Early Civilizations
Great Kingdoms and Empires
Global Impact and The Slave Trade
Geography/Related Qs
Culture, Religion, Society
100
Often called the "Gift of the Nile," this civilization is one of the world's oldest and most studied.
What is Ancient Egypt?
100
This West African empire, famous for its wealth in gold and salt, reached its peak under Mansa Musa in the 14th century.
What is Mali?
100
This 1839 ship was the site of a famous slave revolt that ultimately led to the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that the African captives were illegally enslaved and free to return home.
What is the Amistad?
100
Famous for royal artifacts like the Ezana Stone, this high-altitude empire used the natural defenses of the Adwa mountains to secure its position as a major Red Sea trading power.
What is the Kingdom of Aksum?
100
Mansa Musa's famous 1324 pilgrimage to Mecca is said to have caused massive inflation across North Africa & the Middle East because he distributed so much of this.
What is gold?
200
This ancient empire was famous for minting its own currency to facilitate international commerce.
What is Aksum or Aksumite Empire?
200
This society became the first in Africa to adopt Christianity and have its own developed script of Ge'ez.
What is Aksum or the Aksumite Empire?
200
In the late 15th century, West African elites built immense wealth by shifting away from Saharan trade and providing Portuguese merchants with this human "cargo."
What is the slave trade or slaves (enslaved people)?
200
The world's longest river, it flows through northeastern Africa and was central to ancient Egyptian civilization.
What is the Nile River?
200
The discovery of Chinese porcelain and Indian silk along the Swahili Coast evidence East Africa’s active participation in this vast maritime trading network.
What is the Indian Ocean trade network (or Indian Ocean trade)?
300
This society, in present-day Nigeria, is one of the earliest ironworking societies, best known for their pottery and terracotta sculptures.
What is Nok?
300
Refusing to accept a position of inferiority while negotiating the defense of her nation, this 17th-century queen famously used a servant as a human chair to meet the Portuguese governor at eye level.
Who is Queen Nzinga (or Njinga) Mbande of Ndongo?
300
This African-born conquistador traveled to the Americas with Spanish explorers and is recognized as the first recorded African to arrive in North America.
Who is Juan Garrido?
300
This vast grassland "belt" below the Sahara took its name from an Arabic word describing it as the "shoreline" of a sea of sand.
What is the Sahel?
300
The University of Sankore, one of the world's earliest universities, was located in this legendary city and held hundreds of thousands of manuscripts.
What is Timbuktu?
400
Built without mortar using dry-stone masonry, this massive curved wall complex at Great Zimbabwe is the largest pre-colonial structure in sub-Saharan Africa.
What is the Great Enclosure?
400
This early West African empire, from roughly 300–1100 CE, is considered the first major empire in the region and grew wealthy controlling trans-Saharan trade in gold and salt.
What is the Ghana Empire?
400
Under the 1662 Virginia law incorporating partus sequitur ventrem, an infant's legal status as enslaved or free was strictly inherited from this parent.
Who is the Mother?
400
Mined in desert settlements, Saharan trade centers generated immense wealth by exchanging this essential mineral, often worth its weight in gold, with empires like Ghana and Mali.
What is salt?
400
This West African oral historian, considered a living library of history, genealogy, and culture, played a central role in preserving and transmitting African civilizations' histories.
What is a griot?
500
While this centuries-long migration introduced new tools and crops, its most lasting legacy was establishing the shared linguistic roots spoken across most of sub-Saharan Africa today.
What is the Bantu Expansion?
500
This source details the wealth and influence of the ruler Mansa Musa and the Mali Empire based on the perspective of a cartographer from Spain.
What is the Catalan Atlas?
500
The painting Chafariz d’El-Rey highlights the prominent role of Africans, who made up nearly 20% of the population, in this 16th-century Iberian port city.
What is Lisbon?
500
Africa's varied landscape is made up of multiple climate zones, including tropical rainforests, Sahel, Mediterranean and these (two - must get both).
What are desert and grasslands?
500
This term means the blending of diverse religious beliefs, practices, and philosophies into a new or modified system, such as Cuban Santeria or Louisiana Voodoo.
What is religious syncretism?