Fage defends the span of this volume, roughly 500 BC to AD 1050, as the stretch in which history begins in almost every part of Africa, with Egypt and the far south-west as the exceptions. His marker is iron. Smithing took hold in Egypt after the Assyrian conquest and in the north-west under Phoenician settlement, crossed the Sahara to reach Nok by about the fifth century BC, and travelled through the rest of the continent with Bantu-speaking farmers who, unusually, brought metal and agriculture almost together and skipped a bronze age entirely. He is candid that the sources are lopsided, so that the north can be narrated in detail while the southern two-thirds rest on scattered excavations and on inference from language, and he concedes the volume can look like a history of outsiders. Commissioned surveys then cover Phoenician and Greek North Africa, Ptolemaic and Roman rule, Meroe and Aksum, the Sahara, Bantu expansion, the church, the Arab conquest, Nubia and the Fatimids.