Istwa Nou

Historical linguistics indicates that when metals first came into use, copper and even iron, they were worked into ornament as often as into tools or weapons, and frequently more often. That fits what was happening to societies at the time. Rising farm output in the age of agricultural exchange let some households accumulate more than others, and people with that advantage could command scarce goods. Metal ornament became the sign that a person held wealth, standing and power, and wearing it was the point of owning it. Ehret puts a question to historians from there. If stratification created unequal access to resources, did the appetite for prestige goods drive the technologies that supplied them? The familiar sequence has technology producing wealth and wealth producing classes. The reverse may run alongside it, with emerging classes generating demand for ornaments, fine cloth and worked ceramics, and that demand pulling the crafts forward. Technology and inequality grew together, each feeding the other.

Demand for ornament that marked rank raised metal production. Copper became widely available in Eurasia, iron followed in Africa and Eurasia by the early first millennium BCE, costs fell, and the metals moved into tools and weapons. The people who had used them for display turned to scarcer and showier materials, silver, gold and copper alloys. Weaving looks like the same story. Cloth may have gained its importance because the upper ranks of newly stratified societies wanted garments that announced and confirmed their position. The cotton of the Khartoum Neolithic in Sudan fits, since indirect evidence points to sacral chiefs among the Nilo-Saharan peoples living along the major waterways there. The Americas fit too, because the earliest cotton weaving there sits close in time to the rise of political and social stratification on the coast of Peru from the middle of the fourth millennium BCE. These were the first centuries of textiles, and the first in which what you wore told strangers who you were.

Between 3000 BCE and 300 CE farming reached nearly all the land on earth that would support it, and everywhere it arrived it brought the same consequences for population, settlement and social organisation. In Africa the largest instance is the spread of speakers of Bantu languages, a subgroup of Niger-Congo, across most of the southern third of the continent. It began in the Cameroon and Nigeria borderlands, crossed the equatorial rainforest and came out onto the savannas of eastern and southern Africa. It stands beside the Austronesian settlement of the Pacific, the Indo-European spread across Eurasia and the Turkic spread across Central Asia as one of the great demographic movements in human history. The engine in each case was the same. Food production allowed population growth, population growth allowed territorial expansion, and expansion carried language, technique and custom into new country.