Two words for sheep trace two routes across the Congo basin

The rivers of the Congo basin carried more than iron. Sheep spread out of the African Great Lakes along the same routes, apparently starting in the first millennium BCE, and the vocabulary records the journey. One line of spread is marked by the word *-meme, which began among Central Sudanic speakers in the far southeast of what is now South Sudan and passed from language to language westward through the Bantu communities along the middle Congo, reaching the Atlantic coast at the river's mouth. A second line shows up in a Great Lakes Bantu word, *-panga, which travelled southwest in the same period from the early Bantu settlers of the lakes to the societies around and below the upper and middle Sankuru. Two words, two roads, two streams of animals. Each is documented independently through historical linguistics, and both follow the same river system that was carrying iron, goods and commercial obligation at the same time. The equatorial forest functioned as a corridor.

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.