📚 REVIEW: Civilizations of Africa, A History to 1800

A look at early African government, religion & economy. Fans (and critics) of James C. Scott or David Graeber should really read this book. So should people interested in adapting to new tech!

Sep 17, 2025

Back in 2021, I asked the folks at r/AskHistorians for a good primer on African history. One of the moderators recommended The Civilizations of Africa: A History to 1800 by Christopher Ehret. I got it from the library and took extensive notes. I regret not just buying a copy from Amazon (affiliate link) because it’s probably the reference note1 I look back at most often. A friend of mine asked me to write a review for it, and I’ve been meaning to put my thoughts together and really process these notes in a high-level way for years, so let’s go.

Overview

Civilizations of Africa is framed explicitly as an introductory (but college-level) textbook, but it’s very readable — moreso than a lot of pop history books I’ve picked up over the years. Textbooks get a bad reputation as being “boring,” but I think it’s largely undeserved. Sometimes working through the problem sets really is a useful way to learn, and a lot of the “make education more fun!” rhetoric strikes me as misguided — see also: debates about phonics. Either way, going through a textbook about a topic I actually wanted to learn about, as an adult with high levels of self-motivation and practice using textbooks was kind of a revelatory experience.

Impressively, there were a lot of references to obscure things I’d never heard of and had trouble tracking down evidence for, but was eventually able to confirm independently. I highly recommend Civilizations of Africa to anyone interested in the history of Africa; it’s accessible, reliable, and well-organized.

Before I read it, I knew very little about early Africa — mostly just what was taught in the local world history curriculum, which can be boiled down to four main stories: Ancient Egypt, the Bantu migration, West African Kingdoms, and the Triangle Trade. After I read this book, my biggest takeaway was that the commercial revolution was a much bigger deal than I realized, arguably more important than the dissemination of iron tools.

I no longer have a physical copy of the book, but the first eight chapters go something like this:

Introducing Africa and Its History
Africa before the Agricultural Age: 16,000 to 9,000 BCE
Culture and Technology in Africa
Diverging Paths of History
Age of Commerce and Iron: 1,000 BCE to 300 CE
Southern, Central, and Eastern Africa: 300 to 1,450 CE
Northeastern, West, and North Africa: 300 to 1,450 CE
The Early Atlantic Age: 1450 to 1640

I will not be organizing my review using this system, but I did find it to be a fundamentally sensible structure.

Establishing Civilization in Early Africa

Ehret begins at the beginning. He points out that 60,000 years ago, homo sapiens were genetically established; the people of 60,000 years ago aren’t that different from people today (which is to say yes, very different from me, but probably not much more different than I am from a random Chinese guy or an indigenous person from Papua New Guinea). The close of the ice age thus meant that people in many parts of the world had to seek out new kinds of food resources or pioneer new methods of obtaining sustenance. Most people adapted their previous habits or figured out new methods for hunting and gathering. In the Horn of Africa, people ended up domesticating the enset plant because the monsoon rains made growing grain difficult. It looks like a banana, except you have to pound and cook the interior part of the stem and bulb to get at the (relatively bland) carbohydrates. They also domesticated two different types of palm trees, which between them provided cooking oil, nuts, wine, and fiber.

Around 9500-7000 BCE, others started domesticating things: the Middle East (sheep/wheat&barley), southern East Asia (chicken/rice), and southeastern Sahara (cow/sorghum). I was surprised to learn that the cow was domesticated independently three separate times, although evidently the first case was in Northern Sudan.

It’s not clear to me whether we started domesticating them to save animal populations that were being wiped out due to climate change. It could be a sort of “save the whales” thing. Maybe this bears a resemblance to what's happening in the modern day with the development of salmon fisheries — I don’t know when we started domesticating shellfish like oysters. But it’s the lens I personally prefer to frame early domestication thru, because it makes the most sense to me. Maybe that’s a mistake, but better an analogy than no understanding at all, I always say (to the chagrin of the engineers in my life).

