What do you mean gender would be a concealed experience from the elite? And what happens if men hold the axe and a significant portion of the hoe?
African rice domesticated in fourth millennium BC
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What do you mean gender would be a concealed experience from the elite? And what happens if men hold the axe and a significant portion of the hoe?
Bavarian Raven
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THis would probably still go both ways, in respect to Europe and Asia... being as they will be "isolated" for long periods of time in central Africa. We could end up with both sides of the contact having massive die offs.
THis would probably still go both ways, in respect to Europe and Asia... being as they will be "isolated" for long periods of time in central Africa. We could end up with both sides of the contact having massive die offs.
Would there be? IIRC, one of the appeal of African slaves for the Atlantic Slave Trade was their relative resistance to Eurasian diseases compared to Native Americans. And would tropical diseases survive the winters of Europe and the more temperate climate?
Domestic ponies from what stock? If they aren't some otherwise-lost species that was actually native to sub-saharan Africa, wouldn't this still have to wait until horses are introduced from Asia via Egypt?
That couldn't be very early, because bananas aren't native to Africa: You'd still have to wait for their introduction from southern Asia...
Sand Cats are a bit small. I'd suggest the Serval, and/or some kind of Mongoose, instead.
The African Wildcat, which is thought to be the wild ancestor of domestic cats, is found all over Africa so locals would probably use those as pets/granary guards.
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According to the linked article, they were small ponies indigenous to West Africa and adapted to a semi-arid environment. Their use is dated from before the time that Hyksos horses would have arrived from Egypt. These horses were a similar size to donkeys or mules, and their use would have been as pack or draft animals rather than mounts.
The article does mention that there's uncertainty - the archaeology of Neolithic Africa has been very much neglected until recently, and there's a lot we don't know.
See here for possible dates of banana cultivation - there's scattered evidence in Uganda pointing as far back as the fourth millennium BC, but the first millennium is more likely. I've often seen it theorized that the introduction of bananas to West Africa, and the resulting increase in population densities, was what kicked off the Bantu expansion.
Here, though, that won't happen, will it? The proto-Bantu will get the push earlier, through encroachment by the Niger delta peoples. They might have yams and rice only rather than bananas, and that might slow the speed of their expansion once they get beyond rice country. This could actually redirect their movement toward the Congo basin and Angola, with fewer going into East Africa and lower population densities outside the river basins - which might in turn give the hunter-gatherers and pastoralists in East Africa and the Great Lakes more staying power. This will change once the banana reaches the eastern Bantu, but by then, there might well be a division into rice cultures and yam cultures which breaks many of the common threads among Bantu-speaking peoples IOTL.
Servals or African golden cats would be suitably exotic, but the African Wildcats might be the most likely to invite themselves into the granaries.
BTW, here's a map of the upper Niger basin showing the inner delta. I'd guess that rice culture would start there and spread toward the headwaters, stopping where the forest begins, and that yam and millet agriculture would take place in the less watered areas while pastoralists occupy the open grassland. Once past the inner delta and near the site of Timbuktu, the land would be good for pasture only, and the next possible area of rice culture would be a few hundred miles downriver.
If you think of our society, working class genders are very heavily influenced by the elite's control over media. Ideas of what it is to be a woman, and a man, penetrate into working class kitchens and bedrooms through sports, magazines, films, education systems, churches.
In *Mali the elite turn up twice a year with a cart when they demand grain and labour. In *Mali the elite do not supervise what happens in your bedroom or kitchen, or your village, or the bits of the countryside where rice is grown and irrigation systems occur. Except to demand rice and labour and to ensure that rice grows and irrigation systems happen and to be very surprised when uprisings led by women kill all the supervisors of the labour corvee or kill all the rice taxmen or kill the elite religion priests.
