Hannibal's Wake

[leopard9]

The Lion's Brood Triumphant

215 – 211 BCE​

POD: The Battle of Dertosa, Spring 215 BCE​

The sun beat down on Hasdrubal Barca, making him squint as the cotton under his armor clung to his skin in the humid air. For a while he sat quietly on his mount as he surveyed the gathered Roman army that lay south of his own. There had been five days of skirmishes between his army and that of Gnaeus and Publius Scipio each testing for any weaknesses in their tactics and soldiers, both groups hoping in vain for an easy victory. But neither side had yielded and so here they were, preparing for a clash on a field just south of the Ebro River. Hasdrubal knew he needed to gain a decisive victory to prevent the further harassment of his allies in the town of Ibera and the fall of Hispania. If he lost this battle, the Scipio forces would have a nearly unopposed march into the rest of the peninsula and more Punic forces would be needed to retake Hispania, depriving Hannibal of vital reinforcements in the Italian peninsula. Worse, Carthage grew weary of another war with Rome to satisfy what some in the Hundred and Four called “a blood feud started by Hamilcar” and would most likely use this failure as a chance to weaken Hannibal’s command over the Punic army. Scipio the Elder and Publius Cornelius Scipio were formidable presences on the battlefield but here he hoped he’d be able to prevail against them. With a quick word to his commanders, and a general shout from his soldiers, the army from Carthage engaged their foe. As the battle began, he wasted little time in deploying the double envelopment technique. The Romans drove the Iberian infantry back but were unwittingly flanked by the Punic elephants, but unlike Hannibal’s experience, the Roman and Italian horsemen held firm, battered though they were. As the battle raged on, the Carthaginian cavalry fully engaged with the Roman and Italian horsemen, both sides giving into a mad urge to kill the other. Hasdrubal wheeled around on his horse cutting down man after man, while still hoping that the envelopment strategy would work, desperately scanning the Roman line for weakness. There! A number of Roman cavalry men had gotten too close to a bloodstained elephant and their horses panicked in fright, weakening the line that had thus held firm against the Punic onslaught. Combined with the earlier losses inflicted by Barca’s forces, the line crumbled, leading to a general slaughter of the Roman force trapped by the Carthaginians. Recognizing the battle as lost, Gnaeus and Publius Scipio gathered their remaining forces and fled the battlefield. And for the first time that day as Hasdrubal’s cavalry rode in pursuit of the Romans, he smiled.


Unlike the Carthaginian defeat at Dertosa that occurred IOTL, a better performance of Punic cavalry led to a decisive victory against the Romans for Hasdrubal Barca. Momentarily giving up the idea of engaging the Carthaginians in Iberia, the Scipios took the remainder of their army and headed back to the Italian peninsula to support the Roman armies against the armies of Hannibal and Hanno the Elder. Instead of only two Punic armies in the Italian peninsula, there were now four commanded by Hannibal Barca, Hasdrubal Barca, Mago Barca, and Hanno the Elder. With reinforcements from Mago and Hasdrubal, Hannibal successfully sieged and took the city of Nola in 214 BCE. Several more city-states on the Peninsula decided to ally with Hannibal after the Battle of Nola.

With the might of almost all of southern Italy at his disposal, Hannibal now contended with the legendary Roman legions harassing him whenever he turned to face another region of the Italian Peninsula. However, with four armies at his command instead of the one he had IOTL, he managed to inflict several crushing defeats on them. Having been rebuffed when he came to Rome to talk peace terms, Hannibal had a new goal: to capture Rome itself and make the Romans see that their cause was lost. Hannibal suffered a devastating blow when the Scipios in charge of an extremely large legionary force managed to crush the forces led by Mago Barca and kill Mago at the Battle of Latina in June 212 BCE while sustaining heavy losses of their own. After Latina, a stalemate developed a few miles east of Latina and continued throughout the summer. During this time, Hannibal appealed to Carthage to send more troops so he might break the stalemate and more quickly secure victory. However, the anti-Barca factions of Carthage worked to reduce the number of troops that were sent, saying “Hamilcar’s sons began this war, now let them end it.” Only 3000 Libyan spearmen, 2000 Numidian cavalry and 12 elephants were sent, a fraction of the forces Hannibal needed. In desperate need of greater manpower, Hannibal sent Hasdrubal to Ptolemaic Egypt in July 212 to hire mercenaries that would fight in his war. Hasdrubal hired a total of 10,000 infantry and 1,680 cavalry composed almost entirely of native Egyptians and returned in early August. In September 212 BCE, Hannibal ambushed the Scipios a few miles from Latina and managed to win a decisive victory against their forces, killing most of the men along with both Scipio the Elder and Publius Cornelius Scipio.

With Latina conquered, near the end of September 212 BCE, Hannibal was eager to end the war and began a rapid march to Rome to lay siege to the city but was met with a large force of 25,000, mainly the dregs of Roman soldier commanded by Scipio the Younger and Gnaeus Fulvius. The seasoned Carthaginians and fresh mercenaries made short work of them and continued their famed March to Rome. Rome was in a panic not seen since Hannibal took Cannae as the Senate desperately raised a combined force of free men and slaves to face Hannibal. But farmers, city-dwellers, and slaves posed little challenge to the armies of the Lion’s Brood and the army was crushed in a bloodstained grove with many made prisoner. And so late in 212 BCE, Hannibal started to siege Rome while the Senate debated whether to sue for peace. Hannibal had repeatedly stressed through peace envoys that Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica would be returned to Carthage and Rome would be mostly confined to the Italian Peninsula. Generous terms one might say, but the Senate greeted the prospect of submission to Carthage as nothing less than choosing bondage. As one senator said, “Should Hannibal should breach our gates, all the people of Rome will be made slaves of Carthage.” While the siege was in place, Carthage sent an additional 4,000 infantry with supplies to aid Hannibal in his siege. The Romans mustered another force of 30,000 infantry and 5,000 cavalry to force the Carthaginians out.

The Battle for Rome in December 212 was a bitter one but ended in the utter defeat and merciless slaughter of the Roman force. After the battle, the Senate once more debated whether to raise yet another force to fight the Carthaginians. As Cato the Elder began an impassioned speech for Rome to fight until “Hannibal is forced to march his men through the streets of Hell”, a grief stricken Scipio the Younger without a word wrenched him down from the platform, ending his speech and any more discussion about fighting Carthage. And so in December, the Roman Senate sued for peace. Hannibal consulted with the Carthaginian government to determine the terms of Roman surrender. The terms were thus: Rome would return Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica to Carthage and pay a war fine, thus acknowleding the supremacy of Carthage in the western Mediterranean.

An existential threat had been vanquished but Carthage still had its allies to placate. Carthage had never possessed a large standing army and had made extensive use of mercenaries to fill its ranks and promised riches to several Barbary kingdoms to prevent them from throwing their lot in with Rome. Now it was time to produce the gold they had promised or face uprisings in Hispania and Numidia outside of their core territory that would endanger the city Hannibal had struggled to defend. And so Carthage turned to the lands just south of the Great Desert. Trade between North and West Africa through Berber nomads had gone on for some time now and Carthage was well versed in the tale of the fields of gold of Jenne Jeno. With new trading opportunities available already known to Carthage from Berber nomads and the introduction of camels into the Maghreb through Ptolemaic Egypt from Persia, a few diplomats and merchants made the journey to Jenne Jeno in the fall of 210 BCE. And so the ancient trade of salt for gold across the Great Desert reached new volumes with far reaching consequences for those involved.

 

[leopard9]

The Great Egyptian Revolt​

205 – 188 BCE​

The Ptolemaic dynasty was never truly accepted by the native Egyptians, the occasional small-scale riots and rebellions sparked by native frustration were a constant reminder of this. At best, the Greek dynasty was tolerated in the same vein as other foreign dynasties had been in the past. And perhaps the Ptolemaic reign would have continued, but the events of the last quarter of the third century set the Egypt on a chaotic trajectory. And while many thought the Revolt of 217 BCE that took place just after the Fourth Syrian War was the last demonstration of native resistance, it was in truth a prelude to a much larger and violent civil war.

To truly understand the course and causes of The Great Egyptian Revolt, it’s necessary to examine the society and history of Ptolemaic Egypt. Ptolemaic Egypt was established in 305 BCE when Ptolemy Soter I, a general of Alexander the Great, declared himself pharaoh of Egypt following the death of Alexander and the subsequent dissolution of his empire. Under the Ptolemaic dynasty, the native aristocracy was deposed and Greek settlers became the new upper class. Egyptians were largely excluded from government positions and the army, only allowed to serve at low level governing post and only in the military as either auxiliaries or sailors. While the Ptolemies emulated aspects of Egyptian culture to appease the natives, the general attitude among the aristocracy was that Egyptian culture was inferior to that of their own. Greek gods were widely worshipped among the elite and the native script of Demotic gradually lost its prestige and was slowly replaced by Greek as the legal language of contracts and agreements.

Greek control of Egypt was weakened by the events of the Fourth Syrian War. From 219 – 217 BCE, Ptolemaic Egypt warred against the Seleucid Empire for control over the Levant, which while brief was financially expensive, resulting in higher taxation which heavily impacted the lives of the lower classes, where native Egyptians were disproportionately represented. Additionally, approximately 30,000 Egyptians had served in the Fourth Syrian War in the main army due to manpower needs. This was highly unusual and the military experience these soldiers gained would prove useful during the Revolt. And the final straw was the return in 211 BCE of 10,000 handsomely paid Egyptian mercenaries that had fought for Carthage in the Second Punic War. They garnered great prestige among the peasantry for they represented an earlier time when Egyptians served in the army with distinction and earned a comfortable living. Certainly, contemporary Greek historians noted the increased assertiveness of these mercenaries and their acolytes. And so this was how Egypt’s third century ended: a quagmire of ethnic, economic, and religious tensions.

The Great Egyptian Revolt began in 205 BCE when there was a general uprising against the Ptolemaic Dynasty after the events of the Fourth Syrian War. It is unknown what exactly triggered the rebellion, but once ignited it quickly consumed the entire kingdom. The influence of the Egyptian mercenaries from both the Fourth Syrian War and Second Punic War was instrumental during this time as part of the leadership of the Revolt. People flocked to the cause as the mercenaries represented a chance to return Egypt to that of one ruled by powerful natives. They also used their extensive experience to train the rebellion’s army and advise the military tactics of their self-proclaimed pharaoh of Upper Egypt, a Nubian named Hugronaphor. Operating from his base in Upper Egypt and appealing to the masses as a pharaoh of old come to drive out the oppressive Greeks, he managed to extend his reach into Lower Egypt and the delta region by 202 BCE. In response, the Ptolemies mounted an offensive that managed to push Hugronahpor back down to Memphis where the two sides stalemated for several years and built up their armies that would reunite the country. During this time Macedon and Persia capitalized on Egypt’s civil war by conquering pieces of its land. Macedon invaded Egyptian held islands within Thrace and Caria in Anatolia while Antiochus III attacked the region of Coele-Syria. In the decisive battle of Panium in 198 BCE, Egyptian forces led by Scopas of Aetolia were soundly defeated by a Persian army led by Antiochus III the Great, reducing Egyptian dominance to parts of Judea.

Hugronahpor died around 197 BCE and his possible son Ankhmakis ascended to the role of pharaoh. During the stalemate, it became popular among the peasantry to carve the name of Ankhmakis and Hugronaphor onto the stomachs of stone and clay scarabs. Acts of rebellion such as desecrating the temples of priests that collaborated with the Greek nobility and graffiti praising “the pharaoh ordained by Amon” became commonplace. Additionally, taxes had been raised to pay for the civil war which led to further discontent and riots from the common folk which threatened internal stability. Knowing that the rebels soon intended to break the ceasefire and mindful of the threat within his own borders, Ptolemy V became fearful about the prospects of defeat and begins to enact harsher measures (curfews, taxes, stricter prohibition on Egyptians being able to serve in the bureaucracy and army) on the native Egyptian population, including selling those suspected of colluding with Ankhmakis into slavery. The most important result of this was the considerable desertion of the army by native Egyptians.

Knowledgeable of the Delta population’s discontent with Ptolemy V, Ankhmakis launched a new offensive with a focus on living off the land that resulted in his forces diving deep into the delta to attack and when forced to retreat, adopting a scorched earth policy. Battle after battle raged on, depleting the strength of both sides, but the public opinion turned steadily in favor of Ankhmakis, especially when he announced payment and opportunities to those who would join his army and commit sabotage within the Delta to the Grecian army. This strategy worked and the rebellion saw more and more of Egypt submit to them. Thus in 190 BCE, the siege of Alexandria began. Here the Egyptian veterans that fought in the Battles for Rome proved themselves invaluable with their experience. They instructed Ankhmakis in how to minimize the losses of his forces while maximizing his opponents’ and how to effectively break the will of a city under siege while chipping away at their defenses. Their leader, a wiry man named Abayomi, is to have remarked in disgust, “These perfumed Greeks do not have an ounce of the fire and rage of Rome. They deserve their fate.” The city fell late in the year in 189 BCE and Ptolemy V fled along with most of his court across the Mediterranean to Macedonia. Ptolemy V was promptly executed by order of Philip V of Macedon and his court either imprisoned, married off, or scattered. So ended Egypt's Diadochi dynasty.

