Key Terms
- Bantu migrations
- the millennia-long expansion of Bantu-speaking peoples southward from West and Central Africa, spreading a common cultural foundation that included language, farming, and ironworking
- Berbers
- the name used by Carthaginians, Greeks, and Romans to describe the native peoples of the Maghreb; today, this population generally self-identifies as Amazigh, or Imazighen
- biome
- a community of vegetation and wildlife adapted to a particular climate
- cataract
- a place in a river where the otherwise placid flow is upset by a waterfall, a shallow portion, or the presence of boulders
- deffufa
- a type of monumental mud-brick structure unique to Nubian civilization and believed to have served a religious function
- kentake
- a Kushite title that roughly translates to “queen mother” and was a powerful position in Meroitic Kush
- Maghreb
- the western half of North Africa, including most of present-day Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya
- Nubia
- the name Egyptians gave to the expansive area south of the first cataract and extending into sub-Saharan Africa; it included the Kingdom of Kush
- Sahel
- an east–west belt of semiarid grassland that forms a transitional zone between the Sahara to the north and the equatorial rainforest to the south
- savanna
- a grassy plain with scattered trees found to the north and south of the tropical African rainforest