Much of what Ehret offers is useful, pithy ways to frame things, explain common phenomena, or divide things up. For example, it is intuitively obvious that ethnic groups tend to spread out (and spread their culture) within the environmental zone they occupy, but it wasn’t something I had ever really thought about much. In a section about themes in social and political history he offers another example of something obvious that I would never have thought to phrase so succinctly:

Like governments everywhere, kingdoms in Africa rested on two conceptual pillars:
legitimacy: a set of accepted ideas and institutions that justified kingship in the eyes of the people
material basis that could adequately support the governing stratum of society (i.e. agricultural tribute or trade profit taxes)

He divides societies not into “agriculture” vs. “pastoralist” vs. “hunter-gatherer” but rather “food-collecting” and “food-producing” economies, which as a framing really makes sense. Civilization requires — among other things — food surplus, and increases in food-producing productivity are what allowed for that. One example of this is the way the invention of pottery (2,000 years earlier than it showed up in China!) allowed for people to cook porridge instead of baking bread. If you had asked me which came first, I would have assumed porridge, but apparently this is wrong? Porridge, which doesn't require grinding, is likely significantly easier than bread, even though the cook times for something like flatbread are relatively low. So the invention of pottery vessels and cookpots decreased the labor necessary to turn grain into food.

The origin of cities in Egypt is another nice example of what he’s talking about. Around 16,000 BCE, the first “Cataract peoples” ground the tubers of “nut-grasses” — which are sort of like cattails — into flour to use as food. This was basically the first time anybody started collecting wild grasses for food, as far as I know. They used grindstones and stone blades as spears or stabbing weapons instead of bows and arrows. Because they only used sedge grasses, they were basically trapped around the southern Nile wetlands. This is roughly the same time that fishing became a thing. Evidently, the ‘aquatic’ Sudanese were known for their bone harpoons, with which they speared large fish and hunted down hippopotamuses, which strikes me as incredibly brave but was a nice reminder that prehistoric humans were the absolute masters of killing megafauna. It wasn’t until the second millennium BCE that the Khoisan developed fishing weirs, which are used to trap marine fish in the intertidal zone as the tide recedes and are still useful today.

But anyway, back to the cities of the early Nile civilizations:

The first cities along the Nile began as governing and ritual centers, then (1000 BCE onwards) commerce grew into an equally and sometimes more important factor in the founding of cities. Then urban centers began to emerge.

This quote seems to be saying: the cities happened, then commerce started to lead to cities, then urban centers happened. I’m not entirely clear on the difference between “a city” and “an urban center,” but I like it because it’s a nice reminder that the very earliest centralized physical structures weren’t necessarily inhabited by permanent residents.

Early African Religions

That said, I’d like to offer a reminder that ritual is a really loaded word.

There's a joke in the archaeology and anthropology communities, that if you don't know what something is, it winds up termed “ritual.” Find a weird bone pipe? It must have a ritual use! Find a box that doesn't literally have “this was used exclusively for shipping merchandise” stamped on it? It probably had a ritual purpose!

We often think of rituals as solemn affairs, like funerals and church sermons. Joyous affairs like weddings get “ritualized” with long, formal sermons, especially in the Catholic and Orthodox religious traditions. Even looser rituals like attending a holiday meal are inherently fraught, as family history and social norms evolve.

Anthropologists 600 years from now will almost definitely think my turkey roasting pan I use twice at Easter and Thanksgiving a year had “a ritual purpose,” and to be honest, they'll be right.

Then there's the other kind of rituals, like the weird little superstitions baseball players get known for or the way most people say "namaste" at the end of a yoga session. There are quasi-religious rituals like neighborhood kids hunting for Easter eggs, and not to beat the "sports are rituals" drum too hard, but most are highly ritualized. Tennis is my favorite example: this article from Atlas Obscura details the incredibly elitist roots of the game and explains how so many of the strange little rituals and rules evolved.