In 188 BCE, Ankhmakis was crowned and officially recognized as pharaoh of all of Egypt by the priests of Alexandria. He lifted the bans on Egyptians fully serving in the different branches of the military and in government positions while also granting amnesty to the Macedonian troops that fought against him in the Revolt. He rewarded those in his army regardless of ethnicity who had served with great distinction with titles of nobility taken from Greek nobles that refused to recognize his rule or had fled Egypt to Persia or Macedonia. During his reign, he encouraged a revival in using Demotic in royal records and business transactions and proclaimed a return to the days of the pharaohs.

But Egypt had changed under 117 years of heavy Hellenic rule. Both the Egyptian language and Demotic script now included Greek words and were influenced by the Greek writing system. This new writing system was known as Late Demotic. To avoid the revolt of communities with large Greek populations, Ankhmakis gave Greek, Coptic, and Late Demotic equal standing in certain urban centers. While worship of the native Egyptian pantheon was still the dominant religion, much of the Greek population continued to worship the gods of their homeland instead of Egyptian gods, due to Ptolemaic efforts to retain a distinct Greek population. There were also a substantial number of Jewish, Arab, and Greek civilians in Egypt that were largely left to continue on as they had before the civil war. Hellenic cuisine had blended with the native fare and so had the art styles of the two cultures. Finally, the Greek play remained very popular with both the peasants and nobility and the amphitheaters continued to be supported. Egyptian plays were also performed in these open-air theaters and eventually borrowed aspects of Hellenic plays in their own routines while more traditional religious Egyptian performances were done by priests outside of Egyptian temples. Ankhmakis later took a half Egyptian-Ptolemaic wife named Cleopatra in 186 BCE to pacify any Ptolemaic loyalists and presided over an Egypt that now blended a predominant Egyptian culture with strong Greek influences.

 

[leopard9]

Small Beginnings

208 – 117 BCE​

The trip to Jenne was a success and Carthage’s need and desire for gold, along with the introduction of the camel, quickly fueled the rise of an expanded Aai Merewan* trade with the inhabitants of West Africa south of the Great Desert. Due to their strategic location along the Niger River, the Mandinka people were the greatest beneficiaries of this trade and local chieftaincies grew larger in response to the increased trade. During this time, there appears to have been little direct contact made between Carthage and the various Soninke and Mande polities as they grow in size and power. Carthage gained dyewoods, kola nuts, gold, ivory, and slaves whereas the West Africans gained beads, cloth, iron tools, and most vital of all, salt. This gold enabled Carthage to repay the tens of thousands of mercenaries it had hired and ensured its stability by avoiding a debilitating retread of the Mercenary War. In Carthage, Hannibal, along with the rest of his brothers were regarded as national heroes, lionized as a military genius who had ensured the continued existence and supremacy of Carthage in the western Mediterranean. In 208 BCE, Hannibal was still only 33 and while he what he had accomplished would have been the crowning achievements of other men, he was not yet satisfied with what he had done. He left behind the military and pursued a career in politics, running for and easily being elected as one of the two suffetes of Carthage. During his time in office, he enacted reforms upon the government body that judged the military and generals of Carthage, the Hundred and Four. Shrewdly leveraging his massive popular support, he opened up elections of the Council to direct voting and also limited the term of office from life to that of two years. He, along with Hasdrubal Barca and Gisco were immensely popular with both the common people and the military. Later on while he was in office, he married a woman named Sisa and had three boys and two girls with her.

In 150 BCE, a son named Kebba was born to the chief of the Mandinka state, Jenne. Starting in 130 BCE, Kebba expanded the borders of Jenne to the north and east to better control the Aai Merewan trade routes. The introduction of the dromedary camel and horse to North and West Africa revolutionized the trade and Sahelian states. The dromedary was better adapted to the arid heat of the Great Desert than the bactrian camel was and enabled far more regular and intensive contact between the different Sahel states and Carthage, and as a result, trade with the Sahel came to be a larger part of Carthage’s income and more importantly, gold supply. The horse revolutionized warfare, allowing the quicker movement of armies and aiding states in maintaining larger borders they previously had been able to. Although expensive to purchase and maintain, the horse gave the Sahel states an undeniable military advantage over the people in the tsetse belt, allowing them to occasionally raid for slaves for both foreign sale and domestic use. State formation and greater ease of transportation prompted greater political unity and the beginnings of a common Mande culture dominated by that of the Mandinka people began to spread among the Niger River. The Niger River was critical for transportation and easy efficient access to the forest region of West Africa and so the Sahel states competed with each other for control over the river. However, during these early years, the Sahel states stayed mostly confined to the region bounded by the Aai Merew and its tribes to the north and the tsetse fly belt to the south.

By the end of his conquests in 123 BCE, Kebba had enlarged Jenne’s borders twofold. He then devoted his time and energy to the task of governing, using the oral traditions that all chiefs utilized. But Kebba had always had a more outward looking mind than others; it was what drove him to expand Jenne to control more of the trade across the Great Desert and it was that same mind that led to his curiosity and interest in the Punic writings which he would discuss with the most prominent Carthaginian merchants that would traverse through his chiefdom. Realizing the potential that the Carthaginian script had for aiding the governing of his newly expanded chiefdom, he imported Punic literature in the form of scientific, historical, and business transaction texts. In 120 BCE, he also sponsored several Punic merchants to live in Jenne while they taught him, his family, and his jalis (griots) how to read and write in the Punic script. This is known because one of the merchants, a man named Abibaal, kept a journal of the nearly three years he and ten other men spent among a people he called the “Mndnk”, a black skinned race that lived next to a very large river in the “land of Jnn”. Once the jalis knew how to reproduce the script, they would then use the letters to aid their administration and would teach their descendants how to read and write as well. Because of Kebba’s actions, a modified Punic script gradually spread throughout Jenne and later to the savannah and forest expanses of West Africa in the following centuries.

The Sahel trade also affected its surrounding regions. The demand for exotic goods such as palm oil, kola nuts, ivory, leopard skins, and slaves prompted the regular gathering and collaboration of large groups in order to satisfy the quantity of goods demanded. Leaders emerged that dealt with the foreign merchants and directed the work and organization of their people to balance between producing luxury goods and agriculture needed to support the community. Trade routes that had been used for millennia were expanded, branched, and strengthened between the desert, Sahel, savannah, and forest regions and prompted the rise of small states originating from the political institutions in place among the Africans. The Asante, Yoruba, Fon and more formed loosely organized polities at this time though their populations remained quite low. Minimal Sahel influence was found here during this time due to the differences in climate and was mostly manifested in prominent members of the community being buried with foreign goods and murals and sculptures depicting horses and camels.


*I decided that the name for the Sahara would be Aai Mewer which is Egyptian for "Great Desert". "Sahara" is an Arabic term which wouldn't make sense since due to the timeline's butterflies.

 

[leopard9]

Kings of the Mediterranean

185 – 10 BCE​

In 185 BCE, Ankhmakis and Seleucus IV Philopator signed the Judean Treaty that stated Egypt and Persia would respect their current holdings and to no longer war against each other. As the new pharaoh is recorded to have said in private, “I have no interest in a rotting Greek’s dead empire.” His interests were directed inward, specifically on making Egypt impervious to foreign domination. To accomplish this he maintained a relatively large standing army and navy and fortified the Sinai Peninsula, dotting it with forts at critical choke points, especially the entrance to the delta, the verdant heart of Egypt. While the army was large relative to the size of Egypt’s population, widespread use of Ptolemaic watermills, better irrigation practices, and consistent good Nile floods made Ankhmakis’ policies feasible.

When Egypt and Seleucid Persia agreed to respect their holdings in the Levant, there was a certain tension between the two empires. Both suspected the either of one day breaking the peace to reconquer lost land but the treaty did introduce a new dynamic to the eastern Mediterranean. Both sides were initially skeptical that the peace would hold but Ankhamis’ actions of inward reformation dispelled the worst of Persia’s fears. With the Levant border secured, the Seleucids turned westward and starting in 172 BCE, waged a series of campaigns against Macedon, weakening their position in Asia Minor and using diplomacy and force to spread Persian influence in the peninsula. By 165 BCE, the Seleucids controlled the entire southern coast of Asia Minor and Macedon clung only to the western coast of the peninsula. Encouraged by their success against the Macedonians in Asia Minor, the Seleucids prepared for the next assault to drive them from the peninsula and eventually conquer the Grecian homeland. In time, Antiochus IV planned to invade the Nile Valley to reunite Alexander’s empire and then perhaps extend it past its original bounds further down the Nile to bring the land of Kush under his sway. During this time, the Persians feared a counterattack by the Macedonians or perhaps eventual war with a resurgent Roman Republic or Egyptian Empire, but discord came from the east. Taking advantage of the Seleucid’s concentration of forces in its west and preoccupation with defeating the Macedonians, Mithridates I enlarged the borders of Parthia to the east, south and west from 163 to 148 BCE, conquering the region of Mesopotamia. Losing such a densely populated and productive region would prove to be a fatal blow to the Seleucid dynasty, though it would be several more decades before this became apparent and over a century before their end came.

To secure Egypt’s Levant territories, Egyptians were encouraged to immigrate to the area to hopefully eventually constitute a large section of the local population. To the Jews of the Levant, the migration of the Egyptians and the erection of their temples in Judea looked to some to be a near reversal of the covenant between them and Yahweh. This had the effect of causing Judaism to simultaneously gain more extremist and more pagan elements to it as people searched for answers on how to reverse this invasion. Thus the Levant became one of the greatest mosaics in the Mediterranean world, with Jews, Greeks, Egyptians, and Persians all interacting and exchanging ideas on philosophy, technology, and most far reaching, religions. In 150 BCE, Ankhmakis’ successor decided to mount an offensive against Meroe with the hope of acquiring strategic depth and securing its natural resources of timber. The conquest was a failure, partially due to generals underestimating the forces needed to subdue Meroe and partially due to the famed skill of the Nubian archers.

By 120 BCE, Carthage was the undisputed master of the Western Mediterranean. Trade with the Sahel was immensely profitable and gold, and to a lesser extent slaves, flowed into the city-state and its surrounding territory. Though Carthage rarely attempted to integrate the surrounding people into its empire, it was able to buy their loyalty with their wealth, giving them considerable influence over the locality in Hispania and the Libyan chiefs. With the gold from the trans-Saharan trade, Carthage was able to routinely pacify the Numidian Berbers and maintain a larger mercenary Berber presence in their cavalry. Over time, the Berber people had managed to unify into two loosely organized kingdoms that were intent on expanding in the Atlas Mountains: the eastern kingdom of Massylii, which was loosely allied with Carthage and the western state of Masaesyli, which was nominally so. Though they shared significant ancestry with the people of Carthage, both Carthage and Massylii and Masaeslyi regarded the other as more stranger than kinsman, due to the Phoenician roots that so influenced Carthaginian society. Because of this, though the two Barbary kingdoms would war against each other, there was a great sense of kinship between the two states that would later trouble the Punics to no end. Carthage could not easily expand into the interior of the mountains due to the Berber presence and while relations were currently warm, that was due more to Sahelian gold as than the renewed diplomatic overtures by Carthage. As was discovered during the aftermath of the Mercenary War and the Second Punic War, the Berbers were more than willing to turn on Carthage if its position seemed weak. Always looking to for new trading opportunities, the Carthaginians focused on expanding abroad by turning the Western Mediterranean into a Punic lake.

Intrepid diplomats and merchants established alliances with the local Gauls of the region and established trading towns on the southern coast. During this time, after initial hostilities, the Greek town of Massilia became a vassal of Carthage and was obligated to serve as a port for Punic ships that were used for general transportation of people, goods and war supplies. In later years, it would become a fortified military base to serve as a bulwark against Romans and any hostile Gauls and Germanics looking to plunder the riches of the Mediterranean. By 80 BCE, Carthage solidly controlled the coastal region of the Atlas Mountains, nearly the whole of Iberia and the entire southern coast of Gaul as well as the islands of Corsica, Sardinia, and Sicily. As the trade with the Mandinka polities expanded, Carthage grew wealthier and Egypt saw a potential ally in Carthage. Carthage was interested in keeping the Mediterranean, especially the section west of Sicily out of Greek domination and Egypt was intent on remaining independent from Persia.