If men also hold the hoe, then to a larger extent the elite's demands won't be stopping at the edge of the village, because they'll be demanding control over labour that is within and without the village in the form of a broader view of men's responsibilities. You might see labour corvees as the form of extracting grain from villages by forced work on estates as a general rather than a peculiar relationship. You might also see labour demands against women's labour in an immediate sense, rather than a village levied grain tax.
yours,
Sam R.
twovultures
Donor
I wonder what happens to East Africa without the Bantu expansion? There's a whole lot of other language families that can fill the gap, like the Nilotic or the varios Afro-Asiatic language families-possibly the branch that would have become the Semitic branch IOTL will go south instead of north.
If the push southward is by people with a lower/less concentrated population than the Bantu farmers of OTL, we might see a black/Khoison frontier far to the north and east of OTL.
If the push southward is by people with a lower/less concentrated population than the Bantu farmers of OTL, we might see a black/Khoison frontier far to the north and east of OTL.
There's still the influence of religion, though. This will be an animist society, and the people's conception of what makes an ideal man or woman will be based on the great ancestors... most of whom, of course will be from the elite. Also, if *Mali is like other places, every city and district will have a patron god, which means that although most day-to-day worship would focus on household gods or local nature spirits, there would be some interaction between the peasants and the elite priesthood.
For this reason, gender in rural households might not be fully hidden, and there would be some crossover of elite norms. On the other hand, the strength of animism in *Mali would also magnify the effect of folk heroes, and that might be the part of rural folk-memory that the elites don't know about until it bites them on the ass. If a couple of those heroes are women, they could provide the necessary inspiration.
On the other hand, the part of the hoe that men wield would be seasonal. Land clearing (which Bantu and Niger-Congo cultures tend to consider axe work rather than hoe work in any event) happens once or a couple of times a year, and could be handled with seasonal corvees. The women are still the ones who'll be in the fields every day. So I think your point about the attenuation of elite control of village life stands - I mentioned religion above, but that's an indirect form of rule.
This wouldn't be an Africa without a Bantu expansion - it would just be differently directed. They'd fill the area west of the Great Lakes pretty quickly - only the Namibian desert would stop them, as it did IOTL - but expansion east would be much slower, and the groups that go that way might be the ones who lose out in the competition for rice-growing land. They would, as you say, be weaker, leaving a space for Nilotic pastoralists to fill. The Bantu-speakers who do push into the eastern Great Lakes and the *Swahili coast would fight it out with the pastoralists, possibly resulting in many "Rwandas" where a Nilotic herder aristocracy rules over Bantu farmers along with the occasional kingdom where the struggle ends up the other way. In addition to having very different agriculture and living patterns from the western Bantu, the eastern ones would be more culturally and linguistically hybridized.
For the hunter-gatherers, it would be a mixed bag. In the Congo basin, they'd be subjugated or driven out even more thoroughly than OTL, but in the east, they might do a lot better. They'd still be outclassed by the Bantu and Nilotic peoples, who would both be working iron by this time (here's a truly fascinating set of articles about ancient African ironworking, which I've just started to read through), but with eastern population densities lower and the Nilotic and Bantu groups engaged in fighting each other, they wouldn't be pushed as far or as fast. Everything from, say, inland *Tanzania and *Zambia on south might be Khoisan-speaking country.
Thanks to everyone for this discussion, BTW - I'm really enjoying it. I don't plan to make a timeline of this, but maybe I'll try my hand at a couple of stories after I update Malê Rising.
I'd like to come back to this. Among the Yoruba and the other peoples who have Babalu (by whatever name) in their pantheon, the god of disease is also the god of healing and medicine - he makes people sick, but also makes them better. I don't think that would be the case with the *Malian plague god, because too many people don't recover from pandemics. A deity who controls diseases that can destroy whole communities won't be associated with healing. On the other hand, the *Malians will notice that those who survive pandemics don't get sick of the same disease again, and that their resistance to *measles and similar illnesses works in their favor when invading armies get sick and they don't. So while the plague god will be regarded as cruel and capricious, he might not be considered entirely evil: he'll be the god that culls and tests the people to make them strong.
