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WHO WERE THE EGYPTIANS?
Many Egyptologists regard a discussion of the skin colour of Ancient Egyptians as at best irrelevant and at worst racist … and most museums would balk at discussing the question in displays.
—MacDonald and Rice, Consuming Ancient Egypt, 2003, 99
Of course, ancient Egyptians were not San Bushmen, whose genetic markers peter out north of Zimbabwe (Soodyall and Jenkins, 2006; Wells, 2006). Nevertheless, the Neolithic inhabitants of the Nile Valley some 10 000 years ago, from whom pre-Dynastic Egyptians evolved over the next 5 000 years, must have been, like pygmy and proto-Khoisanoid hunter-gatherers from further south, instances of the diverse Stone Age human groups who were spread throughout eastern, central and southern Africa before the beginning of the Bantu-speaker migrations that would in due course supplant hunter-gatherers from large parts of the continent. We have already encountered Spencer Wells’s suggestion, based on the early findings of National Geographic’s Genographic Project, that ‘people similar in appearance to the modern San Bushmen’ lived as far north as Ethiopia in the Holocene era. Further north, we know of the even earlier Sangoan peoples of the Khartoum Mesolithic, whose culture, it has been suggested, may have been the ultimate source of north-east African civilisation (Welsby and Anderson, 2004). Where might the earliest ‘Egyptians’ have fitted into these configurations?
Assessing the ethnic composition of ancient Egypt’s population is a notoriously Procrustean exercise, and, as my epigraph suggests, many Egyptologists would regard it as best left alone. Standard textbooks such as Douglas J. Brewer and Emily Teeter’s Egypt and the Egyptians (1999) make no reference to Egypt’s ethnic composition. Béatrix Midant-Reynes confesses towards the end of her otherwise comprehensive Prehistory of Egypt (1992/2000a) that the ‘physical anthropology’ of Egypt is ‘a subject upon which we have been very unforthcoming throughout this book’ (251). She does, however, refer the reader to Patricia Podzorski’s very detailed ‘Examination of Predynastic Human Skeletal Remains from Naga-ed-Dêr’ (1990), which focuses on a cache of human remains from just north of Abydos collected by Flinders Petrie around 1900 and neglected ever since.
Podzorski’s findings are cautious but telling. Working before the general availability of DNA genetic testing and its dramatic revelations of population movements and affiliations (Sykes, 2001; Oppenheimer, 2003), she nevertheless comes to the clear conclusion that most of her subjects were ‘delicately built … [with] high foreheads, very slight brow ridges, moderate alveolar prognathism and slight to moderate occipital ridges’ (92), and with hair ranging from reddish brown to black, straight, wavy or curly, but ‘never kinky in texture’ (85). She is sceptical about whether any of these features could be regarded as ‘Negro’ traits, but she is equally sure that ‘biologically, the populations of Upper Egypt and Lower Nubia seem to have been continuous and stable throughout the Predynastic Period’ (93). So who could these pre-Dynastic Egyptians have been?
As we have already seen, ethnic differentiation in Dynastic representational art is, outside the later New Kingdom, often ambiguous. In addition, invasions and migrations in and out of an area as anciently settled and as significant a civilisational thoroughfare as the Nile Delta, or up and down a river as central to early human cultural development as the Nile, must have been so complex and of such long duration that the process can now be retrieved only fragmentarily and speculatively, except in its obvious outcome: ethnic homogeneity must have disappeared at a very early stage. Peter Mitchell usefully sums up the broad process: ‘Archaeology shows that the origins of Ancient Egyptian society lay in the complex interaction between long-established populations along the Nile, the Saharan herders … and, in a few specific ways, the inhabitants of Palestine, Syria, and Mesopotamia’ (2005, 67).
