Tag Archives: Nilo-Saharan

Dawn of the Iron Age in Africa

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Dawn of the Iron Age in Africa

The first metal worked in Africa was copper, smelted and forged in Egypt before its unification in 3100 BC. Copper and stone remained the main tool-making materials in Egypt until the 17th century BC, when the Hyksos invasion from the Middle East brought bronze, a harder alloy, to North Africa. During Egypt’s New Kingdom, gold was forged into jewelry and elaborate furniture to decorate the pharaohs’ palaces and tombs. Far to the west of Egypt, in the Aïr Mountains of what is now Niger, copper working was independently invented sometime after 3000 BC. These early metalworkers probably spoke a Nilo-Saharan language, perhaps ancestral to modern Songhai. By 1500 BC their copper-working techniques and furnaces were well developed and the technology had spread to other copper-bearing areas of the southern Sahara.

Iron is a much harder metal to smelt than copper, requiring larger quantities of charcoal and much higher temperatures. Its invention, therefore, required considerable expertise in furnace building. While the knowledge of ironworking was first brought to northeast Africa from the Middle East after 670 BC, the techniques had been independently invented in sub-Saharan Africa some 300 years earlier. Presumably building upon furnace techniques developed for the smelting of copper, metalworkers were smelting iron in Chad and the Great Lakes region (an area in East Africa between and around Lakes Victoria and Tanganyika) by 1000 BC. From these centers of development, ironworking spread among the agricultural peoples of West, Central, and East Africa, reaching southern Africa in the early centuries AD.

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African Languages

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African Languages are one of the most diverse around the world. The number of distinctive languages spoken in Africa is open to debate. Some experts put the number at around 2,000, while others count more than 3,000. Virtually all of these languages originated in Africa. The most widely spoken indigenous African language is Swahili, spoken by nearly 50 million Africans, followed by Hausa and Yoruba, each with more than 20 million speakers. Several languages have only a few thousand speakers. Scholars generally recognize four African language families: Niger-Congo, Afro-Asiatic, Nilo-Saharan, and Khoisan.

Most Africans are multilingual, meaning that they speak two or more different languages. Few can afford to be otherwise, since daily life often brings people into contact with others who speak different languages. For instance, more than 50 languages are spoken in Nigeria alone. Tanzania, with significantly fewer people, has nearly 100 languages, including at least one from each of the four language families.

North Africans and converts to Islam have spoken Arabic for centuries, and the use of European languages has spread across the continent since the dawn of colonialism. Today, the language of a country’s former colonial rulers often serves as its common tongue which in most cases has led to the diminishing of some African languages.