Ancient Rome and Sub Saharan Africa

To stand on a boat at its thundering base is to be amazed at the immensity of water that pours through the narrow rocks walls that force the river through the canyon they form.  The falls have remained unchanged for centuries, so you are standing at one of the gateways on this earth between the unsullied grandeur of nature and the way the landscape is layered into human memory.

‘Our people believed that the gods lived here,’ David Onguti, a ranger at the park, told me around the fire that night. ‘Like the Greeks and Romans,’ he added. He talked until late in the night of the legends surrounding the falls and I woke the next morning to a flock of Sacred Ibis winging their way upriver against the mauve and pink of sunrise layering the sky.

The Nile is the greatest river in history. It has flowed through thousands of years of memory and imagination. Tutankhamen, Cleopatra, Shakespeare, Napoleon Bonaparte – all of them have touched or been touched by its waters. The ancient Greeks and Romans knew it as an integral part of their world.

Recently, I was doing some research for my latest novel and I was astonished to find that it is possible that the ancient Romans had ventured out of Egypt and come as far south down the Nile as Murchison Falls. Pliny the Elder wrote of an expedition of Praetorian guards sent by Nero in AD 61 from Meroe in Egypt into the interior of Africa ‘when among the rest of his wars he was actually contemplating an attack on Ethiopia.’

The historian, Seneca, writing at much the same time, quotes two Roman centurions whom he claims to have heard ‘from their own lips the story told by the two officers sent to investigate the sources of the Nile by our good emperor Nero.’  The men travelled for many miles to huge marshes which must correspond to the marshes of the present Sudd, ‘the limit of which no one could hope to know … there, my informants went on, “we saw with our own eyes two rocks from which an immense quantity of water issued.”’

Very little real archaeological work has been done to uncover tangible evidence of a Roman presence in sub-Saharan Africa. North Africa and Egypt, of course, were a vital part of the Mediterranean world and Ethiopia, certainly, was well known to ancient Europeans for centuries. Herodotus, writing nearly 2500 years ago, gave extensive descriptions of Ethiopian people, customs and history. Many other sources attest to this ongoing connection.

There are, however, a number of tantalizing fragments of documents and discoveries that point to the Greeks and Romans having a much greater knowledge of both the interior and the southern part of the continent than is commonly known.

Ptolemy the Geographer, a Greek-Roman citizen of Egypt, writing in his Geography in the second century AD, describes the interior of Africa beyond Ethiopia quite accurately: ‘toward the west are the Mountains of the Moon from which the lakes of the Nile receive snow water.’

He goes on to itemize a long list of towns and ports all down the eastern seaboard of Africa.  Some scholars believe that his knowledge of the coast extended as far south as Cabo Delgado in northern Mozambique. Ptolemy included details of the latitude of each place he mentions.  The most intriguing of these is a port called Rhapta which is also mentioned in a book written by an unknown Greek author called the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea.  The Periplus is probably the most comprehensive documents we have of the ancient world of the Indian Ocean.  According to the most thorough translation by Lionel Casson: ‘Two runs beyond this island comes the very last port of trade on the coast of Azania, called Rhapta, where there are great quantities of ivory and tortoise shell.’

A ‘run’ is about 100 nautical miles. The mysterious island is very likely Zanzibar, which means that Rhapta would have lain at the mouth of the Rufiji River in Tanzania.  This is supported by finds by the archaeologist Felix Chami of the University of Dar es Salaam in which he uncovered Greco-Roman pottery and Syrian glass   Even more recent discoveries based on his reading of Ptolemy have led to his unearthing shards of pottery and human bones on Juani island off the coast at Rufiji which point to extensive East African trade in the ancient world. It is possible that the island the Periplus talks of is the larger Mafia island off the Rufiji delta which would then add further evidence to the Romans and Greeks being familiar with the coast as far south as Mozambique.

Even old Chinese documents point to the likelihood that the Greeks and Romans were familiar with east and southern Africa. The fragmentary remains of text and footnotes of the Weilüe an account of the Wei dynasty by historian Yu Huan written in the third century refers to the ‘kingdom of Da Qin’ which was Rome and the territory of ‘Zesan’ which scholars believe is likely to be a corruption of ‘Azania’, the Roman and Greek name for the East African coast.

Coins survive for centuries and are reliable indicators of extensive trade, but they can be carried for thousands of miles in a leather pouch or even someone’s pocket, so they are uncertain indicators of any Greek or Roman presence in southern Africa.  Nonetheless, Victorian archaeologists searching the ruins of the civilization of Great Zimbabwe found a coin from the reign of the Emperor Antoninus Pius (AD 138 – 161) in an old shaft near Mutare at a depth of nearly 25 metres which indicates an age of some antiquity.  Curiously, too, a Roman coin from the reign of Emperor Trajan (AD 98 -117) was found on the Congo River about a century ago.

Clearly, as the late Roman Empire expanded in its last centuries, sub-Saharan Africa was a place they were reaching out towards.  It was Pliny himself who wrote the famous line ‘Out of Africa always something new.’ But with the fall of Rome and the descent of Europe into the political chaos and ignorance of the Middle Ages, the interior of Africa became shrouded in mystery, it became the ‘Dark’ Continent.  The memory of the growing connections between Africa and the world of ancient Europe faded and became largely lost for centuries.  Some evidence, though, remains, and no doubt there is much more that can be found.  In the meantime, I like to think that the gods of Murchison Falls have never forgotten those two centurions staring in awe at the beauty of Africa and the mighty torrents of the Nile thundering through their canyons.