How to get a Greek-like Antiquity along the Horn of Africa/Swahili coast

What about Socotra? Not to lean too heavily on the Greek analogy, but if you have Socotra as the Crete analog, you could get things going AND work on developing a world that extends out from the Red Sea/Horn area into the Indian Ocean.
 
The difference between Socotra and Crete is that Crete lies in the middle of the Eastern Mediterranean. It's well positioned as a go-between sea-point for peoples coming and going from Egypt and Mesopotamia into Anatolia and Greece. Socotra though is just an island off the tip of the horn. I think if you're looking for an analogy to apply, Socorta would be more like the Azores or Canary islands.

Speaking of analogies, might we have a Persian-analogy in Ethiopia/Axum to our Greek polis analogy the Horn? I also believe someone else brought up earlier in the thread how this POD would butterfly the region - Roman-analogy Swahili? OK, I'll stop. We really should limit ourselves on the analogies; otherwise we're just transplanting the Hellenic world onto Eastern Africa. The TL is 'Greek-like Antiquity on the Horn of Africa,' not 'Greeks on the Horn of Africa' OR 'Greece on the Horn of Africa.'
 
:p. Well all alternate history is subjective and it is fun to transplant general historical frameworks from regions we are very familiar with and enjoy reading about (for me: Greece and Rome) onto new places like this. I myself am guilty, no matter my purpose of this thread, in doing the same sort of things. It's fun to discuss anyway, even if doesn't get put into a TL.

Although the situation is likely unique, I think the situation between the Ethiopian highlands/Axum and the city states of our Punt region is perhaps comparable to Persia/Greece, a better one might be between Macedon and the rest of Greece. Axum or any Ethiopic highland state, if it does rise to power in this scenario, is going to be on the peripheral of the trade networks in the region: much as Macedon was. The closest Persian cognate to the Punt states might actually be Egypt or really, Persia itself.

I don't think speculation on a Roman-type state emerging and conquering the coastlines is all that ASB either, comparisons included. The Swahili Coast is quite a rich region and Zanzibar will be active at this time because of its importance along trans-African trade routes. It's not unthinkable that along the East Coast, some tribe could conquer a lot of land as far north as the Red Sea- though as an Empire it might be closer to Carthage than Rome :D.

The difference between Socotra and Crete is that Crete lies in the middle of the Eastern Mediterranean. It's well positioned as a go-between sea-point for peoples coming and going from Egypt and Mesopotamia into Anatolia and Greece. Socotra though is just an island off the tip of the horn. I think if you're looking for an analogy to apply, Socorta would be more like the Azores or Canary islands.

Speaking of analogies, might we have a Persian-analogy in Ethiopia/Axum to our Greek polis analogy the Horn? I also believe someone else brought up earlier in the thread how this POD would butterfly the region - Roman-analogy Swahili? OK, I'll stop. We really should limit ourselves on the analogies; otherwise we're just transplanting the Hellenic world onto Eastern Africa. The TL is 'Greek-like Antiquity on the Horn of Africa,' not 'Greeks on the Horn of Africa' OR 'Greece on the Horn of Africa.'
 
Well, this is an interesting challenge to be sure.

First, the hemming--I have to wonder why in fact, this region never did develop as any kind of really major civilization in world history under any sort of society, even one deeply derivative of other "cradles," let alone under its own steam. Not only were there Greeks and Romans all over at least the western shores of the Red Sea (not to mention the Egyptians themselves there for thousands of years) but even before the rise of Islam there were of course the Arabs, right there on both the eastern shore of the Red Sea and all along the south coast of Arabia. Then they went on to found a continents-spanning ecumene of civilizations. And they certainly did expand south along the east African coast as well as sewing up the sea trade to both the Persian Gulf and India. Yet with Pharonic, Ptolemeic, Roman, and Arab civilizations right next door and all interested in trading and perhaps expansion in at least one direction this sea/land crossroads offered, if not all of them at once, still the region remained just that--a cross-roads, not a cradle.

I suspect you have to take a hard look at why and how Greek society developed as it did. Greece like the Horn region is at a crossroads, to be sure, or rather a jumping-off point near older, initially richer civilizations but also along expansion routes to less developed regions which they both traded with and colonized. So far so good. But two things--first of all, I think the "cradle" land you want to consider is considerably less fertile than Greece. Of course Greece is rather barren itself, particularly after being largely deforested. But while its barrenness and rugged terrain stimulated seafaring--for fishing, raiding, colonization, and also trade, while the dissected terrain favored small, local polities over big centralized empires--still there needed to be an initial foundation for the early city-states to grow on. The Athenians considered themselves mainly in debt to the goddess Athena for her mythic gift of the olive tree. One can't live on olives alone, but, growing on land otherwise largely useless for agriculture they livened and enriched the diet, and eventually served as a basic stock in export trade (mostly in the form of olive oil). Greek trade also was deeply rooted in selling wine overseas--a less unique product, but one that Greece could specialize in.

