The terms African civilizations, also classical African civilizations, or African empires are terms that generally refer to the various pre-colonial African kingdoms. The civilizations usually include Egypt, Carthage, Axum, Numidia, and Nubia, but may also be extended to the prehistoric Land of Punt and others: Tichitt tradition, Kingdom of Dagbon, the Empire of Ashanti, Agisymba, Kingdom of Kongo, Empire of Mali, Kingdom of Zimbabwe, Songhai Empire, Libyan civilization, Garamantes, Sao civilization ,the Empire of Ghana, Bono state,,Upemba civilization, Harla Kingdom, Kingdom of Benin, Ife Empire and Oyo Empire.
Civilizations
Ife Empire
The Ife Empire was the first empire in Yoruba history. The Ife Empire lasted from 1200 to 1420. The empire was formed by Odùduwà, and became well known for its sophisticated art pieces.There were also life-size terracotta and copper or brass sculptures with detailed, idealized naturalism.
Craft specialization defined everyday economic life in which the production of high-value crafts, such as glass-bead production, featured prominently.
Ife grew to have a robust industry in metals, producing high-quality iron and steel. As the population grew, a second wall was built in the capital city Ilé-Ife during the thirteenth century and the construction and pavement of several major roads began as well. The occurrence of potsherd pavements in virtually every part of the area within the Inner and Outer Walls and beyond indicate that the city was densely populated. Ife Empire prominence grew rapidly in Technology and Civilization, Osanyin custodian hold the growth in Yoruba Technology and the Orishas custodian hold the growth in Yoruba Civilization.
Oyo Empire
Oyo Empire, a kingdom in present-day Nigeria, was founded in the 1300s. It was established by Oranmiyan of the Yoruba people of West Africa. The empire grew to become the largest Yoruba-speaking state through the organizational and administrative efforts of the Yoruba people, trade, as well as the military use of cavalry. The Oyo Empire was one of the most politically important states in Western Africa from the mid-17th to the late 18th century and held sway not only over most of the other kingdoms in Yorubaland, but also over nearby African states, notably the Fon Kingdom of Dahomey in the modern Republic of Benin on its west, and the Nupe and Bariba kingdoms up north.
The Oyo were also known for their craftsmanship, especially in ironwork. All this trade made the Oyo Empire a rich one. This wealth was consolidated by the taxes it imposed on tributaries. For example, one tributary alone, the Kingdom of Dahomey, brought in around a million worth of money a year and Oyo spend all this money on military weapons.
Oyo Empire growth in civilization in developing military weapons and commandeer territory under the administrator of Aláàfin such as Ọ̀rànmíyàn, Shango and Bashorun, etc.
Benin Kingdom
The Benin Kingdom was also founded by the Yoruba Ife prince Oranmiyan. It was located in West Africa between the 11th century and 1897 A.D. It is popularly known for its Benin Bronzes.
Eritrea and Ethiopia
Two civilizations inhabited the lands encompassing the modern day states of Eritrea and Ethiopia.
Dʿmt The first kingdom known to have existed in Eritrea and Ethiopia was the kingdom of Dʿmt, with its capital at Yeha, where a Sabaean style temple was built around 700 BC. It rose to power around the 10th century BC. The Dʿmt kingdom was influenced by the Sabaeans in Yemen, however it is not known to what extent. While it was once believed that Dʿmt was a Sabaean colony, it is now believed that Sabaean influence was minor, limited to a few localities, and disappeared after a few decades or a century, perhaps representing a trading or military colony in some sort of symbiosis or military alliance with the civilization of Dʿmt or some other proto-Aksumite state.Stuart Munro-Hay, Aksum, p. 57.Phillipson. "The First Millennium BC in the Highlands of Northern Ethiopia and South–Central Eritrea: A Reassessment of Cultural and Political Development". African Archaeological Review (2009) 26:257–274 Few inscriptions by or about this kingdom survive and very little archaeological work has taken place. As a result, it is not known whether Dʿmt ended as a civilization before Aksum's early stages, evolved into the Aksumite state, or was one of the smaller states united in the Aksumite kingdom possibly around the beginning of the 1st century.Uhlig, Siegbert (ed.), Encyclopaedia Aethiopica: D-Ha. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2005. p. 185.
Axum
The first verifiable kingdom of great power to rise in Eritrea and Ethiopia was that of Axum in the 1st century AD. It was one of many successor kingdoms to Dʿmt and was able to unite the Eritrean and northern Ethiopian Highlands beginning around the 1st century BC. They established bases on the northern highlands of the Ethiopian Plateau and from there expanded southward. The Persian religious figure Mani listed Axum with Rome, Persia, and China as one of the four great powers of his time. The origins of the Axumite Kingdom are unclear, although experts have offered their speculations about it.