At the same time Egypt was observing the expansion of Carthage in the west and the Seleucids in the east with increased trepidation. Persia’s actions against the Macedonian empire stoked fears of an ambitious Persian campaign to conquer Egypt and thus unite the rest of Alexander’s empire. And while Carthage and Persia had little history of cooperation, the pharaoh Merenre (158 - 90 BCE) was primarily concerned with the increased indirect limiting of Egypt’s sphere of influence and eventual encirclement. Egypt saw a perfect opportunity to destabilize Persia through the Parthians. They covertly supplied the fledging empire with powerful weapons and taught Parthian forces battle formations proven to be effective against Seleucid forces to ensure Persia was too preoccupied with fighting draining wars against the Parthians to consider invading Egypt. To counter against greater Punic financial influence against its eastern borders, Egypt increased its own ties with the Libyan chiefs that controlled the most powerful cities through nobility intermarriage and periodic military expeditions to what they called the “desolate coast” to aid allies in order to reinforce its bonds and power in the region. While Egypt later formed a pact of mutual defense with Carthage against Persia, it began to build up its own navy and reinforced its military base located just south of the city of Abiad, formerly known as Balagrae in the province of Cyrenaica. For its part, Carthage was far more preoccupied with establishing and maintaining its trade network that connected the Mediterranean Sea with the Niger River. There was also the matter of the water-mining Garamante civilization that also served as middlemen, carrying the goods of the Niger to the Nile Valley.

The mixture of religions in the cultural mosaic of the Levant caused many “hybrid” religions to spring up that combined Judaism with the polytheism of the Greeks or Egyptians. A notable individual influenced by these cults was a simple man born to a typical Jewish family. Around 10 BCE, a Jewish carpenter named Meir began to preach a new faith. Central to his belief was the idea that there were two supreme gods, not one. After a short stint in Judea, he gathered a modest following and traveled to Avaris, Egypt to continue spreading his faith.

 

[leopard9]

The Path of the Two Gods

“May the Father be praised! May the Mother be adored!”

A traditional Aksumite psalm praising the Two Gods of Creation.



40 BCE – 8 CE​

Meir was born to a Jewish family in the town of Nazareth around 40 BCE under the Egyptian rule of the Levant. Egyptian emigrants and Persian merchants along with their gods were an established part of Meir’s world while growing up. As he matured, he learned his father’s trade of carpentry and it seemed he would lead an ordinary life. But in his early 20s, he became close friends with Jahan, a Persian man and devout follower of Zoroastrianism, and the two would often discuss the intricacies of their respective beliefs along with their mutual interest in the Egyptian gods. And during his spare time, he would meditate on these differences.

When he reached 30, he began to preach of a new faith. Two gods were responsible for creating the world, one male and the other female. Together they created everything and through them, everything was sustained. They each had their own domains which they had created and presided over. However they both influenced the other’s domains, much as the moon influences the ocean. The Father was strongly associated with water, stars, and lightning while the Mother was connected with the earth, fire, and the moon. Everything in creation belonged in either the Father or the Mother’s domains, except for the following: humans, knowledge, love, fertility, justice, and life and death. These things belonged to the Two Gods in equal measure. The world was also inhabited by angels and lesser earthly spirits. Each spirit had a purpose in this world but humans were unique in this regard. They had been created by the Gods simply out of a desire to create beings to fully experience the world the Gods had made. Unique to creation, humans were half divine and half earthly creatures, forever torn between these two conflicting natures. When people died, they would have to eventually choose between their two natures: become fully earthly and cease to exist or become fully divine and live forever in Paradise with the Two Gods. Leading people away from Paradise was an adversarial spirit who was once divine but now infernal who was destined to be destroyed by the Father and the Mother in the end times.

Furthermore, belief in them was solely imperative for access to the afterlife, the abode of the two gods and to avoid being swept from existence. He began to travel around the province, preaching his faith and gaining a sizable following. Eventually, he traveled to Egypt after he learned of a conspiracy on his life by the local authorities and in 6 BCE, settled in Avaris with a few of his followers along his closest friend and foremost disciple Jahan. This religion was particularly popular with the common folk and women with its promise of immortality and a female goddess the equal of her male counterpart, with no “weighing of the heart” trial to undergo. Meir later died of a fever in 8 CE, where he asked to see Jahan on his deathbed. There he thanked Jahan for his friendship and constant support and passed on the leadership of the religion to him, blessing him with “May the Father and the Mother guide your path, and do not look so sad, we will see each other again.” And while many hybrid religions faded with their founder, by luck or by providence, this one spread within the Delta and down the Nile in the years following his death. Some of Meir’s acolytes were literate in Late Demotic and Coptic and so were able to transcribe sections of what he wrote down and said, as well as their own thoughts on Meir’s teachings in a book that eventually became known as The Tome. In the few years after Meir’s death, The Two God Path or Meirism, as it came to be called, was regarded by Egyptian nobles as merely another peasant cult, albeit one more popular and organized than others.

Followers of the Two God Path came from all walks of life which proved crucial to spreading their religion. Merchants who followed the Path established temples in Meroe and Aksum and the priests that maintained them started to win a few converts. And in time the Two Gods came to the western sands and savannas of Africa.

 

[leopard9]

Elands and Agriculture

80 – 900 CE​

Between 80-100 CE, a pivotal moment for Sub-Saharan Africa occurred. In this time period, the earliest evidence is found indicating humans and giant elands living in close proximity to each other, though there are a few pieces of artwork that hint at even earlier attempts at taming giant elands. The evidence was found in the tsetse fly belt of West Africa, suggesting that people started taming giant eland because of need for a draft animal and were inspired to do so because of their knowledge of and interaction with camels, horses, and donkeys. Giant eland are relatively docile and non-territorial but at the same time wary of predators. To alleviate their wariness, people probably acclimatized giant elands to human presence by putting out salt licks and slowly approaching them. Curiously, the oldest eland bones found in human habitations are those of weaned juveniles, suggesting that people concentrated their taming efforts on younger, less dangerous elands that would presumably be more malleable in their behavior.

There are several reasons why humans would domesticate giant elands. Giant elands provide large amounts of meat, nutritious milk, and high quality hides, even when fed an inferior diet to what cattle eat. Their milk can also be kept for several weeks whereas cow milk can only be kept for a few days before spoiling. They are remarkably strong animals and can be used to draw carts and plows and be used to aid in construction and clearing the land. Furthermore, they have are exceptionally quick animals and can be used for transportation. Finally, they are immune to the tsetse fly and do not require water in the same quantities cows do. The domestication of eland is thought to have occurred just east of the Niger River and spread to the banks of the western ocean to the tip of the southern cape by 900 CE.

The taming and subsequent spread of the giant eland transformed Africa. Plow agriculture largely replaced hoe agriculture as the eland spread throughout the continent, resulting in larger yields and enabling communities to devote less time to agriculture. Men took an increased role in agriculture as they became responsible for clearing, plowing, and planting the earth as well as herding and breeding the elands. Women became responsible for weeding and harvesting the fields as well as milking the elands and processing the milk and grain. They were also responsible for maintaining small garden plots for familial use. Young men were responsible for such actions as they were by and large the only group capable of the strength needed to control elands. And as the young men gained greater societal power, they leveraged this into earlier access to marriage. Due to this and the onus being placed increasingly on the man to provide for his wife and children, monogamy increased which led to a decreased age gap between husband and wife, though wealthy individuals would often engage in polygyny. With a beast of burden that could pull carts and move through many different environments, from arid desert to humid forest, trade rapidly grew and the merchants who controlled those routes became increasingly wealthy as goods could be transported much more quickly and easily. Archaeologists find that the spread of the giant eland positively correlated with significant increases in community population size and health as determined by the number of burial plots, the height of the people, and the conditions of their bones. Infant mortality also decreased, prompting a significant bias towards lactose tolerance, unusual for a tropical environment.

But giant eland taming was not without its disadvantages. Warfare became increasingly common as communities sought to control the best grazing grounds and eland herds and the later development of a giant eland-based cavalry led to warfare on a scale that had before not been seen in Sub-Saharan Africa. Parasites spread from eland into human populations. Society became more stratified. Before, the age set system had helped to prevent the rise of notable lineages but giant eland converted otherwise useless bushes, shrubs, and grass into movable forms of wealth that could be controlled and inherited. Additionally, unregulated browsing combined with ironworking led to desertification in semi-arid areas and the decline of several civilizations.

 

[leopard9]

Ansongo Rising

160 CE​

The chief imperial jali* did his best not to appear anxious as he quickly made his way over to the imperial hall where the king and queen held court. He had received urgent summons in the middle of a writing lesson with his apprentices to appear in the hall as soon as he possible. The king had called an impromptu meeting of most prominent officials in the capital. Sarjo reached the doors to the throne room, took a moment to compose himself, a deep breath, and then entered. The hall was made in the classic Mandinka style with mudbrick columns and arches with intricately woven rugs, both domestic and foreign. Baturu, the king, sat in the middle of the room along with his wife, Oba. The king was a handsome man in the prime of his life and Oba was as radiant as polished copper. But it was the new addition to the throne room that drew Sarjo's attention. The skin of some great shaggy animal with a hyena-like snout and sickle-like claws was draped across the back of the hardwood throne.

The king stood up, instantly quieting the room before he spoke. “Sarjo, how many kingdoms lie among the Niger?"

“Five, my king” Sarjo quickly answered.

“Five kingdoms of our people lie along the Niger River. We share the same language, the same writing, the same gods, and yet we feud endlessly with each other. It is not right for our people to do so, especially when there are so many enemies that surround us. Five… all with populations less than Ansongo?”

“Indeed, over one million souls reside in your domain and half a million more in our client states. Mopti has two hundred thousand, Jenne has four hundred thousand, Ke Macina has one hundred thousand, and Koulikoro contains six hundred thousand.”

Baturu was silent as the jali listed the Mande states with their populations from east to west. It was Oba who spoke next, “Perhaps it is time a mansa united our people. The desert clans demand greater tribute for their part in the protection of the caravans and the nomads raid more frequently. These skirmishes threaten to spiral into a war that will leave us vulnerable and ultimately to our demise. We must stop this infighting, this constant struggle for supremacy.”

While the Berbers were indeed threatening to restrict the desert trade, Sarjo privately suspected that it was competition from the other Mandinka kingdoms that vexed Baturu most of all.

Baturu spoke then, “Mopti and Ke Macina grow bolder with each month, disrupting our trade and attacking our caravans, and enslaving Ansongo’s citizens. Their incursions would seem to be a display of strength but my spies tell a different story. Their croplands turn into dust as their herds grow too large and their demand for iron strips the land bare. Like lions dying from their wounds, lashing out at every passing thing. Left alone they may just as easily atrophy or regain their strength, but this an opportunity that may not come again. With one stroke, we ensure our survival and gain control over the trade with Carthage and the forest chiefdoms. As Sarjo said, we have the men, the grain, and the wealth to vanquish them all.”

It was now that Sarjo fully grasped why the king had called him, to legitimize his ascension from king to mansa and to provide the recorded context of why such a claim had been made. If the campaigns succeeded, he would be lofted as a protective king that had conquered out of humanitarian impulses. If the conquests went less favorably, the king would be able to defend himself against accusations of greed and hubris from the scribes and province-masters, because of what his trusted chief jali had told him of the state of the other Niger River kingdoms.

Dutifully, Sarjo spoke, “And so what is your charge, my king?” The pause before the plunge, thought Sarjo.

With a smile so slight that only those that knew the king would have noticed it, Baturu addressed the whole gathering. “Begin the preparations for war. Soon our people will bow to one mansa alone.”




*jali is the Mandinka word for griot

 

[leopard9]

Conquests and Empire

160 – 165 CE​

The kingdom of Ansongo staged a series of campaigns against the four Mandinka kingdoms, conquering one after the other. The four Mandinka kingdoms had been weakened due to environmental degradation due to over browsing and overgrazing of their cattle and eland herds as well as their demand for iron. With environmental degradation came instability and in a few cases, open revolts against the current state. Ansongo was located further to the southeast in the true savannahs of West Africa and so was able to maintain large eland herds and iron production without quite the environmental damage of the Sahel states. As Ansongo gained in strength, the other Mandinka kingdoms atrophied until Mansa Baturu I conquered the kingdoms and brought them under his sway. In just five years Baturu forged an empire out of five separate kingdoms.

Crucial to his success was the flat terrain of the Sahel and savanna and the heavy reliance on giant eland cavalry that gave Ansongo’s forces the ability to use mounted forces that could operate both in the dry Sahel and in wetter environments that hosted diseases that caused horses to quickly sicken and die. The royal families were often allowed to keep a measure of political authority in Ansongo’s new provinces in exchange for oaths of loyalty to Baturu. Their children were often married off to prominent members of Ansongo’s noble families as a way to both diffuse their authority and integrate them into the native power structure.

