Iron Working in Africa
Paragraph 1: Many scholars believe that the secret of iron smelting (the process of extracting the iron from the rock that contains it) came with Phoenician merchants. The Phoenicians living on the shores of the Mediterranean were smelting iron by 1,000 B.C.E. They were a seafaring people whose square-rigged ships sailed along the North African coast, where they established settlements that became colonies. The most famous was Carthage, modern Tunisia, founded about 800 B.C.E, but other settlement there scattered along the Mediterranean and the Atlantic coast of Africa as far south as Mauritania. The indigenous peoples of North Africa who surrounded these Phoenician colonies were Berbers who cultivated wheat, barley, and millet on the rich coast lands between their pastures for sheep, goats, and cattle. The Phoenicians were traders as well as sailors who exchanged iron implements and the technology to make them in return for the livestock of the Berbers.
