Just east of the main city at Meroë there are mounds of small black stones. These stones look like they were once melted. Archaeologists recognized that these stones were slag - the material left over when the Kushites extracted iron from the metal-rich rock (ore) around Meroë.
The metalworkers put the iron ore in a furnace and heated it to a very high temperature. Some of it melted into slag, and what was left over could be hammered so that only iron remained. The waste slag was thrown out and the iron used to make tools and weapons.
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| Mound of slag on the eastern edge of Meroë city, suggesting the locations of extensive iron-smelting and iron-working factories. |
| Photo: T. Kendall. |
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| Large piece of slag from the slag heaps at Meroë. |
| Photo: T. Kendall. |
Meroë appears to have been a great iron-producing center. It was able to produce iron because it was on the edge of a forest (which no longer exists). The people used the wood to fire their furnaces (called smelters or forges), but by cutting down the trees, the people gradually ruined their environment so that it became the desert of today.
Iron was first used in Egypt even before 3000 BCE, but the metal came from meteorites. The making of iron from ores was probably discovered in the Near East about 1500 BCE or earlier and spread to Egypt. Iron was not widely produced in Egypt probably because of the lack of wood for the furnaces, but there were trees in the Nile Delta, and factories appeared there about 600 BCE.
The first iron known in Nubia appears in the tomb of King Taharqa at Nuri (about 664 BCE), although an iron spearhead from Lower Nubia may be a thousand years older. Meroë's iron factories probably began about 600 BCE. For a time, iron weapons probably made the people of Meroë more powerful than the peoples around them. Eventually, their neighbors also learned the secrets of iron working, and the knowledge of iron spread widely across Africa.