He implemented the planting and maintenance of groves and made them distinct from trees one might use to build a house or furniture by placing them under imperial control in the same manner of the gold supply. The groves worked to reverse desertification while also providing steady sustenance for eland herds and fuel for the blacksmiths’ furnaces. The province-masters were rewarded with extra funds for their provinces in concordance with how well they maintained the groves. This also served to give the average villager a reason to avoid stripping the land bare of trees and they were also encouraged to plant and maintain their own trees. As time went on, many of the groves would be populated with fruit trees, baobabs among them to provide additional income and food for the people and their giant elands.

Ansongo was one of the first civilizations to incorporate tamed giant eland into their agricultural practices. They were first used instead of cattle only in areas where cows could not survive but quickly replaced cows as the main beast of burden. Soon, the eland were used to draw wheeled carts of goods and from there, elands were used to plow fields. Fields that would take a day to ready for seeding using a hoe could now be prepared in less than half the time. And the manure the elands produced allowed the same field to be farmed repeatedly, reducing the amount of times a community needed to migrate to fallow land, promoting the stability and growth of human settlements. Tall walls made of wood, rammed earth, and mudbrick topped with thorns were raised to secure eland herds at night and to protect them in the event of raids from neighboring communities.

With such an essential role in society, the giant eland took on a prominent role in West Africa, particularly Ansongo’s religions and customs. The mounts of Mandinka gods were elands, bride prices were commonly paid in elands, and the giant eland, especially its horns, became associated with masculinity. At special occasions such as harvest festivals, giant elands were sacrificed and their blood directed into the ground from where crops had been harvested or deliberately splattered on baobabs and oil palms.

Greater population densities and competition for obtaining giant elands led to conflict of a frequency that had not been seen in many parts of Africa. Compared to either Europe or Asia, Africa was lightly populated and due to the abundance of land, conflict often lead to dispersal instead of consolidation. There are very few events preserved in the archeological record of Sub-Saharan Africa before this time period that indicate significant conflict. Indeed, land that not in use was not considered particularly valuable and would be a waste of crucial resources and calories to defend. But with even adjacent empty land becoming valuable as grazing and browsing land and the increased permanence of human settlements, a shift in cultural attitudes took place. Before this time period, the archaeological record shows very little human-human conflict and of weapons used to kill. For instance, most spears would have been used for hunting animals, not killing humans. But now war spears, distinguished by their longer, broader blades, axes, and daggers became a far more common feature of Sub-Saharan West African society. Due to the environment of the open savanna and the prevalence of the giant eland, cavalry became the most valuable military unit with infantry being confined to a supporting role and only becoming the primary military units in the thick forests of southern West Africa.

 

[leopard9]

Tenets of the Two God Path
​

A page of a Late Demotic early transcript of the Tome.

“Listen well! The Father showed us how to grow the trees and plants of the earth, but it is the Mother who taught us to read.”

110 CE
​

As the decades passed, the Two God Path became woven deeper into the fabric of Egyptian society. While the religion continued to largely be practiced by peasants, a few noble families converted as well. In these instances of nobility conversion, they occurred in areas where the peasants in the area walked the Path. In those areas, the nobility had to walk a delicate balance between both honoring the new religion and appearing to following the old. As an informal theological compromise, the families started to put much more on emphasis on worshiping the married gods Osiris and Isis. By 110 CE, Avaris, the city where Meir had settled had become the center of the Two God Path and the Grand Temple established by Meir’s successor Jahan was reputed to hold the original writings of Meir. It was there that the high priest of the faith dwelt. From Avaris, a network of temples radiated outward into the rest of the delta bringing the knowledge of the Two Gods with them in the form of the Tome. The Tome contained the writings of Meir, as well as the writings of Jahan that focused on his own understanding of the Path and included what Jahan claimed to be revelations from the Gods themselves that supplemented what Meir had preached. To that end, the basic tenets of the faith became known as the following:

There are Two Gods that have created the entire world, the Father and the Mother. Just as it takes both a male and female to create a child, it takes the Father and the Mother combining their knowledge to create humanity. The Two Gods are equal to each other, though the Father is considered to be stronger. While priests disagree over all the specific domains of the Two Gods, there are several concepts that are widely agreed upon.

The Father is the masculine God of Creation. His domain is over urban centers, agriculture, war and peace, metalworking, water, plant life, the stars including the sun, lightning, and fatherhood.

The Mother is the feminine God of Creation. Her domain is over rural areas, the heavenly bodies including the earth and moon, medicine, wildlife, fire, wind, and motherhood. She is revered for teaching humans how to read and write.

Both of the Gods collectively preside over love, fertility, justice, life, death, and the afterlife.

The Two Gods are opposed by an immensely powerful spirit named Aye. Originally a helper spirit created by the Gods to observe Creation, he eventually began to covet all that the Gods had made and strove to replace the Gods and rule over all of the world “like a plunderer” as a "king of kings". He lead a rebellion against the Father and the Mother for control over Creation and he, along with his legions of followers battled the Father for half a year before being defeated and cast down into Sheol. As punishment, the Gods stripped the rebellious spirits of their authority, leaving them only with the ability to corrupt, to pervert the desires of man and cause illness and death. The Father cast them down into Sheol and the Mother sealed them there. When the Father finally cast them into Sheol, the heavens opened up and rain poured down as a symbol of His power and triumph.

Humanity is described in the Tome as “the loveliest jewel in the Father and Mother’s creation”.

All one needs to do in order to be saved is acknowledge the existence and supremacy of the Father and the Mother. Should they do this, when they die, they will be taken to Heaven where both the Creation Gods reside and they will live in perfect health and harmony forever. Heaven is vast and endless, with many dimensions. They will be able to intercede on behalf of their descendants as well without being tied to the number of children they have or if they are remembered by their family.

Those who refuse to worship the Father and the Mother will be shut out from Heaven and their souls will cease to exist when they die. But the Father and the Mother are merciful, they can even will a soul back into existence if they wish.

Among other things, the religion emphasizes the harmony of the family and the need for husbands and wives to respect and truly care for each other. It strictly forbids the killing of children, for every child is a gift from the Gods. It also strictly forbids human sacrifice, calling it “a foul stench”.

Iconography for the religion is as follows:

Two statues of a strong and healthy bearded man and woman of similar age. They are represented from the ages of early 30s to their early 60s.
The most popular representation is that of younger people in their early 30s. It is taboo to represent the Father and the Mother as children or very elderly people.
Interlocking symbols such as an interlocking rectangle.
Two statues, one male and one female holding hands.

Central holidays include:

The day that The Father and Mother finished creating the Earth.
The day that The Father and Mother created humanity.
The day that the Father triumphed over Aye and banished him to Sheol.
The start of the rainy season(s) as a reminder of the benevolence of the Father and the Mother. In Egypt, this is substituted as the time of the year when the Nile floods.

 

[leopard9]

The Flowering Era​

160 CE – 284 CE​

From 155 – 185 CE, rule under Baturu I brought increased prosperity to the unified Niger River region. A common authority to maintain the roads, patrol the rivers, protect travelers, and set prices for gold and salt encouraged heavy trade from all cardinal directions. Inns dotted the trade routes to provide shelter and nourishment to traders and pilgrims. The living standard of the average citizen of Ansongo substantially rose during this time, especially when compared to that of the long ago days of Kebba. And even the common folk dressed better than the Mandinka nobles of centuries past. Houses were on average larger and more elaborate than in past centuries, with vibrant patterns and murals adorning both the inside and outside of the walls, and the houses of the nobility and merchants had multiple levels. Because of the eland’s proliferation, people spent fewer hours on agriculture and were less exposed to the dangers of malnutrition, though it was still certain that a famine would afflict the land in the lifetime of the average man. To mitigate the effects of inevitable famines, for there would always be a time when the rains failed or fell unevenly, Baturu I established imperial storehouses located around the empire to hold harvested millet, sorghum, and rice.

The role of the jalis had also evolved with time. Their early adoption of literacy led them to being not only praise singers and court officials, but essential to the functioning of the bureaucracy. The province-masters were the ones that governed the various districts of Ansongo and ensured that the citizens paid their taxes, but it was the jalis that collected the taxes and noted what village paid how much as well as conducted the census. For the more troublesome and vital provinces, a farba would be appointed to collect taxes and ensure through careful monitoring that the province-masters didn’t overstep their authority. The farbas were picked directly by the mansa and the post could be inherited through the family at will of the mansa. The jalis also corresponded closely with the farbas to ensure that the empire’s governance ran smoothly.

During this time, an explosion of native literature occurred with epics based on Mandinka gods and semi-mythical heroes of the empire written in the Punic script introduced 200 years ago. By this time, the Punic scripts north and south of the Great Desert had widely diverged. While the northern Punic script had added new consonants in response to the influence of the Germanic migrations, the southern Punic script now included tone markers to better reflect the characteristics of the Mandinka language. An exceedingly popular story was how the first man and eland made a pact of brotherhood to live in harmony and to face the demons of the land together. Native instruments as well as those imported from abroad were used to play increasingly complex tunes as less time needed for agriculture and increased urbanization allows for nobles to hire jalis and musicians to compose new types of music. Direct contact with Aksum, and long distance trade with the Nile valley civilizations is also thought to have begun around 280 CE.

Several cities had populations of over 20,000 people and the largest city, Goundam, located near a navigable portion of the Niger River had a population of over 100,000 according to the 300 CE census. The cities contained decorated venues specifically made for dancing, religious ceremonies, and the popular crowd sport of wrestling. The cities were centers of political, economic, academic, and religious activities. The quarters of the cities were home to various clans that specialized in a profession such as blacksmithing, tanning, and artisanal pursuits. Of these clans, the most prominent were the blacksmith families, for they produced the tools used for agriculture, war, religion, and daily life. Because of the increased need for written records, royal schools were established that were used to educate the jalis and nobility, and occasionally, the wealthiest of merchants. Those students were taught the official Punic script as well as the praise songs required of a jali. Merchants were often taught by their parents a pidgin script used exclusively for record keeping and few merchants were fully literate.

After the death of Baturu I in 182 CE, 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. Ansongo’s expansion stopped at the forest’s edge as its famed cavalry’s mobility was severely limited by the thick southern forests. This was demonstrated when Baturu’s heir, Ebou, headed an expedition to conquer an Akan speaking forest chiefdom that while technically a victory, resulted in the Ansongoan force losing over double the men the enemy did. Under Baturu’s heir, Ansongo went through another round of expansion from 175 – 185 CE, extending its northern reach past the arch of the Niger and east to better control the flow of goods and people. Mandinka merchants started to settle in southern forests and intermarry with the local merchants to better control the flow of goods. 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 official policy was that of harmonious co-existence as it ruled a diverse array of ethnicities, most of them of the Mande group. However, the government and military were dominated by the Mandinka people, and there was an unofficial policy of assimilation. Non-Mandinka were encouraged to adopt Mandinka names and cultural practices and blend their culture with that of the dominate Mandinka. While other Mande and non-Mande groups resisted full assimilation, the Mandinka tongue had already become a trade tongue for the Niger region in the Sahel and the savannah and most everyone knew how to speak it. And the dominance of Ansongo led to the spread of its culture.

By 230 CE, the demands of trade and improved agriculture techniques learned from Carthage, along with the giant eland stimulated an explosion in Ansongo’s population. As was natural, those that had lived on marginal land started to migrate in search of relatively fallow land to far and they started to migrate to the east and the south. In the area surrounding the Jos Plateau, these migrants encountered the Nok civilization. Renowned for their intricate sculptures and sophisticated judicial and administration system, the Nok were the progenitors of one of the older urban cultures of Sub-Saharan Africa but were now in the midst of a decades long terminal decline. Over farming and extensive blacksmithing had led to the land being stripped of trees, leading to soil erosion in the presence of rains and dirt baked into a slab in times of drought. Exacerbating the problem was an especially severe famine and sleeping sickness epidemic that gripped the plateau and its surrounding area. As was common in times of societal collapse, many Nok simply left, traveling to the south and east in search of fallow land while others fought for what arable land remained. Those Nok that migrated eventually assimilated into the native populations they encountered and faded from history.

It was in this situation that the Ansongoan migrants arrived. The settlement of the Mande and Songhai in Nok lands was a largely nonviolent affair. The plague and famines had severely reduced the population, meaning land that would have otherwise been occupied was sparsely populated and open for settlement. The migrants brought with them their knowledge of giant eland herding and plow agriculture that combined with the native knowledge of rice farming led to a revitalization of the Nok. They were not unchanged by their interaction with the Mande and Songhai, however. With their novel practices and use of eland, the Mande and Songhai were able to establish a dominance among the local Nok and intermarried with the local upper class to produce a merchant caste and aristocracy that had a great deal of Mande and Songhai ancestry and more often than not followed the customs of the Songhai, rather than that of the Nok.