There might actually be two gods of disease. The first would be an older god, originally worshiped in the days before the plagues, who is much like Babalu: a god of disease, injury and healing, worshiped by physicians and invoked by the sick. The second will be the plague god, the one who makes the *Malians tough and strong but exacts his price first. Under ordinary circumstances, he would be propitiated but not invoked; the exceptions would be during time of war (when he might be asked to bring plague on enemy armies despite the risk to the *Malians themselves) or when a pandemic is in progress. Very likely he would not be named outside his temples. There might be myths about him that recall the story of the Assyrian siege of Jerusalem in 2 Kings 18-19, and stories like the one about Babalu being cast out for trying to sicken the other gods.
The god of death and the dead, of course, would be neither of these. Nobody would want the plague god to be in charge of the revered ancestors, not to mention their own deaths. S/he (probably he) would be a separate, more benevolent deity, and even if a *Malian dies of plague, he would be the one to be invoked.
Let's see: who else would be in the *Malian pantheon? At the apex, there would most likely be a supreme creator deity, a variation on the Mawu and Lesa story (female and male creators who gave birth to the gods and other living things), or both: these are common threads in Niger-Congo and Bantu religions, so they're probably very ancient.
Then there would be the big four: the gods of the sun (male), the moon/sky/rain (female), river (male) and land (female). The sun and moon are married, as are the river and land - the sun fertilizes the sky, the river the earth.
After that: There would be an agricultural god, probably female, having roughly the place of Ceres in the Roman pantheon. A rice god, who would also be the god of brewing and a secondary god of medicine - not a physician's god but an apothecary's. Possibly minor gods for other crops and for wild-harvested trees like palm. The three above-mentioned deities of disease, medicine and death. There would be a god of war, one of herds and pastures (who has somewhat menacing connotations for the *Malians due to periodic pastoralist raids, but is very important in the pastoralists' own pantheon), a storm god, a god of the desert (prized for his patronage of goods like salt, feared due to desert raiders) and, after ironworking is invented, a blacksmith deity. And, because this is West Africa, there would be The Drummer, a god of music, oratory and speech, who is also a divine messenger and a patron of poets and merchants.
There would be a trickster god in there somewhere - there nearly always is. The Drummer is the most likely candidate, but the war god would be an interesting alternative: an environment full of water barriers and islands would favor generals with a sense of logistics, timing and surprise. Maybe there would be two war gods, one for the warrior who needs bravery in battle and the other for captains who must be wily in strategy and tactics.
Finally, the *Malians would have local nature spirits like everyone else, and would also have household patrons/revered ancestors: not gods as such but exemplars, and available to be asked for advice or invoked in family rituals.
Is anything missing, or does anything sound wrong for this culture?
That sounds a bit like the distinction between Athena and Ares--And it's interesting to note that a goddess of war could exist in a culture that very much did not celebrate warrior women.
It's possible to envision a trickster goddess of war though, one that's also the patroness of spies.
I've come to believe in the agriculture's it's all because of beer theory. That was from my Dolphin TL research, looking at the order and especially incredible long-term energy that went into developing corn, for example.
I suspect that people ran into fermented patches of precursors and fell in love because their bods were carb-starved AND the alcohol at the same time.
And wiki says that sake's more like rice beer than wine. No doubt it was the same in China and Japan.
I suspect that people ran into fermented patches of precursors and fell in love because their bods were carb-starved AND the alcohol at the same time.
And wiki says that sake's more like rice beer than wine. No doubt it was the same in China and Japan.
I hadn't thought of Ares and Athena, but it's a good analogy. Athena isn't the only war goddess from a society without a warrior-woman tradition: Inanna was also a patron of war, and the Romans had Bellona. I sometimes wonder how that happened: worship of goddesses doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the status of women on earth (even the most gender-repressive ancient societies had female deities) but war, for such a culture, would seem to be archetypically male.