Christianity was introduced into the country by Frumentius, who was consecrated first bishop of Axum by Saint Athanasius of Alexandria about 330. Frumentius converted Ezana, who left several inscriptions detailing his reign both before and after his conversion. One inscription found at Axum, states that he conquered the nation of the Bogos, and returned thanks to his father, the god Mars, for his victory. Later inscriptions show Ezana's growing attachment to Christianity, and Ezana's coins bear this out, shifting from a design with disc and crescent to a design with a cross. Expeditions by Ezana into the Kingdom of Kush at Meroe in Sudan may have brought about its demise, though there is evidence that the kingdom was experiencing a period of decline beforehand. As a result of Ezana's expansions, Aksum bordered the Roman province of Egypt. The degree of Ezana's control over Yemen is uncertain. Though there is little evidence supporting Aksumite control of the region at that time, his title, which includes king of Saba and Salhen, Himyar and Dhu-Raydan (all in modern-day Yemen), along with gold Aksumite coins with the inscriptions, "king of the Habshat" or "Habashite", indicate that Aksum might have retained some legal or actual footing in the area.Stuart Munro-Hay, Aksum, p. 81.
Egypt
Ancient Egypt was a civilization of ancient Northeast Africa, concentrated along the lower reaches of the Nile River in the place that is now the country Egypt. Ancient Egyptian civilization followed prehistoric Egypt and coalesced around 3100 BC."Chronology". Digital Egypt for Universities, University College London. Archived from the original on 16 March 2008. Retrieved 25 March 2008.
Mainstream scholars have situated the ethnicity and the origins of predynastic, southern Egypt as a foundational community primarily in northeast Africa which included the Sudan, tropical Africa and the Sahara whilst recognising the population variability that became characteristic of the pharaonic period."There is now a sufficient body of evidence from modern studies of skeletal remains to indicate that the ancient Egyptians, especially southern Egyptians, exhibited physical characteristics that are within the range of variation for ancient and modern indigenous peoples of the Sahara and tropical Africa. The distribution of population characteristics seems to follow a clinal pattern from south to north, which may be explained by natural selection as well as gene flow between neighboring populations. In general, the inhabitants of Upper Egypt and Nubia had the greatest biological affinity to people of the Sahara and more southerly areas.”“The data clearly suggests that the population in southern Egypt became more diverse as the society more complex (Keita 1992). Egyptian society seems never to have been “closed”, and it is hard to believe that the modal phenotype could have remain unchanged, especially if social and sexual collection were operating. However, it is important to emphasize that, while the biology changed with increasing local social complexity, the ethnicity of Niloto-Saharo-Sudanese origins did not change. The cultural morays, ritual formulae, and symbols used in writing, as far as can be ascertained, remained true to their southern origins”.|p.85–“The physical anthropological findings from the major burial sites of those founding locales of ancient Egypt in the millennium BCE, notably El-Badari as well as Naqada, show no demographic indebtedness to the Levant. They reveal instead a population with cranial and dental features with closest parallels of those of other longtime populations of the surrounding areas of northeastern Africa, such as Nubia and the northern Horn of Africa. Members of this population did not come from somewhere else but were descendants of the long-term inhabitants of these portions of Africa going back many millennia.”p.355 - “The importance of iconographic sources was emphasized in the main. Säve-Söderbergh and Leclant stressed that the links indicated by cave paintings between the vast expanses of the Sahara and the banks of the Nile nodded to a migration of peoples of the Sahara and groups from the South to the valley –something confirmed by research over the last thirty years. Diop set out to return Egypt to its southern African hinterland by systematically using Pharaonic statues and art to support his point of view. Although a debate on the north-south orientation of a ‘civilizing’ wave of peoples in the valley had prevailed up to that point, the avalanche of new data now made this idea redundant, suggesting instead the image of a growing and unifying political movement in the valley from south to north that repositioned its starting point back in time: in Upper Egypt, digs at the Uj tomb of King Scorpion at the Abydos necropolis push back the origin of the first Horus back to circa 3250 BCE, and the resumption of excavations at Nekhen led to the exhumation of the famous ‘Elephant Kings’ of Hierakonpolis (Nekhen) which have no inscriptions and date back even further to circa 3700 BCE.” p.356 - “It quantified the key impact of sub-Saharan populations and found a clear link between the Siwi and the peoples of North-East Africa. We could continue with work by Zakrzewski on the predynastic population of Nekhen, investigations by Crubezy which traced the boundaries of the ancient Khoisan settlement to Upper Egypt, where its faint traces remain identifiable, and Keita’s work, as the most groundbreaking.”'p.356 - “Hence the work by Cerny’s team highlighting the close links between the peoples of Upper Egypt, North Cameroon and Ethiopia – the Cameroon people living in the Mandara mountains speaking Chadic languages, and the Ethiopians speaking Kushitic languages, prior to Ge’ez being spread throughout the region during the Aksumite period. This broadens the linguistic debate to include language families that had been little studied or used in comparisons that have long focused on the East.” Pharaonic Egypt featured a physical gradation across the regional populations, with Upper Egyptians having shared more biological affinities with Sudanese and southernly African populations, whereas Lower Egyptians had closer genetic links with Levantine and Mediterranean populations."Southern Egypt and Nubia are geographically co-extensive, with populations grading into each other. The absorption of Qustul’s people would have reinforced this. There is biological overlap of these populations in origin, but ongoing admixture is also apparent."