Quercus 🟡⚪🟣⚫ on Nostr: nprofile1q…8lwgl i would like to expand on geography. This theory is from reading ...

nprofile1qy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnddaehgu3wwp6kyqpqafz9jadkpqzaedvclkth4vcm6q9fsvy6mfddq0ufwjpy4gptlwxqx8lwgl (nprofile…lwgl) i would like to expand on geography. This theory is from reading about Ancient Egpyt. You could argue that Egypt is the cradle of modern civilization: it was the envy of the world for 2000 years during a time when cultural interchange was happening at an accelerated rate. Other civilizations of their time, and Egpyt outlasted them all, sought to copy Egypt. Modern beaurocracy is part a product of Egyptian models. Rome is a literal successor to Egpyt. We tend to conveniently forget that Egypt is in Africa.

At that time, trade still happened largely through land routes. Egypt is surrounded to the South and West by thousands of miles of deserts. There were advanced kingdoms all over Africa. But the south and west was largely cut off from the north, at least in comparison to the level of trade with the Meditarranean. So Egypt became part of the Middle East while the rest of Africa remained a separate geographic entity. This has extraordinary implications for the history of Africa. The trade routes were geographically isolated, which put Africa at a disadvantage. However, there were plenty of wealthy and powerful kingdoms in Africa.

There is a story I learned from the book Born in Blackness (about the slave trade from the African perepective) that the King of Mali, a powerful west African polity, Mansa Musa, who is considered one of the wealthiest people ever, made an overland trip to Mecca for the Hajj in the 1300s. Imagine how difficult that trip would have been to make overland. A hundred years later, it would have been done by boat. This author, Howard French, talks about how Musa's expedition misses the arrival of early gunpowder weapons in the Middle East by a very slim margin, and wonders about an alternate history where Mali was fighting on an even playing field. Unlike what we are told about exploring the world, the drive to explore the coast of west Africa was to get access to their gold. Its an utter myth that Africa wasn't advanced. That story is a story my white culture tells itself to distract from the fact that my ancestors pillaged west Africa for gold and then for slaves for island sugar plantations, and called ourselves 'Explorers'.