In some cases, an association of hunting and war could lead to that connection - Menhit, an Egyptian war goddess of Nubian origin, was apparently based on the hunting habits of lionesses. There were lions in ancient West Africa too, so it's not impossible to imagine a hunting goddess, possibly one dating back to pre-agricultural times or borrowed from a pastoralist tribe, taking on a role as patron of strategy and war. And if, as may well happen, warfare during the warring-states period involves intrigue between cities, she could eventually adopt some trickster characteristics and be the god of spies and statecraft as well as wily generals.
Adjata, goddess of hunting, war, espionage, stealth and politics? Not wisdom, though - she's not Athena, and in *Mali, wisdom is more often sought from ancestors than gods.
Absolutely - sake is a brewed beverage, and its alcohol content is similar to beer rather than wine. "Rice wine" is a misnomer, somewhat like barley wine.
BTW, speaking of rice, the *Malians need a fertility/childbirth deity, and either the rice deity or the general agricultural one would be the logical choice.
A couple more cultural notes:
I think I'll give the *Malians theater. This would grow out of a combination of the griot tradition, religion and dance - it would start with drum-and-song narration at religious pageants, and eventually, the masked dancers who represent the ancestors and gods would begin to speak their roles. Another root of *Malian theater might be praise-songs commissioned by kings for themselves or illustrious ancestors, slowly evolving to presentations in which their deeds are re-enacted with the drums in the background.
The theater as it eventually emerges during the city-state period would involve a griot narrator with a drum or stringed instrument giving context to the events on stage, actors (with or without masks) playing the key roles, and masked dancers whose role is roughly that of the chorus in classical Greek theater. Some of the plays will still be religious pageants or elaborate praise-songs. Others will be comedic or wickedly satirical - a society where war and plague are ever-present fears will want catharsis, and in a West African society where reputation is key to legitimacy, satire is a weapon. The use of masks, which make the narrator and actors technically anonymous, will give them license to say things that would ordinarily be taboo.
Of course, there are risks of going too far - a griot-playwright who angers the wrong people or strays into sacrilege (for instance, using the plague-god as a character in a way that the people fear might draw his attention) may have to flee - but there are always other city-states where they can find work. As empires coalesce, this may be less possible, but the theater will still have some institutional license.
A somewhat related issue is writing. The *Malian cities will need to conduct large-scale irrigation works, keep track of the granaries and distribute grain and *sake, so I'd expect proto-writing to develop by the beginning of the city-state period (late third millennium BC) and true writing by 1500 BC or so. The historical nsibidi proto-writing system developed at the other end of the Niger, but it might provide a guide as to what symbols the *Malians use. The *Malians may also emulate the relationship between nsibidi symbols and cloth patterns - the symbolism of weaving is another very common thread in West African cultures, so its roots may well go back this far. (This means we need a weaver-god or goddess, don't we?)
Any thoughts on other cultural traits? I'd be interested in how the *Malians would conceive of law and justice, among other things.
I think I'll give the *Malians theater. This would grow out of a combination of the griot tradition, religion and dance - it would start with drum-and-song narration at religious pageants, and eventually, the masked dancers who represent the ancestors and gods would begin to speak their roles. Another root of *Malian theater might be praise-songs commissioned by kings for themselves or illustrious ancestors, slowly evolving to presentations in which their deeds are re-enacted with the drums in the background.
The theater as it eventually emerges during the city-state period would involve a griot narrator with a drum or stringed instrument giving context to the events on stage, actors (with or without masks) playing the key roles, and masked dancers whose role is roughly that of the chorus in classical Greek theater. Some of the plays will still be religious pageants or elaborate praise-songs. Others will be comedic or wickedly satirical - a society where war and plague are ever-present fears will want catharsis, and in a West African society where reputation is key to legitimacy, satire is a weapon. The use of masks, which make the narrator and actors technically anonymous, will give them license to say things that would ordinarily be taboo.
