Credited to Sudan. Iron smelting was not invented at Meroe, and scholars have argued its furnace style was inspired by Egyptian or Roman practice; exact dates were not confirmed in the snippets seen.
How it began
Meroe lies on the east bank of the Nile about 200 kilometers north of Khartoum. It was a royal city of the Kingdom of Kush and, from the 3rd century BCE to the 4th century CE, its capital. Ironworkers there smelted ore on a scale that left large heaps of slag across the site, and these mounds are among its most visible remains.
UNESCO's description of the World Heritage property lists industrial areas and ironworks, alongside pyramids, temples and palaces, as evidence of the wealth and power of the Kushite state. When smelting began at Meroe is still being worked out, but radiocarbon dates place a large share of the slag in the early, Napatan, centuries of the kingdom.
How it works
The Meroe smiths made iron by the bloomery process: ore and charcoal were heated in a clay furnace driven by bellows, producing a spongy mass of solid iron that was then forged, with slag as the waste product.
Since 2012 an intensive archaeometallurgical research program, with Jane Humphris as lead author of its reports, has studied these remains. As part of it the team carried out experimental iron smelting at Meroe, with a furnace and workshop, and reported the work in the Journal of Field Archaeology in 2018.
What lasted
The slag heaps gave Meroe a lasting reputation. After seeing them in the early 20th century, the Assyriologist Archibald Sayce called the place the Birmingham of Africa, after the English industrial city, and the phrase was repeated for a century. The label rested on an impression of vast production and trade in iron.
That impression is disputed. Despite their fame, the slag heaps received little direct archaeological attention for most of the 20th century, and how much iron Meroe made, and when, was left largely to assumption.
Where it stands today
A 2019 study in Antiquity combined old excavation records with site-wide surface and geophysical survey, new slag heap excavation and radiocarbon dating. It found that the slag heaps date mainly to either the early (Napatan) or the late and post-Meroitic periods, with little evidence of smelting between about 300 BCE and 300 CE. That gap covers exactly the centuries when Meroe was the capital, which points to a major reorganization of the city's industrial base.
Meroe has been part of a UNESCO World Heritage property since 2011. In January 2024 UNESCO issued a call for its protection.
