Northeast Africa

Jebel Sahaba (Arabic: جَبَل ٱلصَّحَابَة, romanized: Jabal Aṣ-Ṣaḥābah, lit. 'Mountain of the Companions'; also Site 117) is a prehistoric cemetery site in the Nile Valley (now submerged in Lake Nasser), near the northern border of Sudan with Egypt in Northeast Africa. It is associated with the Qadan culture. It was discovered in 1964 by a team led by Fred Wendorf.

Since their discovery, the skeletons of Jebel Sahaba have been continuously re-evaluated by anthropologists seeking to determine the circumstances of their death. As of the most recent study (2021), it seems most likely that the war (dating to c. 12th millennium BC) was driven by resource scarcity due to climate change. Tribes of the Qadan culture partook in a series of raids and ambushes against one another with projectile weapons - mostly light arrows, but also much heavier arrows or throwing spears.

The Queen of Sheba, named Bilqis in Arabic and Makeda in Geʽez, is a figure first mentioned in the Hebrew Bible. In the original story, she brings a caravan of valuable gifts for Solomon, the fourth King of Israel and Judah. This account has undergone extensive elaborations in Judaism, Ethiopian Christianity, and Islam. It has consequently become the subject of one of the most widespread and fertile cycles of legends in West Asia and Northeast Africa, as well as in other regions where the Abrahamic religions have had a significant impact.

Modern historians and archaeologists identify Sheba as one of the South Arabian kingdoms, which existed in modern-day Yemen. However, because no trace of her has ever been found, the Queen of Sheba's existence is disputed among historians.

In classical antiquity, the Hellenistic period covers the time in Greek, Eastern Mediterranean, and West Asian (or Middle Eastern) history following Classical Greece, between the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC and the death of Cleopatra VII in 30 BC, in which all these regions were under the influence of Greek leadership, culture, and language as a result of Alexander's conquests. The Hellenistic period was followed by the ascendancy of the Roman Empire, the Battle of Actium in 31 BC, and the Roman conquest of Ptolemaic Egypt the following year, which eliminated the last major Hellenistic kingdom. Its name stems from the Ancient Greek word Hellas (Ἑλλάς, Hellás), which was gradually recognized as the name for Greece, from which the modern historiographical term Hellenistic was derived. The term "Hellenistic" is to be distinguished from "Hellenic" in that the latter refers to Greece itself, while the former encompasses all the ancient territories of the period that had come under significant Greek influence, particularly the Hellenized Ancient Near East, after the conquests of Alexander the Great.

After the Macedonian conquest of the Achaemenid Empire in 330 BC and its disintegration shortly thereafter in the Partition of Babylon and subsequent Wars of the Diadochi, Hellenistic kingdoms were established throughout West Asia (Seleucid Empire, Kingdom of Pergamon), Northeast Africa (Ptolemaic Kingdom) and South Asia (Greco-Bactrian Kingdom, Indo-Greek Kingdom). This resulted in an influx of Greek colonists and the export of Greek culture and language to these new realms, a breadth spanning as far as modern-day India. These new Greek kingdoms were also influenced by regional indigenous cultures, adopting local practices which were deemed beneficial, necessary, or convenient. Hellenistic culture thus represents a fusion of the ancient Greek world with that of the Western Asian, Northeastern African, and Southwestern Asian worlds. The consequence of this mixture gave rise to a common Attic-based Greek dialect, known as Koine Greek, which became the lingua franca throughout the ancient world.

Darius I (Old Persian: 𐎭𐎠𐎼𐎹𐎺𐎢𐏁 Dārayavaʰuš; c. 550 – 486 BCE), commonly known as Darius the Great, was the third King of Kings of the Achaemenid Empire, reigning from 522 BCE until his death in 486 BCE. He ruled the empire at its territorial peak, when it included much of West Asia, parts of the Balkans (Thrace–Macedonia and Paeonia) and the Caucasus, most of the Black Sea's coastal regions, Central Asia, the Indus Valley in the far east, and portions of North Africa and Northeast Africa including Egypt (Mudrâya), eastern Libya, and coastal Sudan.

