Istwa Nou

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.