The Fortunes of Africa: A 5,000 Year History of Wealth, Greed and Endeavour

by Martin Meredith

  Five months after setting out from Spain, Hannibal reached the plains of northern Italy, but lost half of his army along the way. As snow fell across the Alps, men, horses and pack-animals slid over precipices and perished in their hundreds from exposure and exhaustion. Corpses littered the way. But all thirty-seven elephants survived.

  Hannibal’s army roamed about Italy for fifteen years. He reached the gates of Rome but failed to take the city. Roman armies meanwhile expelled the Carthaginians from Spain and then invaded north Africa, forcing Hannibal to withdraw from Italy to defend his homeland.

  In the deciding battle in 202 BCE, the two armies met at Zama to the south-west of Carthage. In the opening phase, Hannibal sent eighty elephants charging into Roman ranks. But, terrified by the blare of bugles, some rampaged back into their own lines, others were channelled through gaps the Romans made in their ranks and were speared to death. After heavy fighting, Hannibal conceded defeat.

  The terms of peace dictated by Rome were humiliating. The Carthaginians were henceforth forbidden from fighting any wars outside Africa; they were required to surrender all their elephants and to undertake not to train any more for military purposes; and their navy was to be reduced to just ten warships. As citizens watched, Carthage’s remaining fleet was burnt to cinders.

  In the aftermath of defeat, Carthage, no longer burdened by the cost of wars and empire, regained much of its prosperity, concentrating on agriculture and trade. Production of wheat and barley soared, enabling Carthage to become a major exporter, principally to Rome. War reparations were quickly paid off. New harbours were built, with extensive quays and warehousing, capable of holding 270 ships.

  But the wealth that Carthage enjoyed was too great for Rome to ignore. Some Roman politicians portrayed it as a threat. After visiting Carthage in 152 BCE, Marcus Porcius Cato, well known for his hatred of the Carthaginians, repeatedly warned the Senate that Carthage had to be destroyed: ‘Delenda est Carthago!’ On one occasion, with a flourish, he produced a ripe fig from his robes, telling his colleagues that it had been picked in Carthage just three days before, a reminder of its proximity to Rome. As well as the potential danger, Cato pointed out the agricultural wealth that could be appropriated if Carthage were destroyed and replaced by Roman rule.

  The war party in Rome decided the matter. In 149 BCE a Roman army sailed for north Africa and laid siege to Carthage. For nearly three years, the Carthaginians held out, sealed off from food supplies, half-starving and subject to repeated attacks. The final assault came in 146. Breaking through the last pockets of resistance, Roman soldiers went from house to house slaughtering men, women and children. The carnage went on for six days and nights. Some 50,000 survivors were sold into slavery. Carthage was then set on fire. Annexed by Rome, the land of the Carthaginians was called Provincia Africa. It was a name taken from a small Berber tribe known as Afri, but later used to describe an entire continent.

  4

  DEATH ON THE NILE

  In the years of its decline, ancient Egypt was overrun by a succession of foreign rulers. In the eleventh century BCE, Libyans gained power and remained in control of a fractured country for some 400 years. In Thebes, on the orders of Libyan authorities, mummies of pharaohs, their wives and families were removed from sacred tombs, stripped of their valuables and reburied randomly in groups in unobtrusive caches. In the eighth century BCE, Kushites from the kingdom of Kush, an old foe crushed by Thutmose I in the fifteenth century but since rejuvenated, invaded from the south and installed their own dynasty of ‘black pharaohs’. Greek writers such as Herodotus referred to them as ‘Ethiopian’, meaning ‘burnt-faced persons’. At a time when Rome was still a small village on the banks of the Tiber, the Kushites ruled an empire that stretched for 2,000 miles from their capital at Napata, a town in Nubia near the Nile’s Fourth Cataract, close to the great rocky outcrop of Jebel Barkal, to the Mediterranean coast. In the seventh century BCE, the Kushites in turn were driven out by invading Assyrians armed with weapons of iron. Once again, Thebes was sacked and plundered. Egypt survived as a mere province of Greater Assyria but at least acquired the use of ironworking technology. In the sixth century BCE, the first Persian occupation began. Known as the Twenty-seventh Dynasty, it lasted for more than a hundred years.

