Hannibal's Wake
- Thread starter leopard9
- Start date
I like this TL for it up holds the glory of Qart-Hadast. 
Even though I have a feeling most posts will be pretty Sub-Saharan/Niger centric, here is a link that'll help with all Carthaginian and Syriac words.
http://dukhrana.com/lexicon/search.php
Even though I have a feeling most posts will be pretty Sub-Saharan/Niger centric, here is a link that'll help with all Carthaginian and Syriac words.
http://dukhrana.com/lexicon/search.php
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The river kingdom in northern Africa is the Restored Kingdom of Egypt, still chugging along. Their contact with Ansongo's caravans will also lead to greater interest in trading with the western part of Africa which may lead to growing tensions with Carthage, who is still Ansongo's primary trading partner. The Berbers have a few desert chieftainships and also have a couple of respectable kingdoms in the Atlas Mountains that I talked about in the "Mediterranean Kings" chapter.
I'm glad you like the course of the timeline! Thanks for the feedback!
Chapter 11: Völkerwanderungs
Völkerwanderungs
3000 BCE – 900 CE
She drew closer to him, the firelight playing off her eyes and cheekbones.
“And have your people always dwelt along these rivers?”
“We have lived here for so very long, but the little men were the first to call this jungle home. No, we came from the North.”
“And have your people always dwelt along these rivers?”
“We have lived here for so very long, but the little men were the first to call this jungle home. No, we came from the North.”
Throughout the centuries, as the Carthaginians, Egyptians and Persians jockeyed for influence in the Mediterranean, Aksum warred with Meroe and spread into the Horn, and Ansongo conquered the Mandinka riverine states, two massive migrations reshaped the ethnic and linguistic maps of Africa and Europe. Around 3000 BC, a group of Niger-Congo speakers in the bend of Africa around the Benue river valley and its adjacent grasslands began migrating into the rest of Sub-Saharan Africa. This great migration became known as the Bantu (literally “people”) expansion. The Bantu expansion can best be understood as the result of the impact of three separate innovations that each drove the great movement of people, population growth, and cultural innovation. The exact reasons for their migration are unknown but it’s theorized that initial innovations in the agriculture of yams and oil palms created populations too large to be sustained in their current homeland. As populations grew and land became scarce, the Bantu spread to the east and south of their core territory.
In those new lands they encountered hunter-gatherers related to the Khoi-Khoi and San peoples of southern Africa and in the dense jungles of the Congo Basin, they encountered diminutive people known in another time as “pygmies”. The greater numbers and size of the Bantu allowed them to quickly outnumber the people they contacted. Through intermarriage and marginalization, the indigenous inhabitants were replaced with the Bantu who now carried varying amounts of admixture from the original people of the land they now lived in. The Bantu expansion reached its southern limit approximately 400 CE when they settled along the banks of the Likwa River, the southernmost tributary of the Limpopo. The impact of the Bantu expansion was immense. Before, most of Sub-Saharan Africa had spoken tongues in the same family as those of the Khoi-Khoi and San of southern Africa but now, Niger-Congo effectively dominated the continent. Where there had once been a land sparsely populated by tawny hunter gatherers, there was now a realm of farmers, darker and taller than those they had absorbed. For most Bantu, the village or perhaps a collection of villages linked by real or fictive kinship was the highest level of social organization. These villages were governed by a group of chiefs that were in turn politically restrained by village elders.
The second innovation was ironworking. Ironworking most likely reached West Africa through the Great Desert by Berber herders and traders. Instead of transporting iron tools through the desert, Berbers would simply forge it at the point of sale. Eventually the local people learned the secrets of ironworking for themselves and from there, it spread through the continent due in no small part to the Bantu. The Bantu began using iron around 400 BCE, which aided them in reshaping their new environments to better suit their lifestyles.
The third and last major innovation was the integration of the giant eland into the Bantu agricultural and cultural toolkit. Northwest Bantu contact with tamed giant elands is thought to have begun around 380 CE and the use of eland for meat, milk, fertilizer, hides, labor, and transportation had the same effect it had elsewhere of increased population and political centralization. The use of giant elands spread throughout Bantu populations until the practice reached the Nguni peoples around 800-900 CE.
Nowhere were the effects of giant eland taming more apparent than the central African jungles. Rainforests are generally a poor environment for humans to make a living: disease is rife, soils are poor and acidic, the seeming fertility of the jungle an efficient and interdependent ecological deception. But several factors were to combine that enabled the Nzere Nzadi Rainforest to defy the trend and become the cradle to powerful kingdoms. Bananas and plantains had been introduced to Africa around the turn of the millennium by Austronesian settlers and had been making their way west for centuries. Highly productive, calorie dense, and able to thrive in year round wet conditions, the banana rapidly propagated through Africa, especially in the central region of the continent. By around 350 CE, plantains were a staple in the diet of the Nzere Nzadi Bantus. But even more momentous changes were coming to the region.
