The final part of Gus Casely-Hayford’s search for the Lost Kingdoms of Africa takes us to Nigeria and Mali. The framing story of the program is the search for the origins of the magnificent bronzes looted from the fall of Benin and now to be found, of course, in the British Museum. My ancestors were the most appalling vandals.

What distinguished Benin from the more northerly kingdoms based around Timbuktu (see here) was resistance to the march of Islam and continuation of an animistic religion that dates back millennia. The city of Jenné-Jeno in Mali, abandoned after Islam arrived, is believed to date to around 250 BC. To get a glimpse of what those cultures might have been like, Casely-Hayford takes us to visit the Dogon people of Mali whose religious practices are extremely colorful and supposedly unbroken for hundreds of years, even since they fled to their current home on the Bandiagara Escarpment to escape the advance of Islam.

Possibly even more interesting are the mysterious Tellem people who lived in the area before the Dogon and created amazing cliff villages so daring that the Dogon were convinced they must be able to fly.

There’s so much history there that we’ve barely scratched the surface of, and plenty of powerful kingdoms every bit as impressive as those of medieval Europe. Someone needs to tell their stories.

As far as I know, none of the Lost Kingdoms of Africa programs are available in the US, but I’m sure they would be of tremendous interest, particularly to African-Americans. If you keep pestering PBS I’m sure they’ll turn up.

Program three in the Lost Kingdoms of Africa series was the weakest so far. That’s partly because Gus Casely-Hayford and his crew were lucky to be allowed into Zimbabwe at all. The BBC is not exactly popular in that part of the world. Also the medieval kingdoms of Southern Africa appear to have left no written records, so we know little about them other than the ruins they left behind and what Portuguese adventurers have written about them. Even so, Wikipedia manages to tell a much more complex story about Zimbabwe than the program did, with reference to two successor kingdoms that Casely-Hayford didn’t mention.

The star of the program, however, was the little island kingdom of Kilwa Kisiwani. Strategically located on the East African coast just where trade ships following the monsoon winds across the Indian Ocean needed it, this little island became a wealthy trading hub exchanging gold from Zimbabwe for spices from Asia.

That picture, which is from the Wikipedia article, shows part of the ruins of the Great Mosque on the island. It is of similar antiquity to Notre Dame in Paris, and also similarly impressive. But stone was in short supply on the island, so the original structure was built entirely of coral.

Program 2 in Gus Casely-Hayford’s survey of African history for the BBC centers on Ethiopia, and the claim that the Ethiopian emperors can trace direct descent to King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba (“Sheba” being the ancient kingdom of Saba in what is now Yemen).

Both Wikipedia and Britannica Online say that modern scholars now discount the claim that the Aksumite Empire was founded by Sabaens (specifically that Emperor Menelik I was the son of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba). It is more ancient than that, though carvings in the Sabean language have been found in Aksum and elsewhere in Ethiopia dating back to around 700 BC. Casely-Hayford manages to ignore this as it rather dents his story. However, he does a decent job of demonstrating a continuous cultural history from Aksumite times to the present day.

Of particular interest are the incredible rock churches of Lalibela, which are every bit as impressive, if not quite as elegant, as Petra. The ancient Ethiopians excavated huge holes in their mountains, leaving the shells of the churches behind.

Also very impressive is the 17th Century castle of Emperor Fasiladas in the city of Gondar.

And yes, the name of that city is sometimes spelled “Gondor”.

Last night’s TV watching was so interesting that I decided to embark on Gus Casely-Hayford’s series, Lost Kingdoms of Africa. The first episode was about Nubia. Possibly we should call it Kush, because “Nubia” appears to be an Egyptian word meaning “land of the slaves”, but the Nuba people of southern Sudan carry the name with pride today and if they are happy with it I guess we can be too.

Nubia is familiar to anyone who has studied Egyptian history, but the program gave us far more background on this once-great civilization that has been destroyed by the encroaching Sahara. Casely-Hayford took us back to an 8,000 year old archaeological site in northern Sudan, an area that is now a baking desert but which once clearly, from rock paintings, supported cattle and even elephant.

Around 2000 BC the Nubian city of Kerma was so wealthy that the burial of one ruler was accompanied by the sacrifice of 5,000 cattle and 300 servants. 500 years later Nubia was conquered by Egypt, but the Nubians later turned the tables on their conquerors founding their own dynasty. The Nubian holy city of Jebel Barkal contains a temple dedicated to the Nubian pharaoh Taharqa clearly showing him wearing the combined crown of Upper and Lower Egypt. Wikipedia says that Taharqa fought wars against the Assyrians.

As the desert encroached, Nubian civilization retreated southwards, first to Meroë and eventually down the White Nile to where the Nuba still herd the same cattle, and play the same wrestling sport, that their ancestors did millennia ago.

As with yesterday, apologies for the Wikipedia links. I haven’t had time to do my own research (yet).

Having had a rather tiring week I decided to take an hour off this evening and delve into the material I had downloaded from the BBC iPlayer. Thus it was that I came across Aminatta Forna’s fascinating program, The Lost Libraries of Timbuktu.

