Istwa Nou

Copper smelting and iron smelting were both worked out by people living in small scale societies, away from the regions where social ranking and political consolidation were under way. The earliest iron smelters known, in the middle of Africa around four thousand years ago, lived in a country of small villages with no states in it. The same holds at the other independent origin. The people who worked out iron metallurgy in Anatolia during the first half of the second millennium BCE lived west and south of the core territory of the Hittite kingdom that was about to emerge, out on its political margins. The pattern is consistent. Copper smelting came from the Balkans while Mesopotamia had cities. Iron came from central Africa while Egypt had pharaohs. Powerful states are very good at taking up a technique, scaling it and monopolising it. The moment of discovery keeps happening somewhere the centre has no reason to look, among people the record was not being kept for.

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.