Where are the gifts of an East African Dionysus and Athena, that the people of the Horn region could use as foundations of their initial subsistence and then trade? I think right here we have one reason East Africa has always been a crossroads--it's barren country. Perhaps if the Ethiopians could have started exporting coffee earlier? But even then, the East African coast is merely a transfer point at best--and indeed Arabs did start trading in coffee, and establishing plantations elsewhere, and the southern mouth of the Red Sea remained just that--with rather vibrant cities on the east coast, in Arabia, but not so much on the African coast, despite their closer proximity to the original source of coffee. (And by the way, Ethiopian coffee, at least the cups I have enjoyed at Ethiopian restaurants, is really really good coffee! There is still, after something like a millennium of development and spread of the crop, a significant advantage in going straight to the source!)

Second, Classical Greek civilization did not spring straight out of virgin soil, like Cadmus's army sown from dragon teeth to legendarily found Thebes. The classical Greeks themselves remembered they were the descended from the Myceanean civilization and, grudgingly, that that was derived from the Minoans. I don't know if this point is worth dwelling on too much, but I suspect it has some bearing--very possibly, to get a situation in East Africa roughly parallel to the Greece of the early Classical period, you may well need some layers of earlier empire in their backstory. So you would really be exploring not one alt-timeline society but two or several. None of which existed OTL except as roadside services on other people's highways.

Now for the hawing--is "hawing" in any sense opposite to "hemming" or is it just more of the same?

Anyway I think it would be cool if you could pull this off. One feeling I have about it--if it could happen at all, it would happen well before the Classical Greek period, and would very possibly pre-empt--excuse me, I 'm still new around here, "butterfly away"--that whole thing, or at any rate drastically change it. Seeing the Horn region as a crossroads, two of the three directions you can go from there go straight to the most ancient civilizational regions known to history--Egypt and Mesopotamia. (With the mouth of the Indus River one hop further east.) In fact, Yemen is very likely the most ancient spot of human settlement outside of Africa itself--the ancestors of everyone who isn't more recently African probably crossed from Djibouti to Yemen when the sea levels were much lower, and from there their descendants colonized along the shores to India and only later branched north into Eurasia. So, both in terms of long-term human occupation and proximity to the most ancient civilizations you can't get much more ancient than the Horn region! This merely raises once again the question of how come we don't generally hear much about this region as a center in its own right, which has had longer than just about anywhere to claim such attention. But if you can do it, I'd guess it could be just about as far back in time as you like, within the past 8000 years or so. And if it's any time before 500 BC, the Greeks would become peripheral also-rans, because the East African version of Alexander would surely lock up Egypt. And probably do it long before Homer's poems would even be written down, if not before the real Trojan War.

Perhaps then a skeptic like myself would be dismissing, but a thousand years ago, the possibility of any really deeply historically significant society arising on those barren islands and peninsulas on the north shore of the Eastern Med, where they only have olives and vines, but none of the really vital stuff everyone knows comes from East and Southeast Africa?

Then again, though less probable, it could also be fun to have the two regions, Greece and East Africa, rising in parallel at pretty much the same time, with Persian-ruled Egyptians bemusedly answering the impertinent, skeptical if sometimes awed questions of both Greek and East African coastal tourists--who would most likely run into each other right there on the Nile. Would the two upstart peoples recognize a kinship in spirit that draws them together in collaboration and doubles the reach of a united Classical era, or would they despise and fear each other as rivals--the way Greeks and Romans regarded the Phoenicians?

Speaking of Phoenicians, what if the East African Classical city-states and their expanding colonies/traders/mercenaries get started only somewhat earlier than OTL Greece, but find, on the other side of Egypt or via Palestine, Phoenicians, and link up with them? I think that would very clearly butterfly away Greece as a regional dominant culture, and probably the Romans into the bargain.
-------
And now back to hemming again--
I reread your original post, Midas. It reminds me you aren't tightly focused on any one candidate Greece-sized region, but just asking "could there be a Greece-parallel anywhere between the mouth of the Red Sea and the southern reaches of the 'Swahili Coast.'" Is that a fair paraphrase?

Well, clearly we tend to focus on the north end of that range, to be near the "crossroads," and tend to reserve the southern regions for the eventual expansion, analogous to the Greek colonization to the West that brought about Sicily, Magna Graecia, Marseilles, as we know them. And so strongly influenced Rome. I see you claim there are enough fertile regions interspersed with barren ones along the coast that somewhere there ought to be a Greece-type region.