While the arrival of the Songhai and Mande had stopped the complete dissolution of the Nok civilization, approximately 270 CE the Nok people split into five kingdoms which were densely populated but small in size. The northern two had extensively mixed with the Songhai and Mandinka whereas the southern three hade minimal foreign ancestry but had merely adopted the use of giant elands and the Mande innovations in rice agriculture. The southern three kingdoms expanded south past the Benue River and appear to have made direct contact with the inhabitants of the Niger Delta around 350-400 CE.

From around 100 CE, Aksum had risen on the fertile plains of the Ethiopian highlands located in the northeastern region of the Horn of Africa to control trade between Egypt, Meroe, India, and its local hinterland. Aksum first got into direct contact with Ansongo in 280 CE when the mansa of Ansongo sent a large caravan of giant elands and camels laden with gold, ivory, palm wine and oil, salt, iron, and cloth to explore and trade with the east. The negu of Aksum was impressed by the quality of the goods and intrigued by the use of the gigantic antelopes as mounts. Aksum soon established trading ties with Ansongo and other Sahel states along the Western Road, helping to stimulate the rise of Mao, a small Kanembu polity centered on Lake Chad. Mao served as a middleman of the Western Road, facilitating safe travel across the continent and serving as a crucial waystation between the other states. In time, Mao came to have a highly cosmopolitan culture influenced by Aksumites, Egyptians, Nubians, Mandinka, and native Kanembu. This contact with Ansongo spurred a shift in Aksum’s worldview. Before, Aksum had in truth been only concerned with the north containing Egypt and Meroe and the east with Arabia, the Parthians, and India. But now, the possibility of rich and powerful civilizations throughout the rest of Africa seemed a certainty and would drive Aksum west and south to seek out other trading opportunities.

The last of the caravan returned to Ansongo in the year 284 CE with tales of a wealthy mountain kingdom and of an even greater civilization to the north that lay along a river larger than the Niger. This kingdom was richer than any other and produced well-made linen, iron tools, and the most intricate gold and silver artwork. This northern river kingdom was governed by a man who claimed divinity and contained a gleaming city that contained a library that was rumored to hold all of the world’s knowledge. During this time, the first Aksum missionaries made the long journey to the Niger River valley to spread the message of the Two God Path.

 

[leopard9]

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.”​

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.

 

[leopard9]

The World of Hannibal's Wake

300 CE

 

[leopard9]

Full Bloom (Prelude)

250 – 365 CE​

“May you reign as long as the baobabs live.”

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.

 

[leopard9]

Diadochi Ghosts

Seleucid I Nicator - The diadochi that founded the Seleucid Empire

321 – 353 CE
​

In 321 CE, a war ignited between Egypt and Kush over Egyptian accusations of Kushite piracy and a long-simmering border dispute over the second Nile cataract and a burgeoning harbor town that was named “Dendera”, if one was Egyptian, or “Khufu”, if one was Nubian. The Restored Kingdom had advanced in lock technology to create specialized canals that could bypass some of the smaller river cataracts and carry small and medium sized boats, typically river barges, up and down the Nile farther than they had in the past. This made expansion further south more tenable than in the past centuries and the pharaoh Hakor determined to Egypt’s security by capturing the heart of the Nile. A Kush weakened by consistent skirmishes with Aksum was little match to an Egypt that possessed modernized Ptolemaic phalanxes and had learned well its lesson of the famed Nubian archery in 150 BCE. And so what began as a skirmish between the two kingdoms over border markings and piracy disputes soon became an outright war of Egyptian conquest as the pharaoh saw an opportunity to accomplish a goal that was over four centuries old. Nubian soldiers fought fiercely for their homeland as they retreated, making use of hidden hill forts to harass the Egyptians behind army lines, but the course of the war could not be denied. Between 322 – 324 CE, the Egyptians enacted a near total blockade on Meroe’s Red Sea coast preventing the nation an avenue from financing their war or gaining foreign help. The more mountainous terrain allowed the Nubians to resist the invasion for several years, but the Egyptians slowly made their advance until the year 326 CE when Egypt captured Kush’s capital Meroe, and with it the reigning King and Kandace. Alarmed at the progress Egypt was making and at the possibility of having an expansionist empire as its neighbor, Aksum reversed course in its own slower conquest against Meroe and sent Aksumite soldiers to help its northern neighbor resist the Egyptian campaign. So in 329 CE, the Kingdom of Kush had effectively ceased to exist. The northern two-thirds of Kush was now a client state of Egypt and the southern one-third was governed by a formerly noble Nubian family that had been elevated to royalty by the Negu Wazena. This new rump state’s main purpose was to serve as a buffer between Egypt and Aksum. But Egypt was not satisfied: it knew of Lake Tana and planned to bring the entire course of the Blue Nile under its rule.

But as Egypt massed its forces for a conquest of Aksum, it was then that Parthia launched its invasion of Egypt in earnest in 332 CE. Egypt’s strategy when dealing with an eastern war was simple: keep the invaders from crossing into the delta, bleed them dry in the Sinai. Osroes II was the mastermind behind the invasion of Egypt. The ghosts of the Diadochi generals still haunted the Levant, plotting their wars. Egypt’s Nile delta was immensely productive agricultural land and made Egypt a regular exporter of grains and other crops to both its north and south. Capturing Egypt would be “like capturing the heart of the Mediterranean” according to Osroes II and would provide the grain needed to feed Persia’s armies as they conquered the rest of Asia Minor and pushed into Eastern Europe.

Egypt was ill prepared for this war after their battles with the Nubians and Aksumites and was surprised by the suddenness of the engagement with the Parthians. To worsen the situation, much of Egypt’s army was stationed in its newly captured territory from Kush and so couldn’t immediately face the invaders with their full force. And so the Pharaoh Ahkemis II committed to a desperate plan designed to deal with invaders from the east: keep the barbarians from crossing into the Delta, bleed them dry in the Sinai. Egyptian armies retreated from the Levant’s interior, being careful to hold crucial ports and intentionally drew the Parthians through the Levant into the Sinai. The generals were wary of battling in a more open environment where their skeleton forces were in far more danger of being outmaneuvered. In the Sinai’s high mountains and plateaus, the numbers of the Parthians wouldn’t have the same advantage, and the Egyptians’ familiarity with the Peninsula would result in minimal losses.

Or so Egypt thought.

The improvements to the Parthian forces as well as an extensive spying network meant that the Sinai didn’t slow them down as much as the generals had hoped. The fighting was fierce, but the tide of war couldn’t be denied. Soon the Persians were at the entrance to the delta itself. And it was then that Rome offered an alliance to the Egyptians. Rome had steadily been expanding through Eastern Europe, conquering the Balkan peninsula, and steadily chipping away at the strength of Capua the last couple of decades. As the Roman Republic expanded, they had skirmishes with Parthian expeditionary forces that were interested in conquering Greece to reunite Alexander’s empire. Rome had fought wars with Parthia over the decades, and while the Romans had better tactics they had honed against Capua to the south and the barbarians of the north, they couldn’t match Parthia’s numbers. In truth, Roman leadership agonized over what to do about an insatiable Parthia. And then Parthia invaded Egypt’s lands and it seemed like Jupiter himself had provisioned for Rome.

The Roman Republic hastily made an alliance with the beleaguered pharaoh to help Egypt drive back the Parthians and asked for only one thing in return: the island of Crete. Ahkemis II was loath to surrender Crete, as they used it for a source of timber as well as an important trading port, but it was a mark of Egypt’s desperation that the terms were deliberated for only two weeks before being agreed to. The formidable Roman army and legions were dispatched to the eastern border of the Egyptian delta to drive back the Parthian forces. After five years of hard fighting, a peace treaty was drawn up. Parthia would keep half of the Sinai Peninsula and all of Egypt’s Levant territories, except for a few ports in the Judea region. Rome officially was the new master of Crete and now enjoyed a status with Egypt as “most favored ally”, meaning that Roman merchants would enjoy special trading privileges throughout the Egyptian Empire.

And through this turmoil, the Two God Path continued to spread. 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 CE 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 CE, 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. In Aksum especially, people seemed drawn to this new faith and became enthusiastic converts, especially those of the lower class. To be under the constant protection of benevolent gods that did not care about the number of children one had was a relief to many. Eventually, the negu of Aksum, Azaba was persuaded by his wife who had converted to the Two God Path to entertain one of her favorite priests. After years of listening and in 210 CE, in an open field in the shade of the baobabs, he converted to Meirism. The years of the Parthian invasion also weakened the clout of the Egyptian gods, leading to many more peasants, and increasingly the nobility, turning toward the Father and the Mother for solace and guidance.

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 rivals the Egyptians converting, the Carthaginians became more determined to resist the new faith. 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 while Meirism gained small footholds in the Punic Sea, especially among the Sicilians and Libyan chiefs, it was largely shut out from the region.

When all was said and done, Northeast Africa and the surrounding regions had seen over 30 years of near-constant war and many people migrated from the region, searching for a better life. This included many people that had clustered around the Middle Nile and now faced displacement and oppression from the Egyptian colonizers. Packing what they had, they headed into the Great Desert upon the Western Road, hopeful for a new life.

 

[leopard9]

Feasts and Conspiracies

Late May 360 CE – The Twilight of the Dry Season​

Modou carefully wove through the evening crowds as he traveled to the Merchant District of Goundam to meet with Bailo, the most powerful merchant in the city, some would say in all of Ansongo. He was a jali that served the province-master of Niono and would periodically travel between the province’s capital and Bamako to report back to the imperial jalis. This gave Modou unique opportunities to form networks all over the empire and as of late, he’d spent more time traveling than his job required, a fact that he and his province-master worked to conceal. He wore a dark blue cotton cloak that concealed his identity while disguising him as a merchant of means and so was not to be bothered on his journey. Not too long ago, even an unaccompanied woman would’ve been able to walk the streets of Ansongo’s biggest city without worrying about unwanted aggressive attention, but fewer soldiers now patrolled the city and even formally safe areas were suspect.

Gods, let us be on the right path.

Past the small three-story buildings used to house travelers, merchants, and pilgrims, past the four-story mudbrick houses that held up to 20 families, past the slaves that were on one task or another for their masters, he turned into the Merchant District, where only the wealthiest merchants lived. The stone-paved streets were better cleaned here and well-lit from torchlight and the houses were larger and better decorated, with vibrant designs on their outside walls and intricately carved doors. There was even a wide canal from the Niger running through this section that was flanked on either side by several types of flowers and trees, and they perfumed the air. But even here there were signs of decay. Many of the stones used to make the street were cracked and chunks were missing, and the canal’s water level was lower than it should be, even during the dry season.

The greatest empire in all Creation, and look how the Baturu clan has abused the gods’ gifts.

After making sure he was not followed, he turned onto a narrower street and knocked on an expansive three-story’s door. The door was made of dark wood and inlaid gold, and featured a carving of a leopard lazing in an acacia’s branches with one eye open and the other closed. While less familiar men and women might pause to admire the artwork and remark on the wealth of its owner, the meaning was clear to Modou: never let your guard down around Bailo, no matter how tranquil he might appear to be. Besides Lamin, he was the smartest man Modou knew, and was always looking to expand his knowledge, economic, scientific, or spiritual. Loose words said around Bailo had a way of coming back to vex those he deemed competition. While Modou was lost in thought, the door opened and there stood Nyima, Bailo’s senior wife, a tall, handsome woman who was nearly as dark as the night but with a smile that could rival the sun.

“It’s good to see you Modou”, she said as she made the traditional gesture of welcoming a friend. If she found it strange that he wore the clothes of a merchant, she gave no indication.

Modou returned the gesture and said, “And likewise, Nyima”.

Once the door was closed and locked, Modou heard Bailo.

“Modou! Come over here, you old man!”

Bailo was already in the eating room. Bailo was a tall stout older man with deep brown skin and eyes so dark they were like black glass. He frequently used a cane after a caravan attack perpetrated by some Tuareg raiders had left him with an irreparably damaged left leg, and today he wore a copper pendant made of two interlocking rectangles. Several plates of sorghum flatbread were on the table, along with red rice, several bowls of a variety of vegetable relish, native and exotic fruits, several generous cuts of seared eland meat, and a whole roasted juvenile honeyed ostrich cooked with spices from the southern forests.

“We will talk afterwards, but now we will eat”, Bailo said as he sat down along with his three wives and 10 children. “Modou, do be sure to try the sorghum bread with the first bologie relish, the spices of both combine into an entirely new flavor…”

After the feast, Bailo’s wives and children cleaned the room and then left the table to retire to their rooms while Modou and Bailo stayed seated, drinking ụtọ ano, a drink of crushed kola nuts and squeezed marula fruit.


“So, we agree then?” The question itself was a formality. Modou and Bailo had been friends for most of their lives and while they differed when it came to matters of women and gods, any fool could see that the Baturu clan was running unchecked to the harm of all in Ansongo. But still, Modou needed to know that Bailo was committed to ousting the Baturus from power.


