is not always considered part of Africa proper. Imperialists could still claim that there was no civilization on the rest of the Dark Continent.
There are gaps in the archaeological record, but recent evidence indicates that the first African kingdom may have been located in the area historically known as Nubia, an area south of Egypt. It was in this region where agriculture may have first appeared. By the third millennium B.C.E., contacts between the areas of the upper and lower Nile were established, and there was trade between Egyptian merchants and those of Nubia for ivory, ebony, frankincense, and leopard skins. In time, Nubia became an Egyptian territory, but at the end of the second millennium B.C.E. the region took advantage of the disintegration of the Egyptian New Kingdom and became the independent kingdom of Kush. This kingdom would emerge as one of the leading trading states in the area, and the discovery of iron ore near the river at Meroe only increased this trading position. Kush would be a major commercial empire for several hundred years, providing goods from Central and West Africa to Rome and its tributary states in the Mediterranean. While Kushite culture borrowed heavily from the Egyptian, historians were wrong in considering Kush as a mere tributary of the Egyptian empire. One of the reasons much is not known about the Kushites is that they developed a phonetic script unrelated to Egyptian hieroglyphics, a script that has not yet been deciphered:
This evocative land of Nubia has been described as the cockpit of the ancient world, the point of contact between the civilizations of the Mediterranean and the now lost early cultures of inner Africa. (Keating, 1963, 96)
By the sixth century, three states had emerged as cultural heirs of the earlier Meriotic kingdom in northern Egypt--Nobatia in what is now Egypt, Makuria, and Alwa or Alodia. These are the successor kingdoms of Nubia, and they are first...