But who were these ‘long-established populations’ and ‘Saharan herders’? Bruce Trigger reminds us that the Nile Valley ‘is the only region of Africa where human settlement stretches without a break across the Sahara from the southern shore of the Mediterranean to the centre of the continent’, and that it is best to speak of a ‘Nile Valley continuum’ on which Egyptians occupy mainly a northerly and Nubians ‘an intermediate position’ (1978a, 27). In similar vein, Jean Leclant speaks of the whole of north-east Africa as part and product of ‘the great Palaeosaharan culture’ (1997a, 73). Such views are encouraged by our age’s sensitivity to the dangers of racial stereotyping and an anxiety to counter the historical realities of discrimination. But the results can be confusing, and a simple ‘melting pot’ theory of Egyptian culture will not advance our investigations much.
Anthony Leahy, in his ‘Ethnic Diversity in Ancient Egypt’ (1995), speaks of an ‘incessant movement of different ethnic groups into Egypt throughout the Pharaonic period’ or ‘over several millennia’ (225), but concludes his examination of the New Kingdom ethnographic scenes in temple art already referred to by insisting that it ‘is clear that the Egyptians chose to define themselves as darker than the peoples of Libya and the Near East but lighter than their southern neighbours’ (226).
But who would these Egyptians have been, the products of millennia of ethnic heterogeneity, whose later ethnic semiotics (dare one say, prejudices?) could nevertheless yet be so ‘clear’? When with Yaacov Shavit we reject, as we must, simplistic Afrocentrist claims that the ancient Egyptians were ‘a homogeneous, pure black race’ (146), do we discount along with such ‘pure blacks’ the many other, often smaller, ancient African peoples? As ‘delicately built’ as Podzorski’s pre-Dynastic Upper Nile population, sometimes, like ancient Egyptians, yellow-brown in colour, and as non-negroid in physiognomy as in language and culture, such populations – now confined to the deserts of southern Africa (the Khoisan) or remote parts of Tanzania (the Hadza and Sandawe) or the Sahara (the Twa) – were 10 000 years ago still spread across much of north-eastern, central and southern Africa, from Eritrea to the Cape of Good Hope.
Some contributors to the Lefkowitz and Rogers response to Black Athena, perhaps from a laudable concern not to seem to be reconfirming ‘Hamitic’ theories about Egypt’s non-African roots, raise similar conundrums about the origins and identity of Egypt’s ancient population. Kathryn Bard, for instance, reminds us that Lower Egypt was once called Kmt, ‘Black Land’ (hence the Kemet of Asante’s title, mentioned earlier), but not because of the colour of its population but because of the silt-laden Delta floodplain, just as Upper Egypt was Dšrt, ‘Red Land’ (and hence our word ‘desert’) because of the colour of the Sahara (1996, 104). Ancient Egyptians, she argues, ‘were Mediterranean peoples, neither sub-Saharan Blacks nor Caucasian Whites…. Ancient Egypt was a melting pot; people of different ethnic identities migrated into the Nile Valley at different times in its prehistory and history’ (104). Yet Lefkowitz and Rogers, summing up the findings of Bard and several other contributors, conclude: ‘On the basis of the available evidence … the ancient Egyptians regarded themselves as ethnically distinct from other African peoples, as well as from the peoples of the Near East and Europe’ (1996, xii). Once again, there is some tension between acknowledging the complex historical origins of ancient Egypt, and allowing for the singular cultural perceptions Egyptians had of themselves.
Furthermore, how ‘ancient Egyptians regarded themselves’ and what modern analysis of the demographic evidence might reveal are not necessarily the same thing. Frank Snowden, drawing on a lifetime’s research into aesthetic representations of blacks in the classical world (1970, 1983, 1989, 2001), argues for a radical distinction between Egyptian and Nubian types: ‘Egyptians and their southern neighbours were perceived as distinctly different physical types, [and] it was the inhabitants of Nubia, not the Egyptians, whose physical type most closely resembled that of Africans and people of African descent referred to in the modern world as Blacks or Negroes’ (1996a, 115). His ready assimilation of the ‘Nubian’ and ‘African’ type suggested here will need to be re-examined, but the earlier claim holds. Elsewhere he cites the archaeological evidence put forward by David O’Connor in support of the basic distinction: ‘Thousands of sculpted and painted representations from Egypt as well as hundreds of well-preserved bodies from cemeteries show that the typical physical type of Egyptian was neither Negroid nor Negro’ (Snowden 1996b, 107).