“Yes, the mansa three months ago passed a decree that 30% of my goods and earnings would be considered imperial property. No doubt to fund the construction of some dry season palace or other useless vanity. And what do we see for the increased taxes?” Modou’s voice had steadily been rising throughout his diatribe and now it seemed to crescendo.


“The caravans are more poorly guarded than ever before. Just last week Juma told me how the guard across the desert was half of what it usually is. He lost a third of his returning cargo to a Barbary raiding party and then he was forced to give forty percent of that to the imperial coffers. I’ve had to start hiring mercenaries to guard my wares, and some of them are as likely to steal as to protect my cargo. And the canals and irrigation streams go without repair, driving up the price of grain and making the drought even worse. When Lamin moves against the Baturu clan, he will have my support and resources, along with that of the many other merchants disgruntled with their policies, including the Desert Foxes*. What of the palace jalis and the military?”


“The jalis except for those of Bani are united behind Lamin and they have great influence among the common people. The province-masters as well are weary of overreaching royals who think they can govern their provinces from Bamako better than they can. As for the army… their loyalty is divided and many of the common folk still look upon the Baturus fondly.”

“Well, Dembo still has at least another five years in him before he passes the throne to Ebou II, may the Father and Mother save us from that. Dembo was a good man and ruler once, but Ebou II knows nothing but excess and hears his own voice above all others. Between now and then, they too will have to see the damage the Baturus are doing to Ansongo and so come to our side.”


Modou privately doubted Bailo’s reasoning, but hoped it was sound. Of the eight high-generals, five of them were fiercely devoted to the Baturu clan, and trying to convince them to commit treason would accomplish nothing but the summary executions of the conspirators and subsequent purges throughout the government. After a few more hours of talking, Modou bid goodbye to Bailo and Nyima and went back into the street on his way home to the jalis’ quarters, deep in his thoughts.

A mansa was the spiritual focus of his empire, and through him flowed the will of the gods. But what happened when the mansa so blatantly disobeyed the gods by neglecting his people? Was a father worthy of respect if all he did was drink palm wine and eat from his wife’s garden?


His wandering thoughts had led him on a different path than the one he’d taken to Bailo’s home and as he passed the gathering place for religious ceremonies, he paused. There as the centerpiece was a large circular open space partially enclosed by gleaming curved stone white walls with the likenesses of the gods carved and painted into them. It shone with the light of the full moon pouring into it. All at once, Modou was overcome with anxiety for this plan to save Ansongo from its once proud rulers and a love for Ansongo and its people. Quickly he went to the gathering place and said a small prayer. As he did so, he became filled with a renewed sense of purpose and continued on his way home.


Yes, there were still more people, clans, and secret societies that needed to be brought into the fold before such a rebellion could be launched. Fighting would be inevitable, but hopefully brief, lasting only a few years. And once the dust settled, a new competent mansa that knew his political limits, both formally and informally, would reign.


*The Desert Foxes is the name for the most prominent secret society of merchants in Ansongo. So named because the richest merchants typically make their fortune through the trans-Saharan trade.

 

[leopard9]

The Crocodile’s War

An Ansongoan general about to lead spearmen into battle.

360-372 CE
​

Populist and political frustration with the Baturus and their allies had been building for several years now but there were still alliances to cement within the military and among the province-masters before the royal clan could be overthrown. The leadership of the conspiracy foresaw several more years of plotting ahead. This careful planning was undone by the chance events of a single day in June 360 CE. In mid-June at the beginning of the rainy season, the mansa Dembo went on a lion hunt with a small number of trusted soldiers and friends and never returned. As Dembo stooped to drink from a river in privacy, what he thought was merely a disjointed log lunged out of the water, grabbed him in its mighty jaws and upon dragging him back into the water, ended his life with a single roll. His soldiers heard his cries, but they were too late. All they could do was gape in horror at their dead mansa and the emerald crocodile that for all the world seemed to be smiling. On the same day his friends brought back his torn and bloodied clothes back to Bamako, Ebou II ascended to the throne and Ansongo began to spin off its axis. Dembo was viewed by the conspirators as a man who had once been a good ruler that overtime, had allowed the temptations of office and the softness of peacetime to cloud his judgement and had started to use the coffers of Ansongo to fund his luxuries. In contrast, Ebou II had matured in this luxury and sloth and had never known anything different. Worst still, he seemed to be dull-witted and previous small battles he had led had ended poorly, due to him ignoring the advice of seasoned commanders and pursuing his own course.

Word spread out from Bamako into the surrounding provinces that Ebou II was now mansa, and the conspiracy against the Baturus were divided about what to do. Some argued that it was better to act now, while Ebou II’s grasp on authority was tenuous. Waiting to act, risked Ebout II winning the greater loyalty of the high-generals, the province-masters and the common people. But then there was the other side that urged that the plan be stuck too. Right now, Ebou II still had too much support from the upper levels of the bueracracy and while the high-generals had little regard for Ebou II, they were still loathe to turn against the imperial family. The participants of the would-be rebellion looked to Lamin for guidance, and Lamin in turn studied to Ebou II to determine his course; perhaps the responsibilities of the throne would provoke a change in him. When only a week later, Ebou II maintained that the 30% tax would be maintained on all caravan goods and moved to impose a similar tax on goods that were transported on the Niger River, Lamin made his decision and the course of Ansongo was set. And so in 360 CE, the frustrations of the upper class against the Baturus boiled over into open rebellion. A series of conflicts memorialized later as “The Crocodile’s War” took place during this time. In 360 CE, a group of four imperial jalis had grown in influence and when the current mansa’s incompetent son Ebou II ascended to the throne, the jalis along with three high-generals staged a coup and installed Lamin, the chief imperial jali and rumored half-brother to Ebou II as the steward of Ansongo. Ebou II, along with all but a few members of the Baturu clan were exiled to the Lake Chad centered kingdom of Mao. If they had only known the chaos their actions would unleash unto the region, perhaps Ebou II would have remained king.

There had been several dynastic disputes in Ansongo’s history, but they had always been quelled in a few years. What distinguished the Crocodile’s War from other succession struggles was the length and bitterness of the conflict.

The Baturu family was furious at their exile and instead of going to Mao, swiftly withdrew from Bamako to Bani, their ancestral province in the southeast. They declared Lamin to be a false mansa and illegitimate ruler. They, along with the province master of an adjacent province who was a member of a cadet branch of their family raised an army of 30,000 infantry and 40,000 cavalry to defend themselves and retake the empire. The jalis and generals allied with Lamin in response commanded the faction of the core imperial army that was more loyal to the three high-generals than the royal family of 35,000 infantry and 50,000 cavalry. Several battles took place that revealed the inexperience of Lamin’s army and weakness at the core of the regime. In one such battle, one of Lamin’s army, a force of 5,000 engaged with Ebou II’s army of 4,200 men. Lamin’s army lost 2,058 while Ebou’s lost 704. In another battle, Lamin’s army of 32,450 lost 10,500 men whereas Ebou only lost 8,645 out of a force of 28,000. And while battles were being waged, political intrigues became a constant reality in Bamako. Officials, jalis, and generals suspected of loyalty were either outright executed after a hasty trial or were relocated to non-strategic parts of Ansongo.

In 362 CE, Koury, the westernmost province declared its independence from Ansongo. Ansongo quickly sent a section of 5,000 infantry and 2,000 cavalry to subdue Koury but this detracted from its campaign in the east to bring the Baturu clan back under its sway. With a tripartite civil war underway, the trans-Aai Meweran and Western Road trade slowed, depriving Ansongo of its lifeblood. To compensate, Lamin enacted harsher taxes on the hinterland, which while paid, served to increase resentment against his rule. Five of the eight experienced high-generals had joined the Baturus, leaving the four jalis with inexperienced commanders and this showed in their initial performance. In a way, the Baturus had the advantage in the conflict: they merely had to resist Ansongo’s advances whereas Ansongo had to reconquer the eastern provinces and hold them. The other jalis and high-generals counseled Lamin to leave the Baturus alone for the while and to focus his energies on reconquering Koury before over provinces followed their example. In 363, Ansongo and Bani settled into a ceasefire though each accused the other of rebelling against the proper authority. Lamin, against the rightful mansa Ebou II, and the Baturu clan against the Mandinka gods. During this time, Lamin dropped all pretense of being the steward of Ansongo and declared himself mansa, establishing the Mariko dynasty.

After two years of tension-filled peace, Ansongo launched a renewed campaign against Bani in 364 CE. With time to fortify its position and hire Kanembu and Nok mercenaries, Bani stood firm and casualties, both military and civilian, mounted on both sides. During 365 CE, a coalition of Berber and Fulani clans struck from the north, incorporating part of northern Ansongo into their own personal fiefdoms, effectively bisecting Ansongo. While Lamin was able to reclaim that territory, it took two years to accomplish and fighting a war on two fronts is never easy. Psychologically, it was a great blow to the Mandinka to have been invaded by a group that many believed to be inferior and uncultured. It also showed that Ansongo was not regarded as the power it had once been. Fighting raged back and forth among the countryside until finally in 368 CE, the Baturu clan fled to Mao after several prominent Baturus were killed in a decisive battle and Ebou II himself was captured. During this same battle, two of Lamin’s sons, Birom and Jaasi, were struck down as well. There in the midst of the dry season Ebou II dressed in a simple goatskin was dragged out in front of a cheering crowd of both nobles and peasants to be executed. He was to be killed by the standard executioner, but Lamin, half-mad with grief, broke precedent and intervened. Stepping in front of the executioner, he took out a gold and steel dagger and pulling Ebou’s head back by his hair, slashed open the false mansa’s throat, splattering his blood on a baobab’s bark and let the corpse fall to the ground. The only thing Lamin was recorded to have said about the execution was, “Let him lie there and the sun will reveal his true nature.” And by Lamin’s decree, Ebou’s body stayed there in the shade of the baobab for two days before it was thrown into a modest burial plot. Nobles and peasants alike gossiped of the erratic action of Lamin and how though Ebou II was disgraced, it was not right for one of royal blood to meet such an ignoble end. And there was the matter of sacrificing him to the baobab in the same manner one would kill a cow or an eland. Surely the gods were not pleased.

Shortly after the flight of the Baturus, Bani sued for peace and was reincorporated into Ansongo. Though he had finally achieved his goal, Lamin had become an old man during the course of the war and after reigning for just five years, he voluntarily left his position of mansa to his son, Adama. Adama had not been his first choice as his successor, but his two boys were dead and Adama was his last son. But even now, not all was well.

Ansongo was greatly weakened by the Crocodile’s War. Fighting had occurred during both the dry and wet seasons, damaging agricultural output and leading armies, especially mercenaries, to raid the countryside for sustenance. Eight years of civil war caused military and civilian deaths and internal migrations on a scale previously unimaginable. Roads had degraded and in some cases trade had simply stopped. Over 570,000 souls had perished as a result of the war. Ansongo’s coffers were drained from the fighting and many of its citizens had been impoverished by the war, and though many were no longer slaves, for that had been one of Lamin’s earliest decrees as mansa, they were poorer than they had been in the Full Bloom of Ansongo.

And then the nomads invaded from the east. They were a particularly successful offshoot of a group of gradually melding Nilo-Saharan and Afro-Asiatic tribes that dwelt west of the Blue Nile and north of the Aksumite mountains. They had been migrating to the west for a few generations now; perhaps the decades of violence along the Nile were the impetus for their migrations. They were armed with the Nubian bow, a weapon far stronger than the West African varieties, and they used it against a weakened Ansongo to devastating effect. Because of their bow mastery, the Mandinka named them the "Karoo" (literally bow) people. They settled around the easternmost part of the Niger River and soon began adopting aspects of Mandinka culture and established several city-states. There were many people who claimed in secret that the barbarian violation of Ansongo had been brought about by Lamin’s personal execution of Ebou II. Ansongo had fallen from the undisputed artistic, economic, scientific, and military power of West Africa to a nearly failed state with nomads gnawing at its edges and invading its borders. Many contemporaries thought that Ansongo was in the twilight of its existence, but much was left to come for the broken empire.

 

[leopard9]

The Aftermath

372 CE – 430 CE

“The baobab used to be the most beautiful tree in all of creation, but it grew proud and boastful. The gods grew weary of the baobab’s arrogance and so flipped it upside down, forcing its lovely branches and fruits into the ground and leaving its roots and bulbs on display for those it had held itself above to see.”