Near simultaneously people began cultivating West African rice and herding giant eland around 450 CE. It’s most likely they were introduced to the region by migrants and merchants from the southern Nok kingdoms of the Niger delta. While the West African breed of rice was not as productive as the Asian varieties, it was far more adaptable to environmental stress and change. It could tolerate infertile acidic soil and there were floating varieties perfectly suited for growing along the banks of the world’s deepest river. As time went on, the people of the region would experiment with differing rice breeds to create higher yielding varieties. As elsewhere, the elands could be used for transportation, agriculture, as well as a reliable form of meat and dairy products for infants and the rare adult still able to digest milk. Of great use to the Bantu was the fact that giant elands were primarily browsers, meaning that they could unwittingly mostly avoid the environmental damage of clearing land to create grazing grounds for animals such as cattle that never could tolerate the heat and disease of the jungle. They could also thrive in a climate and ecology where large domesticated animals with the exception of goats and dogs had uniformly failed. Rice, bananas and plantains, yams, goats, eland and oil palms…together these crops and animals encouraged the growth of populations far larger than what had previously been possible in the region. And with large sections of the Nzere Nzadi navigable, ever larger communities that would trade, marry and war with each were a certainty. Of course the thick expansive rainforest made cavalry largely impractical and giant eland were largely used as pack animals in times of warfare.
Meanwhile the ethnic map of Europe was being remade. The Germanic people seem to have originated in southern Scandinavia and northern central Europe and began migrating to the south and west around 250 BCE in search of more farmland. They were stopped from moving east by Roman settlements that were located along the western Balkan coast and in the peninsula’s interior and so the Germanic tide turned west. As they migrated west, they encountered Celtic peoples that had been intermittently warring among themselves and with Rome for centuries. Weakened by the wars, the Celts were unable to stop the movement of the Germanics into and through their lands, resulting in many cases in a majority Celtic population with a Germanic upper class. By 150 BCE, Germanic people were at the Pyrenees, halted by a resurgent Carthage. This would be the southern border of their expansion for more than a century.
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Southern Africa is currently the same as OTL. The tamed elands haven't penetrated that far yet and it's too far away from the rest of the continent too be affected by the Sahelian trade. That will eventually change. Europe is in a state of flux right now due to the barbarian invasions sweeping through the land.
Yes, I'm working on the next couple of chapters and the outline, trying to make the pieces fit in a logical and fun manner. I know where I want this TL to end up, it's just a matter of writing it out.
Chapter 12: Full Bloom (Prelude)
Full Bloom (Prelude)
250 – 365 CE
250 – 365 CE
“May you reign as long as the baobabs live.”
The traditional words of coronation as the mansa crowns his successor.
The traditional words of coronation as the mansa crowns his successor.
As the third century waned and the fourth century began, Ansongo entered a period that would 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 subtly reinforce the power of the Baturus, the first gold and copper coins were minted in the royal city of Bamako around 290 CE 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 CE. 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, especially surgery, 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 CE, an educated healer by the name of Fara Touray, gained fame by traveling throughout the empire and observing and recording the types of herbs and treatments various tribes used to cure fevers or infections. These herbs included ways to alleviate malaria and yellow fever 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 detailed dissections of male and female chimpanzees with notes on their 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. As a testament to the value of these codices, when meeting with a Ansongoan dignitary, an Akan chieftain paid the price of “nearly three dozen male and female slaves, tall in stature and bright in countenance” in return for a second-hand copy of Fara’s codice. 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. 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. In times past, both had products the other needed to survive: the farmers had crops and the nomads had animal products, but Carthage and giant eland taming 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.
When Ansongo contacted Aksum and the Nile Valley in 280 CE, 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. It would be difficult to overstate the economic, cultural, and martial dominance Ansongo during these times. Ansongoan’s manner of dress, artworks, pastimes, writing form, and even gods became well known and imitated throughout west Africa. Indeed, Ansongo was known as a land of bounty. 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 Baturu clan 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 for 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.
Why would there be any difference in India and China at this point? that would require an ABS level butterfly work.
Things are pretty much as in OTL right now. India might have access to more gold than they did IOTL due to Ansongo, but neither the Two God Path or tamed giant elands have found themselves in India or China. I have thought about what butterflies will reach India and China and how they will and won't impact their civilizations.
Just did it. Let me know what you guys think!
