How Much Did Rome and Sub-Saharan Africa Know About Each Other?

Podcast Transcript

The Romans were familiar with Africa, or at least part of it. At one point, they controlled everything on the north coast of Africa from Morocco to Egypt.

However, below their African territories was the vast Sahara Desert, which was extremely difficult to cross. For all practical purposes, it served as a permeable barrier between the people above and below the desert.

As such, historians have wondered just how much the people above and below the Sahara knew about each other.

Learn more about Rome and Sub-Saharan Africa, and what contact they had with each other on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

In a very early episode of this podcast, I asked the question, “How aware were China and Rome of each other?”

The short answer was that they were vaguely aware that there was some great nation far away from themselves. There was no direct contact between China and Rome.

What little they knew was a civilizational version of the telephone game. There were reports from China that they knew the other nation had an elected body which was like the Senate, but they had many of the facts wrong.

Likewise, the Romans knew that there was some distant land where silk came from, but didn’t know much else.

In this episode, I want to turn attention south to sub-Saharan Africa.

This is clearly different than China, if only because sub-Saharan Africa is much closer to the Roman base of power in the Mediterranean than China.

The Romans had provinces on the continent of Africa. At various times, the provinces of Africa, Africa Nova, Mauritania, Numidia, and Egypt were all part of the Roman Republic or Empire. However, what they controlled was often just a thin band along the Mediterranean coast.

The Romans were clearly aware of Africa and knew that there were vast, uncharted lands to the south.

The people in North Africa who became part of the empire were largely Berbers and Egyptians, and they eventually merged in part with Romans and other people from the empire who migrated to the region.

There was a host of notable Roman Africans. The biographer Suetonius, the comic poet Terence, the Christian theologian Tertullian, and the philosopher and novelist Apuleius.

The most notable had to be the Emperor Septimius Severus. Severus reigned for 18 years, a rather long time for an emperor, and is considered one of the better emperors in history.

He was born in Leptis Magna in what is today Libya and was of Carthaginian and possibly Berber ancestry. He spoke Punic as his first language before Latin.

Likewise, Macrinus, who was briefly emperor, was born in the city of Caesarea in the province of Mauretania in what is today Algeria. Denzel Washington portrayed Macrinus in the movie Gladiator II.

Macrinus was most probably of Berber descent.

The Berbers will probably be the subject of a future episode.

The big question that most modern people have is “Were they black?”

The truth is, we don’t know, and it depends on what you mean.

The Romans didn’t have a concept of race like we do today. If you looked different, then it just meant that you or your ancestors were from a faraway place.

It had no bearing on your position in the empire. What was notable about Macrinus wasn’t that he was from Africa, but that he was the first emperor who wasn’t of Senatorial rank.

We know that Macrinus and Septimius Severus were not of sub-Saharan African descent. Did they have darker skin than most people from Rome, possibly, as far as we know, but we don’t really know what that means.

So, yes, Rome was very entwined with North Africa, but lets get the to big question of this episode, how much did they know about the rest of Africa?

Due to its immense size, harsh climate, and geographic isolation, the Sahara Desert served as a formidable natural barrier between the peoples of North Africa and those living in sub-Saharan regions.

That is why we even have a term for sub-Saharan Africa.

Spanning over 3.5 million square miles, the Sahara is the largest hot desert in the world, with extreme temperatures, scarce water sources, and vast stretches of sand dunes, rocky plateaus, and arid plains that are difficult to cross.

These environmental challenges made sustained travel and communication across the desert extraordinarily difficult before the advent of camel caravans, which weren’t developed until the first millennium. Without reliable means of transport or navigation, the Sahara severely limited cultural exchange, trade, and political interaction between the Mediterranean world and sub-Saharan Africa, effectively dividing the continent into two largely separate spheres for much of antiquity.

The Ancient Greeks had a word for all of the lands below the Sahara, and the Romans adopted the same term. They called it Aethopia. People from Aethopia were known as Aethopians.

If the word sounds familiar, it is because it is the basis of the modern word Ethiopia. Aethopia, however, referred not just to Ethiopia, but to everything south of Egypt and the Sahara.

Some writings indicated that Aethiopians came from both the east and the west, which was just another way of saying that the Mediterranean world’s contact with sub-Saharan Africa came primarily from East Africa along the Nile and the Red Sea, and to a lesser extent, along the Atlantic coast.

The most documented relationship was between Rome and the Kingdom of Kush, centered in modern-day Sudan. This was a sophisticated civilization that the Romans knew well and respected. Roman sources describe military encounters, diplomatic exchanges, and trade relationships with Nubian rulers.

The Romans even built temples and settlements near the border regions, creating zones of cultural exchange.

If you remember back to the episode I did on Nubia and the Kingdom of Kush, there was actually a battle fought between Rome and Kush. It wasn’t a big battle, nothing was really resolved, and they never fought again.

Think of this relationship like neighboring countries today – there were tensions, negotiations, trade disputes, and periods of cooperation. Roman writers like Pliny the Elder and Strabo provided detailed accounts of Nubian society, architecture, and customs.

The Kingdom of Axum, located in modern-day Ethiopia and Eritrea, was connected to Rome via the Red Sea. Roman merchants and diplomats visited Axum in the first century, and Roman coins have been found in archeological digs there.

