We Haitians have always known who we are and where we are going. Every generation sets out for it, and in every generation something interrupts our journey, our walk. Sometimes it comes from outside. Sometimes it comes from among us. Those interruptions are in this chronology because they happened; they're not who we are. We have never been defined by those off-road moments; and we have never internalized them.
The textbook story sends iron from Anatolia to Africa last
Anatolia to the Levant to India and Europe, then Carthage and Meroe, then the rest of a continent.
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For most of the twentieth century the history of iron was taught as one invention with many copies. Smelting began in Anatolia around the middle of the second millennium BCE, moved through the Levant and the Middle East between 1300 and 1000 BCE, went east to India and west towards Europe, and crossed from southern Arabia to the Ethiopian highlands before the middle of the first millennium BCE. In North Africa the Phoenicians brought iron to their settlement at Carthage in the late ninth century BCE. Meroe had it by the fifth century BCE, arriving either up the Nile through Egypt or across the Red Sea, and became a large producer. Africa south of the Sahara entered the story last, receiving the technique from these northern points of contact. That version is still commonly taught. Ehret objects on dates. The chronology of the savanna sites does not fit a technology working its way down from the Mediterranean fringe.
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Africans south of the Sahara invented iron smelting themselves
Nok, the Chad basin and Rwanda were smelting before there was a Phoenician settlement at Carthage.
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By 1000 to 700 BCE, before the Phoenicians settled Carthage, ironworking was established across the African savannas from east to west, more than fifteen hundred kilometres south of the Mediterranean coast. The westernmost sites lie in the country of the Nok culture in north central Nigeria and date to the eighth or ninth century BCE. Sites of similar age have been found in the southwestern Chad basin nearby. In Rwanda, thousands of kilometres east of Nok, smelting furnaces excavated by Marie-Claude Van Grunderbeek and her team date from as early as the middle of the eighth century BCE. Look at what that means on a map. Furnaces separated by thousands of kilometres of savanna were running at the same time as, or earlier than, the supposed points of entry along the northern edge of the continent, and no route carries the technique from Anatolia to Nigeria or Rwanda before it reaches Carthage. Africans in the savannas worked iron out for themselves, and it changed farming, war and government there for the next two thousand years.
Nok cultureMarie-Claude Van GrunderbeekNigeriaChad basinRwandaCarthageSahara
Where this comes fromEhret, C. (2023). Ancient Africa: A global history, to 300 CE. Princeton University Press.HT-EHAA-000087HT-EHAA-000088
A code like HT-WIB-000044 is a bates number. It marks one page of our stamped scan of the book, so the same page can be found again by anyone working from the same copy. Open one to see every entry drawn from that page.