The Civilizations of Africa: A History to 1800
Christopher Ehret
Deep African history reconstructed from the evidence of language itself.
Ehret rebuilds thousands of years of African history using historical linguistics, tracing how the major language families spread and carried with them agriculture, cattle-keeping, ironworking and religious ideas. He presents Africans as independent innovators who developed crops and technologies on their own terms rather than borrowing wholesale from outside. The method recovered the pre-literate past of societies that left few written records, pushing African history back many millennia.
Its legacy. It showed how linguistics could open Africa's deep past to historians.
- Author
- Christopher Ehret
- First published
- 2002
- Genre
- History
- Theme
- The Continent's Own History
The Lost Cities of Africa
Next →Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1680
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