Of course, there are risks of going too far - a griot-playwright who angers the wrong people or strays into sacrilege (for instance, using the plague-god as a character in a way that the people fear might draw his attention) may have to flee - but there are always other city-states where they can find work. As empires coalesce, this may be less possible, but the theater will still have some institutional license.
A somewhat related issue is writing. The *Malian cities will need to conduct large-scale irrigation works, keep track of the granaries and distribute grain and *sake, so I'd expect proto-writing to develop by the beginning of the city-state period (late third millennium BC) and true writing by 1500 BC or so. The historical nsibidi proto-writing system developed at the other end of the Niger, but it might provide a guide as to what symbols the *Malians use. The *Malians may also emulate the relationship between nsibidi symbols and cloth patterns - the symbolism of weaving is another very common thread in West African cultures, so its roots may well go back this far. (This means we need a weaver-god or goddess, don't we?)
Any thoughts on other cultural traits? I'd be interested in how the *Malians would conceive of law and justice, among other things.
Another thought: would *Mali have a Bronze Age? IOTL, West Africa went directly from the Neolithic to the Iron Age sometime between 1500 and 500 BC (dates are very uncertain). Here, though, there's a much earlier urban civilization that can support specialist labor and resources. *Malian jewelers even in the fourth millennium BC might work with beaten copper and gold, and would have time to learn the properties of the metals and discover how they react to heat. Also, there are easily-accessible copper deposits in northern Mali and tin on the Jos Plateau that can be mined with primitive techniques, so the *Malians will have sources of both metals within easy trading range. So ITTL, would here be a Chalcolithic period beginning in the early-mid third millennium, shading into a Bronze Age around 2300-2000 BC when the city-states rise, and then a more conventional Iron Age transition about 1500-1000?
Also, I mentioned writing in the previous comment, which raises the question of what medium they'd use. Both papyrus and clay are plentiful along the upper Niger, and there's also the possibility of cloth, which is easily stored and carried and which has spiritual significance but which has a short shelf-life and is laborious to make.
Hmmm. In addition to law and justice, which I mentioned above, I'm curious about ceramics, sculpture, medicine and (especially) monumental architecture.
Also, I mentioned writing in the previous comment, which raises the question of what medium they'd use. Both papyrus and clay are plentiful along the upper Niger, and there's also the possibility of cloth, which is easily stored and carried and which has spiritual significance but which has a short shelf-life and is laborious to make.
Hmmm. In addition to law and justice, which I mentioned above, I'm curious about ceramics, sculpture, medicine and (especially) monumental architecture.
All right, monumental architecture. The *Malians would have it - every stratified urban society does. The standard monumental buildings in Bronze Age and early Iron Age societies are temples and palaces; the *Malians would build both, and once religious pageants and plays get started, they'd also have amphitheaters.
They'd build their monuments with mud-brick, because that's what they'd have available. This means that they wouldn't have anything like the Great Pyramid, especially since, in an animist society, a royal mortuary cult isn't necessary to guarantee an afterlife. The question is whether they'd have something similar to ziggurats. Raising the gods above the people is a fairly natural thought, and several civilizations have come up with it, but if you buy into the theory that Mesopotamian ziggurats and Mesoamerican step pyramids were originally representations of sacred mountains, then it might be less likely for *Malians to build them.
Maybe they'd go for buildings and compounds that are twenty or thirty feet high - tall enough to stand out, but not spectacularly so - and that are monumental because of their decoration and the vast land area they encompass rather than their height. They'd go all out with surface decoration - painting, symbols incised into the brickwork, crenellations. If they strengthen the mud-brick with sticks, Sankoré Mosque-style, artful arrangement of the sticks would be part of the decor.
