From the Serengeti and Ngorongoro across the Rift and Lake Eyasi to the Maasai steppe.
In 1200 the herders of these plains are Southern Nilotes, forebears of the Datooga (the Maasai arrive only in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries); Southern Cushitic farmers and herders, forebears of the Iraqw, Gorowa and Burunge, hold the Mbulu highlands; the Hadza hunt round Lake Eyasi and the Sandawe in the Kondoa hills, where the rock paintings are older still. The stone-built irrigation of Engaruka belongs to the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries and has not been built.
Who holds it
- Name
- Not known: no leader is named for this date
- Title
- Heads of lineages, villages and clans
- Since
- Not pinned
- Confidence
- low
How things stand that morning
Independent herding, farming and foraging peoples. The Lake Victoria shores to the north-west, the Mara and the Kenyan Rift are the neighbouring researcher's ground.
Customs
Cattle herding with age-sets among the Nilotic herders; Cushitic farmers on terraced highland fields; hunting and gathering among the Hadza and Sandawe.
Assemblies
Clan and age-set elders among the herders; lineage heads among the farmers. No chief over any whole people is attested.
What the year holds
What happened next, if nothing in play changes it. Each event carries what it depends on and what would stop it.
- Through 1200No dated event is known.
Where the sources disagree
Evidence: Language history (Ehret) and the archaeology of the Pastoral Neolithic and Iron Age, thin for this century; Engaruka dated fifteenth to eighteenth century.
On the map: Drawn from modern language areas, physical geography and a few dated sites; the 1200 extent is a rough guess.
Sources and studies
- Ehret, An African Classical Age (1998) and Nurse and Spear, The Swahili (1985), on the language history of the East African interior and coast (cited from memory of the literature)
- Wikipedia, Engaruka (fifteenth to eighteenth century)
- UNESCO General History of Africa, vol. 4, and Cambridge History of Africa, vol. 3, chapters on East Africa and the interior (cited from memory of the literature)
Last revised 4 November 2026. Published 4 November 2026. Suggest a correction on the OMNIA Discord.