雙語(yǔ)+MP3|美國(guó)學(xué)生世界歷史65 沿著東非海岸

65
Along the Coast of East Africa
沿著東非海岸

     AMERICA was not the only place where adventurers sailed in search of excitement and wealth. While the Spanish were conquering the Aztecs, Incas, and Mayas in America, the Portuguese went to Africa. Just as Christopher Columbus was looking for a route to India by sailing west, the Portuguese were also looking for a way to sail to India and China. They decided to try sailing around Africa. They didn't know for sure that they could ever find an end to that continent-a way around-but they wanted to try.
     Before Columbus got to America, several Portuguese explorers sailed south along the coast of West Africa. They passed the mouth of the Senegal River that had been in Mansa Musa's empire. Then they rounded the corner of the great continent and soon came to Benin, an empire in a part of Africa that is now Nigeria. Benin was ruled by a king called an oba and was known for its beautiful artwork. If you visit a large art museum, you can see carvings and statues and ceremonial masks made in Benin. Farther south still, the ships passed an empire called Kongo. One explorer even got as far as the very southern tip of Africa, but then he turned around and headed for home.
     Five years after Columbus left Spain, Vasco da Gama left Portugal. He finally succeeded in sailing around that southern tip of Africa and into the Indian Ocean. He sailed up the east side of Africa. Then he traveled on toward India. While he was still in East Africa, he found wonderful cities that he thought nobody knew about.
     Way back, in fact, some Europeans had known that these cities were there. Greeks and Romans as well as Egyptians all knew their way to East Africa. Soon after the time of Christ, a Greek guidebook for sailors told how to get to the different ports and said that ivory, tortoise shell, and coconut oil were traded there. During these early years, the towns were small, with perhaps one thousand people living in them.
     Around 900 A.D. or about one hundred years after Charlemagne, at a time when very few Europeans were doing much traveling and all had forgotten about East Africa, an Arab geographer visited there. He was on his way home from a trip to India and China. He wrote that in East Africa the climate was warm and the land fertile and that gold and many other wonderful things were found there. We know now that a lot of traders visited East Africa during those first thousand years after Christ. Archeologists have found large numbers of coins from Persia, Greece, Rome, Arabia, and even India and China there. They have found pieces of pottery and glassware from China, India, and Arabia too. The Arabs visited East Africa most. In fact, some of the Arabs who went there to trade settled down and made their homes there. Soon the language spoken by the Africans had some Arab words mixed into it. Then Arabs began writing that language in Arabic letters. That language is called Swahili. Swahili is still spoken all through East Africa.
     The most famous early traveler to visit East Africa was a Muslim from Tangier, a city in North Africa. His name was Ibn Battuta. He was the Marco Polo of the Muslim world. In fact, he lived about the same time that Marco Polo did, in the 1300s. The stories of Ibn Battuta's travels were written in Arabic, so most Europeans never read them, but he was very famous where people knew how to read Arabic.
     That Ibn Battuta really got around! He left home when he was twenty years old to go on the pilgrimage to the Muslim holy city of Mecca. After he got there, he was having such an interesting time traveling that he didn't go back home for twenty-five years. He visited southern Russia, Persia, India, and Indonesia. And just like Marco Polo, he got all the way to China. His goal was to go everyplace in the world where there were Muslims, and he did.

City states of East Africa（東非的城邦）
     One of the most interesting places he visited was East Africa. A lot of the people there were Muslims. As you know, some were Arabs. Most were Africans. Sometimes Africans had married Arabs, and their children were amixture of the two.
     By Ibn Battuta's time, the trading towns had grown into cities. They were city states, independent like the earlier Greek city states. Each city had its own ruler, and each was surrounded by countryside where men and women farmed. You can still visit many of these cities in East Africa. The cities had names like Mogadishu, Malindi, Mombasa, and Kilwa. Try saying those names. They may seem strange at first, but soon they will seem easy to you.
     Ibn Battuta described Kilwa as the most beautiful town in the whole world. There were fountains and public squares, he said. The main palace was on a high cliff above the Indian Ocean, had one hundred rooms, and an eight-sided swimming pool. How would you like to have been a guest of the ruler in Kilwa?
     The cities all had ports where large vessels tied up. Arab ships were sixty to seventy feet long. Even larger ships came from Persia and India. Occasionally Chinese fleets of hundreds of huge ships visited the East African ports. Africans sold gold, iron, and ivory in exchange for silks, glassware, and tools. Once, the city of Malindi sent a wonderful gift to the emperor of China. Can you imagine something-that was not gold-that the ruler of Malindi might think would be a good surprise for the wealthy and powerful Chinese emperor? Something that did not exist in China? It must have made a big impression on the Chinese, because they wrote all about it-and that's how we still know about this gift. Well, have you guessed? It was a

     That's certainly something they didn't have in China!
     The rulers of those city states must have been pretty smart because one thing that they didn't have much of was war. There were some minor squabbles, but most of the cities didn't even have large fortifications except around the ports. They didn't think they needed them because they weren't fighting each other all the time. This meant that they could spend all their energy on trade and farming. I'm sure it's one reason why these cities were so prosperous.
     Eventually, though, they were attacked. Then they had a real problem. Can you guess what country decided to take over these cities? I'll give you a hint. There was a country that wanted to take control of the trade routes-that wanted to move in on the trade with India and China. Well, you may have guessed it by now. That country was Portugal. When the Portuguese discovered that not only was there gold in Africa, but that the East Africans already had the trade with the East that both Portugal and Spain wanted, they were ready to move in.
     The Portuguese came with big guns on their ships. When a city didn't just give in to them, they attacked. Mombasa was completely destroyed. All the people there were killed.
     The East Africans knew they couldn't defeat the big ships and their cannon. So they used another strategy to get rid of the Portuguese. They stopped the gold trade. The miners stopped mining gold. The merchants stopped shipping gold. Gradually the ports closed down. The people from the cities moved into the countryside and became farmers. Now, the Portuguese weren't interested in farms so except for keeping a few places where their ships could stop to get fuel and supplies on the long voyage to the Indies-they lost interest in East Africa. The people had lost their cities, but they had won their peace.