There is, however, a danger here that such stark distinctions on the one hand, no less than diplomatic ‘melting pot’ explanations on the other, exacerbated by the continuing embarrassment of racist hyperdiffusionist theories (both Eurocentric or Afrocentric) noted in Chapter 1, may obscure the actual interest, complexity and duration of the demographic and ethnic processes that not only gave ancient Egyptian and Nubian people their actual identities, but, more importantly, conditioned their perceived identities – whether of themselves or of one another. In short, in order to arrive at some adequate surmise of who the ancient Egyptians thought they were, and how they both saw their African neighbours and also preserved or understood their own indebtedness to any ‘African’ origins, we must attempt to define the demographic, topographic and cultural provenance of ancient Egyptian civilisation rather more firmly than may now be fashionable – or even politic. As Susan Stephens suggests, ‘the peculiar fascination that Egypt and its symbolic realm hold in the western imagination’ (2003, 5) exacerbates the ideological premium placed on such investigations.
It is now generally agreed that the crucial period, and essential stimulation, for the emergence of pre-Dynastic Egyptian culture was a series of alternating wet and dry phases in the Nile Valley and eastern Sahara during the early Holocene, that is, from about 12000 BP onwards (Wendorf and Schild, 1976; Close, 1992; Hassan, 1995; Butzer, 1995; Iliffe, 1995; De Flers, 2000; Edwards, 2004). Dubbed the ‘Neolithic Revolution’ by V. Gordon Childe, the process marked a relatively rapid advancement in the Middle Eastern populations, from mobile hunter-gatherer existence to sedentary farming practice and the settlement of the great river valleys of the Nile and Mesopotamia (Wells, 2006; Mithen, 2008). The systole and diastole of the Saharan climate over these millennia speeded up the clockwork of Nile Valley civilisation. Each wet spell dispersed human groups into a habitable desert, where they developed new skills (pastoralism, rock art, domestication of grains, pottery) that would then be consolidated back in the Nile Valley during successive arid phases (Midant-Reynes 2000a, 40–43). Just before the Holocene, during the Late Pleistocene, some Middle-Palaeolithic occupation of the Egyptian deserts had developed, between about 140000 and 70000 BP (Hassan, 1995, 666). However, the extreme desiccation of the Sahara, which lasted from then till about 12000 BP, effectively depopulated the Sahara (Wendorf and Schild, 1992), creating a demographic vacuum and driving Palaeolithic populations to the Sahara’s extremities, where, as we shall see, fundamentally different social groups and language families developed.
While the Sahara was drying up, key developments were taking place in the Nile Valley: ‘From 21000 BP a new era begins in the Egyptian Nile Valley with numerous [human] assemblages of great typological variety’ (Vermeersch, 1992, 148) – as one might expect from the very diverse groups retreating into the valley. The Nile Valley became ‘the principal place of refuge until the Holocene pluvial’, the achievements of its emergent culture marked by the appearance of a superior stone-blade industry (Midant-Reynes, 2000a, 42–43). Wilma Wetterstrom posits a seasonal but sluggish river, ‘open landscapes of marshes and meadows’, where Nilotic hunter-gatherer communities developed, for instance in the Wadi Kubbaniya, opposite Aswan and dated to at least 18000 BP (1993, 170). Béatrix Midant-Reynes regards this as a paradigm site for the history of Nile Valley occupation, as groups had repeatedly moved into and out of it from as early as 89000 BP onwards (2000a, 35–36).
