History of Africa by Kevin Shillington (13 Edtion)

History of Africa, third edition:
The writing of Afnci’s history has taken many forms over the centuries. The Ancient Egyptians, who invented one of the world’s oldest scripts, hiero glyphies, recorded then history on papyrus scrolls, on the walls of temples and tombs, and carved into solid pillars of cock They certainly wanted people of the future to know about their history, even if it was otten lenle more than king lists and Lantastre stores of the muhtary prosess of their rulers. Ethiopians too wote hitetate from at least the fifth century and aspects of theit history were recorded in religious and regal texts and in works of literature. The most prominent recorders of Alucca’s history from the math to sixteenth century were Arabic speaking, north-Atuncan scholars They wrote both the lostory of their own societies and that of the peoples ot al Sudan’ (the land of the black people), south of the Sahara, whom they had heard about through trading contacts or had visited themselves. But it was not only outsiders who wrote the history of al-Sudan. In the seventeenth century a local Muslim scholar of Timbuktu, named Abd al-Rahman al Sadi, chronicled the history of the Soughay empire in the larikh al Swiam. Similarly, in the trading comes of the cast-African coast, local Swahili-speak-ing scholars recorded some of their history, using Arabe setupt Much of these carly forms of African histoty were heavily dependent upon the local oral traditions of the time. Today they form the basis of much of our under standing of those distant times.Meanwhile in the pre-hterate societies of much of sub-Saharan Africa, people had their own way of recording and interpreting their history, passing it from one generation to the next through the tecitation of oral tradition. Some of this, such as the Sundpata Epic (see p. XXX) took the form of performance art that persists to this day Eminently clear and approachable, History of Africa remains the essential text for anyone with an interest in this remarkable continent and its fascinating past.