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Eugene N. Anderson
University of California-Riverside The systemic connections between Eurasia and Africa will be examined here in the light of three brief pictures: the rise of civilization from the Neolithic to the beginning of civilization in the Near East and Egypt, with the coming of Near Eastern crops to the latter and African domesticates to the former; the very important period around 1500-1200 BCE, when the systems fused into one; and the late Roman Empire and just after, when Egypt imported major south Asian plants and began to raise many of them. These show that defining the beginning of systems is very difficult, because of the undocumented flow of vitally important commodities and even staple goods in a time when literary sources either did not exist or were confined largely to elite matters.
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