Again--while I don't want to slight the potential of East Africa (which, inland, is where we all evolved, after all!) I have the telling impression that while much development did eventually occur there, along the coast it was mostly trading posts of larger civilizations based elsewhere, writ more or less large. Inland I know of at least a few examples of civilizations less beholden to outside power--Egypt itself, Sudan, Ethiopia, Buganda, Great Zimbabwe, scattering far across both space and time--but I am not aware of any of these finding their own way to the coast and then launching ships along it, or even stimulating some local shore-dwellers to take up the role of mediating in such a coastwise trade. That role, as far as I have ever read, has always fallen to foreigners coming into Africa from the sea, and they or their proxies did the finding and trading with the inlanders. Again--I have to wonder why, and suppose that in some sense, either in terms of fertility on or very near the coast, or the perhaps challenging nature of the coast itself for shipping (until one masters the art in more forgiving waters), the land itself strongly discourages such developments.

Certainly, however nice the tropical and southern shores of Southeast Africa might be, I have the notion that right near the Horn and toward the mouth of the Red Sea, those shores are tough to either live on or navigate around.

But as I say I'd be fascinated to be proven wrong!

Just to say this though don't take anything by this guys. But I have always thought that the the reason the romans conqured so much was becuase of their army so if anyone is going to make a tl on this maybe could you talk about an african rome or something you know a rome with an army that is like the romans but even better!:eek:
 
Seaweed farms seem very hard for a young marine culture. But look at this:

bateas-mejillon.jpg



A batea is a floating raft on a sea bay common in the spanish Cantabric; it has dozens of ropes hanging down inside the sea; they grow mussels by the hundreds of then, and it's easy for the Proto-Puntians to "discover" once you forget to untie a rope from a dock for a few weeks and find if covered in sealife.
Once they have a sure maritime farm product, time and experimentation will give then others. But do mussels (or similar edible moluscs than attack themselves to ropes) live on the red sea?
 
Yes they do in fact. However, the industry is not developed at all- mostly because settlements along the Red Sea coast are pretty sparse, but also because remember Hanafi Islam prohibits the consumption of shellfish. While some locals obviously would ignore these tenants, there has been so historical inertia to establish a big industry for it. iirc though the Red Sea does have lots of contaminants in their shellfish, but that might be more modern. I suppose we'd need a bit more info.

A batea is a floating raft on a sea bay common in the spanish Cantabric; it has dozens of ropes hanging down inside the sea; they grow mussels by the hundreds of then, and it's easy for the Proto-Puntians to "discover" once you forget to untie a rope from a dock for a few weeks and find if covered in sealife.
Once they have a sure maritime farm product, time and experimentation will give then others. But do mussels (or similar edible moluscs than attack themselves to ropes) live on the red sea?
 
Yes they do in fact. However, the industry is not developed at all- mostly because settlements along the Red Sea coast are pretty sparse, but also because remember Hanafi Islam prohibits the consumption of shellfish. While some locals obviously would ignore these tenants, there has been so historical inertia to establish a big industry for it. iirc though the Red Sea does have lots of contaminants in their shellfish, but that might be more modern. I suppose we'd need a bit more info.

Since this would be pre-Islam and pre-modern industrial contaminants, these floating farms should work.
 

The Sandman

Banned
Find some way to eliminate either the assorted trypanosomes that cause sleeping sickness in humans and livestock or their tsetse fly vectors.
 
Some great info on here, hopefully after midterms I'll have more times to flesh something out for it.

I was actually hoping for this (quote below). In Ancient Greece, despite being pagan with many ideas that very much opposed the church viewpoint of the world: I was hoping the same could ultimately get said for the Horn region. Since this would likely be in the very early A.D.'s, Islam would not have come around (1) and whatever pagan traditions are around are the ones that are likely going to be practiced.

This is just a sort of assumption on the times not necessarily a "must" for anyone contributing here.

(1) As a sort of side-note, I realize an early A.D.'s PoD would likely butterfly away Islam as we know it today, but I'm just taking a sort of creative liberty here in involving it: both as an example, and because TLs are generally easier to write with familiar religions etc. If I do write one, I'll probably end up writing with both an ASB (unless you're Muslim, in which case I apologize) "Islam still comes around" PoD and one where it doesn't and another religion pops up.