​

The effects of the Crocodile’s War rippled far beyond Ansongo’s borders, shaping the fortunes of its many throughout Africa. Carthage was dependent on Sahelian gold to buy its mercenaries and keep peace in its hinterland, but the nearly decade-long war disrupted the trans-Saharan trade in its third year, and the trade that continued immediately after the war was a pale shadow of its antebellum self. With the bulk of its gold supply momentarily lost and the Germanic invasions flooding past Gaul, through Hispania, and into the Atlas Mountains disrupting its Berber allies, Carthage saw more and more of its territory in the Punic Sea slipping out of its control and into chaos. Uncertainty and violence is always bad for commerce, and the disruptions caused by the invasions were no exception as Carthage merchants saw many of their familiar customers unable or unwilling to trade in such violent times, drying up Carthage’s coffers and their ability to purchase mercenary forces and pay their native armies. Unlike other more settled folk that the Carthaginians traded with, many of the migratory Germanics had little use for commerce; it was land they desired. When a member of the Carthaginian governing body the Hundred and Four went to treat with a Vandal chieftain, asking him what his people sought to stop their movement, he merely laughed and pointed a spear at the ground, “The land you stand on, and nothing less”. The Punic cities overtaken by the combined Germanic and Celtic tide were alternately sacked and threatened with sacking if they did not comply with their new rulers. Punic records during the time period of 365 – 400 CE noted several powerful German tribes that invaded their territory, most notably the Suebi, the Vandals, and the Visigoths. The final blow came in 375 CE when the Suebi people sacked the city of Carthage itself, killing many of the Punic population and prompting a scattering of the greatest concentration of Punic leadership and population to locations across the Mediterranean. Here at last the great migrations were stopped by the Great Desert to the south. This was the end of a unified Carthaginian civilization, but that did not mean their culture disappeared. The Northern Punic script was by now used throughout the Western Mediterranean basin and in some cases the Carthaginian gods melded with those that conquered their worshippers’ lands. Punic influence was especially pronounced on the islands of Sicily and Sardinia and it was here the majority of Punics fled. They also fled to various Egyptian cities, such as Alexandria and Abiad. Some of the lower class chose to live among the barbarians, as their position did little to change as they had no land to lose to the hordes. Some chose to continue their profession as small-time merchants and shipbuilders, over which they retained a monopoly due to the lack of experience the Suebi had with maritime activities. But many other Punics fled west, past Hispania and then south, some to the Canary Islands and others to the western coast of Sub-Saharan Africa, especially to the area around the Senegal River. In the lands where the Carthaginians were the minority, they established diplomatic and economic links to the surrounding peoples, but typically practiced endogamous marriage. In many areas with maritime trade, they gradually became the dominant traders plying the waters as their experience was superior to that of their neighbors. These migrations also fractured the two Barbary kingdoms, throwing the entire region into chaos as Berbers and Germanics alike tried their swords at establishing new states.

Ansongo fared little better as the nomads it had repelled during its Full Bloom now held de facto control of the eastern and northern periphery of the empire and made increasingly bold claims forays into the heart of the empire, the provinces which bordered the Niger River. Of particular trouble were the Bafer, a semi-nomadic group of mixed Tuareg and Soninke ancestry. Nfansu, Lamin’s successor launched several campaigns against the nomad clans, attempting to reassert Ansongo’s authority over all its territory. And though the first war in 376 CE seemed to be a success, the nomads attacked again in 379 sensing weakness in Ansongo’s core, reclaiming territory that Ansongo had driven them back from in earlier conflicts. In earlier times, Ansongo simply would’ve redoubled its efforts and driven out the invaders and perhaps established more guard forts in the area for good measure. And most likely, the nomads wouldn’t have dared operate so deeply in Ansongo’s land in the first place, instead raiding only the borderlands. But this was not Ansongo’s Full Bloom, this was the empire immediately after a devastating civil war where nearly every death was that of an Ansongoan, every victorious siege meant a native city sacked, and every time an army or mercenary force foraged, a native granary was depleted. In the dry season of 384 CE on perhaps the saddest day of his rule, Nfansu met with the leader of the coalition of Bafer perople, Izem the Green (so named for the color of his eyes) and gave leave for the nomads to settle in portion of Ansongo’s eastern and northern provinces and also reduced the authority of the province masters in those regions to only that of Ansongoans. In theory, the land stipulated in the treaty would be used by both Ansongoans and nomads, but in practice the Bafer now controlled parts of the empire.

But not all was ruined. The reforms made by Lamin and continued by Nfansu served to restore social stability to the nation. He made it law that the waterworks, the wells, irrigation ditches, and river overflow canals, be regularly inspected and repaired every five years and that enough gold was automatically annually set aside into a special fund to accomplish this task. He also emancipated over sixty percent of the slaves owned personally by the Baturus and capped the number of slaves a single person could own at 30 slaves. He also set down on papyrus certain rights the province-masters had except in times of war, in a document named “The Law of Mansas and Province-Masters”. While old coins from the Baturus’ time were still in circulation, the mints of Bamako and Goundam began producing new coinage in honor of the new Mariko dynasty, with the face of Nfansu on one side and a crocodile on the other. Ansongo’s culture also changed during this time, becoming more insular more inward facing, an ironic change for an empire that expanded so far from its southeastern ancestral location. Books and plays written in the shadow of the Crocodile’s War were more introspective than the past works. In the past, works had focused on great deeds and conquests and stirring adventures and the masks worn by performers were large and richly decorated. In this era stories dealt with dispossessed protagonists that had suffered some sort of misfortune, either self-inflicted or visited upon them by outside forces. Hubris was a major theme among these works. After struggle, these characters eventually after some trials managed to restore their place in their family and larger society. From 400 CE onwards, city walls became more fortified and additional fortifications were built because of the increased vulnerability of Ansongo to nomad depredations, including that of the Bafer, as well as to protect themselves against their neighbors. During the civil war, it had become common for a man to be constantly armed with a knife or dagger as he went about his business, whether that was accompanying his wife as she brought goods to market or as he ploughed the fields.

The ripple effects of the Crocodile War manifested spiritually as well as physically. The Two God Path had been present in Ansongo since it’s Flowering Era with merchants being the primary followers of the religion, but in the physical and spiritual aftermath of The Crocodile’s War, many more people, especially peasants, became adherents of the Path. During the war, atrocities had been perpetrated and condoned by both the Baturus and Marikos with both sides alleging that the damage left in their wake was the will of the Mandinka gods. In older times without the option of another religion to follow, people would’ve continued worshipping their traditional gods, but with the spread of Meirism offered a seemingly more benevolent alternative theology to that of the gods of the two mansas that had burned the empire to ash. Several temples had been established by merchants in Goundam, Bamako and a few other cities and these became focal points gathering places for the religion. There were few learned priests in west Africa to “correctly” convert the new followers to the Path and so the Path took on a more local flair than that of Egypt, with more room for minor spirits that were helpers of Tahres, the Father and Olabisi, the Mother. While the Path insisted on exclusive worship of the Two Gods, few people in practiced did so, and merely gave the Father and Mother prominence over all other spirits and gods.

​

With the decline of Ansongo come an opportunity for Kita, its Soninke-speaking vassal, to assert its full independence from its overlord, which the kingdom gladly seized. In 364 CE while Ansongo was simultaneously tearing itself apart and trying to drive back foreign invasions, Kita stopped paying tribute to the empire and launched forces to expel the Ansongoan forces from their forts they used to monitor their provinces. Now even with the civil war, Ansongo was still too strong for Kita’s king Sicco to dream of expanding east, but with the additional revenue that normally would’ve been tribute to Ansongo, Kita spread west in search of glory, riches, and greater trade opportunities. Kita expanded from 373 to 384 CE across the savannas until it abutted up against the highlands that bordered the Senegal River. Because of the unfamiliarity of the mountainous habitat, the relatively ineffectiveness of their cavalry and the resistant of the native peoples, it stopped its expansion. There, they directly contacted the coastal ethnic groups of West Africa and with permission with the local chiefs, established several waystations along the Senegal and even two such places along the coast, though they were kept strictly non-military in function as stipulated by the Wolof and Fulani chiefs. There they began trading with the Punic refugees, many who had brought their shipbuilding and sailing knowledge with them. Kita for the time was content to include a portion of the Senegal River into its territory which gave it access to the Western Ocean. The Great Desert trade had of course affected these people and instilled a taste for foreign goods, and exotic cloth, salt, and Ansogoan gold and glass could be found in limited amounts here. Kita mainly functioned as a middleman trader; providing the riverine and coastal people with products further inland such as dyewoods, animal products, salt, and gold while the coastal peoples provided them with mangrove wood and a variety of seafood and cowry shells. As time went on, the people on the Senegalese coast began to intermarry with the Carthaginian arrivals, creating a new culture.

 

[leopard9]

The Great Lakes and their Coral Coast

360 – 600 CE​

While Carthage and Ansongo crashed under the weight of their own actions, Nubia languished in bondage, and Egypt stagnated, Aksum was ascendant. There were two factors responsible for this. There was a shift in maritime trade between the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean basins to a model that heavily relied upon monsoons winds to power ships to their harbors, and this bestowed new importance to the Red Sea ports, with Aksum and its Nubian satellite benefitting the most. And more fundamentally, from 100 CE onwards, the rainy season in the northeast plain of Africa’s Horn grew twice as long, starting in April instead of July and ending to September, enabling two growing seasons per year instead of the traditional sole one, and spurring an expansion in Aksum’s population and the clout that came with it. This meant more farmers, merchants, blacksmiths, and the elites the rose out of the need to command their labor and consume their goods, and greater control of the eastern reaches of the Horn. From Ansongo’s Flowering Era onwards, trade between Ansongo and Aksum had been a non-trivial amount of the mountain kingdom’s economy, especially the movement of kola nuts, palm wine, cloth, and Goundam glass. The cloth and glass especially found markets in Egypt, the Indian subcontinent polities, Parthia, and the various states of China.

When the Crocodile’s War erupted in the west in 360 CE, the flow of the goods from the Western Road slowed to a trickle, simultaneously causing the Amhara and Tigray merchants that controlled the trade to gain more wealth in the short term, but also putting them at risk of losing their livelihood. From their trade networks in the Indian Ocean, Amhara merchants knew that trade in ivory, tortoise shell, and slaves was done along the eastern coast of Africa, far south to where they were. Faced with the prospect of losing their fortunes and having a tolerance for long distance trade, the traders of Aksum decided to try their fortunes on the coast, following the trails already blazed by Persian and Arab sailors. They did this the same way all other traders worked: using the power of the monsoon during November to March to blow their ships to the east African coast once they got past the tip of the continent’s Horn. Of course, this necessitated that the traders stay an entire season before the monsoon arrived that would blow them back to north of the Horn and then to Aksum. While the burgeoning trade held promise, doing the legwork of establishing markets and personal relationships with the local population required too much time away from the homeland for such meager profits to be worthy of the head of families; such tasks went to less favored sons and in a few exceptional cases, daughters. While the people who lived on the coast discovered a taste for kola nuts, they were also more than willing to accept rugs, porcelain, cloves, cinnamon, raw cloth, and pepper and export ivory, gold, exotic hides, slaves, ebony, mangrove poles, and sandalwood, which Aksumite, Persians, and Arabs would sell to various markets in the Indian Ocean, including Parthia, Arab chiefdoms, and the Indian kingdoms, the Gupta being the most prominent. Bantu settlers had already settled the coast by 200 CE and lived in small villages, catching fish and growing cereal crops for domestic consumption, and producing specialty items to be sold in the Indian Ocean Rim and beyond.

As the Indian Ocean trade grew, the Bantu villages that lined the coast rose in tandem. What had been a political system controlled as elsewhere in Africa by a gerontocratic system of chiefs, gradually morphed into a society, if not exactly controlled, then dominated by an oligarchy descended from the intermarriage of Arab, Persian, and Aksumsite merchants, and Bantu chiefs. As a native aristocracy slowly developed, they eschewed the mudbrick and thatch that they previously used for housing and started to build in coral stone and mortar, a material that was intended to showcase the affluence and permanence of the elite. These new buildings also blended the styles of the Arabian Peninsula and Aksum into the native coastal Bantu style, starting to erect primitive stelae and incorporating Aksumite brickwork and small monkeyheads into building design. The coral stone was fitting as the growth and true genesis of Kori* society came from the same ocean that the coral did. Compared to other nations where it was the lower class that provided an inroad for the Two God Path, it was the aristocratic class, the merchants and “small negus”, that first started worshipping Tahres and Olabisi, the Father and the Mother, and the religion of the nobility eventually became the religion of the commoners. In contrast to West Africa, the East African coast had many natural harbors, stimulating the rise of many such towns from the Horn to the Channel between Madagascar and the mainland and helping sustain a general Aksumite-influenced culture. These villages traded the goods that came from the interior such as iron and copper goods, ivory, amber, leopard skins, turtle shells, and gold to the wider world and imported textiles, ceramics, beads, glass, and other goods. The towns in time evolved into cities all along the coast and became known as the Kori Cities.