Were early Egyptian ritual centers important because of the ritual or because of the social importance of things that weren’t necessarily trading-of-item events but more like “this is the annual meetup where we have a big party, find girlfriends, and learn stuff from each other” gatherings? I really feel like wrapping that up under the banner of “ritual” does readers a disservice by implying ancient civilizations were super mystical. But why does it have to be “pilgrimage to Mecca” in tone instead of “the annual trip to Burning Man” — I genuinely don’t think we have any way to know how that went down.

One of the things I appreciated about Ehret was that he took aim at overly simplistic views of early African religions, for example:

Animism is a bad word for African religions, which took a variety of forms, including: monotheist, henotheistic, nontheistic and even polytheistic.

He later goes on to discuss the nontheistic Nilo-Saharan belief systems, where spiritual power and spiritual danger do not reside in a deity but are expressed by an animating force.

This animating force in its disembodied aspect, when not properly dealt with through ritual and religious observations, can be the source of danger and harm to people. Its effects, in other words, explain the problem of evil.

But it’s definitely not the only religious system discussed, nor even the only explanation of evil presented. In fact, the Cushite/Sudanic blended concept of divinity in roughly the 7th millennium BCE is the earliest known instance of religious syncretism.

In early Niger-Congo thought, evil had two principal causes. It could result from neglect of the ancestors or from the actions of an ancestor spirit who had been an evil or malicious person when alive. Or it could be due to the malice, hate, or envy of a living person, whose malicious will manifested itself in "witchcraft." By witchcraft we mean the use of medicines and spells to bring harm to others.

Non-Christian monotheism in Africa, by the way, is really interesting.

The Sudanic religion, as we will term it here, was monotheistic. At the core of the belief system was a single Divinity, or God. Divinity was identified metaphorically with the sky, and the power of Divinity was often symbolized by lighting. There was no other category of spirits or deities. The ancestors passed after death into some kind of vaguely conceived afterlife, but they had no functional role in religious observance or ritual.

It was a nice reminder that monotheism is not necessarily an Abrahamic, Levantine thing.

On similar note, he emphasizes that the Abrahamic religions aren’t the only “missionary religions with fixed sacred texts” with “the ability to meaningfully persecute other people for believing differently.” He says this wasn’t possible until the Commercial Revolution, which I’ll touch on later.

Early African Rituals

I know I said the term “ritual” sometimes gets my back up, but I did want to share some of the more surprising things I came across.

None of the early Sudanic peoples practiced either circumcision or clitoridectomy, but they did engage in another notable kind of bodily marking, the extraction in adolescents of the two lower incisor teeth. Unlike circumcision, this trait is visible in the archaeological record. When archaeologists encounter skeletons lacking the two lower front teeth, they have a useful marker for identifying the sites of Sudanic civilization.

My 5-year-old son just lost his first tooth, and he loves apples. I expect it’ll be pretty inconvenient when he loses the next one. Given that, I find it very surprising that people would deliberately make it much harder to bite off food. Going back over my notes, I was strongly reminded of this review of Sick Societies (challenging the myth of primitive harmony) by Robert B. Edgerton (affiliate link), which points out the problems with the way it’s common to assume that if a primitive society did something, it must be “natural” and somehow better for us.

Early African Groups

The typical residential unit in early Niger-Congo civilization may have been a relatively compact village, containing probably somewhere in the range of 100-200 inhabitants. The “core” was mostly related, but not exclusively. A common village layout was a single street with houses set out along each side of the street. If such a village fronted on a river, then the riverbank area formed the street, and the village comprised a single row of houses on the side of the street away from the river. The houses in these villages had a rectangular floor plan and ridge roofs covered with woven palm matting.

The early Khoisan societies, by contrast, were much less settled. Bands were comprised of between 25 and 50 people who were related mostly by birth or marriage. Settlements were a loose collection of small, easy-to-build (and therefore replace) dome-shaped houses. Bands met up periodically to trade, see friends, and marry.

When Saharo-Sahelians started hunkering down in larger and building longer-lasting settlements, they dug wells to cope with the long dry season and built granaries. They ended up in large family homesteads surrounded by a thick thornbush fences, similar to what was used in the American Southwest before the invention of barbed wire. They kept their cattle within this enclosure to protect them from lions and hyenas.

