Sahara: Did you mean...?

The travels of Leo Africanus (al-Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan al-Fāsī, c. 1494 - c. 1554) illuminate the cultural and political complexity of 16th-century North and West Africa at a moment of shifting imperial, commercial, and religious frontiers...

Agriculture arose independently at several locations across the world, beginning about 12,000 years ago. The first crops and livestock were domesticated in six rather diffuse areas including the Near East, China, Southeast Asia, and Africa...

The desert campaigns in North Africa during the Second World War (1939-45) provided soldiers on all sides with a set of particular challenges. Scorching day temperatures, freezing night temperatures, sand and flies getting everywhere, the...

From the voyages of the Portuguese navigators under the patronage of Henry the Navigator in the 15th century to the transcontinental expeditions of Henry Morton Stanley in the 1870s, European exploration of Africa gradually transformed European...

This prehistoric Saharan rock carving from Wadi Mathendous in the Fezzan, Libya depicts two cats fighting. Similar petroglyphs can be found in rock escarpments throughout the Sahara, providing valuable clues to the people who inhabited and...

Great Zimbabwe is a ruined city near Masvingo, central Zimbabwe which was inhabited between c. 1100 to c. 1550 (flourishing c. 1300 - c. 1450) in the region’s Late Iron Age. Capital of the Kingdom of Zimbabwe of the Bantu-speaking Shona people...

Ancient Egyptian architecture is often associated closely with the pyramids of Giza but was actually quite diverse, taking a number of forms in the construction of administrative buildings, temples, tombs, palaces, and the private homes of...

A pyramid is a structure or monument, usually with a quadrilateral base, which rises to a triangular point. In the popular imagination, pyramids are the three lonely structures on the Giza plateau at the edge of the Sahara Desert but there...

Ibn Battuta (l. 1304-1368/69) was a Moroccan explorer from Tangier whose expeditions took him further than any other traveler of his time and resulted in his famous work, The Rihla of Ibn Battuta. Scholar Douglas Bullis notes that “rihla”...

The Kingdom of Benin, located in the southern forests of West Africa (modern Nigeria) and formed by the Edo people, flourished from the 13th to 19th century CE. The capital, also called Benin, was the hub of a trade network exclusively controlled...