All this began to change fairly rapidly (in meteorological time) from the beginning of the first major Holocene wet phase, from about 8800 BCE onwards (De Flers, 2000; Edwards, 2004); once again, ‘the Sahara [was] invaded by people supporting an economy which can be labeled Neolithic’ resulting ‘in an important colonization of the depressions’ (Vermeersch, 1992, 143). Just who these people were is not clear; what is, is that these great transhumant cycles, played out over thousands of years, established a process that would culminate in the creation of a recognisably pre-Dynastic Egyptian culture by about 5000 BCE, when the Sahara once again entered a hyper-arid phase. Angela Close puts it most succinctly: ‘Human groups moved into the Eastern Sahara after it began to rain there at the beginning of the Holocene. They moved into a cultural vacuum, so we do not need to consider local antecedents. When the Holocene rains ceased, settlement of the desert proper was abandoned and has not been resumed’ (1992, 157).
It is what happened during and between the Holocene wet phases – that is, between about 10000 and 5000 BCE – that is crucial to our story. The period was not marked by a single curve towards and then a decline from an optimal wet phase, but rather by a series of oscillations between wet and dry phases that effectively speeded up the developmental clock of Nile Valley culture (Said, 1981, 370–1; Muzzolini, 1993, figure 11.2; De Flers, 2000, 209, graph). During each relatively wet period, human groups from the entire Nile Valley, from the confluence of the Blue and White Niles to the Delta, would move into the eastern Sahara and then back again; each time, it would appear, with major advances in their life skills as they progressed from hunter-gathering to sedentary farming. It was a complex process spread over millennia, as demonstrated in the careful studies of Fekri Hassan (1988, 1995), Barbara Barich (1992), Wilma Wetterstrom (1993), Toby Wilkinson (2003) and David Edwards (2004), who all confirm the postulates of Michael Hoffman’s seminal Egypt before the Pharaohs (1980). For Hoffman, the civilisation of the Nile Valley was part and product of ‘an African continuum’, beginning with the movement of ever greater numbers of people from the Sahara into and out of the valley from 14000 BP onwards, as the desiccation of the desert was alternately relieved or intensified.
Out in the desert, at sites such as Nabta Playa, some 100 kilometres west of Abu Simbel, crucial developments took place, including possibly the domestication of cereal grasses and cattle (Close, 1992, 160–166; Hassan, 1992, 309). Whether cattle were independently domesticated in the eastern Sahara or were an early Holocene import from the Levant is still hotly disputed. Davies and Friedman (1998) argue that by 10000 BCE, Nabta Playa was a lacustrine site, home of ‘perhaps Africa’s first cattle-herding culture’ (19–20). Hassan insists that cattle had been domesticated in the eastern Sahara by the late seventh millennium BCE, ‘well before they appeared on the banks of the Nile’, at the same time that pottery emerged ‘in a broad zone extending from the central Sahara to the Eastern Sahara’, and in association with ‘a proto-Nilo-Saharan language’ that these Neolithic cattle herders spread from a point of emergence in the northern Sudan (1995, 669). Juliet Clutton-Brock, who has probably made the most extensive study of the Holocene domestication of animals in Africa, admits to the complexity of the case. She surmises, however, that bos primogenius, the wild auroch, had probably been domesticated in North Africa by the seventh or sixth millennium BCE, but possibly independently in the Nile Valley as early as 9 000 years ago, and that by 6000 BCE cattle pastoralism was well established throughout North Africa and spreading southwards (1993, 66–7). Christopher Ehret thinks it was the other way round: ‘The peoples of the steppes and grasslands to the immediate south of Egypt domesticated … cattle as early as 9000 to 8000 BC…. The earliest domestic cattle came to Egypt apparently from their southern neighbours’ (cited by Celenko, 1996, 25).