Nyong-Lomami farmers had one of the more interesting gender-based divisions of labor I’ve come across2: apparently men cleared the land, while women farmed it. They aimed to preserve soil fertility by leaving the “litter” of the clearing process so that the rain didn’t hit the ground directly. I wish I knew more about how common that sort of “mulching” was compared to slash-and-burn techniques, crop rotations, fertilization, or other methods of ensuring soil fertility.

By contrast, the early farmers of the southern Ethiopian highlands used a system that reminded me strongly of Incan terrace farming, which I had always sort of considered fairly unique.

Because the fields to be irrigated lay on steep hillsides, the Highland East Cushitic farmers began to build terraces to stave off the erosion of their lands. The earliest terraced fields may have been supported simply by earthen embankments. But early on, probably well before 1000 BCE, the irrigation farmers of the southern Ethiopian Highlands increasingly turned to building stone-walled terraces, a much more effective and long-lasting kind of support than earthen embankments.

Early African Governments

One of the questions Ehret spends the book trying to answer is how the formation of states happened. He doesn’t have James C. Scott’s reflexive, anarchist dislike of governments, but he’s offering a similar sort of look into what leads to their formation. Here’s how he describes the process:

As population pressure increases, a common consequence is a growing competition and conflict over the available resources. The existing institutions of society—which arose in times when small, local social units were the rule, and easy access to resources was available for all—lack rules and customary laws adequate to address the new problems. In the turmoil of such times, the people (for example, clan chiefs) who already hold culturally recognized roles of authority in society, are particularly well situated to apply the sanctions and social influence of their positions in new ways. Those among them who have the necessary ambition and talents take the central role in establishing new rules for unequal access to resources. In so doing, they consolidate new kinds of political and social positions for themselves, as chiefs or kings in a new, layered social order.

Remember how I said that Ehret did a fantastic job of succinctly explaining things that make sense once explained, but had never occurred to me? Yeah, it never occurred to me that the very earliest human leaders might have mostly had ceremonial roles with little benefit… until states started to form and they took advantage of their pre-existing positioning as “the guy in charge of giving stuff to the gods” or “the guy who settles disputes in exchange for half of the prestige trophy items that have no practical use.” Ehret is saying that these guys were established in roles that were mostly status things without much impact on their access to resources, until suddenly they wound up in a position to exploit the chaos for their own gain. In a weird way it reminded me of early adopter internet influencers taking advantage of sudden monetization opportunities not available to those who come after them.

This happens repeatedly. For example, in the early centuries of the first millennium CE, when high-value luxury goods were still rare, clan chiefs did a pretty good job of maintaining the social order. Old chiefly prerogatives, which before then didn’t matter, were transformed into the basis of actual rule — because those prerogatives gave chiefs much greater access to a newly important kind of property: cattle. In essence, some chiefs took advantage of their positions as adjudicators in the community’s acquisition and disposal of property and started building up their own personal herds. Once they had huge herds, the chiefs began to be able to attract new followers and clients by redistributing cattle to them. Because cattle were men’s property, chiefship at the same time became increasingly the prerogative of men.

These chiefly prerogatives probably date to the first millennium BCE, which marked the emergence of a new type of government in the southwestern Ethiopian Highlands: “sacred chiefship.” Under the old Omotic henotheism, the “hereditary clan head was a priestly figure, responsible for making the annual livestock sacrifices to the society’s or clan’s deity, and at the same time especially sacred because of these duties.” Eventually, this evolved into a chiefship able to make political and spiritual claims to the community's allegiance.

It’s not always just “priests into rulers,” either. Sometimes it’s more like “kings into gods.”

An interesting light is thrown on how a sacral leader becomes a divine ruler if one looks at this religious context. South of Egypt, under the monotheistic Sudanic religion, the later kings of Nubia and other states of the Sudan belt of Africa retained their sacral aspects but could never become viewed as gods themselves. In contrast, in Egypt, where political unification changed henotheism into polytheism, it was possible by the time of the Third Dynasty for a king to convert the claim of sacred status into a claim of being included among the gods.

