What even happened here? Were these precolonial subsaharan kangdoms real polities or just retroactively astroturfed settlements?
>>18532314This is soulful. Imagine coming home to your big booty gf who spent all morning picking mangos.
>>18532314>Were these precolonial subsaharan kangdoms real politiesKind of, South Eastern Africa had fishing villages that would regularly trade with the people of Madagascar for example. They built city-states but they rarely worked with stone (which isn't that unusual when you realize that neither did most of Asia) so we only have trace evidence of them at best
>>18532314They were built by Africans, aren't as impressive as they're hyped up to be, and the Rhodesians cope about how it was actually built by Arabs is hilarious
>>18532314They were real enough that the Portuguese wrote about and had diplomatic relations with them
>>18532314This was built by the Bushmen in a last ditch effort to resist the bantu onslaught.Pure Bushmen are as genetically distant from "black" africans as Eurasians are.>wtf black peepo spreyd peesefullyno they didnt and we can see evidence of violence and war and we know it was a Bushman fortress because the particular style of the stone tools was that of the Bushmen, not Bantu.Bushman lithic culture extends up to fucking Kenya, today it is absent everywhere but the reservations created by White people in South Africa.
>>18532406I seriously doubt anyone needed to cope it was built by arabs. It's a fucking wall bruh. Or do people find it impressive because it's the only structure south of equator not made out of mud?
>>18532561My understanding is that it was done for political reasons. Blacks nationalist groups were appealing to Great Zimbabwe as evidence this was historical black land and that Rhodesia should return back to black rule. The government then counter-signaled that by claiming that the structure was built by somebody else.
what was pre-bantoid central africa like bros
>>18532314It's extremely primitive for its time, so it probably was indeed built by negroes. Some ooga-booga chieftain once saw a real city (an Arab one on the coast of Africa), then made his subjects build one for him. All without really having the technology or understanding the purpose of a city.
>>18532595freckled
>>18532314This looks like it could fit like nine people
>>18532561Iirc there's enough adjacent structures for them all to be lumped together as "Zimbabwe Culture" by some.
"Great Zimbabwe" is cool when you don't have 500 fags on the internet telling you it isn't. Population wise I believe it peaked at around 8,000-10,000 people.Given that the process of plundering the shit out of it was already well underway by the mid-late 19th century, it isn't surprising that there's not much to see there now.
>>18532781Imagine how hard they must have celebrated after piling up all those stones.
>>18532781>plunderingWhat, was there a big black market for pebbles back then?
>>18532783Explorers in the 16th century were actually very impressed by the structures being built without any mortar. Of course, we know today that it's retarded, but still.>>18532784Anon, Great Zimbabwe sits in an area of countless gold mines. There's gold fucking everywhere. So yes, the place was torn to bits whilst people searched for the riches in the area.Like many things, Great Zimbabwe is something that's moderately cool and very interesting which retards online insisted was a golden great utopia which in turn caused more retards to jump the shark and insist it was nothing of notice.
>>18532791I feel no shame over my chud reaction instinct. I will begrudgingly give them credit for not being wifeguyfaggots and using their pile of stones as a symbolic womb like the cucks at Newgrange and Stonehenge.Imagine some broad hambeast Den Mother waddles over to you while you're inventing the lever and swats you over the head and tells you you have to spend the next 20 years dragging bluestones from Wales to build her a massive womb-tomb that gets only gets penetrated at the exact solstice
The surrounding farmland was not especially productive, its location on the gold trade route is what makes it exceptional. Next to it is Lake Mutirikwe, a product of Kyle Dam, before this dam there ran a tributary to the Save river, running between the more famous Limpopo and Zambezi rivers, all of which provided avenues into continental Africa. Although not always navigable, small canoes could run along long sections supporting trade on foot to the coast.Trade at this time was not like trade today where you can order something direct from a factory in China it was performed by middlemen. African tribes were not carrying ostrich plumes all the way to Europe to sell to the nobility, they sold them to another tribe who sold it to another who brought it to the coast to arab merchants who went down to Aden then others specializing in the red sea to sell to egyptian merchants who transmitted it to the mediterranean and italian merchants and so on.. Great Zimbabwe likely fit this trading pattern, accumulating gold from tribal traders on foot then organized convoys down the Save river.We see this in the masonry which clearly has little influence from the rest of the old world. This very long lintel reminiscent of stone structures from the bronze age for example. There also seems to be a lack of long lasting lime mortar. I doubt they had absolutely zero contact, no doubt couriers of sorts were sent along these trade routes, with the obvious motivation of bypassing middlemen and getting the product a little cheaper or selling it for a little more. However contact was stifled enough that the builders of Great Zimbabwe lacked access to Muslim architects and stonemasons.
