African History: Did you mean...?

This Roman oil lamp of unclear provenance was made in the 1st Century CE. It portrays an Aethiopian slave, with barbarians like Africans and Celts being popular motifs in Roman art. The lamp has also been suggested to have erotic connotations...

Escaped slave Gordon, also known as "Whipped Peter," formerly enslaved on a cotton plantation along the Atchafalaya River, showing his scarred back at a medical examination, Baton Rouge, Louisiana. After the whipping, his wounds were salted...

West Africa was one of the world's greatest producers of gold in the Middle Ages. Trade in the metal went back to antiquity but when the camel caravans of the Sahara linked North Africa to the savannah interior, the trade really took off...

The transatlantic slave trade (also given as the Atlantic slave trade, circa 1492 to 1860) was the practice of enslaving the citizens of African states and transporting them across the Atlantic Ocean to the "New World" of the Americas. Although...

The Secret History of the Mongols is a chronicle written in the 13th century CE (with some later additions) and is the most important and oldest medieval Mongolian text. The book covers the origins of the Mongol people, the rise to power...

The Description of Africa is the first comprehensive book about Africa, written by Leo Africanus, an African scholar trained in the Islamic intellectual tradition, in 1526, during the Italian Renaissance. A skillful mixture of anthropology...

The first plantations in the Americas of sugar cane, cocoa, tobacco, and cotton were maintained and harvested by African slaves controlled by European masters. When African slavery was largely abolished in the mid-1800s, the center of plantation...

Sub-Saharan Africa was explored by Roman expeditions between 19 BCE - 90 CE, most likely in an effort to locate the sources of valuable trade goods and establish routes to bring them to the seaports on the coast of North Africa, thereby minimizing...

The Kings and Generals animated historical documentary series on the ancient civilizations continues with a video on the Berbers. In this first history video out of two on the ancient origins of the North African civilization, we are going...

The British Museum invited Dr Cornelia Kleinitz, an archaeologist specialising in rock art, and Liam Williamson, a modern rock drummer, to try and discover how a rock gong might have been played. This was the result. Rock gongs are a...