  The centuries of foreign incursions that Egypt endured gave it a cosmopolitan character, but Egyptians nevertheless retained their own cultural and religious traditions and a strong sense of their own identity. When Herodotus travelled around Egypt in about 450 BCE, visiting Memphis and Thebes and venturing as far south as Elephantine, he was struck by the many indigenous peculiarities of Egypt, everything from its climate to its customs to the workings of the Nile. The Egyptians, he wrote, ‘seem to have reversed the ordinary practices of mankind’.

  For instance, women attend market and are employed in trade, while men stay at home and do the weaving. In weaving the normal way is to work the threads of the weft upwards, but the Egyptians work them downwards. Men in Egypt carry loads on their head, women on their shoulders; women urinate standing up, men sitting down. To ease themselves they go indoors, but eat outside in the streets . . . Elsewhere priests grow their hair long; in Egypt, they shave their heads. In other nations the relatives of the deceased in the time of mourning cut their hair but the Egyptians, who shave at all other times, mark a death by letting the hair grow on both head and chin. They live with their animals – unlike the rest of the world, who live apart from them. Other men live on wheat and barley, but any Egyptian who does so is blamed for it . . . Dough they knead with their feet, but clay with their hands – and even handle dung. They practise circumcision while men of other nations – except those who have learned from Egypt – leave their private parts as nature made them. Men in Egypt have two garments, women only one. The ordinary practice at sea is to make sheets fast to ring-bolts fitted outboard; the Egyptians fit them inboard. In writing or calculating, instead of going, like the Greeks, from left to right, the Egyptians go from right to left – and obstinately maintain that theirs is the dexterous method, ours being left-handed and awkward.

  Herodotus was also puzzled by the annual flooding of the Nile and where the river came from. ‘Concerning the sources of the Nile,’ he wrote, ‘nobody I have spoken with, Egyptian, Libyan or Greek, professed to have any knowledge, except the scribe who kept the register of the treasures of Athene in the Egyptian city of Sais [in the Delta].’ The scribe maintained that the springs of the Nile flowed from between two conically shaped mountains close to Syene, near Thebes and Elephantine. But Herodotus was doubtful. ‘This person, though he pretended to exact knowledge, seemed to me hardly serious,’ he commented. ‘As far as Elephantine I speak as an eye-witness, but further south from hearsay.’ It was to be more than 2,000 years before the sources of the Nile were properly established.

  Overall, Herodotus was highly impressed by Egypt. ‘There is no country that possesses so many wonders, nor any that has such a number of works that defy description.’

  In 332 BCE, new invaders arrived. After a string of conquests in western Asia, the Macedonian ruler Alexander marched across the Egyptian border and seized power, bringing an end to the second Persian occupation. Welcomed as a liberator by both indigenous Egyptians and Greek settlers, Alexander spent only four months in Egypt, never to return, but in that time made plans for a new administration intended to combine Macedonian command of the army with Egyptian management of civilian matters. He also chose the location for a new capital city on the Mediterranean coast, mapping out the extent of its walls with a trail of barley-meal carried by his soldiers, envisaging a grand metropolis of unrivalled power.

  After Alexander’s death in 323, one of his generals, Ptolemy, assumed the title of pharaoh, founding a Greek dynasty that lasted for nearly 300 years. The first century of Ptolemaic rule brought great prosperity and renewed fame to Egypt. Alexander’s ‘city on the sea’ – Alexandria – became the commercial and cultural hub of the Mediterranean
world. On the seafront, its two deep-water harbours, divided by a causeway, provided anchorage for a host of merchant shipping; south of the city, a third harbour on the shoreline of Lake Mareotis connected Alexandria by canal to the Nile and Egypt’s interior.

  The main city was laid out on a grid system, separated into different quarters. At the centre stood the royal quarter with sumptuous palaces and pavilions overlooking the sea; to the north-east, the Jewish quarter became home to the largest Jewish community outside Judaea; in the central area, Greek merchants occupied imposing residences; and on the western end lay the Egyptian quarter where most of the Egyptian population lived.

  From east to west, the city measured nearly four miles. Running the entire length was a ninety-foot avenue – the Canopic Way – lined by colonnades. Other features of the city included theatres, temples, shrines, gymnasiums and public baths. Like their Egyptian counterparts of old, the Ptolemys delighted in staging elaborate parades and pageants. Their wealth, from taxes on land, commodities, property and produce, reached fabulous proportions.