>>18532793Consider, those boyim were all WHGlets being lorded over by extremely busty big bunda Neolithic Anatolian mommies.They subsisted on beast milk and slept between huge brown bunda cheeks at night.If they were lucky they’d get a chance to pound some petite elf looking creature from the Baltic when Yamnaya rapists roll the family wagon train up to do the traditional breeding session with NeolithiMommy
Great Zimbabwe was the center of a decentralized tribal kingdom, designed for the king and his court to reside in and for nearby subject chiefs to come, feast, trade and pay tribute.>>18532320Given the nature of the place, the area in the photograph, called the Great Enclosure, would have been out of bounds for anyone whose wife 'picked mangos'. It's where the king lived, along with his inner circle and wives. On that last topic, wives: if you were a male commoner, odds were you wouldn't have a wife. The Shona were always a polygynous nation, and in polygynous nations, particularly Bantu nations, women historically tended to be distributed among warriors, not farmers. So if you were a simple farmer or laborer living in one of the outer sections of the compound, then practically all of the girls you grew up with would become the secondary wives of the king's warriors.
>>18532793>pile of stones as a symbolic womb like the cucks at Newgrange and Stonehenge.That's a fringe theory that's frankly retarded. A much more plausible explanation is that these monuments served as landmarks to demonstrate land ownership and facilitate regular meetings between clans. The whole point of the solstice alignments probably was to signal when the annual market/feast/debate was supposed to start. If you were a farmer living in a village a hundred miles from Stonehenge, you'd send a delegation there every year. You'd know exactly when you were expected there because you could simply count the days from the last time. We even know when in the year that was at Stonehenge: it was at midwinter, because vast quantities of animal bones belonging to young animals that died around midwinter were found nearby. So a week or two before midwinter, with no agricultural work to be done, you'd take some pigs and maybe a cow, a bag of trade goods and any young women in search of a strategic marriage and you'd make your way to Stonehenge. There you'd meet the same representatives who were there every year, exchange news stories, solve disputes, probably engage in some religious rituals, trade your goods for things from other areas with different types of flint/woodworking/leatherworking, etc., arrange strategic marriages with other representatives and close it out with a big feast where everyone's pigs and cows were slaughtered and eaten. Then, right before your delegation started the walk back to your village, you'd look at the sun and see precisely in how many days the next midwinter would be.
>>18533014We need to RETVRN
>>18532314>What even happened here? Gold mining, cattle feuds, agriculture, trade feuds, elephant hunting. All we have to go off is oral folklore unfortunately so we can't really get a super accurate picture.>Were these precolonial subsaharan kangdoms real polities or just retroactively astroturfed settlements?Yeah, settlements like Great Zimbabwe were centers for real human organizations that did state-like things like control trade routes, extract tribute and impose an ideology over its subjects. The portuguese viewed them as such, anyway. But Great Zimbabwe was abandoned by then.>>18532791Well technically speaking the retard cycle started the other way in this case. The idea that africans built this greatly disturbed some colonialists who tried to endlessly credit it to a variety of soures, most famously Rhodesia and its hijinks.
