Between the Nile and Atlantic: North Africa during the First Millennium AD

Catalog description

This course explores the history of North Africa during the first millennium AD using historical documents, archaeology, and environmental data, to better understand the past–human experience and to deconstruct colonial narratives of North African history. Within those 1000 years, North Africa witnessed the rise and fall of many empires, and the expansion of Christianity and Islam. Throughout the course, we will ask: how does regionalization and periodization affect our understanding of world history? How do we understand and identify the local population from what sources that survive today? What happens to society when empires collapse? How did trade across the Sahara affect the development of regional powers? While the geographical range of this course will focus mainly on the areas of modern Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt, much attention will be placed on how communities connected within and across the Sahara with sub-Saharan Africa, such as Ghana and Ethiopia. The theme for this course varies from year to year. Previous themes include: the archaeology of Early Islamic North Africa; and North Africa in Late Antiquity. For this Fall 2021, the course’s theme will focus on the first 100 years following the rise of Islam out of Arabia and the effect that monumental event had on North Africa. We will survey a wide variety of evidence from archaeology, art, environmental data, papyri, and historical texts from a diverse selection of languages and authors. By the end, students will be able to discuss and critically critique the sources, narratives, and histories of Early Islam that survive today. More so, they will be able to engage the history of both Islam and North Africa as a part of a wider-human history.