7000 to 3000 BCE · Africanspan
The ledger of ancient exchange runs in Africa's favour
›Read the full entryClose
Count what left the continent. Watermelon and the bottle gourd from the Sudan belt. Muskmelon from the Horn of Africa. Cowpea, the country potato, roselle and tamarind out of West Africa. Pearl millet from the western and the eastern Sudan belt both. Sorghum and the lablab bean out of the eastern Sahara and the eastern Sudan. Finger millet from Cushitic speakers up in the Ethiopian highlands. The castor oil plant, most likely from Cushitic speakers in the Horn. And the donkey, from herders on the dry steppe and semidesert of the far eastern Sahara and the northern edge of the Ethiopian highlands. Thirteen items in all, moving out across the seventh to fourth millennia BCE, most of them well into Eurasia by 3000 or 2000 BCE. None of them came from the Mediterranean rim. They came from independent centres of innovation deep in the African interior. Africa gave the ancient connected world more than it received back, and that sentence still reads as a provocation.
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.