I wonder if the Carthaginians will end up being swept towards Brazil, or whether the Nok successor peoples will. You'd think if there's more maritime activity (which will wax and wane depending on how safe the Sahara is).
The ships that ply the Med-West Africa route are very careful to stay within sight of land, but one of them might find South America by accident if blown out to sea by a storm. As others have mentioned, the problem is developing the shipbuilding and seafaring techniques for
sustained contact - but if a ship succeeds in coming back from *Brazil, and if its sailors' accounts aren't dismissed as fantasy, the knowledge that there's land out there might inspire people to work on those techniques. Maybe there could be a regular back-and-forth trade sometime in the first millennium AD, depending on whether trade along the West African route is interrupted by a dark age.
You know, I really like this idea of Rome as a merchant-republic.
I'll admit I wanted to do something a bit different - Rome in AH
always becomes an imperial capital or disappears, and I've never seen it as a prosperous but minor power.
Anyway, here are my notes on Africa in 22 BC:
*******
West Africa is dominated by three large empires, although smaller buffer states and vassals exist in the interstices. The most powerful is currently the Asun Republic, a coastal state which controls everything from the western Niger Delta (the proto-Igbo are vassals but not subjects) to what we would know as eastern Côte d'Ivoire, and the lower Niger Valley as far north as the site of Niamey. It is the cultural successor of the Asun kingdom that existed in Nok times, but has endured foreign conquest and warring-states periods in the interim; its current incarnation took place during the third century BC and marked a shift in power from the inland cities to the coastal ports.
The dominant culture is cognate to the Yoruba, although like all of West Africa, Asun has been influenced by Indian and Mediterranean philosophies via the Palm Road and the Sahara. Government is an often-Byzantine interplay between the elected king, lesser elected officials, the aristocratic senate (the kingmakers) the secret religious society, and the citizens' assemblies.
The other two empires are Bara, an upper Niger empire with its capital at the site of Bamako, and Djamé, which is centered on Lake Chad and controls both the old Nok heartland on the Jos Plateau and what were once the Iron Cities of Termit. Bara is dominated by the peoples who would, in OTL, have become the Mandé, Mossi and Dogon, and Djamé by the proto-Sara and proto-Hausa, but the northern empires have been heavily influenced by the desert tribes, both during periods of ascendancy when their reach extended to the Sahara and periods of decline when the tribesmen acted as raiders and barbarian conquerors.
The three states are in a metastable relationship: they go to war occasionally, but at least for now, there’s no danger of a major shift in the balance of power and no threat to any of their heartlands. They have traded places over the last few centuries as the cultural leading light of West Africa, with that title currently held by Asun. Not everything is happy and shiny there – slavery exists, inequality is high, and the political system isn’t much more democratic (or much less corrupt) than the Roman Republic – but the republic is going through a remarkable creative period and is the birthplace of West African theater.
Central and Southern Africa, with “central” defined purely on a north-south basis, is dominated by Bantu-speaking peoples. With the earlier formation of large-scale political organizations, Bantu expansion has gone somewhat faster than OTL, and by 22 BC, they occupy nearly all the areas where they historically lived. This has generally been bad news for the pre-Bantu peoples such as the Baka, the Batwa and the various hunter-gatherers, who were conquered and subjugated by the Bantu; however, pre-Bantu peoples have held on in the extreme south, the deep rainforest and mountainous regions, and those with something to trade have been able to buy steel weapons.
The northern boundary of Bantu rule is roughly the same as OTL; although the formation of states allowed for more cultural exchange, the upper Nilotic peoples were strong enough to resist their political domination, and the crop package on the Ethiopian highlands was different enough that the Bantu never made a serious attempt to conquer them.
The eastern and western coasts are dotted with city-states and kingdoms based on trade with the Indian Ocean rim (in the east) and the West African empires (in the west). Most of these are small, but a few extend a considerable distance into the interior, and all of them have trade connections deep inland. There are also kingdoms of considerable size around the Great Lakes, most of which are feudal herding societies. In the Rift Valley, the Congo basin and the south, where populations are sparser and (in the south’s case) where Bantu occupation is relatively new, most peoples are still at pre-state levels of development. However, a powerful mining-based kingdom has recently arisen in the Copperbelt, and states are starting to form in what we would know as interior Angola, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
The Nile and the Horn are dominated, respectively, by the lineal descendants of Kush and Iam and by the proto-Amhara. The more northerly Nilotic peoples have conquered and been conquered by Egypt several times, with Wawat and Kush still nominal Egyptian vassals, and a great deal of Egyptian and Mediterranean cultural influence has filtered south (and vice versa) over the centuries. The southern Nilotic peoples are more Bantu-influenced and, as stops on the Palm Road, have encountered Indian and West African cultures. Iam and Kush are something of a transitional zone between the African and Mediterranean cultural spheres.
Ethiopia, in TTL, is one of Africa’s
younger civilizations, with early kingdoms and urban culture appearing on the highlands after 500 BC. The current hegemon is an empire centered on Lake Tana which controls nearly all the highlands and also much of the Somali coast. There is substantial interaction between this empire and South Arabia, and it also competes with the eastern Bantu city-states for the India trade. A number of important religious teachers have come from this region, including one who predated the rise of organized kingdoms and is known to Egyptians and West Africans as “the myrrh-country prophet.” Ethiopia is considered something of a cultural isolate by its neighbors, but as an integral part of the African trade routes, it is less of one than commonly believed.