2000–1000 BCE: (Chapter 4: Towns and Long-Distance Commerce in Ancient Africa — The West African Commercial Revolution, the Rise of the First Towns and the D…

2000–1000 BCE: (Chapter 4: Towns and Long-Distance Commerce in Ancient Africa — The West African Commercial Revolution, the Rise of the First Towns and the Development of Commerce Over Distance as Conjoined Developments in the West African Savanna Belt South of the Sahara, Taking Shape Over Roughly the Same Broad Span of Time as the Mediterranean and Levantine Commercial Revolution, Both Having Their Beginnings in the Second Millennium BCE): Chapter 4 of Ancient Africa: A Global History opens with a claim that redraws the map of commercial history. In the West African savanna belt south of the Sahara, the rise of the first towns and the development of commerce over distance were conjoined developments — part and parcel of what Ehret calls the West African Commercial Revolution. And these developments took shape over roughly the same broad span of time as another notable early commercial revolution of world historical significance, one that had its origins in the eastern Mediterranean and Levant. Both these initially quite separate commercial revolutions had their beginnings in the second millennium BCE. The emphasis on “initially quite separate” is Ehret’s, and it carries the full weight of his argument. West Africa did not learn commerce from the Mediterranean. West Africa invented commerce independently, on its own terms, during the same centuries. Two parallel revolutions, separated by thousands of kilometers, each generating its own merchant class, its own trade networks, its own urban forms. The standard narrative of commercial history begins with the Phoenicians and the Greeks, as if long-distance trade were a Mediterranean invention that the rest of the world eventually adopted. Ehret insists that West Africa was doing the same thing at the same time, and that failing to recognize this parallel is not an innocent gap in the literature but a structural feature of a discipline that cannot see African achievement even when it is staring at contemporaneous evidence.