1000 to 800 BCE · Africanspan
Borrowing a technology means borrowing the words for every part of it
›Read the full entryClose
Along the great Western Rift, the earliest Mashariki Bantu communities of the early first millennium BCE took their iron vocabulary from Central Sudanic languages. The list is long: the ore itself, the bellows that drive air into a furnace, the smith's hammer, the hoe and the blade. Every one of those terms traces back to Central Sudanic speech, from the country where the Central African Republic, South Sudan, Congo and Uganda now meet. A people that borrows the word for a metal has met a trader. A people that borrows the words for the ore, the furnace, the bellows, the hammer, the hoe and the knife has taken up an entire system of production, tools and working practice together. The Mashariki Bantu in this period were moving in from the west into the Rift country, running from Rwanda in the north through a thousand kilometres of land along Lake Tanganyika. Van Grunderbeek and her team dated smelting furnaces in Rwanda to the eighth century BCE.
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.