land. They're solidly in Hispania now and a few people groups, notably the Suebi, are coming into the Atlas Mountains to war with and plunder the Barbary kingdoms. So the Germanics are a very real concern for Carthage. They also have some minor trouble with Egypt over competing influence in the Libyan coast.
And as for a popular revolt in Ansongo, aside from the peasants, there's a clue in the Full Bloom post about who will be the group leading the charge.
Great stuff as always - Ansongo is having a glorious classical period, although the seeds of decline are taking root. The one thing I might quibble with is the lack of marriage alliances with the nomads - in a society with royal polygamy (which I assume exists in Ansongo), it's very possible for the king to marry a few tribal chieftains' daughters, and rulers of other empires have done this.
Will the reformed Punic religion include borrowings from classical philosophy? Sophisticated urban societies, even polytheist ones, tend to demand more from their religions than traditional pantheons provide.
Will the reformed Punic religion include borrowings from classical philosophy? Sophisticated urban societies, even polytheist ones, tend to demand more from their religions than traditional pantheons provide.
Royal polygamy certainly exists in Ansongo, the mansa may have up to six wives and many more concubines if he wishes, though the elder wife has certain legal and informal authority that the other wives do not. Polygamy is more common in upper classes and is legally regulated by if you're a government official and your general income. I based it loosely off both Mandinka and Aztec practices I hadn't thought of marriage alliances between nomadic tribes and Ansongo, though I should have. I may add it to the post.
I'm glad you like my description of Ansongo's Full Bloom/Golden Age. I included the bit about medicine because it seems that given the strong hold that disease has had over Sub-Saharan Africa, once you had a class of educated healers, the first order of business would be to investigate ways to better treat sicknesses. Necessity is the mother of invention after all.
What higher demands do urban societies make of their religions? Do they tend to prefer a more personal relationship with their gods? Do they demand answers to the eternal questions of "why were we made" and "what happens to me after I die"?
For a little context...
Ansongo, Mao, Kita, and the Nok States all use the Southern Punic script. The Akan and proto-Igbo state are both pre-literate. The script used by the Nok kingdoms, especially the southern three is a bit divergent from that of Kita's and Ansongo's. The script of Mao also is slightly different due to its proximity to Aksum, Egypt, and Meroe. The entire Punic Sea uses the Northern Punic script and the Barbary kingdoms use their own indigenous writing system.
And though Carthage has done little to integrate the people who aren't born Carthiginians into its trade empire, aspects of its culture have still filtered into the surrounding area. Its gods have made their way into many pantheons of Hispania, the Gaulic Celts, and even some of the migrating Germanics. And of course, Punic is widely spoken in the Western Mediterranean region.
Ansongo, Mao, Kita, and the Nok States all use the Southern Punic script. The Akan and proto-Igbo state are both pre-literate. The script used by the Nok kingdoms, especially the southern three is a bit divergent from that of Kita's and Ansongo's. The script of Mao also is slightly different due to its proximity to Aksum, Egypt, and Meroe. The entire Punic Sea uses the Northern Punic script and the Barbary kingdoms use their own indigenous writing system.
And though Carthage has done little to integrate the people who aren't born Carthiginians into its trade empire, aspects of its culture have still filtered into the surrounding area. Its gods have made their way into many pantheons of Hispania, the Gaulic Celts, and even some of the migrating Germanics. And of course, Punic is widely spoken in the Western Mediterranean region.
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Benevolent
Banned
You forgot the Garamante, it's a pretty important civilization as they gave rise to the nomads of the Sahara along with Peul after collapse.
Also the toubou who started Kanem that and the previous Sao civilization that's the basis for Sahelian states.
Also there is already an Africa domesticate, is Bos Africanus genetic research is showing that by the second phase of the Neolithic Subpluvial Tenerians had already domesticated them.
Also the toubou who started Kanem that and the previous Sao civilization that's the basis for Sahelian states.
Also there is already an Africa domesticate, is Bos Africanus genetic research is showing that by the second phase of the Neolithic Subpluvial Tenerians had already domesticated them.
Thanks for the info on the toubou and the Garamante. I've acknowledged within the TL that African cattle are spread throughout the continent when the TL is taking place.
So I've posted the rewrite and expansion of this timeline under the name of Hannibal's Wake. Give it a read and tell me what you think!