The Long View: A Chronology from the earliest times to the 13th CE

A terracotta sculpture from Jenne-jeno in Mali. This image comes from Early Art and Architecture of Africa by Peter Garlake, Oxford University Press, 2002

This rough chronology comes from two excellent sources for the study of early Africa, Christopher Ehret’s, The Civilizations of Africa: A History to 1800, University of Virginia Press, Charlottesville, VA, 2002 and Roderick McIntosh’s The Peoples of the Middle Niger, The Island of Gold, Blackwell Publishers, Malden, MA, 1988.  I intend to further develop and annotate this chronology in the coming weeks.

From Christopher Ehret:

4.5 to 2.6 million BCE Various hominids inhabit the eastern parts of Africa

2.6 million BCE The first stone toolmaking industry, Olduwan, develops in eastern Africa;

1.8 million BCE A new species of hominid, Homo ergaster, is known in Africa; a second closely related species, Homo erectus, may have spread out of Africa into southern Asia not long after this time.

1.5 million BCE. Development of a new kind of stone tool industry, Acheulean, characterized by the making of hand-axes, takes place in Africa

800,000 to 600,000 BCE Acheulean tool industry spreads for the first time outside Africa to the Middle East and Europe.

90,000 to 60,000 BCE First appearance of Homo sapiens, ancestor of modern humans, develops in eastern and southern from earlier African species Homo ergaster. They are the first makers of bone tools and backed blades, characteristic of all later human stone tool industries.

60,000 to 40,000 BCE Homo sapiens spread out of Africa, first into the Middle East and southern Asia and then after 40,000 BCE into Europe and northern Asia (and eventually still later from Asia into the Americas) outcompeting and replacing all other species of the genus Homo.

9,000 to 5,000 BCE Agriculture first develops. First appearance of pottery used for storing water and for cooking. Also Ehret argues that the first domestication of cattle and use of fishing (the Aquatic Tradition) emerge around this time.

1,000 to 300 BCE Development of the manufacture and use of iron in Africa

  

From Roderick McIntosh:

300 BCE Foundation of Jenne-jeno (Upper Delta) and Dia (Macina)

AD 300  Demographic explosion in four areas along the Upper Niger

AD 5th century Jenne-jeno “Island of Gold” emerges as a trading center of exchange relations with greater West Africa (Bambouk gold production?)

   —Founding of large Niger Bend settlements (eg Timbuktu)

AD 7th century (Appearance of first tumuli/megaliths in Lakes Region?)

AD 690 Traditional date for foundation of Gao (Songhai capital)

AD 8th century Occupation specialists in recognizable (“casted”) form

AD 850 Rural abandonment begins in Dia hinterland

   —Population maximum at Jenne-jeno and its hinterland (Ghana Empire hegemony over Mema and Lakes region?)

AD 10th century Early in-migration of Fulani pastoralists

   —Beginning of abandonment of Lakes Region sites (Bure gold production?)

A sculpture from Jenne-jeno in Mali. This sculpture is on display in the Musee Nationale du Mali in Bamako.

AD 1055 Almoravids wrest Awdaghost (Tegdaoust) from Ghana

AD 1076 Almoravids temporarily overwhelm capital of Ghana

AD 1100 Beginning of demographic decline in Macina and Upper Delta

AD 11th-12th centuries Beginning of contraction of Jenne-jeno’s hinterland

   —El-Oualadji constructed

   —Prolonged droughts at Saharan entrepot (eg Tegdaoust)

AD 13 century Early in-migration of Bambara

   —Mema an independent kingdom under Tunkara

   —Abandonment of many large Mema settlement clusters

AD 1235 Battle of Krina—founding of the Mali Empire

   —Kurukan Fuga a corpus of laws established for the empire of Mali