Istwa Nou

Between 5500 and 3000 BCE people in widely separated parts of the world invented loom weaving, independently of one another, and Africans were among the earliest to do it. Standard periodisation has no room for this. The sixth to third millennia BCE are labelled by metal, Chalcolithic and then Bronze Age, and the labels put the weight on technologies at which the Near East and Europe excelled. Cloth matters to a complex society as much as copper does. It is worn, traded, taxed and used to mark rank. There is still no Textile Age in the standard sequence and no epoch named for the loom. Drawn that way, the periodisation would put Africa at the head of the earliest phase, and the received story of technological progress would look different enough that people would notice. Which technologies get to name an era is a decision, and it was made by people with an interest in the answer.

Cotton was being woven in Sudan by 5000 BCE. India arrived at cotton weaving about a millennium later and did so on its own, and people in South and Middle America worked it out shortly after that, also on their own. Silk weaving in China dates to the fourth millennium BCE. Linen from domesticated flax was probably being woven in the Middle East and Egypt equally early. Far from the eastern Sudan, in West Africa, people invented loom technology a second time and applied it to raffia no later than the fourth millennium. The map of weaving looks like the map of agriculture: several centres, several continents, Africa among the first. The inventors were mostly villagers. Cotton weaving and raffia weaving both happened in country that had neither cities nor states, and the earliest known copper smelting from ore, in the later sixth millennium BCE, happened in the Balkans. Transformative technique does not require a state to produce it.