I know this might be to much to ask but I was thining since aethiopia was christian could we make these states christianity a major affect on these places by chance?:eek:
 

archaeogeek

Banned
I know this might be to much to ask but I was thining since aethiopia was christian could we make these states christianity a major affect on these places by chance?:eek:

That's much later, Axum converted to christianity in the 4th or 5th century, and a large population in the region became muslim: the trading city states on the somalian/swahili coast for example.
 
As was generally the case throughout antiquity and well into the Early Modern period OTL, "controlling" a sea is generally a matter of extensive control of its shores. Because until the development of advanced sailing and navigation methods, a ship's course and progress was rather random. This was something I noticed during my class on the Crusades--the Romans considered the Mediterranean "Our Sea", Mare Nostrum, because they eventually did indeed control all its shores, whereas in the times of the Crusades when there were several strong sea powers there, both Muslim and Christian, none of them no matter how extensive their navies and developed their seamanship, were safe from raids by the others nor safe from getting stranded in enemy territory.

Axum was in fact a sea power, and was very strong on both sides of the southern Red Sea. Having a stronghold near or at modern Djibouti is a good move for a power trying to get control over the Red Sea traffic.

However, I want to repeat--getting a classic culture that parallels what the Greeks were to the Med involves some long stages of development, some contradictory. The important thing was to get some basis for the sort of collective of individuals the poli were in Greece. I suggest that ancient Punt, as a tightly integrated trader monopoly of the type that actually has recurred in the region OTL, was successful on a larger scale for a sustained time very long before the Neo-Puntians, allowing a fairly populous society to grow along the northern Horn and Red Sea shores mainly on the basis of trade--then there would have been a collapse that left the trader kingdom high and dry. This would be the Dark Age, during which the now-isolated remnant population scrambles to survive and in that time develops the new techniques and associated cultural values that make them the Greek-analogs. In so doing they would preclude, for a while, the formation of a new trade empire on the old lines, because as the potential for trade picked up again their numbers of settlements of roughly equal competence would compete. In fact I suspect that on this basis the region as a whole might benefit but everyone would be focused on trying to get the whole trade into their own hands and by that standard life would still seem tough. Thus they'd expand south, colony by colony, each town leapfrogging its rival neighbor's latest settlement in a war of maneuver. And thus they'd greatly expand the overall volume of trade, and by the time a particular power--one of their own grown larger like Athens, or some hinterland power parallel to Macedonia (like, say, Axum/Ethiopia!) or outside power stimulated into both growth and involvement by their own interventions parallel to Rome from somewhere on the southern coasts--once again took control of the whole Red Sea, or using more advanced sailing methods used a strategic choke point like Djibouti to get control of the sea that way--by that time the whole situation would be greatly transformed or at any rate accelerated WRT to OTL.

I am glad that my musings about mariculture don't seem too ASB--are we getting ahead of ourselves? As always I have to wonder why, if something _can_ work, more people did not make it work more often sooner.

BTW kelp "farming," the way they traditionally do it in Japan, is a lot like the mussel farming shown above--you float a bunch of ropes in the water, wait a while, then haul in the ropes and with them all the stuff that grew along them!

Aside from eating stuff like mussels and kelp, one could also use less edible stuff as fertilizer to boost garden production ashore.

Once again I come bearing bad news though--maybe I will talk myself out of it again. But just looking at maps and comparing the scale--within 15 degrees of Athens, the Greeks had the shores of the Med from Marseilles to the east end of the Black Sea. Whereas within 15 degrees of Djibouti or Soccoro, there are the mouths of the Persian Gulf, most of the Red Sea itself, and southward--one doesn't even get to Madagascar. Even if NeoPuntian mariculture is such that the long strands of desert these shores are largely made of (as opposed to the mostly fertile shores of the Med) can be made to bloom--still, the total shoreline within range is about half that available to the Greeks. With a whole lot of wide open ocean where the Greeks would eventually find another shore.

Thus to make this work, the NeoPuntans must be masters of both mariculture and seamanship to a degree that far surpasses anyone of that period OTL. The question is, is that at all reasonable?

I am once again running later than I thought, have to go for now!
 
Thus to make this work, the NeoPuntans must be masters of both mariculture and seamanship to a degree that far surpasses anyone of that period OTL. The question is, is that at all reasonable?

I thins so . Consider than we are talking about a bronze age -or even stone age!- proto-culture, not the eventual City State civilization they created.
Proto-Puntians don't need to cover the entire sea (Minoans started in a single island), or to master evrething. They only need a real foothold, and let the civilization grow over centuries.

