Large-scale iron smelting at Meroe
Siderurgia a gran escala de Meroe
- Date
- c. 500 BCE · confidence medium
- Place
- Meroe, River Nile, Sudan
- Credited to
- Kingdom of Kush (Meroitic period)
- Field
- Matter & energy
What it is
Bellows-fed smelting furnaces that left enormous slag heaps beside the royal city. They made Meroe one of the largest iron-smelting centres of the ancient world.
Sayce called it 'the Birmingham of Africa', an exaggeration; excavations by Humphris and Rehren confirm large-scale production from the mid-first millennium BCE.
What it led to
- iron tools and weapons for the Kushite state
- deforestation of the surrounding savanna
- technical diffusion across the eastern Sahel