around the Mediterranean Sea had access to precious gem-
stones, ivory, exotic hardwoods, new types of minerals and
stones, silks, fabric dyes, pigments, and mother-of-pearl.
Trade contact also exposed craft s workers to new technolo-
gies and techniques, enriching craft s production for all.
AFRICA
BY KIRK H. BEETZ
It is possible that ancient Africa’s greatest achievements in
craft s involved perishable materials, such as wood and reeds,
with only rare traces of those materials surviving to the pres-
ent. Th us, ancient craft s are represented mostly by ceram-
ics and metal artifacts. Most early African metalwork was
in copper, tin, or bronze. Copper by itself was hard to work
with, and making it keep its shape during casting was a prob-
lem with which ancient African metalworkers struggled, but
combining copper with tin made bronze, and bronze held its
shape well. In Nubia, the land south of Egypt, bronze was at
fi rst used for casting bowls and other vessels. Bronze gradu-
ally replaced stone for use in weapons, with spears still being
tipped with stone as late as 900 b.c.e., when the kingdom of
Kush arose.
Th e Kushites cast bronze using clay molds that were
probably sculpted by hand, instead of by the lost-wax meth-
od that involved sculpting a fi gure out of wax and shaping a
mold around it. Th e National Museum in Athens, Greece, has
a bronze casting of the Kushite king Shabaka, who was also
pharaoh of Egypt (ca. 716–ca. 702 b.c.e.). Th e artifact shows
the skill that Kushite bronze casters had attained: Shabaka’s
face is an individual portrait taken from life, and the body
is well defi ned and proportioned. Kushite casters made even
such everyday objects as bowls and pitchers decorative. For
example, the British Museum has a handle shaped like a girl,
probably for a pouring vessel, such as a pitcher, from the
400s–200s b.c.e. Bronze was used for religious practices, with
the most unusual perhaps being the legs of beds on which the
dead were laid in their graves.
Th e Kushites cast in other metals besides bronze. Th ey
made silver objects with the same fi ne skill as their bronz-
es, including realistic human images on such objects as sil-
ver mirrors. Th ey developed ironworking in about the 600s
b.c.e., perhaps aft er being exposed to the iron weapons of the
Assyrians when the Assyrians drove them out of Egypt in
about 656 b.c.e. Th e monarchs of Kush moved their capital
from Napata to the city of Meroë, far south along the Nile
R iver, in about 590 b.c.e. Th e area of Meroë is rich in iron ore,
and a few archaeologists have suggested that Meroë became a
great iron-manufacturing center. But of the city’s iron-smelt-
ing furnaces the earliest so far discovered date to around 370
b.c.e., and it is likely that before then the Kushites imported
iron ingots from the Near East. Aft er 370 b.c.e. Kush may
well have exported iron ingots to other parts of Africa.
Another signifi cant center for smelting iron was in the
region of modern Nigeria, where a mysterious people called
the Nok lived from ca. 500 b.c.e. to ca. 300 c.e. Th e Nok are
named for the village where some of their pottery was fi rst
found. By 300 b.c.e. the Nok had iron-smelting furnaces.
Some archaeologists think that the Nok learned to smelt iron
from Berbers who brought the technology south from Phoe-
nician colonies in North Africa or from Kushites who mi-
grated to the west, but the existing evidence largely suggests
that the Nok developed smelting of iron independently. How
they did so is unknown.
Trade in metals was extensive in ancient Africa. Metal
may have been in use in the ancient land of Ghana, about 100
miles north of modern Ghana, from 1000 b.c.e. to 500 c.e.
Th ere were copper mines in modern Niger, in central Africa,
that may have supplied copper to much of central and east-
ern Africa. Th e Bantu-speaking peoples who began expand-
ing through Africa from central Africa in the last 200 or so
years b.c.e. worked with copper. Th ey probably worked metal
inside their houses, and they seem to have favored copper.
Th ey wound copper wire into bracelets, made copper beads,
and even made copper money, shaped into crosses. If they
were like the Bantu-speaking people of later eras, their met-
alsmiths were highly regarded members of the community
and were credited with having supernatural powers.
Trade in materials that could embellish the body were
common. Th e magnifi cent metal jewelry of Africans is rep-
resentative of this practice. In addition to metal, glass beads
were traded extensively and were popular in most of Africa in
ancient times, but at present evidence for local manufactur-
ing of glass in Africa dates no earlier than the medieval era.
In ancient Africa glass came from Egypt, Rome, and India.
Other craft s are harder to identify because of the perish-
ability of materials. Th e oldest wooden object may be a vessel
from about 1000 b.c.e. found in a cave in southern Kenya. It
is shaped like vessels used by modern cattle herders to carry
milk and may indicate a cultural tradition for the area that is
mostly lost because wood usually decays rapidly in the area.
Masks, which are an important part of the culture of much of
Africa, were usually made of wood, and archaeologists must
make do with depictions of masks in stone and ceramic fi g-
ures, mostly from northeastern Africa.
In Kush wood was used for footboards of burial beds as
well as for doors and probably other objects. Kushite doors
to important buildings were wondrous, oft en made of ebony,
carved with geometric and realistic fi gures, inlaid with ivory,
and embellished with bronze or gold. Magnifi cent doors were
made well into the modern era in eastern Africa, especially in
cities and towns that traded with people from Asia. Furniture
of any kind came late to much of Africa, especially western
Africa, where chairs were fi rst seen when Europeans brought
them. In Kush furniture tended to imitate Egyptian forms,
with wooden headrests being common.
Basketry seems to have been important in most of Afri-
ca, but as with wooden objects, most surviving indications of
the types of basketry are found in ceramics and on stone im-
ages. Many designs for ceramic vessels seem to be imitationscrafts: Africa 285