Wilma Wetterstrom argues that domestic cattle came to the Nile Valley from south-west Asia between 6000 and 5000 BCE (1993, 201); Anthony E. Marks believes they only arrived around 3500 BCE (1991, 37); Brian Hesse proposes multiple sites of domestication in Anatolia and north-east Africa (1995); Lech Krzyzaniak offers a time-table – domestication in and west of the Nile Valley by 8000 BCE, dispersal throughout the whole of the Middle and Lower Nile Valley by 4900 BCE, diffusion over the whole of North Africa between 4500 and 1200 BCE, and into the Sudan and East Africa between 3500 and 2500 BCE (1992, 241, figure 5).
It must also be remembered that several different strains of cattle were involved. So, for instance, bos indicus, the humped, short-horned Zebu, was perhaps domesticated as far away as the Indus Valley by about 5000 BCE and introduced to Africa via the Horn of Africa and African east-coast settlements. Meanwhile bos taurus, the humpless long-horned animal, may well have been domesticated in Africa, either in Egypt or (as suggested by recent genetic research) in the Niger-Cameroon heartland of Bantu-speaking peoples (Bradley and Loftus, 2000; Poland and Hammond-Tooke, 2003, 15). Both strains can be seen in rock art across Africa. Most recently, Peter Mitchell has claimed, on the basis of mitochondrial DNA analysis, that ‘the herding of cattle developed earlier in Africa than anywhere else’ (2006, 119) and that it spread from the Nile Valley southwards (2005, 40).
If I appear to be belabouring the experts’ opinions in this matter, it is because the provenance and vector of influence of Africa’s most basic culture, cattle pastoralism, is clearly of considerable importance for our understanding of the earliest relationships between Egypt and the rest of Africa. Fekri Hassan puts it well: ‘The importance of cattle in Egyptian mythology may be traced to the special values assigned to cattle among the herders [from the eastern Sahara] who converged on the Nile Valley [from] about 5000 BC’ (1995, 676). Toby Wilkinson’s extensive recent investigations (2003) of the boat-and-cattle petroglyphs of the Egyptian eastern desert leave little doubt as to the central ceremonial importance of cattle in the ideational world of the founders of Egypt’s pre-Dynastic culture.
The cow-deity, Hathor, appears to have been one of the oldest and most ubiquitous in Egypt’s earliest pantheon. The Ptolemaic temple of Dendera, dedicated to Hathor and adorned throughout with Hathor capitals, stands on a site where a shrine devoted to Hathor had existed since the pre-Dynastic period (Oakes, 2003, 36). Fekri Hassan (1992) and Walter Fairservis (1992) have explored the still poorly understood process whereby a primal and ancient female deity associated with the rise of a cattle culture in the Nile Valley yielded to the male deity Horus in late pre-Dynastic times. The ‘dancing goddess’ of early statuettes, eastern-desert rock art, and Naqada II vase decoration, who survives in the dynastic pantheon as either Hathor or Isis, yielded in proto- and early-Dynastic times to Horus (later Amun) and the cult of pharaoh as bull. For our purposes, it suffices to see the process as once more indicative of the more general tenet whereby an essentially African root culture in the Nile Valley gradually melded with or was transformed by elements that may have originated in the Near East.
According to Hoffman (1980), the Saharan cattle economy underlay most of the pre-Dynastic cultures that developed along the Nile of Upper Egypt and Nubia and directly anticipated the Dynastic Egyptian world. Yet the story of the foundations of North Africa’s cattle cultures is only part of the larger account of the ancient synergies between Egypt and the rest of Africa. As Hoffman suggests, ‘Egyptian civilization [was] an end rather than a beginning – a result of prehistoric development during which the first Egyptians adapted their societies to the evolving river Nile and the radically changing climatic regimes that together forged a distinctly Egyptian cultural template’ (xx).
