9700–5000 BCE: (Culture and Belief in the Age of Incipient Agriculture — Africa Introducing New Directions for Rethinking the History of Ideas, a Common West…

9700–5000 BCE: (Culture and Belief in the Age of Incipient Agriculture — Africa Introducing New Directions for Rethinking the History of Ideas, a Common Western Presumption Being That Monotheism Emerged Only in the Past Three Millennia, but in Fact Monotheistic Religions Already Predominated Thousands of Years Earlier Among Two Major African Groupings — Niger-Congo Speakers and Nilo-Saharan Speakers — Long Before This Kind of Belief Emerged in the Middle East): Bringing Africa fully into our conversations about world history from 9700 to 5000 BCE has the added benefit of introducing new directions for broadening and rethinking our understandings of the history of ideas. Religion in Africa during this transitional age from foraging to farming offers two notable case studies. A common Western presumption has long been that monotheism is an idea that emerged in the past three millennia, and historians have rightly given major attention to the spread of monotheistic religions widely around the world during the most recent two millennia. But in fact, monotheistic religions already predominated thousands of years earlier among two major groupings of African cultures and peoples — among the speakers of the Niger-Congo languages and of the Nilo-Saharan languages — long before this kind of belief emerged in the Middle East. The standard Western narrative of monotheism runs like this: the idea of one God was born among the ancient Israelites, refined by the prophets, universalized by Christianity and Islam, and spread to the rest of the world through missionary activity and imperial expansion. It is a narrative that places the Middle East at the center and the last three millennia as the relevant time frame. Ehret demolishes this narrative with a single observation: two of Africa’s largest language families — encompassing between them the majority of the continent’s population — had monotheistic belief systems thousands of years before Abraham. The history of monotheism does not begin in the Levant. It begins in Africa, and the Middle Eastern versions that the Western academy treats as the origin of the idea are, in the deep time of human religious thought, relatively recent innovations in a story that began many millennia earlier, among African peoples the Western tradition has never bothered to consult.