572 inventions: Africa sailing expeditions of perhaps the greatest ocean-going vessels of the medieval era were ended just as sailors were on the verge of discovering a way to the Atlantic south of Africa Imagine what the world might have been like had Chinese ships sailed into Lisbon in al-Andalus It is often noted by historians that the voyages of discovery, which involved many small and large advances in the technology of shipbuilding, ended because factions in the imperial government argued that the Chinese empire had everything it wanted and therefore voyages of discovery were a waste of time A more fundamental reason was that the voyages were costly and the money spent on them was wanted for other projects in the empire This touches on another aspect of invention: Not even the most famous of inventors acted alone They required help During the medieval era can be seen the development of centers of invention These required three elements: the inventors, the skilled workers who aided the inventors, and people to pay the inventors and protect them Having a patron was common in much of the world Inventions such as that of the crankshaft made by al-Jazari in the 1100s were not organic developments naturally arising out of older practices They required thought and the application of mathematics Thus, in the medieval world, the mixing of cultures played a vital role in inventions The early Islamic scholars thirsted for knowledge, usually believing that every morsel of truth they uncovered was a testament to their faith in God, because God wanted them to seek the truth of his world They translated Greek books on science and engineering; they absorbed the mathematics of India; they incorporated the technology of China, such as papermaking, into their everyday lives Yet they were practical people, motivated like inventors elsewhere in the world by the desire to solve problems Support often waxed and waned for inventors and their inventions Wars or changes in governmental leadership could shut down the work of engineers Indian mathematicians went to China to find work, where they were honored Arabs looked for work as far away from home as England; Syrians moved to Europe and made glass, advancing European glassmaking with their innovations as they did so The inventions of the medieval era did not arise in vacuums; they came out of the complex interactions of creative minds and their societies Africa by Bradley Skeen Anyone living in the 21st century has been conditioned to expect life to change constantly because of new inventions and the advancement of technology But this expectation is very different from the reality of life during the Middle Ages in sub-Saharan Africa In that time and place, life was static, and its rhythms and character might not change for generations When change did come, as, for example, when a new invention was introduced, it was likely to be something from one of the cosmopolitan civilizations that existed in North Africa rather than something entirely new created in the isolation of southern Africa The greatest stimulus of change in Africa was contact between cultures For instance, many of the Khoisan peoples of Africa made the most sweeping, fundamental cultural change in human history—from being hunter-gatherers to being farmers and herdsmen—but it happened because they took up the ways of their Bantu neighbors, not because they invented new technologies It is important to keep in mind that inventions are rarely entirely new More often someone sees something in a new light or is able to put together existing things in a new way An example can seen in a new type of architecture invented in medieval Ethiopia According to biographies of the emperor Gebre Mesqel Lalibela (r 1189–1229) written later in the Middle Ages, after he had been recognized as a saint, he was inspired in a dream to invent a new kind of architecture, and there is no denying that he did so After the Christian crusaders lost the city of Jerusalem, Lalibela was constructed a new version of the city at his hometown of Roha, which he renamed after himself In it, he constructed several churches, all of which were carved out of solid rock Huge outcroppings of stone had trenches cut down into them to reveal the square shape of the buildings, which were then carved out room by room so that they were in every way like ordinary buildings—except that they were made of solid stone forming a single piece with their foundations in the mountainsides, rather than constructed in the usual way This was a completely new style of architecture, but it was not without precedent Some of the rock-cut churches originally may have been carved out of the mountainside for use as fortresses by the earlier Axumite kings of Ethiopia Also, some of the Ethiopian royal tombs in the city of Axum had tremendously large tombstones carved to resemble the facades of buildings These existing structures and designs must have been in Lalibela’s mind when the inspiration for the new form of the rock-cut church came to him Thus Lalibela created something quite new out of traditions that were available to him Another innovation coming out of medieval Ethiopia was the domestication of the coffee bean No one knows any details about how this was done, but it seems to have been completed not earlier than the ninth century c.e In general, domestication of a new variety of plant takes many generations of patient breeding to move from a wild variety to one that can be grown as an agricultural product The coffee