Considerable archaeological evidence supports this view. For Hoffman, there are demonstrable ‘continuities … from the hand axes of the [Egyptian] Lower Palaeolithic through [to] the great royal tombs of Abydos and Saqqara’ (345). These early, crude hand axes show that by 75000 BP ‘the Nile Valley was already a route of migration’ (51); by 45000 BP (the Middle Palaeolithic) the valley already contained ‘considerable cultural diversity’ but also complex interaction (71); by the Late Palaeolithic (13000–10500 BP) ‘large and intensively occupied sites flourished in southern Upper Egypt and Lower Nubia’ (89); and the Holocene Neolithic Subpluvial of 7000–6000 BCE, when ‘the deserts bloomed and human societies colonized areas that have been unable to support such dense population since’ (16) set the scene for the emergence of pre-Dynastic Egypt.
The onset of the current phase of aridity urged populations once again into the Nile Valley, marking the crucial transition from hunter-gathering to farming and herding, and giving rise to ‘the spectacular Predynastic cultures [Badarian, Amratian, and Gerzean or Naqadan I–III] that flourished in Egypt between about 5500 and 3100 BCE’ (102). From here emerged proto-Dynastic Upper Egypt in about 3100 BCE: ‘The values and lifestyles of these Gerzeans became those of the new Egyptian state and ultimately Egyptian civilization itself for the next 3 000 years’ (211). Furthermore, the ‘evidence of the [earliest] tombs points not to catastrophic change, but to the slow development of one tradition in the Egyptian Nile Valley’ (117). And while Alfred Muzzolini (1992, 1993) has argued for a much more diffuse Holocene process of parallel Neolithic developments all over the central and eastern Sahara, the Nile Valley and the Sudan, Toby Wilkinson (2003) has now determined beyond reasonable doubt that it was specifically the eastern-desert nomadic Badarian-Naqada I culture of about 5000–4000 BCE that gave rise to most of the fundamental symbolic elements of pre-Dynastic Egypt, all on display in ancient eastern-desert rock art.
While the largely indigenous Sahara-Nile synergies described by Hoffman were developing in Upper Egypt, the culture of the Delta or Lower Egypt was taking a much more heterogeneous course at this crossroads of the ancient world. The biblical story of Joseph (Genesis 30–50) might be regarded as emblematic of developments here, even though it is of a much later date: a Levantine immigrant rises to prestige and power, and is followed into Egypt by his people.
If the Nile Valley was one of the great ancient cultural transit routes, so was the isthmus of Suez, and along it came other influences that would eventually contribute to the Afro-Mediterranean character of Dynastic Egypt and its ethnic constituency. Elise Baumgartel (1955/1960) has suggested that during the peaks of Holocene wet phases, much of the Lower Nile and the Delta might have been uninhabitable swamp land, hence explaining the earlier – and more significant – developments further south. Nevertheless, at Merimde and Maadi and in the Fayum, between 5000 and 3000 BCE, some of the inhabitants were also migrants from the surrounding deserts – ‘Saharan cattle nomads’, according to Hoffman (1980, 206) – while others ‘differed radically from both the Predynastic peoples of Upper Egypt and the Dynastic Egyptians’ (173). These ‘nomads’ evidently came from Libya and southern Palestine. Midant-Reynes, having examined the most recent archaeological evidence from Delta sites (Maadi, Buto and Heliopolis) speaks of ‘a frontier between two traditions: the “African” culture of Upper Egypt, and the oriental culture of Palestine’ (2000a, 219). The warming and more humid climate of the Neolithic also stepped up developments in the Near East between 12000 and 7000 BP, inevitably affecting northern Egypt, until the re-aridification of the Sahara once again led to the relative isolation of an emerging Nile civilisation.
Recent genetic research reveals a dramatic story of early Levantine population impact on the Nile Valley in the Late Palaeolithic and Early Holocene periods. Stephen Oppenheimer’s tracking of so-called mitochondrial-Eve genes and Adamic Y-chromosomes following the out-of-Africa exodus of Homo sapiens some 60 000–80 000 years ago, suggests that there was a re-immigration or return into the Nile Valley from the Levant around 30 000 years ago, of people from whom the Berbers and other indigenous northern African populations are descended (2003). These findings have now been confirmed by Barkhan and Soodyall’s work on north-African genetic patterns (2006) and National Geographic’s Genographic Project (Wells, 2006). We shall return to the implications of these findings for our understanding of how later Dynastic Egyptians saw themselves in relation to other Africans.
