While most of what is now Niger has been subsumed into the inhospitable Sahara desert in the last two thousand years, five thousand years ago the north of the country was fertile grasslands. Populations of pastoralists have left paintings of abundant wildlife, domesticated animals, chariots, and a complex culture that dates back to at least 10,000 BCE. Several former northern villages and archaeological sites date from the Green Sahara period of 7,500–7,000 to 3,500–3,000 BCE.
Early historical period
The Songhai Empire expanded into what is modern Niger from the 15th century, reaching as far as Agadez before its collapse in 1591, from which the modern Zarma and Songhai peoples trace their history. At its fall, portions of the empire and refugees from modern Mali formed a series of Songhai states, with the Dendi Kingdom becoming the most powerful. From the 13th century, the nomadic Tuareg formed large confederations, pushed southward, into the Aïr Mountains, displacing some previous residents to the south. At their peak, the Tuareg confederations ruled most of what is now northern Niger, and extended their influence into modern Nigeria.
In the 18th century, Fula pastoralists moved into the Liptako area of the west, while smaller Zarma kingdoms, siding with various Hausa states, clashed with the expanding Fulani Empire of Sokoto from the south. The colonial border with British Nigeria was in part based on the rupture between the Sokoto Caliphate to the south, and Hausa ruling dynasties which had fled to the north. In the far east around the Lake Chad basin, the successive expansion of the Kanem Empire and Bornu Empire spread ethnically Kanuri and Toubou rulers and their subject states as far west as Zinder and the Kaouar Oases from the 10th to the 17th centuries.
In the 19th century, contact with the West began when the first European explorers — notably Mungo Park (British) and Heinrich Barth (German) —
