4000–1000 BCE: (Copper and Iron in Northern Africa, Where the Standard Sequence Held: Copper First via the Levant to Egypt in the Fourth Millennium BCE, Then…

4000–1000 BCE: (Copper and Iron in Northern Africa, Where the Standard Sequence Held: Copper First via the Levant to Egypt in the Fourth Millennium BCE, Then an Independent African Copper Metallurgy Developed by Nilo-Saharan Speakers in the Aïr Mountains of Niger from 2500 to 1500 BCE with Experimental Furnace Configurations Settling into a Mature Technology by 1500 BCE, Copper Trade Reaching Northwestern Nigeria Before 1000 BCE and Southern Mauritania by the Ninth Century BCE, and the Unexplored Copper Potential of the Darfur Region): In the farther northern parts of Africa, the history of metallurgy followed the more usual expectations, with copper as the first metal of major importance. Copper technology reached the Egyptian corner of the continent in the fourth millennium BCE, in the form of native copper from deposits in the Sinai Peninsula, initially used for decorative items before becoming practically important as Egypt moved fully into the Bronze Age in the early third millennium. But only slightly later, 2,500 kilometers away from Egypt, in the Aïr Mountain Range of today’s Niger, another African people, most probably speakers of a Nilo-Saharan language belonging to the western sub-branch of the Sahelian branch, initiated their own separate development of copper metallurgy. The archaeologist Augustin Holl has argued that the earliest Aïr sites with copper, dating from 2500 to 1500 BCE, reveal a period of experimentation with different furnace configurations for smelting copper ores. By no later than 1500 BCE, the smelters of this region had settled on a particular furnace type and brought into being a mature copper smelting technology. From the producing areas in the Aïr Range, copper soon began to be traded widely southward and westward in West Africa. Linguistic evidence developed by the historian Constanze Weise indicates that trade in copper had reached southwestward from Aïr to the northwestern parts of modern-day Nigeria sometime before 1000 BCE. Soon after, no later than the ninth century BCE, the technology of copper smelting had spread a thousand kilometers farther west, to present-day southern Mauritania. Ehret also notes the Darfur region as a potentially very early copper-producing area, an important source for regions as far south as northeastern Congo during the second millennium CE, but one that remains almost entirely unexplored archaeologically.