Darius ascended the throne after overthrowing the Achaemenid monarch Bardiya (or Smerdis), who he claimed was in fact an imposter named Gaumata. The new king met with rebellions throughout the empire but quelled each of them; a major event of Darius's career described in Greek historiography was his punitive expedition against Athens and Eretria for their participation in the Ionian Revolt.

The region of Palestine is part of the wider region of the Levant, which represents the land bridge between Africa and Eurasia. The areas of the Levant traditionally serve as the "crossroads of Western Asia, the Eastern Mediterranean, and Northeast Africa", and in tectonic terms are located in the "northwest of the Arabian Plate". Palestine itself was among the earliest regions to see human habitation, agricultural communities and civilization. Because of its location, it has historically been seen as a crossroads for religion, culture, commerce, and politics. In the Bronze Age, the Canaanites established city-states influenced by surrounding civilizations, among them Egypt, which ruled the area in the Late Bronze Age. During the Iron Age, two related Israelite kingdoms, Israel and Judah, controlled much of Palestine, while the Philistines occupied its southern coast. The Assyrians conquered the region in the 8th century BCE, then the Babylonians c. 601 BCE, followed by the Persian Achaemenid Empire that conquered the Babylonian Empire in 539 BCE. Alexander the Great conquered the Persian Empire in the late 330s BCE, beginning Hellenization.

In the late 2nd-century BCE Maccabean Revolt, the Jewish Hasmonean Kingdom conquered most of Palestine; the kingdom subsequently became a vassal of Rome, which annexed it in 63 BCE. Roman Judea was troubled by Jewish revolts in 66 CE, so Rome destroyed Jerusalem and the Second Jewish Temple in 70 CE. In the 4th century, as the Roman Empire adopted Christianity, Palestine became a center for the religion, attracting pilgrims, monks and scholars. Following Muslim conquest of the Levant in 636–641, ruling dynasties succeeded each other: the Rashiduns; Umayyads; Abbasids; the semi-independent Tulunids and Ikhshidids; Fatimids; and the Seljuks. In 1099, the First Crusade resulted in Crusaders establishing of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, which was reconquered by the Ayyubid Sultanate in 1187. Following the invasion of the Mongol Empire in the late 1250s, the Egyptian Mamluks reunified Palestine under its control, before the region was conquered by the Ottoman Empire in 1516, being ruled as Ottoman Syria until the 20th century largely without dispute.

The incense trade route was an ancient network of major land and sea trading routes linking the Mediterranean world with eastern and southern sources of incense, spices and other luxury goods, stretching from Mediterranean ports across the Levant and Egypt through Northeast Africa and Arabia —through both the sea and the land along the Red Sea— to India and beyond. These routes collectively served as channels for the trading of goods such as Arabian frankincense and myrrh; Indian spices, precious stones, pearls, ebony, silk and fine textiles; and from the Horn of Africa, rare woods, feathers, animal skins, Somali frankincense, gold, and slaves. The incense land trade from South Arabia to the Mediterranean flourished between roughly the 3rd century BC and the 2nd century AD.

Copts (Coptic: ⲚⲓⲢⲉⲙ̀ⲛⲭⲏⲙⲓ ̀ⲛ̀Ⲭⲣⲏⲥⲧⲓ̀ⲁⲛⲟⲥ, romanized: NiRemenkēmi enKhristianos; Arabic: أقباط, romanized: aqbāṭ) are a Christian ethnoreligious group native to Northeast Africa who have primarily inhabited the area of modern Egypt since antiquity. They are, like the broader Egyptian population, descended from the ancient Egyptians. Copts predominantly follow the Coptic Orthodox Church, the Alexandrian Greek Orthodox Church and the Coptic Catholic Church. They are the largest Christian population in Egypt and the Middle East, as well as in Sudan and Libya. Copts account for roughly 5 to 15 percent of the population of Egypt.

Originally referring to all Egyptians, the term Copt became synonymous with native Christians in light of Egypt's Islamization and Arabization after the Muslim conquest of Egypt in 639–646 AD. Copts have historically spoken the Coptic language, a direct descendant of the Demotic Egyptian that was spoken in late antiquity.