1200–500 BCE: (The Linking Up — Commercial Networks Connecting Tichit, the Inland Delta, and Aïr Before the End of the Second Millennium BCE, a New Kind of T…

1200–500 BCE: (The Linking Up — Commercial Networks Connecting Tichit, the Inland Delta, and Aïr Before the End of the Second Millennium BCE, a New Kind of Town Emerging Across the Sahel of Mali from Clusters of Manufacturing Villages with Specialized Wards for Cotton Weavers, Leather Workers, Potters, and Later Ironworkers, and the Merchant Class as the Fifth Element Carrying and Financing the Transport of Goods to Distant Places): Even before the end of the second millennium and beginning of the first millennium BCE, all these regions began to be linked together in expanding networks of commercial exchange. Across the Sahel of today’s Mali, a new kind of town grew out of what had originally been clusters of manufacturing villages. One village or ward of the newly evolving town was inhabited by weavers of cotton textiles for the market — cotton weaving having been fully established in West Africa by no later than the end of the second millennium BCE. Leather-working families inhabited another ward of the town, and still another ward was the habitation of professional potting families. Then, in the first millennium BCE, as knowledge of iron technology reached as far west as Mali, each town came to include a fourth ward inhabited by ironworking specialist families. The fifth element in the new urban populations consisted of the emerging merchant class, who carried and financed the carrying of the products of the town to distant places. Over the course of the late second and the first millennia BCE, the expansion of long-distance trade took place not just across today’s Mali and Senegal but as far east as the Chad basin of modern Niger, northern Nigeria, and Chad. One notable early town, Dia, its origins dating to the close of the second millennium BCE, lay at the west side of the inland delta of the Niger River. Far to the east, Houlouf on Lake Chad grew into a notable polity and intersection point in the growing networks of trade. Archaeologists have identified several hundred probable and possible town sites spread across the nearly 2,000 kilometers of the western and central Sudan belt — sites that will occupy the attention of generations of future archaeologists.