Merchant societies with ranks and rituals made long distance trade safe

Trade across the eastern half of the Congo basin ran on an institution usually translated as secret societies. Their members were the merchants who moved the goods, together with leading figures from the chiefdoms and small kingdoms the routes passed through. Women could belong as well as men. The societies stretched from the Lomami River east to Lake Tanganyika. Secret here meant roughly what it means among Masons: ranks a member advanced through, rituals marking each advancement, and observances reserved for those who had reached a given standing. The practical effect was security. A merchant travelling with cargo could call on hospitality and protection in each district he entered, because in every district there were members of his own society or of one allied to it. Goods therefore crossed a patchwork of independent polities, including polities at odds with each other. With no single state anywhere in the region, this was the machinery that made distance trade possible, and it was made of obligation.

At Cerrillo, in the west of Puerto Rico, there is a place where people went to work flint. It reads as a workshop rather than a village, since the ground holds the waste of tool manufacture, the flakes and rejected pieces that come off shaping a nodule into something usable. Cerrillo was busiest during the changeover into the Ceramic age, when pottery was being adopted and settlement was reorganising, and the flint had been quarried there before that. The evidence indicates people were taking nodules out of the same deposit back in the Archaic age. That continuity is the interesting part. A source of good stone gets found once and then used for as long as anyone needs stone, across changes in pottery, diet and social arrangement that archaeologists treat as boundaries between cultures. The people at the flint outcrop in the seventh century were going to a place their predecessors had gone to for centuries, for the same reason.

Christianity had been seeping into Nubia on a small scale for some time, but the formal conversion of the rulers and, soon after, of most of the population came in the middle of the sixth century with missionaries from Byzantium. Julian, a Monophysite encouraged by the empress Theodora, went south in 543. The rival Melkite mission never got there in time. Theodora persuaded or ordered the governor of the Thebaid to hold it up in Upper Egypt while Julian travelled on. The doctrinal quarrel of a Byzantine court decided which form of Christianity took root on the middle Nile. The kingdom that grew from it kept a literate culture with Byzantine and Coptic colouring, its own line of bishops at Faras, and a cathedral there that the fifth bishop, Paulos, rebuilt in 707, recorded on two foundation stones, one in Greek and one in Coptic.

The evidence is indirect and it points to small states in Aïr, in West Africa, by 1000 BCE or earlier. The Nok region of Nigeria appears to have held an early strong state during the first millennium BCE, and its wealth most likely came from trading the metals found in its territory. Nok is famous for something else. Its terracotta heads and figures are among the earliest known figurative sculpture in West Africa and they sit in museums around the world, captioned as art and nothing more. The political economy behind the workshops goes unmentioned. Sculpture of that quality in that quantity implies patrons, and the patrons were living off control of metal and the trade in it. Together with Aïr, the finding puts political complexity in the Sudan belt at 1000 BCE or earlier. That is contemporary with the first Iron Age states around the African Great Lakes, and centuries before the gold trade that made Ghana, Mali and Songhay rich.