The isolation of the Nile Valley from about 5000 BCE onwards, caused by the Late Holocene re-aridification of the desert, is an important moment in our story, as it also presents a problem for contemporary Afrocentrist claims about continuing interaction between Egypt and the rest of Africa. Effectively, while the isolation of the Nile Valley may have increased human interactions up and down the river, aridification sealed off the nascent civilisation of pre-Dynastic Egypt from further contact with greater Africa, with crucial results: ‘The great techno-economic innovations of the Holocene did not flow from Egypt to the African interior, but rather … after a period of cultural contact (ca 10000–7000 BCE), “Inner” Africa followed its own dynamic’ (MacDonald, 2003, 99).
Fundamental as the Sahara-Nile synergies may have been in the creation of an original African-Holocene Nile culture, from now on the north-south dynamics would be more important, although these, too, would in time become more limited. Peter Mitchell (2005), making use of a radical geo-cultural hypothesis proposed by Jared Diamond (1997), has argued that transhumancy across the sharply differentiated climatic zones consequent on Africa’s north-south orientation was always far more difficult, and hence much slower, than that along the Eurasian east-west temperate belt, with the result that once the aridification of the Sahara intensified, the Nile Valley continuum became relatively isolated from the rest of Africa.
Nevertheless, the interplay among communities up and down the Middle Nile, from central Sudan to Upper Egypt, was important throughout the emergence of pre-Dynastic Egypt, and it is in this matrix that we must continue to look for African inflections in ancient Egyptian culture. Even though Béatrix Midant-Reynes calls ‘the region of Upper Egypt between Qena and Luxor … the fountainhead of Egyptian prehistory’ (2000a, 169), she sees the crucial events of ‘the Neolization of the Nile’ as taking place further south, ‘from the eighth millennium BC onwards … in the region of Khartoum, where the earliest pottery vessels were fashioned’ (253–254). A network of successor cultures seems to have fanned out from here, marked by the earliest evidence of ceremonial burials, clay figurines and the ritual elaboration of cattle culture. If, as Toby Wilkinson has suggested, the more immediate ancestry of pre-Dynastic culture may be traced in the rock art of the eastern desert, some of its earlier antecedents came from further south.
The so-called Khartoum Mesolithic and Neolithic cultures of Upper Nubia, of the seventh and sixth millennia BCE, which provide ‘the oldest known record of settled African civilization’, have yielded material artefacts such as human figurines, cosmetic palettes and black-topped pottery ‘strikingly similar’ to those of pre-Dynastic Upper Egypt (Lacovara, 1996). A.J. Arkell’s (1949) pioneer excavations in the Khartoum area led him to postulate a ‘Sudan Neolithic Revolution’ that triggered off developments in the Eastern Sahara, Nubia and the Nile Valley.
Some scepticism has been expressed about this version of diffusionism (see Muzzolini, 1993, for example), but Jacques Reinold’s comparative excavations at Kadada near Khartoum and at Kadruka almost a thousand kilometers further north, near ancient Kerma in the ancient Kushite Nubian heartland, as well as the work of the Italian mission in the Geili region north of Khartoum, have confirmed the widespread penetration of the Khartoum Neolithic (Reinold, 1991; Caneva, 1991). Isabella Caneva proposes an ultimately Saharan origin for the Khartoum Mesolithic culture that gave rise to these developments. More recently, the Khartoum Mesolithic has itself been associated with an east-African Sangoan culture, dating back some 70 000 years, and characterised by proto-Khoisanoid-style stone tools, bead work and burial customs (Welsby and Anderson, 2004). In other words, at the root of the Khartoum Mesolithic and Neolithic developments, we must once again look for one of Africa’s very ancient pre-Bantu population groups, similar to the Khoisan.