>>18532406>Rhodesians cope about how it was actually built by Arabs is hilariousWhich makes no sense Bantus had been known to have used stone masonry all over Africa by that time why would they think Great Zimbabwe would be far fetch at all it didn't even look Arab
I feel like Arabs would be more offended that you'd think their ancestors went to Africa and started worshiping birds for no reason
>>18532406>>18533191No one said it was built by Arabs. They said it wasn’t built by the Bantu and they were correct as we know the lithic culture that was unearthed there wasn’t of Bantu origin, it was of “Khoisan” origin.
>>18532791>>18532826Interesting stuff.I got this sense that parts of Africa that got colonized in the 1800s was almost post-apocalyptic. West Africa too had large cities that Portugese traders described in the 1500s and 1600s, but were half-abandoned by the time the region was colonized. I wonder what caused this decline. Climate change?
>>18533456>we know the lithic culture that was unearthed there wasn’t of Bantu origin, it was of “Khoisan” origin.False again. The narrative was always about trying to point to another group, initially Arabs or an Arabized group then some other. The groups that made the Zimbabwe's were Bantu.
>>18533014That's an interesting story but it does nothing to explain why Newgrange is the way it is. If all they wanted was a clock-calendar there were far easier ways to do it. They could have put up two sarsens in a row that are aligned such that the shadow of the taller one exactly matches the shorter one at sunrise on the solstice. That would have taken about one day's work.Instead they labored for decades to build their clock-calendar such that it was a passage grave in the shape of a birth canal and it was only fully penetrated by a ray of light at the solstice.Obviously i was playing into the longhouse meme when we know the Newgrange folk were patrilocal and had already undergone the hunter gatherer reconquest 1500 years prior to the Newgrange construction. They didn't carve fertility goddess statues. But their ANF cousins in Southeast Europe were certainly fertility goddess worshippers, who carved 1 hunched over passive male statue for every 100 bird-masked female statues, and these cousin cultures had extensive trade networks and probably cultural relations. We need some sort of theory of their culture that would conform with 90% of them getting wiped out by the Beaker intrusion
From what I remember it was basically gold mining boom town. They built that huge walled settlement on a hill to store gold, but also the trade goods they exchanged it for. It was actually much more populous than the hilltop settlement makes it look, there was a whole complex of structures that surrounded it.
>>18533482Probably guns in conjuction with other factors.
>>18532458>This was built by the Bushmen in a last ditch effort to resist the bantu onslaught.That's not true at all. The Shona clearly built this and other such structures in the region and they could do so due to the combination of productive agriculture and intensive cattle-keeping. The Khoi or San peoples haven't shown any inclination towards building such structures.>Bushman lithic culture extends up to fucking KenyaNo it doesn't, and the Hadza are not related to the Khoisan at all, we have very little idea of what most of non-West Africa or Horn Sub-Saharan Africa looked like demographically prior to the Bantu Expansion. Cushitics seem to have had a larger range, Central African Rainforest Hunter-Gatherers ("pygmies") were probably more widespread in the Congo Basin, Khoisan peoples maybe were a bit more widespread in Southern Africa, but that's about it.And the Bantu Expansion was a combination of demographic swamping, assimilation, and probably some degree of armed conflict.>>18532561It was deemed impressive enough at the time so that White Rhodesians claimed it the Shona couldn't have possible built it.>>18532706Correct, there are multiple "zimbabwes" in the region, it's just the "Great Zimbabwe" is the largest and most well-preserved.
>>18532458>This was built by the Bushmen in a last ditch effort to resist the bantu onslaught.It's odd to try to create this weird image of some sort of organized assault considering the various Khoi speaking groups and San lived on extremely large pieces of land prior to colonialism. Several were expanding/assimilating entities in their own right.>today it is absent everywhere but the reservations created by White people in South Africa.How fucked up are you in trying to paint these reservations as a good thing?
