By Stan Wadolowski, B.A. from University of Cambridge
Much more than one would expect.
We all know that the Romans directly controlled the entire North African coastline from Morocco to Egypt. The only authentically inland possession was Egypt due to the fertile and hospitable land surrounding the Nile.
But the Romans were hardly oblivious to what lie beyond. In fact, many Romans penetrated places in Africa that modern Europeans would not survey until just a few hundred years ago.
I created a map that colors in red present-day countries in Africa that there is good evidence for Roman citizens stepping foot in at some stage, with green for countries where the evidence is perhaps more equivocal.
Cape Verde
Compared to the East African coastline, there were not really many reasons for the Romans to venture out into the West African waters. Nevertheless, Pliny the Elder suggests that a Roman expedition was dispatched in 10 AD and visited an archipelago of islands where there were no humans but a great number of dogs (Canis = dog in Latin, and hence the name Canary Islands).
It is likely that another naval expedition around this time reached present-day Cape Verde. That is because there are references in Roman literature to a set of islands called the “Gorgades” situated two days sail away from the Senegal peninsula – something they could only know if someone had at some stage made the journey.
While Cape Verde is most likely the furthest that the Romans ventured into the Atlantic Ocean, the Romans under Augustus actually planned to circumnavigate the African continent. This was prompted by the discovery in the Red Sea of a sunken ship believed to be originally from Spain (at least according to the Romans), and hence the belief that Africa could be circumnavigated.
Mali
By land, Western Africa is probably the most impregnable frontier separating Northern Africa from sub-Saharan Africa. The vast Atlas mountain range extends from the Atlantic coast of Morocco to Tunisia, and it means that anyone wishing to cross north to south would have to first have to clamber up mountains covered with snow throughout the year before even setting food in the ruthless inferno that is the Sahara.
Atlas Mountain Range
Yet this treacherous journey was undertaken by Suetonius Paulinus in the first century AD. As governor of Mauretania (modern Algeria and Morocco), one of his main preoccupations was stamping out rebellious groups hiding in the rocks and shadows of the Atlas mountains. Presumably curiosity got the better of him on one of his campaigns, for in 41AD he decided to take his legionaries to the top of the range and see whats lie on the other side.
After ascending an ice-covered peak, for Paulius the view of a vast desert sprawling across the horizon was not enough to lessen his appetite for exploration – and he proceeded to trek the Sahara sands with his legionaries. Now it is unclear where exactly Paulinus and his men ended up. According to Pliny the Elder, Paulinus traversed “deserts covered with black dust occasionally broken by projections of rock that looked as if they had been burnt” before he reached “forests – which swarm with elephants, wild animals and all kinds of snakes”. Now the latter could be Senegal or Mali, but in either case it seems very likely that Paulinus did in fact cross the Sahara given the unmistakably West African features that are described.
Roman coins and Latin ceramics have been found in Mali, but this could just as well be the result of cultural interchange – coins with the face of Trajan have been found in Congo, but it’s hardly plausible that any Roman ever set foot there.
Chad
Modern Lake Chad is a speck on the map compared to the gigantic lake that once extended across the heart of the Sahara, making it much more accessible to the Romans by foot than it is today. And indeed, in 90 AD a merchant by the name of Julius Maternus is believed to have journeyed southwards to the heart of the Garamantes tribe that was located in present-day Fezzan (south-western present-day Libya). Here, he joined the Garamantes King on a military expedition southwards towards one of his subjects, what Ptolemy calls the “Agisymba”. Maternus’s account of tall mountains, which correspond most likely to the Tibesti Mountains in the north of Chad today, and the presence of elephants and rhinos, which could only live in the presence of some larger body of water (i.e. contemporary Lake Chad) makes it very likely that Maternus found himself in present-day Chad.
Lake Megachad in the early Holocene (12,000 to 7,000 BC). During Romans times it was probably smaller than this, but nevertheless much larger than it is today.
South Sudan
The source of the Nile was a great puzzle to the men and women of antiquity, as revealed in one of the poems of Horace, ”the Nile, which hides the source of its sources”. Curiously enough, it was Nero of all emperors who organized an exploratory operation in 60/61 AD to map the source of the Nile. Guided by two centurions – which says something about the seriousness of the whole enterprise – the expedition travelled down the Nile until they came across:
"huge marshes, the limit of which even the natives did not know, and no one else could hope to know; so completely was the river entangled with vegetable growth, so impassable the waters by foot, or even by boat…”
This is almost unmistakably the Sudd that is being described, a massive swamp in present-day South Sudan that literally means “barrier”.
Tanzania
The Romans knew about south-eastern Africa, which they called Azania. Ports along the coastline of east Africa were part of an intricate trading network across the Indian Ocean in which the Romans participated. But while Romans in trading posts on the Egyptian Red Sea coast must have known that the goods they were receiving were arriving from Azania, the question remains whether any Roman actually got to the places where these goods had originally come from.
Ptolemy describes the testimony of a merchant in the Indian ocean trade named Diogenes (Greek admittedly, but then again a Roman subject) who in circa 100 AD was blown off course and after 25 days at sea found himself in a trading city called Rhapta. According to his account, Rhapta was characterized by a river entering the Indian ocean and an island on the other side of the coast forming a strait. This sounds quite a lot like present-day Zanzibar in Tanzania, thought it could also be Pemba island (north of Zanzibar) and Mafia island (south of Zanzibar). In either case, if Diogenes’s account is true, then he there was a Greek man from the Roman Empire stepping foot in what is present-day Tanzania.
But Diogenes’s story doesn’t end there. Diogenes actually ventured inland, coming across a set of mountains that the natives called the “Mountains of the Moon” because their snow-covered tops stood out against the backdrop of the lush greenery of the African jungle. More importantly, there was water emanating from these mountains into large pools of water – Diogenes was convinced he found the source of the Nile. Now Diogenes realistically might have stumbled across several mountain ranges in Eastern Africa – but the presence of both mountains and a pool of water (i.e. a Lake) bears striking similarity to the Ruwenzori Mountains and Lake Victoria, which indeed are the source of the Nile – meaning that Diogenes’s might well have correctly identified the source of the Nile almost two millennia before this was done for the first time in modern history by the British in 1854.
Medieval map made based upon Ptolemy’s description of the Nile. The lakes and mountains seen on the bottom were most likely influenced by the account of Diogenes.
All in all, the ancients did some pretty amazing things exploration-wise.
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