Before 2000 BCE: (The Inland Delta’s Deep History of Exchange — Susan and Roderick McIntosh Documenting the Multidirectional Exchange of Subsistence Products…

Before 2000 BCE: (The Inland Delta’s Deep History of Exchange — Susan and Roderick McIntosh Documenting the Multidirectional Exchange of Subsistence Products Among Specialist Communities of the Inland Delta and Between Them and the Farming Populations of the Surrounding Sahel and Savanna Going Far Back into the Past Well Before the Second Millennium BCE, Sorghum Having Spread Westward from the Eastern Sudan Belt to Join Local Grains and Livestock): The inland delta’s role in the commercial revolution rested on ecological foundations laid millennia earlier. As the archaeologists Susan and Roderick McIntosh have shown, the multidirectional exchange of subsistence products among the different specialist communities of the inland delta, as well as between them and the farming populations of the surrounding Sahel and savanna, goes far back into the past — well before the second millennium BCE. Sorghum, which by that period had spread westward from the eastern Sudan belt, joined pearl millet, fonio, and livestock in the agricultural repertoire of the surrounding communities. The delta was not a single economy but a mosaic of complementary economies, each dependent on the others, each generating surpluses that the others needed. This was the substrate from which commercial complexity would grow — not from a single commanding center but from the accumulated logic of thousands of years of exchange among ecologically differentiated communities. The McIntoshes’ work in Ancient Africa’s framing is a rebuke to every model of urbanization that requires a centralizing state as precondition. Here, exchange preceded hierarchy. Commerce preceded kings. The towns of the inland delta grew from the bottom up, not the top down.