Why fascinating? Well for a start, while we Brit’s were busy killing each other in the Wars of the Roses, Timbuktu was a thriving Islamic university city with a population of around 100,000, about of quarter of whom were scholars and their families. That is mostly gone now. The Songhai Empire collapsed for a variety of reasons, one of which was economic decline brought about by competition in the gold market from imports from the Americas. War with Morocco was followed by internal religious wars and finally colonization by France. During the collapse, the middle class families of Timbuktu hid their treasures – their books – in safe places. Only now are they finally being made available to scholars again.

The national library of Mali owns some 300,000 manuscripts, only a fraction of which have been translated and studied. The Library of Congress has a small exhibition. Thousands more manuscripts still exist in private collections, or are lost in whatever safe storage location they were buried in.

Most of the manuscripts appear to be either religious or bureaucratic in nature, but some will inevitably be useful in throwing light on the history of West Africa. The Songhai were only the most recent empire to control Timbuktu. Before that was the Mali Empire, and before that the Ghana Empire. That history, however, takes us back only to the time of the Anglo-Saxons. Archaeological remains (described for us in the program by an American scholar who is actually descended from the great explorer, Mungo Park) suggest the existence of a vast civilization along the course of the Niger that was as big, and possibly as old, as those of Mesopotamia.

As you can imagine, I was sat there with story ideas flowing freely through my brain. And the good news is that you can tap that wellspring too. Someone has uploaded the entire thing, in bits, to YouTube. Here are the links:

• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Part IV
• Part V
• Part VI
• Part VII

Apologies for the links to Wikipedia above, but I don’t know enough about West African history to provide more reliable sources. Maybe one of you folks does.

Here are a couple of stories I found in The Independent that may be of wider interest.

The first one concerns the discovery of the remains of Queen Eadgyth (pronounced Edith) in Germany. Eadgyth was a princess of Wessex. She was the granddaughter of Alfred the Great, and sister of Athelstan, the man generally credited with uniting the Saxon kingdoms of Britain to create England. She was married to Otto I, the Holy Roman Emperor, in 929, and miraculously (pun intended) her tomb appears not to have been robbed by medieval relic hunters.

The news services over here are very excited because Eadgyth’s remains, if proved genuine, will be the oldest known relics (again careful world choice) of a member of the British Royal Family.

Well, apart from the ones in that tomb in Glastonbury Abbey, of course. 🙂

The other story is about the discovery of a temple to the cat goddess Bastet in Egypt. This one dates from the time of King Ptolemy III, and the newspaper report states that the temple belonged to his queen, Berenike. I would put this forward as evidence that women have always worshiped cats, except that there is nothing in the article to connect the temple with Queen Berenike except that it is devoted to a cat goddess.

Still, with any luck replica Bastet statues from the temple will turn up in the British Museum sometime soon. I have friends who could do with one right now. Neil, Natania: thinking of you.

The hot news in the UK today is a treasure trove of over 1,500 gold and silver items dating from Anglo Saxon times that has been discovered in a field in Staffordshire. The experts say that the horde is worth a “seven figure sum”, and that it is as significant a find as Sutton Hoo. The BBC has a report and pictures.

As Twitter followers will know, I spent much of today in a graveyard. I was not there for anything to do with zombies or vampires (though the place in question is apparently home to several species of bat), but rather to support a couple of friends of mine who have just put together a new guide book for the place.
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Israeli archaeologists believe that they have found evidence of a pre-Exodus Caananite city with a woman ruler. Details here.

A document dating from 1460 recently discovered in the library at Eton suggests that Robin Hood might not have been loved by the good after all. Then again, the author was a monk, and the men of Sherwood were not exactly kind to rich churchmen, so who really knows? The Independent has the story.

Someone in Suffolk has dug up one hell of a lot of money. Apparently around £1m in today’s money alone, and presumably far more than that as collectibles. Of course the government has laws about such things, but hopefully the lucky finder will still do well out of it.

Such hoards normally get buried during times of uncertainty – particularly times of war. The Independent‘s article notes that, “Almost all the coins were minted by royal predecessors of Boudicca.” If the other coins were also minted prior to Boudicca’s reign then there’s a good chance that the burial was a reaction to the Iceni rebellion.

Here’s some more info on the NPL study of Viking swords. Key passage:

NPL’s results match descriptions of ancient sword making in Herat (now in Afghanistan) described by ninth century Arab philosopher and writer Al-Kindi. This links to a known Viking trade route down the Volga and across the Caspian Sea to Iran but until now it was not known that Vikings had brought crucible steel back to Scandinavia and integrated ancient Arab steelmaking methods with their own swordsmithing.

Or at least not without checking them carefully first.

For those of you who are into ancient technology, this Guardian article about the manufacture of Viking swords should provide plenty of food for thought.

Naturally the article assumes that the ancient Vikings were idiots. I have a sneaking suspicion that they might have thought that burying fake swords with dead people and keeping the real ones for the serious business of fighting was a smart move.