What are the characteristics of agricultural development in North Africa?
Herders have been living in the northern part of the Serengeti Plain since 2000 BC, when new livestock breeds have evolved to cope with southern conditions.
Humans also began to learn to adapt to their trade economy, as travel was so difficult that different tribes rarely met and had to learn how to communicate with each other.
Farmers began to grow multiple crops and animals at the same time, growing sorghum, pearl millet and millet, and raising cattle, sheep, goats and chickens. As iron technology became widespread throughout the continent, they also began to use iron as a tool.
As agronomists took over the land, a group of hunter-gatherers were pushed to the edge. The Khoisan Bushmen were forced into the Kalahari Desert and South Africa, where they began grazing their flocks.
The jungle dwellers of the Congo region continue to hunt and gather wild plants deep in the forest, and the Bantu themselves have never formed a large civilization that has emerged anywhere else in the world. They had villages, trade networks and cultural traditions, but they did not build cities or develop advanced technology.
North Africa's climate and geography are very different from sub-Saharan Africa, and while deserts begin a few miles of ocean, the Mediterranean coast is fertile.
Carthage became the center of the North African trading empire in the fifth century, and after the Punic Wars, Rome took over most of the territory of Kaisage and formed a new province in northern Tunisia in 146 BC.
The province's roughly 5,000-square-mile area was the most fertile in North Africa, where land became Roman public land, which the government leased to grain farmers who grew wheat for export to Rome.
Property in North Africa is large, with most of the land in the hands of non-existent landowners, although there are also some more common lands owned by locals.
Scholars believe that about 500,000 tons of wheat leave Carthage each year, and Carthage has become the second largest city in the Mediterranean for its agricultural exports.
By the second century BC, North Africa continued to supply food to Rome until the end of the Roman Empire, and the main agricultural challenge facing the region was the lack of water, all African farmers had to irrigate their crops, and they invented complex systems to transport water to their fields.
In areas with narrow rivers and narrow land areas, farmers dig canals and build dikes to direct and control water. Every year, a large number of people work together to clean up debris from the canal and repair damaged structures. In areas closest to the sea, farmers must ensure that brine does not enter their irrigation structures and kill their crops.
In areas where farmland is above surface drainage level, farmers have to use mechanical irrigation systems. One of the irrigation devices is shade, a device that lifts water in a container.
It consisted of a wooden or stone frame with a long horizontal rod at the top of which the farmer would tie a bucket or leather bag to one end of the pole and a stone or clay at the other.
If the device is properly balanced, it is easy for farmers to pick up a bucket or bag of water from a body of water and swing it onto an irrigation canal that flows into farmland.
Although irrigating fields with turf is less than carrying water by hand, it is still slow and laborious, and one turf can irrigate about an acre a day. During the Hellenistic period, two more advanced irrigation devices appeared, one of which was the Persian waterwheel of the Sachians.
This device is a large wheel with a barrel around it. The cow or donkey lifts it from a river or pond and transfers it to an irrigation canal. Archimedesian screws, or Egyptian screws, are a device for lifting water through a large helix attached to a pipe attached to a bevel.
The lower end of the screw is placed in a piece of water, and the workers turn the screw by hand. As it turns, it collects and raises the water and pours it on top. Both Sachia and Archimedes screws are large and expensive pieces of equipment that most small farmers cannot reach, and only large landowners can start using them.
Sub-Saharan Africans domesticated crops that were not widely grown on other continents, and all African cereals were annual plants that completed their life cycle within a year.
However, unlike domesticated grains from the Near East, African cereals show a strong tendency to cross-linearize. Grains in the Near East pollinate themselves, which causes the seeds to produce spring like their parents, an desirable property of a crop.
African grains can interbreed with wild grains, producing plants that are not conducive to their original plants. Farmers in Africa may have a harder time domesticating crops than farmers in the Near East and Mesopotamia, and they must grow crops far from wild grains that pollute farmland.
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