Common aspects of this Kori culture included the inclusion of Amhara and Arab words and grammar into an otherwise coastal Bantu language, houses built of coral, an almost completely urban society, and preoccupation with the sea and commerce. Like the Arabs that had been the first to trade with them, these people used sewn boats and adopted their dress to showcase the difference in status. As time went on, out of the many villages that dotted the coasts, ten villages at strategic locations all down the length in the coast grew in prominence and the largest of the cities had a population of over 50,000 by 600 CE. Around 550 CE, Ge’ez was adopted by the Kori Coast as its script; the fact that it was the language the Tome of the Two God Path was written in played a significant role in its growing usage. They traded with the people further inland for goods they sold among themselves and the wider Indian Rim. The Kori city-states lived on the fringes of society, seen as not fully of the inland groups, and yet not truly Aksumite, or Arab, or Persian. They were truly middlemen in the Indian Ocean trade, acting as a filter; taking products of the inland such as slaves, ivory, and grains and trading it to the sailors coming in exchange for spices, cloth, and carvings. They were dependent on people who at times only felt marginal kinship for them and did not produce many goods themselves for sale. This was to be a recurring vulnerability within the stone and country towns of the Kori Coast. Of the most successful group of cities were typically those nearest to the Great Lakes because of the greater trading opportunities inland due to the Lakes’ larger populations compared to other parts of eastern Africa. Of these Great Lakes people, the strongest Bantus were those that lived around the largest lake, Lake Nyanza**. For their part, the Great Lakes Bantus started using giant elands around 600 CE. With plentiful consistent water, deep fertile soil, a beast of burden that thrived in humid tsetse fly infested environs, and the influence of external trade, populations quickly grew leading to hierarchal polities.

The integration of the giant eland into the agricultural and economic fabric of society proved to be much slower in Aksum compared to other Sub-Saharan peoples and the main impetus was trade with southern peoples. Aksum had a uniquely productive agriculture system largely free from the scourge of the tsetse fly, blunting the main competitive edge of the eland. Additionally, people were experienced with raising cattle and horses and the giant eland required different management to thrive. In the end, it was the merchants who were early adopters of the eland, first using them to traverse the parts of the Western Road that dipped into sections of the savanna under the sway of the tsetse fly. Around the year 520 CE, the first mentions of giant elands being bred showed up in ancient Aksumite texts. Instead of paying their counterparts in Mao and Ansongo to use their giant elands, Aksumite merchants started breeding giant elands in the Ethiopian highlands to use for their travels and to have access to their meat, milk, hide, which they found sold well in the domestic markets. As Aksum’s influence grew, bolstered by its trade with the Kori Coast, it extended its reach to the southern coast of the Arabian Peninsula.

* = Amhara for “Coral”
** = Nyanza is the native name for OTL Lake Victoria

 

[leopard9]

Small Shoots of Green (Resurgence)

430 – 480 CE

“An elephant does not die from one broken rib.”​

Slowly, slowly, Ansongo regained its strength. Partially subjugated it might have been and while Ansongo had seceded territory to the Karoo and Bafer peoples, its core territories with fertile soil watered by the Niger River were still firmly loyal to Bamako and this was to be the demographic heart of its future victories. However, there were several strategies Ansongo employed to stop its losses. The first was shifting focus to an increased emphasis on martial prowess and tactics within the male age sets and as part of the age sets rituals, the participants would serve in the local forces for a minimum of five years, patrolling the territory, participating in public works projects, and having mock battles with wooden weapons. Payment was not accepted as a substitute for service, and this helped to establish a healthy respect and experience with the military in all economic strata of society. Another step was to encourage sons of generals and noblemen to become stewards of the Bafer and Karoo, to familiarize themselves with the tactics of the former nomads, as despite their (to the Ansongoans) utter lack of civilization, their skills in handling horses were far superior to those of Ansongoan forces in their care of giant elands. Despite the best efforts of Ansongoan spies, the secrets of making the Nubian bow were not discovered. The mansa Yoro made his move in 432 CE to regain the eastern territories first as they held the better agricultural and browsing land and contained significance as the ancestral boundaries of Ansongo. At the Battle of the Branch (so named because it happened when a tributary of the Niger branched south of the main river), an Ansongoan force of 3,000 men defeated a Karoo force of 1,200 with Ansongoan casualties of 500 and Karoo losses of 800. Several more battles, including the White Acacia, rapidly occurred from that point, and while Ansongoan forces faced relatively heavy losses, they won a good deal of the battles and unlike their semi-nomadic opponents, the much greater population of the riverine Mandinka meant they could much more easily sustain military defeats and field fresh soldiers while the advantages of the Karoo laid in the experience of their men. The Ansongoans and the Karoo danced in the savanna and Sahel for several years before the Battle of the Sands where an Ansongoan force caught a Karoo army and a nearby civilian encampment unawares. In comparison to other battles, the Karoo army was killed to the last man and then to break the will of the Karoos opposing them, an ambitious 23-year-old Ansongoan general named Sainey ordered his soldiers to massacre the encampment “down to the last soul”. As Sainey later told his friends rather matter-of-factly, the Karoos were not a civilized people and so using civilized methods to treat with them “would be like offering a hyena your outstretched hand”. Sainey’s methods were adopted by other commanders and while perhaps brutal, had the effect of cowing the Karoos to come to the treaty table. Ngalo, the prime chieftain of the Karoos, eventually sued for peace in 438 CE and thus agreed all of the Karoo would become vassals of the Ansongoan empire. They were permitted to keep some of their land they had won through conquest but were forced to give up the most productive to Mandinkas that had been dispossessed of their property when the Karoo had originally invaded. In exchange, the Karoo were bound by Ansongoan laws and forbidden from holding any governing positions besides those indigenous to their people and for the first decade of their incorporation, were forced to pay heavy taxes to repay the damage caused by their partial conquest of Bani. This became known as the “horse tax” among the Karoo due to the practice of being forced to sell their horses to pay the tax when they had nothing else to sell. Sainey was promoted to high general for his role in crippling the Karoo menace and received much honor throughout the empire. And now that the Karoo were officially subjects of Ansongo, what to do with them? They knew little of crop raising and their blacksmithing skills were poor compared to that of native smiths. Eventually, they became integrated into the herding and tanning complex that surrounded giant elands, gradually abandoning their equine mounts for the antelopes, using their famed livestock and archery skills to benefit Ansongo and help to defend its eastern border.

The Bafer remained a larger problem, not so easily dealt with like the Karoo people. Unlike the Karoo that had been a recent transplant from the Blue Nile regions, the Bafer were descended from a mingling of Niger and Saharan bloodlines and so could invoke blood ties among the Tuaregs to aid them in their skirmishes with Ansongo. Sainey now headed forces against the Bafer people in 440 CE, loosely lead by Izem the Green’s son, also named Izem II, who was disparagingly called “the lion cub” by his enemies. Ansongo’s army relied heavily on giant eland cavalry but again were out-performed by the Bafer, who used a mixture of equines and elands as their mounts and who lived and died in the saddle. Izem II was killed in a pitched battle by a stray arrow in 444 CE and Sainey lost his right eye and was heavily wounded in what was supposed to be a minor skirmish not long after and contemporary historians and jalis said that those events seemed to drain the Bafer people and the Ansongoan Empire of their taste for war as they met to discuss terms of peace only a few days later at the beginning of April. Later jalis would note that the sudden death of Izem II lead to succession struggles among his clan that complicated the Bafer’s war effort and Ansongo was still recovering from the Crocodile’s War and its loss of trade routes and could not sustain nearly a decade of war. The Bafer, now lead by Izem II’s daughter Illi, agreed to secede about half of Ansongo’s northernmost province to the full command of the empire and unlike the Karoo, kept their autonomy.

From 444 CE on, mansa Yoro focused on rebuilding its trade relationship with Carthage, but alas, the Phoenician civilization breathed no longer. The Punics were scattered across the Mediterranean, settled at the mouth of the Senegal River, or under the rule of their new Germanic overlords. While the trans-Saharan trade continued, it was through the now largely stateless Barbary peoples as the newly crafted kingdoms of the Suebi and Vandals of Byzacena had little interest in the goods of Africa. In these days, intermarriage between the Germanic invaders and Berber natives became increasingly common and a new people began to form, a small minority though they may have been. With the trans-Saharan trade diminished, Ansongo looked south for new wealth. The Desert Foxes, a secret society of merchants that had helped finance the downfall of the Baturus and rise of the Mariko dynasty, were the pioneers of a much more established presence in the southern forests. They did this by having less favored sons and daughters marrying into trader and merchant families depending on whether the marriage patterns were matrilineal or patrilineal; but such alliances could be fraught with difficulty. One granddaughter of a prominent merchant named Modou1 even wrote to her parents about the lack of sophistication of her groom’s people, the Asante, complaining that, “…what they call a city we call a village and what they claim is a village we would name a farm, there are no wrestling pits, the food is bland, the women are coarse and the men savage…”. Here, salt, copper, eland meat, and beef from Ansongo could be traded for hardwoods, dyes, spices, and kola nuts. The trade at times lacked the grandeur of the trans-Saharan trade, but many of the goods were essential to daily life and so were in demand in times both prosperous and lean. This more domestic trade also encouraged the advancement of agricultural methods and due to the proximity of the two trading spheres, such knowledge more easily flowed between the savanna and forests.

Ansongo also looked east to Mao and Aksum and west to Kita and the ocean for more commercial opportunities. Aksum was twice the distance from Ansongo than Carthage was and so the trade wasn’t as profitable or practical, but this did provide another diminished avenue for the gold and salt trade, as Aksum had large salt deposits it mined for commercial trade. The typical route was an eastern trek through the kingdom of Mao at which point most goods would be sold and exchanged for goods from Egyptian or Aksumite merchants, and Ansongoan traders would load their eland-drawn carts and start on the road back home. Few merchants ever wanted to make the journey around the highlands of the Blue Nile to trade in Axum itself and besides, even fewer with the desire had the wealth to finance such a long-range caravan. They would much rather integrate their fortunes into the growing verdant heart of the Niger delta that emptied into the sea. The Nok kingdoms that had been reinvigorated from Mande and Songhai migrants, had briefly been united into five different entities before shattering into a dozen different chiefdoms, under control of the local ethnicities, the Nok having been long absorbed into the stunning collage of ethnic groups, the Igbo, Yoruba, and Hausa being most prominent among them. The Niger delta even before the advent of giant eland taming had been a lush and densely peopled region of Africa, now with the usage of elands and plows in 400 CE, its population density was even higher than Ansongo’s more developed inner delta. Like Ansongo, a high degree of cultural and commercial sophistication existed here, but unlike Ansongo, the Niger delta remained stubbornly non-hierarchal. There was already a large trade network that extended east and southward overland into the Nzere Nzadi (or simply “Nzere”) basin or westward into the coastal forests and it was here that Ansongoan traders wanted further access into. However, Ansongo knew it could not conquer the delta area, which left the tool of diplomacy to establish relations with the delta.

The greater sophistication of the delta, specifically of the Igbo people that lived in the area enabled them to resist outright economic domination by the Ansongoans that explored the area and led to a more equal relationship than that of the dynamic between the Mandes and the people of the coastal forests to the west. The brass sculptures of the Igbo were the most coveted good among the Ansongoans, which they also sold to Kita and Mao. These sculptures would end up in the houses of Egyptian nobility, and the dhows of Aksumite and Kori merchants to travel the Indian Ocean to Arabia and the Indian subcontinent. But more valuable than the goods were the writings of Ansongo, of which certain Igbo merchants were fascinated by. Merchants were the first to adopt Southern Punic, as it allowed them to much more easily count their wares and track transactions. From there, chiefs used the script to track the movement of people and the agricultural production of staples like yams and oil palms. Of course, the common man had no desire or need to learn how to read or write as delta society and politics were perfectly navigable without the aid of literacy and the “Mande Letters” as the Southern Punic script became known in the Niger delta remained the province of the elite, and even then only for referential and decorative matters. Some “big men” of their communities might have an artisan that had some knowledge of the Letters to paint or inscribe them on their house doors and walls to display their prestige. In this way, Ansongo became associated with a general sense of prestige. “The Ansongoans”, one Igbo merchant wrote in 478 CE, “are very clever, able to make the desert bloom at the mansa’s command and are more numerous than locusts. They have powerful magics and their blacksmiths are more potent than any we can produce. But they are a proud and haughty people, a common merchant will speak to a chief as if the man were in an age-set below him and will brook no reprimand.” While this attitude would be indulged to retain access Ansongoan salt and specialty goods, ethnic tensions could occasionally flare into minor riots and protests at the small but economically powerful Mandinka colonists that would settle in the area to escape political tensions of their homeland. The descendants of the Songhai and Mandinka people that had intermarried with the Nok back in the 3rd century were often noted to be shown favoritism by visiting Ansongoan traders and native merchants would often complain of the unfairness of the situation. But as Ansongo was drawn deeper into the land of the delta, dire challenges to both the east and west of its Sahelian borders would soon demand the full attention of the recovering empire.