Over on the western coast of Africa, the Romans were generally terrified of sailing beyond the Strait of Gibraltar into the open sea. We know that they did, on rare occasions, as they named the Canary Islands, but there were no regular trade routes there. Moreover, there weren’t any harbors or ports for them to visit.

The contact with the people on the West Coast would have been via traders who traveled over land along the coast.

I don’t want to imply that there was zero contact between the Nile and the Atlantic. There was, but there wasn’t as much of it.

Traders in the Sahara would often travel to markets in locations such as Carthage, Tripoli, and Egypt.

The Romans didn’t deal directly with people in sub-Saharan Africa. Theydealt with intermediaries, such as the Garamantes, an ethnic Berber people who lived in what is today southern Libya and Chad. They were one of the few cases of contact in the Sahara itself.

They had complex relationships with Rome and connected Saharan trade routes to the Sahel. They traded with the Romans and sometimes fought with them. More on that in a bit….

The trade network wasn’t one-way. Sub-Saharan Africans, particularly in modern-day Ghana and Mali, knew about Roman goods and currency through these same networks. Roman coins have been found in archaeological sites deep in West Africa, showing that Roman economic influence reached far beyond direct political control.

One of the biggest imports from Africa was exotic animals.

Giraffes and rhinoceroses were brought to Rome for public games through a vast and complex trade network stretching deep into Africa. These animals were typically captured in regions south of the Sahara, such as Nubia, Ethiopia, or even farther inland, where local hunters and African intermediaries helped procure them.

Once captured, they were transported northward across deserts and savannas by caravan, often through routes managed by desert peoples like the Garamantes. From there, animals were shipped down the Nile or across the Red Sea to Roman-controlled ports such as Alexandria or Carthage.

Specialized Roman ships then carried them across the Mediterranean to Italy, where they were housed in animal pens and displayed or fought in Roman arenas like the Colosseum. The immense cost and difficulty of these expeditions made the appearance of such exotic beasts a rare and spectacular event that symbolized Rome’s global reach and imperial power.

Supposedly, the first giraffe to ever appear in Rome was during a celebration by Julius Caesar in 46 BC.

So, very clearly, unlike China, there was a fair amount of contact between Rome and Aethiopia, as they understood it.

Given how expansionist the Romans were, it should be no surprise that the Romans conducted several expeditions into Africa beyond the Mediterranean coast, motivated by strategic, commercial, or exploratory goals.

While their formal control largely extended only as far south as the start of the Sahara Desert, they consistently showed interest in the lands beyond, especially regions rich in exotic animals, gold, and other luxuries.

Shortly after Egypt became a Roman province in 30 BCE, Emperor Augustus commissioned exploratory missions to better understand the lands to the south.

One of the earliest was led by Publius Petronius, the prefect of Egypt, who launched a military campaign into Nubia around 24 BC. In response to raids into southern Egypt, he captured the city of Napata, capital of the Kingdom of Kush.

Augustus also sent an exploratory mission up the Nile River to locate its source. This mission is believed to have reached as far south as Meroë, a major city of the Nubian kingdom.

In 19 BC, Lucius Cornelius Balbus, a Roman general and proconsul of Africa, led a significant military expedition deep into the Sahara Desert, becoming the first Roman commander to celebrate a triumph for a campaign conducted entirely outside the traditional Roman provinces. Balbus targeted the Garamantes, who controlled key trans-Saharan trade routes.

Balbus may have traveled all the way down to the Niger river in what is today Mali.

In 41, the Roman general Suetonius Paulinus led an expedition across the Atlas Mountains in modern-day Morocco, becoming the first Roman commander known to have crossed that range. As governor of Mauretania, he aimed to subdue resistant Berber tribes and expand Roman influence further inland.

After defeating local forces near the coast, Paulinus advanced with a well-organized army through treacherous mountain terrain and into the desert beyond. He may have gone into modern-day Mauritania and possibly even to Senegal.

Around 50, the Roman commander Septimius Flaccus led an expedition southward from the province of Africa Proconsularis into the central Sahara, pushing beyond the limits of regular Roman control.

With the support of the Garamantes, who were now allied with Rome, his forces advanced into the interior and reportedly reached a distant region known as Agisymba, a land rich in wild animals like elephants and rhinoceroses, possibly located near modern-day Lake Chad or the Sahel.

By the start of the second century, Rome lost interest in exploring southward. If you remember my episode on how the Sahara Desert was once a grassland, 2000 years ago, it wasn’t as big as it is today, and was slowly expanding.

They concluded, quite rightly, that expanding to the south just wasn’t worth the effort.

To summarize, Rome and sub-Saharan Africa knew a lot more about each other than Rome and China did. However, there were limits. There was much more contact in East Africa than there was in West Africa. In fact, there is no evidence that Romans ever got as far as the modern countries we considered to be part of West Africa, other than possibly getting to Senegal.

By the same token, we have no evidence of West African people making it north to the areas controlled by Rome. There are no written records from Africa from this period, which allows us to see the other side of the exchange.

So Rome and Africa were familiar with each other, but it depends on what part of Africa. The further north and east, the most contact there was. The further south and west, the less contact there was.

If you go far enough south in Africa, then there was no contact and it just as well might as have been China.