  Their ambitions went further. Ptolemy I was determined to turn Alexandria into a leading centre of scholarship and scientific enquiry, choosing as his model the school and library where he and his childhood friend Alexander had been taught by Aristotle. He lavished funds on building a research institute in the royal quarter and establishing a library that soon gained international renown. Ptolemy’s own collection formed the library’s nucleus but agents were also dispatched to track down every text in existence. The library eventually contained the greatest collection of books in the ancient world and included every volume written in Greek.

  Philosophers, poets and scientists were recruited by the score to lecture and study there, housed in luxurious accommodation and fed in a vast communal dining hall. Among the luminaries who resided at Alexandria in the third century BCE was an Egyptian priest named Manetho who was commissioned to write a history of Egypt. Manetho’s history identified thirty ruling houses or dynasties stretching back to 3000 BCE, which provided the basis for all subsequent accounts of ancient Egypt. Visitors from the Greek world included Euclid, who codified geometry in Alexandria; the mathematician Archimedes of Syracuse, who invented a water-lifting device while he was in Egypt; the geographer Eratosthenes of Cyrene, who calculated the circumference of the earth with remarkable accuracy using measurements taken at Alexandria and Syene (modern Aswan); and the astronomer Aristarchus of Samos, the first scientist to place the sun at the centre of the solar system. It was in Alexandria too that physicians established the workings of the nervous, digestive and vascular systems.

  Another project initiated by Ptolemy I and completed during the reign of Ptolemy II was the construction of a giant lighthouse linked by a causeway to an island called Pharos which lay north of the main harbour. Built from blocks of stone weighing on average 75 tons and reaching a height of 328 feet, the lighthouse became one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Its beacon shone from a fire magnified by mirrors of polished bronze which burned day and night, visible at a distance of more than thirty miles. The lighthouse stood for a thousand years before being severely damaged by an earthquake in 956 CE.

  A new script known as Coptic was devised as a way of transliterating ancient Egyptian into Greek. Since the seventh century BCE, Egyptians had begun to use a simplified, demotic version of ancient Egyptian, based on a cursive form of hieroglyphs. Coptic employed the Greek alphabet – which Greeks had adopted from the Phoenicians – with the addition of seven extra letters to accommodate sounds that did not exist in Greek but were part of the sounds of ancient Egyptian. The word Copt itself illustrates the transition that occurred. It is derived from the Greek word Aigyptos which in turn is derived from the word Hikaptah, one of the names of Memphis, the first capital of ancient Egypt.

  The prosperity that Alexandria enjoyed came from international trade, agricultural bounty and gold. Early in his reign, Ptolemy II invaded Lower Nubia and seized control of its gold mines. He established new ports on the Red Sea coast, opening up sea routes to India for lucrative trade in lustrous silks and spices and making Egypt the linchpin of commerce between the Mediterranean and the western Indian Ocean.

  One of the settlements he founded far to the south on the Red Sea coast – Ptolemais Theron or Ptolemais of the Hunts – grew into a ‘great city’, according to a contemporary inscription, self-supporting in crops and cattle. Its main purpose was to serve as a base for capturing elephants which Ptolemy wanted for war purposes. But local ‘Ethiopian’ hunters proved unwilling to help capture elephants alive. A Greek geographer Agatharchides, writing in the second century BCE, noted: ‘Ptolemy urged the hunters to refrain from killing elephants in order that he might have them alive . . . Not only did he not persuade them but they said that they would not change their way of life in exchange for the whole kingdom of Egypt.’ Nevertheless, the enterprise at Ptolemais Theron eventually succeeded. ‘Elephants were caught in great number for the king and brought as marvels to the king, on his transports on the sea.’

  The voyage to Egypt in specially constructed transport ships was hazardous. Crews had to deal with treacherous head winds, hidden coral reefs and the constant risk of shipwreck. The Greek historian Diodorus recorded in the first century BCE:

  The ships which carry the elephants, being of deep-draught because of their weight and heavy by reason of their equipment, involved their crews in great and terrible dangers.

