1000 BCE: (Early States in the Aïr Region and the Nok Region of Nigeria — Indirect Evidence for Small States in the Aïr Region of West Africa by or Before 10…

1000 BCE: (Early States in the Aïr Region and the Nok Region of Nigeria — Indirect Evidence for Small States in the Aïr Region of West Africa by or Before 1000 BCE, the Nok Region of Nigeria Probably Home to an Early Strong State During the First Millennium BCE with Its Wealth Coming from Trade in the Metals Found in Its Territories): Indirect evidence points to small states in the Aïr region of West Africa by or before 1000 BCE. The Nok region of Nigeria seems probably to have been home to an early strong state during the first millennium BCE, with its wealth coming probably from trade in the metals found in its territories. The Nok culture is best known for its extraordinary terracotta sculptures — among the earliest known figurative art in West Africa — but this note reveals that behind the art lay a political economy: a state whose power rested on control of metal resources and the trade in those metals. The Aïr region, in what is now Niger, adds another node to the map of early West African state formation, pushing the emergence of political complexity in the western Sudan belt back to at least 1000 BCE — contemporary with the earliest Iron Age states in the Great Lakes region of East Africa and centuries before the trans-Saharan gold trade that later enriched the empires of Ghana, Mali, and Songhay.