African Cavalry Units - North Africa and Sahel
I would love to be able to use these sprites in any way of game development or other projects that may seem intersting.
This is lovely. I have been checking out african medieval history for a bit this year, but it's incredible hard to find interesting visual content like this. GOt a thing for those charts as you saw from the knight chart :)
It's easy to see how the internet is flooded with european and asian history in pop culture, games and such yet Africa is always kind of left outside the picture. There are even some narratives and ideas like thinking Africa didn't have any cool, powerful cultures and states in antiquety. Or Egypt being the only african civilization most people can name out of the whole continent.
I'd say in pop culture a lot got super distilled in just the last 25 years (or since LotR) and not much new material found entry in the go-to inspirations. And for the Japanese influence I'd say the popuarity of Manga & Anime has a big part to do with it. Black Panther probably was a big outlier, but the most popular piece of media with African inspiration recently.
If you look into earlier pop culture and fiction it's also a very different piicture from today, e.g. all the Mega Drive Fantasy Games there is a distinctive orientalism (inspired from 1001 Nights) going on, If you look at the tales of Robert E. Howard, the guy who wrote Conan and is like one of the driving forces of the more "primeeval" kind of fantasy, there is a lot of inspiration of Africa going on, but of course it's 100 years old and told with the casual American mindset from the time. Also a lot of the lost world genre like e.g. Haggards King Solomon Mines have a fascination with Africa (more from a British view). And you also got all currents of Orientalism much earlier, which if African inspired mainly take inspiration from Egypt (Cleopatra which is connected to Rome).
Literally there is barely any good information to find in European history regarding Africa, aside some border quarrels (Egypt through Rome and the Moors are Important) and that's still the extend of the biggest information there is.
And considering this and how hard it is to get and understand history of a stem of language and culture you are familiar with, it becomes increibly harder to understand something which is more alien. Like how Japanese "western fantasy" struggles with western concepts not in their worldview.
I tried to learn a bit about Africa myself, but there is just much less overall available and therefore much less research and much less information, cross references and pieces of art connected to it. Maybe it will change in the next 30 years, it seems like interest overall is rising.
looks amazing, love the details
omg being noticed feels so warm haha thankyou :3 i love your work as well
You should try to make African infantry Units
Absolutely, i actually have some sketches and ideas, just gotta figure out in which order i should go. I do have some more guys that i really should post somewhere.