Ancient African Architecture

Pyramids at Giza (about 2500 BC)

Africa was probably the place where people first built houses for themselves out of mud and sticks, because people lived in Africa before they lived anywhere else. This was the earliest architecture. We don't know much about it, because mud and stick houses don't last as well as stone houses.

By 3000 BC, however, people were beginning to build in stone, in places where stone was available. We have the pyramids from Old Kingdom Egypt, from about 2700-2500 BC, and smaller stone tombs known as mastabas.

Egypt is also where people built great temples during the New Kingdom, around 1500 to 1200 BC.

When the Phoenicians invaded and colonized North Africa about 800 BC, they brought with them the idea of building in stone, and there were many stone temples to the goddess Tanit and other Phoenician gods in Carthage and the Carthaginian empire, all along the North African coast, from 800 BC down to 146 BC. The city of Carthage had stone houses, with drains and pebble floors.

About this time, south of Egypt, in the kingdom of Meroe (modern Sudan), there were also people building smaller pyramids.

In 146 BC, the Carthaginians were conquered by the Romans, who continued to build great stone monuments all over North Africa.

When the Romans were in turn conquered by the Vandals in the 400's AD, the Vandals built some of the earliest Christian churches in Africa.

And after the Islamic invasions of the 700's AD, there were many mosques and forts built in North Africa as well.

Along the coast, in East Africa, Islamic influence beginning about 1000 AD led people to build mosques. Inland, at the end of the great trade routes looking for ivory and gold, the people built a great city called Great Zimbabwe, about 1200 AD.