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Definitions
Northeast Africa
Niger River Valley
South of the Equator
Geography
100
A complex society featuring cities, states, monumental architecture, and great social inequalities.
What is civilization?
100
The classical era successor state in Nubian civilization.
What is Meroe?
100
Dubbed “cities without states” by historians, the urban centers of the Niger Valley cities from the classical era challenge our conventional notion of this important historical concept
What is civilization?
100
In Africa, south of the equator, the most significant development during the classical era involved the migration of speakers of this language group.
What is Bantu?
100
Africa's second largest desert.
What is the Kalahari?
200
The term historians and geographers use for the movement of people.
What is migration?
200
A new civilization that developed during the classical era in the Horn of Africa and adopted Christianity in the fourth century.
What is Axum?
200
Because the cities of the Niger Valley lacked these fortified garrisons for the defense (and control) of the city, they have also been dubbed “cities without ____________.” (HINT: the answer is not stated.)
What is citadels?
200
The most important innovation that spread in Africa as a result of Bantu migration.
What is agriculture?
200
The geographical name for the area in east Africa occupied by the modern nations of Eritrea, Djibouti, Somalia, and Ethiopia.
What is the Horn of Africa?
300
The knowledge and skill of crafting tools and objects from heated metal that has been separated from its ore. (HINT: We are looking for the general scientific term for form of work.)
What is metallurgy?
300
The city-state of Meroe declined as a result of this kind of ecological crisis.
What is deforestation?
300
Housing more than 40,000 people at its high point in the classical era, this city is most excavated and well studied in the Niger Valley region.
What is Jenne-jeno?
300
In addition to numerical and immunological advantage, migrating Bantu farmers also had this technological advantage over the people they encountered.
What are iron tools?
300
The confluence of the Blue Nile and the White Nile is near this Sudanese capital.
What is Khartoum?
400
The dark organic material in soils, produced by the decomposition of vegetable and animal matter, that is essential for the fertility of the earth. (HINT: It is NOT recommended that you eat this on pita bread!)
What is humus? (No, not hummus--hummus tastes good, humus does not!)
400
Through its port city of Adulis, the Axumite kingdom participated in long-distance Indian Ocean trade that made its way to this body of water.
What is the Red Sea?
400
The earliest and most prestigious of the specialized occupations that characterize classical Niger Valley civilization.
What is iron smithing?
400
In the rain forest region of central Africa, these “forest specialists” traded with the Bantu and adopted their language but maintained a non-agricultural lifestyle and separate identity. (Hint: “Pygmy” is not a specific enough answer.)
What is Batwa (or Twa) people?
400
This tributary, which has its origin in Lake Tana carries 80-90% of the water that makes up the Nile River.
What is the Blue Nile?
500
A tapering, four-sided shaft of stone, usually monolithic, and often having a pyrmidal apex.
What is an obelisk?
500
At roughly the same time as Constantine did so in the Roman Empire, King Ezana of Axum adopted Christianity in the fourth century C.E. which linked Axum religiously to Egypt where this distinctive Christian church was already well established.
What is the Coptic Church?
500
Professional praise-singers who preserved and recited the oral tradition of their societies.
What are griots?
500
Many of the Bantu languages of southern Africa retain this distinctive feature of the languages of the now vanished gathering and hunting peoples of the region?
What are "clicks" or clicking sounds?
500
Of the two African nations that remained independent during the Age of European imperialism, this one was due in large part because of its special relationship with the United States.
What is Liberia?