Sure but even by 0AD Egypt was a vassal to Rome, and had been living under a Greek royal family for centuries prior to that after Alexander's conquests. Doubly weird considering they became the breadbasket of the empire, so it's not like they couldn't support a large population.

Egypt is on the African continent but is usually considered to be more a part of the Middle East.

There's a huge blind spot in western education about what was going on in Africa that wasn't ancient Egypt or sometimes the Carthaginians. Mansa Musa might get a mention but people don't know shit about the Mali Empire, or any of the other political formations in Africa that were contemporary to those in Medieval Europe.

A lot of this is by design because Europeans destroyed artifacts and historical sites.

Development is a nebulous term. African societies weren't building oceanic armadas or smelting steel but they were making huge advances in mathematics and physics. Some African societies were larger and wealthier than contemporary European ones. But the western yardstick is to measure the development of a society by how many bombs and iPhones it produces per second. Same goes for pre-columbus American civilizations. South American societies were engaged in full-scale hydrological engineering and advanced animal husbandry and selective agriculture exceeding European development. North American societies were governing massive tracts of land and creating self-sustaining food forest ecosystems.

Africa is not a monolith. Neither is development. North Africa was pretty advanced if I recall correctly with people like Mansa Musa and there were very significant cultural and scientific developments in the Muslim world at the time. I think that Europeans had better armaments, armor, naval technology and possibly construction ability. However that is a result of Europe having more easily attainable iron and coal deposits, constant war and England being an island. African animals are also more or less impossible to domesticate (except camels and maybe zebras, but not really) and this gave Europeans a leg up in agriculture and prioritized urban development which in turn leads to ideas spreading faster and more technological development. I think a lot of the gap was due to Europe having more cities, which also allowed for biological warfare. Parts of Africa were incredibly wealthy and developed and parts more or less operated off sustenance farming.

The answer is complicated for the reasons others have said, but I like to explain it this way:

Advanced, peaceful aliens arrive at Earth in 1400 CE. They want to set up relations with earth but they are used to dealing with planets that have one planetary government, society, etc (just like Star Trek). They don’t quite know how to deal with such a fractured and diverse planet.

So these aliens decide to only meet with leaders from selected societies. They don’t have specific criteria but are generally looking at a whole host of factors we might broadly call “development”: education, metallurgy, governmental forms, material output, health & sanitation systems, etc.

The aliens would almost certainly choose to meet with reps from at least China, India, Persia, the Byzantine Empire, North and West Africa, parts of the Arab world, and Tenochtitlan. Europe, outside of Byzantium and Al-Andalus, would have been completely bypassed. On a global scale Europe was a poor, irrelevant backwater that didn’t have much in the way of achievements that we mention or much pull beyond its own corner of the globe. If you could go back to 1400 and live some place for a year, you almost certainly wouldn’t pick Europe.

Outside of North Africa (and some part of West Africa)… I don’t know much about comparing the rest of the continent to Europe. But I really don’t think they were much behind if at all.

If you look at pre-industrial societies, then Africa is on par or even ahead of Europe, examples would be the Umayyad Caliphate, Egypt, the Malian Empire, the Abyssinian Empire, the Kongo, and the Zanzibar Sultanate.

My first thought too lol. Malaria, dengue fever, whole bunch of other ones.

The answer boils down to geography really

Ah, so that explains Florida

Is the earliest known evidence of civilisation not in Mesopotamia?