50,000+ BCE–300 CE: (The Architecture of the Book, Chapters 2 Through 5 as Longue Durée Arguments: Technological Invention in Africa Paralleling and Sometime…

50,000+ BCE–300 CE: (The Architecture of the Book, Chapters 2 Through 5 as Longue Durée Arguments: Technological Invention in Africa Paralleling and Sometimes Leading Innovation Elsewhere, Independent Inventions of Agriculture and the Spread of African Crops Including the Donkey to Other World Regions, the Seminal Contributions of African Merchants to Long-Distance Commerce Across the African-Eurasian Macrocontinent, and the Deeply African Foundations of Ancient Egyptian Culture, Beliefs, and Institutions): In Ancient Africa: A Global History, Ehret organizes his subsequent chapters around four longue durée arguments, each designed to illuminate how history in ancient Africa moved along paths broadly parallel to contemporary courses of change outside the continent, how those developments came to intersect with developments elsewhere, and how they raise fundamental issues for our understanding of world history as a whole. Chapter 2 explores notable cases of technological invention in Africa from the close of the last Ice Age through the first millennium BCE, relating them to parallel courses of invention elsewhere. Chapter 3 turns to the independent inventions of agricultural ways of life in Africa, taking place broadly over the same periods as such developments elsewhere, and brings attention to the spread of numerous African crops and one key domesticated animal, the donkey, to other world regions. Chapter 4 addresses the seminal contributions of African merchants and tradespeople, beginning in the second millennium BCE, to the advent and spread of long-distance systems of commerce across the African-Eurasian macrocontinent. Each chapter compares changes in Africa with those in other parts of the world, showing similarities and often the leadership of Africans in innovation. Chapter 5 then takes on what may be the most consequential longue durée correction of all: laying out the deeply African foundations of ancient Egyptian culture, beliefs, and institutions, findings that four decades of archaeological discoveries and linguistic historical studies have now made abundantly clear. The implications are enormous. If Egypt is African, then the oldest civilization the West has claimed as its intellectual ancestor belongs to the continent it has spent centuries disparaging.