2000 to 500 BCE · Africanspan
Tichit was trading a thousand years before the Phoenician cities
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In the second and first millennia BCE a new social class appears in several parts of the world: merchants, people who live by moving other people's goods over long distances. Africans well south in the continent were among the first to build such networks. The towns of Tichit, in what is now Mauritania, were doing this kind of business in the second millennium BCE. A comparable development was under way separately in the eastern Mediterranean and the Levant by the beginning of the first millennium BCE. One driver on both sides was demand for metal, iron above all, as smelting spread and buyers appeared for what the smiths made. The usual telling gives this story to Phoenicia. Ehret puts Africa in it from the start on the evidence of dates. Tichit was a node of long-distance trade a full thousand years before the Phoenician cities built their Mediterranean network, and its towns, manufactures and merchants were African.
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