>>18533619Some of the early explorers actually destroyed large parts of the site (and the artefacts within them) arguing that they were later corruptiuons of the original non-bantu site. This being the capital of the place where King Salomon had his famous gold mines. It was a fairly dogmatic position, but anything to justofy colonialism.
>>18533621I like that they keep calling them Khoisan as if they are the same thing. Don't the Khoi groups possibly descend from Easr African herders? Correct me if I'm wrong.
>>18533821> Don't the Khoi groups possibly descend from Easr African herders? The Khoekhoe have significant horner (and thus eurasian) ancestry, which is where they got pastoralism from.
>>18533821>>18533847Khoi and San peoples are relatively closely related and both are indigenous to Southern Africa and split off from the rest of the modern human species before OOA, some ~150,000 years ago. Some groups have some degree of Cushitic ancestry, but it's not a massive amount and whatever Eurasian DNA would be part of that would be from thousands of years ago and filtered through Cushites.>>18533815Luckily some things were preserved.
>>18532826Those can't be the original lintels, they're wooden.
>>18533529>That's an interesting story but it does nothing to explain why Newgrange is the way it is.There's another theory that's decently popular among experts on the Neolithic, which is that tombs were the best way at the time to signal clan-level land ownership. Tombs at the time were often built fairly tall, often using artificial mounds with stone bases or supports, and were located on high ground. The theory holds that these tombs sent a signal to everyone around: "our ancestors' bones are right there in that big tomb, which they built, so they were important, we are important, and the land around these tombs is unquestionably ours".That's likely what Newgrange was for, signaling status and land ownership. If you look at the location and elevation around the place, you'll find that it's located on the highest point in the area, flanked on three of its four sides by a downward slope leading straight to the river Boyne. So for everyone in the region, it would have been visible as a place marker, signaling perhaps that all the land in view of the tomb, or at least all the land on its side of the river Boyne, belonged to one group of people, one clan or tribe. And since this clan or tribe was particularly powerful/influential/land-rich, it was able to expand the size of its monumental tomb beyond those of its neighbors.As far as the alignment goes, that may be a signifier of the cycle of death and rebirth, or just a neat feature that one of their 'architects' thought of and they decided to base their tomb around, like those Africans who make coffins and gravestones shaped like luxury cars, or people who have a cheeky motto carved on their headstone ("I told you I was sick!")
>>18533529>We need some sort of theory of their culture that would conform with 90% of them getting wiped out by the Beaker intrusionThat's not all that difficult: the Neolithic farmers were no match for the new arrivals militarily (the Beaker people had a highly militarized culture and could mobilize more, larger and better-armed men in any given place at any given time). Plus, these Beaker people needed a place to settle permanently because Ireland (and Britain, of course) was the end of the road for them, no more land to move on to.There may also have been different attitudes between the two groups. The Beaker people, who were Indo-European, had a longstanding tradition of disenfranchising their 'surplus men', and it was expected that every second, third, et cetera son of a Beaker landowner would join a group of these dispossessed men, take up arms and try to carve out his own land claim somewhere else before being considered his father's/firstborn brother's equal and becoming a husband and a father. This phenomenon necessitated a life-or-death attitude in the Beaker people, one where you either killed a bunch of people and took their land or withered away, an attitude the Neolithic farmers would not have had.
>>18533619>It was deemed impressive enough at the time so that White Rhodesians claimed it the Shona couldn't have possible built it.That's your interpretation but there is not much evidence for it
>>18536057They were somewhat clear about much they didn't like the idea that local blacks stacked those rocks.
>>18533208>great>birds>more than a yard>scholars have suggested>emblems of royal authority>precise significance>powerful symbols>national emblemsamazing, to be sure
>>18534894>the Neolithic farmers were no match for the new arrivals militarilyperhaps individuals farmers vs. pastoral herding types well-versed at working in groups. odd that they came in waves across the channel, something that gave the romans pause thousands of years later. anyway, seems like something planned and executed
>>18536059what did they say
>>18532320Mangos are from India you retard
