Napata ruled a larger empire than Egypt ever governed

Between about 750 and 663 BCE the kings of Napata held the largest state the Nile had yet carried. Their capital stood on the Dongola Reach in what is now Sudan. Their realm ran two thousand kilometres from north to south, from below the meeting of the Abbai with the White Nile through most of Egypt, and it was multiethnic, its peoples speaking mainly Nilo-Saharan languages. In land and in population it exceeded anything Egypt commanded at any point in three thousand years of dynastic history. Textbooks file the period as the Twenty-fifth Dynasty, a numbered slot in an Egyptian sequence, which turns the expansion of an independent African state into an episode in the history of the country it swallowed. These kings governed from the Dongola Reach to the Delta. Their political and religious traditions came out of the Middle Nile, and they carried those traditions downstream with them. For a century, Egypt was ruled from Sudan.

Around 700 BCE the knowledge of iron smelting began moving out from the early Great Lakes Bantu to the rest of the early Mashariki, the eastern branch of Bantu speakers. The Great Lakes region is where Schmidt and Avery documented prehistoric smelting of an advanced kind, and it acted here as the transmission node, the place from which furnace technique travelled on to communities spread across a wide stretch of eastern Africa. Ehret dates that stage from the linguistic and archaeological record together. He first set the finding out in a lecture at Columbia University in September 1974, added evidence from South Sudan when the Society of Africanist Archaeologists met at UCLA in March 1992, and published it later still. Nearly two decades separate the finding from the article. I keep the delay in view because it says something about the discipline. The resistance to African technical achievement that Schmidt later wrote about was already in the rooms where these papers were read.