Istwa Nou

Where towns existed in Egypt, the Levant and Mesopotamia, they were built around temples or around the seat of a king. The West African town of the second millennium BCE had a different centre of gravity. It existed to produce goods for sale, or it sat at the crossing of routes and handled goods in transit, or it did both. That is a different theory of what a city is for. The usual account treats urban life as an emanation of state power, religious or royal. What the Sudan belt produced grew out of the logic of making things and moving them. Ehret notes that the importance of this separate commercial revolution goes unrecognised outside African studies and often enough inside it. It began independently of the Mediterranean and appears to have begun earlier. Four production regions had emerged in the western and central Sudan belt by the early and middle second millennium BCE, and the linking of those four in the second half of the millennium is what made a revolution of them.