The kelp or mussel farms, for instance. Mussel rafts will eventually bring kelp farms, which are similar, and from they other kinds of mariculture. They need boats to operate those rafts; those boats will bring coastal fishermen, and they will evolve into ships and deep sea fishermen. Bigger ships and stable food production -sea produce is not too affected by seasons, and is not afected at all by droughts- will bring increased population, beyond the food production capacity of the mostly desertic coast. With bigger ships, though, colonies to house excess population becomes possible, and that colonization will create sea trade, than will eventually expand further towards Egypt, Mesopotamia and India.

The important part is than this will cover the entire rise of a civilization; they do not need to be master merchants, sea farmers, sailors and fishermen to start with. But by the time this civilization collapses, and while we wait fir the Red Sea pseudogreeks to appear, the basis of a city state culture will have been seed.
 
Having more thoroughly read through your previous posts I am very glad you decided to contribute to the thread :D it's been very helpful.

I think it's quite reasonable, and good that we also recognize this isn't simply a cognate of Greek Antiquity culture and geography. The Greeks are definitely in a much better position relative to land and availability of resources, whereas our trading Punt culture isn't going to be. However, maricultural masters in Punt who thrive on a three-way trade between western Eurasia, Africa and India is a very fun TL to work with :D.


Once again I come bearing bad news though--maybe I will talk myself out of it again. But just looking at maps and comparing the scale--within 15 degrees of Athens, the Greeks had the shores of the Med from Marseilles to the east end of the Black Sea. Whereas within 15 degrees of Djibouti or Soccoro, there are the mouths of the Persian Gulf, most of the Red Sea itself, and southward--one doesn't even get to Madagascar. Even if NeoPuntian mariculture is such that the long strands of desert these shores are largely made of (as opposed to the mostly fertile shores of the Med) can be made to bloom--still, the total shoreline within range is about half that available to the Greeks. With a whole lot of wide open ocean where the Greeks would eventually find another shore.

Thus to make this work, the NeoPuntans must be masters of both mariculture and seamanship to a degree that far surpasses anyone of that period OTL. The question is, is that at all reasonable?

I am once again running later than I thought, have to go for now!

As a sidenote, I'll probably get to work on my TL this weekend, though unfortunately for some it's going to end up ASB. I read a thread called "[The] Sea of Africa" about a dammed Lake Congo creating massive great lakes in Africa, and I also read one called "Atlantic Islands" where some of the seamounts ended up a bit more raised than iotl, creating a few more islands between the Atlantic, off the coast of South Africa and South America. Doggerland has always been a fascination of mine since I came onto this site as well, so I'll be throwing in geological PoDs and sort of handwaiving any immediate ethnographic effects (still be Greeks, our Puntians etc.). This is of course quite ASB but it is nonetheless very interesting (well to be fair it's certainly not impossible, just probably on the very, very unlikely side :p).

Anyway so that's what I'll be doing. I'm sure with the information here, if anyone wanted to they could write a much more realistic take on Punt when it comes around :D.
 
5000 BC
Settlers in Mesopotamia start developing Agriculture. Along with Agriculture they also develop Irrigation technology.

2000 BC
A Wave of Steppe people invade Mesopotamia, Thousands Flee South across the Persian Gulf.Ending up along the South Coast.
There they build Irrigation systems based on small dams across the many arroyos that line the coast.

For the next 800 years the Puntians develop a complex bronze age culture along the Coast.
Trading with the Mesopotamians, North Indians, and the Stone Age Tribes along the African coast.

1200~800 BC
A series of waves of Steppes People wash over North India, Mesopotamia, Anatolia, & Greece [Greek Dark Ages].
Several offshoots of these waves wash over the Puntians, across to the Horn of Africa, and into the Highlands west of the Horn.

800~500 BC
The Puntians slowly begin rebuilding however this is based on individual city states rebuilding the local dams, or colonies rebuilding abandoned/destroyed dams.
While there is still a overarching Culture along the coast, lots of individual differences between cities, based on how extensive the Destruction from the Invasions was.

500 BC
Like the Greeks far to the west, most of the recovery is over.
Like the Greeks expanding around the Black Sea, The Puntians begin expanding along the north Coast of Arabia, and around the Horn into the Red Sea.

For the next 300 years the Puntians will trade and fight with each other, with no-one coming out on top.

200 BC
Having United, the remains of the Steppes People in the Highlands of Ethiopia, sweep down conquering the Puntians, and establishing the Ethiopian Empire.

For the next 600 years the ethiopian Empire would butt Heads with the Eygptian/Roman Empire in the North, and the Mesopotamian Empire in the East.

400 AD
As a new wave of VolkWanerdung sweeps out of the Steppes driving the Huns and Goths into the Roman and Mesopotamian Empires. Once again a Offshoot washes across Arabia destroying the Ethiopian Empire.
 
Top