  Since they run under full sail and often are driven before the force of the winds during the night, sometimes they strike the rocks and are wrecked, at other times they run aground on slightly submerged spits.

  The sailors cannot go over the sides of the ships because the water is deeper than a man’s height, and when in their efforts to rescue their vessel by means of their punt-poles they accomplish nothing, they jettison everything except their provisions.

  At first, elephants were taken by ship all the way to the head of the Gulf of Suez, 1,000 miles away, and from there by canal to Memphis. But so dangerous was the long sea route that a new port was established for them halfway along the coast at Berenice Troglodytica. From Berenice, the elephants walked over land through the eastern desert to the Nile along a caravan route specially equipped with camps and watering places. Their eventual destination was the main elephant stables at Memphis. Some were taken to Alexandria for display in a zoo which Ptolemy II established there.

  Despite its stunning achievements, Egypt under the Ptolemys remained as divided as ever between an autocratic ruling class and the vast mass of the Egyptian population who became increasingly restless with their lot. Greek merchants dominated Egypt’s foreign trades and much of its commercial life, making the most gains. Greek officials ran the bureaucracy with the aim of extracting the maximum fiscal return. The language of government was Greek. The agricultural wealth of Egypt was similarly skewed. Peasant farmers benefited from the introduction of an animal-driven waterwheel – the saqiya – which enabled them to irrigate huge areas away from the Nile and deliver higher output, but they were then burdened by an array of taxes that kept them as poor as they had always been. A regional divide also began to appear. The Ptolemys were content to reside in the splendour and luxury of their capital in Alexandria at one end of the country, making few forays beyond, leaving whole areas of the Nile Valley and Upper Egypt resentful of neglect and chafing at Ptolemaic rule.

  In an attempt to bind the country together, the Ptolemys used Egypt’s religious system to bolster their legitimacy, claiming the same right to rule as divine kings as Egyptian pharaohs. They upheld indigenous cults, oversaw the rebuilding and embellishment of numerous temples in Upper and Lower Egypt and made strenuous efforts to secure the support of priests. Provided with funds for their upkeep and development, temples continued to perform their ancient function as centres of economic activity, producing manufactured goods and sponsoring artistic works. On temple walls, the Ptolemys were depicted in pharaonic poses.


  But it was not sufficient to hold the loyalty of Egyptians. Internal revolts broke out time and again. Ptolemaic rule survived in many parts of the country only through repression. The defeat of one group of rebels in the Delta in 197 BCE was recorded in stone in a proclamation known as the Decree of Memphis, with dramatic consequences 2,000 years later. The decree was carved on a granite stela in three scripts: in Greek; in Egyptian hieroglyphics; and in demotic, the ancient Egyptian script of the time. The granite stela was originally set up in a temple in Lower Egypt, but it was subsequently reused as building material in a fortress on the coast of the Nile Delta at Rashid, east of Alexandria. Known today as the Rosetta Stone, it was discovered during the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt in 1799 and became the key to unlocking the secrets of ancient Egyptian history.

  Beset by civil strife, maladministration, bureaucratic corruption, debilitating foreign wars, periodic famines and rampant inflation, Ptolemaic Egypt fell into inexorable decline. Compounding its list of woes were constant feuds and infighting among members of the royal family, carried out by one generation after another with murders and bloodletting aplenty. Amid the turmoil, rival factions in Alexandria endeavoured to gain support for their cause from Rome, the rising superpower of the Mediterranean. It was to result in a fatal entanglement, involving the last of the Ptolemys.

  Cleopatra VII became queen of Egypt in 51 BCE at the age of eighteen. In accordance with her father’s will, she shared the throne with the elder of her two brothers, ten-year-old Ptolemy XIII, with Rome as their official protector. Highly educated, quick witted, well versed in politics and diplomacy, she was said to be proficient in nine languages and to be the first and only Ptolemy to learn the Egyptian language of the seven million people she ruled. Brought up as a goddess, she had a commanding presence but by appearance she was not especially attractive. Her coin portraits depict her with a hooked nose and prominent chin. It was rather her personality and manner which, according to the historian Plutarch, were ‘bewitching’. She seemed to possess an irresistible charm; her conversation captivated her audience. She was also incomparably richer than anyone else in the Mediterranean.