1500–700 BCE: (Africa’s Special Place in the History of Iron, the Conventional Story That Iron Metallurgy Had a Single Beginning in Anatolia Around the Mid-S…

1500–700 BCE: (Africa’s Special Place in the History of Iron, the Conventional Story That Iron Metallurgy Had a Single Beginning in Anatolia Around the Mid-Second Millennium BCE and Diffused Outward to the Levant, India, Europe, and Eventually Africa via Carthage, Meroë, and the Ethiopian Highlands, and How That Story Fails in Striking Fashion to Explain What Was Actually Happening South of the Sahara): Now Ehret turns to what is actually most arresting about African metallurgical history: the continent’s special place in the history of iron metallurgy worldwide. In the versions of this history that used to be taught, and which are still commonly being taught, iron metallurgy had a single beginning in Anatolia around or before the middle of the second millennium BCE. According to this understanding, within a few centuries the technology began to diffuse outward from that region to the rest of the world, spreading first to the rest of the Levant and the Middle East between 1300 and 1000 BCE, and from there eastward to India and subsequently westward toward Europe. This technology, it was supposed, then passed from southern Arabia across the Red Sea to the Ethiopian Highlands by or before the mid-first millennium BCE. Farther west in North Africa, the Phoenicians introduced iron at their settlement at Carthage in the late ninth century BCE. Ironworking spread, in addition, by or before the fifth century BCE to Meroë, either south via Egypt or across the Red Sea from Arabia, with Meroë thereafter becoming a major new iron-producing center. The conventional assumption was that iron then spread from these introductions along the northern fringe of Africa southward to the rest of the continent. But that view fails in striking fashion to explain the history of ironworking farther south in Africa, south of the Sahara.