It’s interesting that “god-kings” only come about in polytheistic contexts, but honestly I was most interested in “sacral leadership.” It has a lot of really weird connotations that show up if you do a web search, but even the Britannica version doesn't come close to the way “sacral leaders” are being described by Ehret. He seems to mean something like “rulers whose followers are sacrificed and buried with the king when the king dies.” This is definitely not limited to Africa; I’m most familiar with it in the context of the Middle East and steppe nomads, which you can read more about in my article On Sacrifice: the real kind, with corpses.

The bit I had the most difficulty with was the difference between taxation and tribute, which lots of fancy books I can’t access assure me exists.

But one of the most valuable things that Ehret talked about — at least for people going through transformative social and economic times, like, oh, all of us — was how communities adapted to changes in society and technology. For example the Sabi shifted to a solely matrilineal system, and communal female initiation ceremonies became their central social rite. They maintained two rites of passage for women and male initiation (i.e. circumcision) either disappeared or was completely sidelined. They also added a new word for female holders of various social offices and occupations as women strengthened their position in society.

On the economic front, older fishing specialist communities grew into collections of allied trading villages, acting as middlemen in the metal and other trades between distant places, while continuing to sell fish they caught. For another example, I present the Kusi:

The Kusi settled in compact villages, did some hunting and gathering on the side, and were well-positioned to become manufacturing centers for the areas around them when iron-working came to southern Africa. The villagers also made pottery, which they traded to neighboring gatherer-hunter bands. They probably also made wooden stools, containers, baskets, etc.

Iron & the Economy

One of Ehret's big claims is that the commercial revolution was a bigger deal than the mastery of ironworking. He argues that commerce—specifically the shift from ruler-controlled trade to merchant-driven markets—created the conditions necessary for urbanization, colonization, and the emergence of missionary religions. I wrote a lengthier explanation of the rise of the merchant class about a year ago, so I won’t get too deep into that now, but the general idea is that around 1000 BCE, trade transitioned from being controlled by the ruling class (i.e. Egyptian expeditions like the one organized by Hatsheput) to being much smaller in scale. Phoenicians began extending trading connections west through the Mediterranean Sea by creating discontiguous colonies, notably Carthage. The main long-range importance of this is that merchants, who began as trading proxies for large landowners, started shifting into something resembling capitalist enterprise.

I am not sure how this compared to places like Assur, which definitely had prosperous trading consortiums who made protection and taxation agreements with local rulers, but Ehret really emphasizes the importance of merchant-driven trade for colonization, as opposed to “disgruntled youth” or “military expansion into a neighboring territory.” The polities that came about through this process differed from previous city-states largely in that they were relatively small in population and territory, centered around a single commercial city — as opposed to an agricultural center.

But fundamentally Ehret is focused on Africa, not the Eurasian precursors to the Silk Road, and it’s not until 300 CE that the far-reaching economic links started penetrating Africa. Still, there were certain common patterns that stuck out to me. For example:

The Commercial Revolution tended to spread a particular pattern of exchange: the early commercial centers of the Mediterranean usually offered manufactured goods (purple dye, metal goods, wine, olive oil, etc) for raw materials or partially processed natural products of other regions, like wheat or myrrh. The more recently added areas of commerce provided new kinds (or new sources) of raw materials.

This struck me as being pretty similar to trade under imperialism and had a lot in common with the Atlantic Triangle Trade between America, Europe, and Africa. It’s also not terribly different from the flow of trade today, with manufactured goods, raw materials, and “intellectual property” coming from different regions of the world.

Pastoral Nomads as Allied Buffers

Early African pastoralists were transhumant, aka they would have a “base camp” and then have to travel from there to pastures during certain seasons. The camel — which came to the Berbers from Arabia — changed everything, and led to “true” pastoral nomadism. “For the first time they possessed a large animal, a source of much meat and much milk, truly adapted to arid climates—able to be taken into the deep desert, into areas where even goats couldn't survive.”