I think wood might also be important to their monumental buildings. The *Malians would know of wood-carving from the forest peoples to the south, and living on a grassy floodplain themselves, they'd consider wood something valuable: dedicating a hardwood statue to the gods might seem to them like dedicating a golden or marble statue would seem to other ancient peoples. They wouldn't build anything entirely of wood, but they might have carved hardwood doors and shutters like many African peoples made IOTL, as well as wooden statuary and gold- or copper-inlaid wooden utensils amid the ceramics and metalwork.
An entirely unrelated question for the disease experts, assuming any are still with me (is anyone still interested in my continuing this?): is it likely, given the conditions of *Malian cities and rice-paddy agriculture, that a Shigella-type dysentery bacterium would mutate into something like cholera? Would the *Malians have to contend with periodic outbreaks of that as well as *measles, smallpox and parasitic diseases?
They'd build their monuments with mud-brick, because that's what they'd have available. This means that they wouldn't have anything like the Great Pyramid, especially since, in an animist society, a royal mortuary cult isn't necessary to guarantee an afterlife. The question is whether they'd have something similar to ziggurats. Raising the gods above the people is a fairly natural thought, and several civilizations have come up with it, but if you buy into the theory that Mesopotamian ziggurats and Mesoamerican step pyramids were originally representations of sacred mountains, then it might be less likely for *Malians to build them.
Maybe they'd go for buildings and compounds that are twenty or thirty feet high - tall enough to stand out, but not spectacularly so - and that are monumental because of their decoration and the vast land area they encompass rather than their height. They'd go all out with surface decoration - painting, symbols incised into the brickwork, crenellations. If they strengthen the mud-brick with sticks, Sankoré Mosque-style, artful arrangement of the sticks would be part of the decor.
I think wood might also be important to their monumental buildings. The *Malians would know of wood-carving from the forest peoples to the south, and living on a grassy floodplain themselves, they'd consider wood something valuable: dedicating a hardwood statue to the gods might seem to them like dedicating a golden or marble statue would seem to other ancient peoples. They wouldn't build anything entirely of wood, but they might have carved hardwood doors and shutters like many African peoples made IOTL, as well as wooden statuary and gold- or copper-inlaid wooden utensils amid the ceramics and metalwork.
An entirely unrelated question for the disease experts, assuming any are still with me (is anyone still interested in my continuing this?): is it likely, given the conditions of *Malian cities and rice-paddy agriculture, that a Shigella-type dysentery bacterium would mutate into something like cholera? Would the *Malians have to contend with periodic outbreaks of that as well as *measles, smallpox and parasitic diseases?
On buildings:
The oldest stone building in sub-saharan west africa I can find refrence to are the buildings in Dhar Tichitt. Sure, it's further to the west and north than the centre of *Mali, but with earlier agricultural and urban societies in the region, perhaps the some of the western most rice cities would adopt imported stone as a building material for some highly prestigious structures around 1500 to 1000 BC.
The oldest stone building in sub-saharan west africa I can find refrence to are the buildings in Dhar Tichitt. Sure, it's further to the west and north than the centre of *Mali, but with earlier agricultural and urban societies in the region, perhaps the some of the western most rice cities would adopt imported stone as a building material for some highly prestigious structures around 1500 to 1000 BC.
twovultures
Donor
I don't know if it's likely to happen with a local bacteria. However, conditions are ripe for the disease, so even if that doesn't happen water-spreading bacteria from other locations will establish themselves quite quickly once they arrive. Different types of dysentery-causing bacterium and polio-like illnesses could do quite well for themselves. Schistosomiasis too.
One interesting way to combat these illnesses could be to create brackish paddies using salt brought in from the desert and brackish-tolerant rice (which some modern strains of African rice are!) At the cost of lowering the harvest (and using a huge amount of salt), paddies could be cleared of freshwater parasites and salt-intolerant aquatic bacteria. This is the sort of project you'd need a strongly-functioning government to pull off, however, and it would take a lot of scientific development before people have the knowledge that this could be done, let alone the will.
