The Penguin History of the World

By that time, iron had come to Africa and it had already produced the first exploitation of African ores. This occurred in the first African state other than Egypt of which we have information, the kingdom of Kush, high up the Nile, in the region of what is now Sudan. This had originally been the extreme frontier zone of Egyptian activity. After Nubia had been absorbed, the Sudanese principality which existed to its south was garrisoned by the Egyptians, but in about 1000 BC it emerged as an independent kingdom, showing itself deeply marked by Egyptian civilization. Probably its inhabitants were Hamitic people and its capital was at Napata, just below the Fourth Cataract. By 730 BC Kush was strong enough to conquer Egypt, and five of its kings ruled as the Pharaohs known to history as the Twenty-Fifth or ‘Ethiopian’ Dynasty.

None the less, they could not arrest the Egyptian decline. When the Assyrians fell on Egypt, the Kushite dynasty ended. Though Egyptian civilization continued in the kingdom of Kush, a pharaoh of the next dynasty invaded it in the early sixth century BC. After this, the Kushites, too, began to push their frontiers further to the south and in so doing their kingdom underwent two important changes. It became more African, its language and literature reflecting a weakening of Egyptian trends, and it extended its reach over new territories which contained both iron ore and the fuel needed to smelt it. The technique of smelting had been learnt from the Assyrians. The new Kushite capital at Meroe became the metallurgical centre of Africa. Iron weapons gave the Kushites the advantages over their neighbours which northern peoples had enjoyed in the past over Egypt, and iron tools extended the area which could be cultivated. On this basis was to rest some 300 years of prosperity and civilization in the Sudan, though later than the age we are now considering.

It is clear that the history of man in the Americas is much shorter than that in Africa or, indeed, than anywhere else. About 20,000 years ago, after Asian peoples had crossed into North America, they filtered slowly southwards for thousands of years. Cave-dwellers have been traced in the Peruvian Andes as many as 15,000 years ago. The Americas contain very varied climates and environments; it is scarcely surprising, therefore, that archaeological evidence shows that they threw up almost equally varied patterns of life, based on different opportunities for hunting, food-gathering and fishing. What they learnt from one another is probably undiscoverable. What is indisputable is that some of these cultures arrived at the invention of agriculture independently of the Old World.

Disagreement is still possible about when precisely this happened because, paradoxically, a great deal is known about the early cultivation of plants at a time when the scale on which this took place cannot reasonably be called agriculture. It is, nevertheless, a change which comes later than in the Fertile Crescent. Maize began to be cultivated in Mexico in about 2700 BC, but had been improved by 2000 BC in Mesoamerica into something like the plant we know today. This is the sort of change which made possible the establishment of large settled communities. Further south, potatoes and manioc (another starchy root vegetable) also begin to appear at about this time, and a little later there are signs that maize has spread southwards from Mexico. Everywhere, though, change is gradual; to think of an ‘agricultural revolution’ as a sudden event is even less appropriate in the Americas than in the Middle East. Yet it had an impact which was truly revolutionary not only in time, but beyond America itself. The sweet potato, a native of Mexico and Central America, was to spread across the Pacific to sustain island farming communities centuries before the European galleons of the colonial era took it to Africa, the Indian Ocean and the Philippines.