But it wasn’t just the Berbers. “The Makurians, in particular, might have been encouraged by the Meroitic kings to settle as a buffer population, responsible for the defense of these territories from the threats coming from Egypt. They provide an example, not uncommon in world history, of a pastoral transhumant population attracted to the more productive lands and material wealth of a neighboring, strongly sedentary and partially urbanized society.”

I believe James C. Scott makes a similar point in Against the Grain (here’s the affiliate link, it’s a great book… but see also With the Grain by food historian Rachel Laudan for a good rebuttal of Scott’s central thesis). I discussed some non-African examples in my article about steppe princesses and their relationship with the Han Chinese, but Scott’s preferred example is actually Rome:

result of this symbiosis was a cultural hybridity far greater than the typical “civilized-barbarian” dichotomy would allow. A convincing case has been made that the early state or empire was usually shadowed by a "barbarian twin which rose with it and shared its fate when it fell. The Celtic trading oppida at the fringe of the Roman Empire provide an example of this dependency.

Scott, even more so than Ehret, emphasizes that this is generally a symbiotic relationship rather than a purely predatory one. “The [settled] kingdom was more valuable as a trade depot, in the long run, than as a site of plunder.” The African steppe nomads — which, before I read this book, I didn’t even realize existed, I thought it was all desert-dwellers — were generally allied buffers in relationships that rhyme with the symbiosis between the Russians and the Cossacks, or the Ottomans and the Kurds (this is a really interesting story, of ignored because of modern tensions).

In Context

One of the things I liked most about this book was that it gave me lots of opportunities to make comparisons to other cultures I knew more about. For example, I had no idea that the Roman Empire considered Persia and Aksum — modern-day Ethiopia — to be the second and third “great powers” they were in competition with.

There were plenty of other examples where comparisons to other cultures were made. It did a fantastic job of putting various details into a broader context.

To put the discovery of metals into a wider context, the Middle East / Egypt forms the best known of the several areas in which metalworking originated, but it was far from being the oldest. The earliest copper users of all were the people who made the Old Copper culture of the American Great Lakes region, dating to around 6000 BCE.

By contrast, the copper axe belonging to the oldest human mummy, Ötzi the Iceman, is from the European Alps in around 3400-3100 BCE. Ehret doesn’t go out of his way to insist everything awesome happened first in Africa, and the book doesn’t ever feel like it’s scoring points. He’s just trying to help us understand the big picture. For example, to bring it back to the beginning, food production:

Food production may have had an independent inception in up to six other regions of the world as well. As many as three separate inventions of agriculture can be traced in the Western Hemisphere. The earliest was initiated by the domestication of pumpkins and chilies in northeastern Mexico at around the eight millennium. The heartland of this agriculture shifted southward by about the sixth millennium, when maize (corn) and beans were brought into cultivation in the better watered southern Mexican and northern Central American region. A second American agriculture was invented in the Andean highlands. Its key early crop was potatoes, and it was there that the most notable domestic animal of the Americas, the llama, was raised. A third center of agricultural invention may have been in the tropical lowlands of South America, with manioc and American yams as major crops. Two other early centers of agriculture can be proposed for eastern parts of Asia, one in north China, based on millet, and the other on the island of New Guinea. It also now appears possible that food production began separately too in India, with an independent domestication there of the zebu type of cattle as early as the eighth or seventh millennium BCE.

There are tons of neat examples of things I’d never heard of, or thought were invented much later or somewhere else. I’m going to stop here because candidly my personal interest starts to wane after 300 CE, but after reading The Civilizations of Africa I really felt like I had a much better understanding of the ancient world than from basically any other book I’ve read about early societies, because Ehret doesn’t seem to have a mission other than to share neat stuff about Africa. He’s not trying to convince me that anarchy is great or governments are evil; he’s just offering an incredibly detailed overview of an incredibly diverse stretch of human history.

If you have any interest in anthropology or early human history, I highly recommend getting this book (from your local library, because it’s pretty expensive).

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