West African commerce was running before the Garamantes mattered

The Garamantes were merchants of the central Sahara who became prominent in the middle of the first millennium BCE, and a habit has grown up of crediting them with starting West African commerce. The dates make that impossible. By the time the Garamantes mattered, towns of the West African Sudan belt had been running specialised production for centuries, with artisan quarters working metal, cloth and pottery and trade routes carrying their output across two thousand kilometres of country. The system was built and operating before contact with the Mediterranean world could have set it going. The attribution survives because of a reflex Ehret spends his book dismantling, the assumption that anything complicated in Africa must have been triggered from outside, so that African achievement always turns out to be somebody else's arrival. Applied here it reverses the direction of cause. The Garamantes joined a network. They were customers of West African commerce and carriers within it, and West Africans built the thing they joined.

Words for iron and for the work of the forge spread eastward across central Africa until they stopped in the west of South Sudan, along what is now the Ethiopian border. They stopped because another body of ironworking terms was coming the other way, southward out of the northern Ethiopian highlands. The two met in eastern South Sudan around the middle of the first millennium BCE. Each set carries its own words for the furnace, the smith and the tools, and each traces back to a different chain of transmission, one African in origin and one reaching the highlands from the Middle East across the Red Sea. Had iron been born once in Anatolia and radiated outward from there, the vocabulary across this whole region would descend from a single root. Instead there are two lexical systems running into each other from opposite directions, thousands of kilometres from where either began. That meeting place is where the single origin theory stops working.

Herodotus wrote down what Carthaginians told Greek listeners about a coast beyond the Straits of Gibraltar. The ships would land, the crews would set their wares out in a row along the shore and raise smoke. People living there came down when they saw it, left gold beside the goods and withdrew. The Carthaginians came ashore and looked. If the gold matched the value they took it and sailed; if it did not they went back aboard and waited while more was added. Neither side touched what the other had put down until the exchange was settled. The same silent barter appears in much later accounts of the gold trade in the West African interior. The metal most likely came from the alluvial fields of Galam and Bambuk on the upper Niger and Senegal. This is among the earliest written notices of West African gold reaching the outside world.

East of the Mediterranean, in lands that had held states and steep social hierarchies for centuries, the new commerce changed who moved goods. Merchants took over from the agents of kings and priesthoods as the principal carriers of long-distance trade. Skilled artisans found buyers beyond the palace and the temple and worked for a wider market. Kings adjusted. They gave up monopolising the acquisition of valuable goods and took taxes on the traffic and tolls on the roads instead, raising the value of what they taxed by protecting the merchants and the routes. Protection sold for revenue is the origin of a great deal of later state finance. By the middle of the first millennium BCE the Garamantes of the central Sahara had joined West African trade to the Mediterranean system. Gold and other goods from the Sudan belt reached Carthage and later Rome through them, on routes the camel and Islam would inherit centuries afterwards.