1000–500 BCE: (The Scholarly Foundations of Congo Basin Commercial History — Jan Vansina and Kairn Klieman’s Studies, the Beginnings of Long-Distance Goods T…

1000–500 BCE: (The Scholarly Foundations of Congo Basin Commercial History — Jan Vansina and Kairn Klieman’s Studies, the Beginnings of Long-Distance Goods Transport Very Likely Going Back to Early in the First Millennium BCE According to Klieman, Ironworking Spreading from the Western Rift Regions Westward and Southwestward Along These Same Routes During the Middle and Second Half of That Millennium, and Sheep Dispersing from the African Great Lakes Region Along the Same Routes Also Beginning in the First Millennium BCE): Knowledge of these Congo basin developments rests in particular on the studies carried out by Jan Vansina and Kairn Klieman. What we know best are the developments of the past two thousand years, but Klieman has shown that the beginnings of the long-distance transport of goods in these regions very likely go back to early in the first millennium BCE. Ironworking, as we have already seen, spread from the Western Rift regions westward and southwestward along these same routes during the middle and the second half of that millennium. At least one domestic animal, the sheep, dispersed out from the African Great Lakes region following these same routes, apparently beginning also in the first millennium BCE. One line of the spread of sheep raising, marked by the diffusion from language to language of a particular word — *-meme, for “sheep” — passed west from peoples living in the far southeastern parts of today’s South Sudan, who spoke languages of the Central Sudanic branch of the Nilo-Saharan family. What emerges is a picture of the Congo basin’s river network as a highway system carrying not just goods but technologies, animals, and vocabularies across thousands of kilometers of equatorial forest. Iron, sheep, and the words to describe them all traveled the same waterways — and all of this was happening in the first millennium BCE, contemporaneous with the expansion of the West African commercial revolution and the rise of the Garamantes in the central Sahara. Africa was not developing one commercial system. It was developing at least three, simultaneously and independently.