1000 to 500 BCE · Africanspan
Iron, sheep and the word for sheep travelled the same rivers
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What is known about early commerce in the Congo basin rests largely on work by Jan Vansina and Kairn Klieman. The best documented stretch is the past two thousand years, and Klieman argues that the long-distance transport of goods in the region very likely began early in the first millennium BCE. The routes carried more than cargo. Ironworking spread along them from the Western Rift westward and southwestward during the middle and later part of that millennium. Sheep spread out of the African Great Lakes region the same way. One line of that spread can be followed through a single word, the term for sheep handed from language to language, which travelled west from Central Sudanic speakers living in the far southeast of what is now South Sudan. So the rivers moved goods, technique, livestock and vocabulary together across thousands of kilometres of forest, while the West African trade belt was expanding and the Garamantes were rising in the Sahara.
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