16.1 Africa: a.d. 101 to 200

Africa

Back to Africa: 0 to A.D. 100

Northeast africa

The kingdoms of Meroe and Axum continued to develop. (See page 292) Egypt was under the rule of the Roman emperor, but beyond the mouth of the Nile, the country was actually little touched by Romanization. The royal custom of brother-sister marriage had been copied by the lower classes, and it has been estimated that by this century two-thirds of the citizens of Arsinoe were off spring of sibling unions. Alexandria was now a great trade center containing some 500,000 people, receiving goods from Red Sea ports and exporting its own manufactured products such as linen, processed Arabian drugs, Indian perfumes, papyrus, glass-ware and Egyptian grain. This city which originally was one of the greatest of the Greek cities, gradually became more and more oriental. Strife between Greeks and Jews resulted in massacres; soldiers mutinied and taxes soared.

Ptolemy, or Claudius Ptolemaeus

North central and northwest africa

North Africa remained the granary of Rome, with the Moors as the dominant people of the area now developing considerable sea-power and prestige. The Moors were of Berber origin (later with an Arab mixture) and came originally from south of Morocco in the country of present Mauretania, on the great Atlantic bulge of Africa. In about A.D. 125 a locust invasion destroyed large areas of cropland and this was followed by a plague which killed perhaps 500,000 in Numidia and possibly 150,000 more on the coast. (Ref. 222 )

Subsaharan africa

The changes in central, eastern and southern Africa were very slow. As noted in the last chapter, the introduction of wet zone crops like the yam and banana allowed better penetration of the Bantu-speaking blacks into the forest and low-lying river valleys and coastal plains. They also continued to drift south along the Indian Ocean coast. (Ref. 68 )

Forward to Africa: A.D. 201 to 300

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