1000–800 BCE: (Iron Technology Spreading Southward to the Mashariki Bantu Along the Great Western Rift, Key Early Iron Terms Including Words for Iron Ore, Be…

1000–800 BCE: (Iron Technology Spreading Southward to the Mashariki Bantu Along the Great Western Rift, Key Early Iron Terms Including Words for Iron Ore, Bellows, Smith’s Hammer, Iron Hoes, and Iron Knives All Borrowed from Central Sudanic Languages Spoken in the Borderlands Where the Central African Republic, South Sudan, Congo, and Uganda Conjoin, the Mashariki Bantu Advancing from the West into the Rift Zone from Rwanda Southward Through 1,000 Kilometers Along Lake Tanganyika): Farther south, along the great Western Rift zone of Africa, the key early terms relating to iron and iron technology among the earliest Mashariki Bantu of the early first millennium BCE similarly came from Central Sudanic languages. Ancient words for iron ore, for the bellows used in smelting furnaces, for the smith’s hammer for hammering iron, and for iron hoes and iron knives all trace back to Central Sudanic sources spoken in the areas where today’s territories of the Central African Republic, South Sudan, Congo, and Uganda conjoin. These borrowed words reveal the diffusion southward of iron and associated new implements and productive activities from those regions to the early Mashariki Bantu, who around the beginning of the first millennium BCE would have been advancing from the west into the areas along Africa’s great Western Rift, immediately south of the Central Sudanic-speaking regions. The lands of the early Mashariki speakers would have extended from Rwanda in the north, where Van Grunderbeek and her team located smelting furnaces dating as early as the eighth century BCE, southward through the 1,000-kilometer stretch of lands along Lake Tanganyika. What Ehret is reconstructing here is not just the movement of a technology but the movement of entire vocabularies of production. When a people borrows not just the word for iron but also the words for the furnace, the bellows, the hammer, the hoe, and the knife, you are looking at the wholesale adoption of a technological system, complete with its associated material culture. And the direction of that adoption, confirmed word by word, is from the Central African origin zone southward and eastward, not from anywhere outside the continent.