There are other intriguing connections. Lower Nubia’s A-Group culture, which is contemporaneous with the Egyptian proto- and early-Dynastic period, and which centred on an area around Qustul just south of Abu Simbel, flourished around 3100–2800 BCE, and seems to have had strong affinities with its northern equivalent (Edwards, 2004). Francis Geus’s investigations of Nubian A-Group burials of around 3500–2000 BCE have revealed that they are ‘hardly distinguishable from Egyptian Amratian [i.e., Naqada I] counterparts’, while at the same time ‘display[ing] many affinities with those of the southerly areas’ (1991, 59). Frank Yurco suggests that these are all expressions of the ‘Khartoum Variant traditions of the Sudan’ (2001, 32). Indeed, Bruce Williams has argued (1980, 1996), on the basis of the University of Chicago’s excavations of Nubian A-Group tombs at Qustul in the 1960s, that a well-ordered pre-Dynastic pharaonic culture existed there ‘several generations before the rise of the first historic Egyptian dynasty’ (1980, 12) and inspired and provided the essential features of early Dynastic statehood in Upper Egypt. For Williams, ‘A-Group Nubia and [early] Egypt shared a common pharaonic heritage’, the forebears of Dynastic Egypt derived from the Khartoum Neolithic, and it may have been ‘the A-Group kingdom itself [that] united Egypt’ (1996, 96).
Such a direct lineage and intervention is challenged by scholars such as William Adams (1977), Peter Lacovara (1996) and Joseph Wegner (1996), and Williams may have interpreted the limited evidence (notably the so-called Qustul or Horus Incense Burner, an artefact replete with pharaonic motifs) too enthusiastically in support of his argument. Nevertheless, in view of the complex dynamics of changing power relations, mutual influences and resistances that marked the rapid emergence of the early Dynastic state in Upper Egypt round about 3200 BCE, one may have to agree with Wiliams’s thesis in its more general form: ‘Egypt and Nubia shared a core of pharaonic institutions, rulers, deities, officials, and representations that began long before Egypt became a unified state’ (1996, 95). We shall also see that a broadly common population group occupied Upper Egypt and much of Nubia at this stage (Keita, 1992). However, the question is not so much one of how ‘long before’ the founding of Dynastic Egypt this common heritage existed, but of how long afterwards it was remembered by the Egyptians – or at least subsumed in their institutions, art and cultural practices; and of how such cultural traces might have affected later Egyptians’ perceptions of both their own ‘Africanness’ and their relation to their southern neighbours.
The evidence looked at so far suggests that another way to assess the ‘Africanness’ of ancient Egypt is to determine what vestiges Egypt’s African origins may have left in Dynastic culture; whether these would have been perceived as such; and how such perceptions may have been revised, transformed and even mythologically ritualised over succeeding millennia to produce, by Late Dynastic and Hellenistic times, a set of strictly demarcated images of ‘Egyptians’ on the one hand and of ‘Nubians’ and ‘Ethiopians’ on the other – images that would then inform later Mediterranean cultures. The evidence is, paradoxically, elusive yet pervasive, controversial at the particular level, yet overwhelming in ensemble.
An opening clue is provided by the findings of a research team from the University of Michigan, which re-examined the skeletal material collected by Flinders Petrie between 1895 and 1906 at Naqada and Giza, now in the Duckworth Laboratory, Cambridge, and (as we have seen) analysed by Podzorski in the 1980s. The question guiding the investigations was simple: ‘Who in fact were the ancient Egyptians, and to whom were they most closely related?’ (Brace et al., 1996, 132). Genetic, cranial and nasofacial measurements were correlated with research findings gleaned from many parts of the Mediterranean world, including data derived from archaeological remains of other African and Near-Eastern people of the pre-Dynastic period.
The results were fascinating. Petrie’s original assessment that the Naqada population of about 4000–3200 BCE constituted a ‘New Race’ of ‘invaders … entirely different to any known among native Egyptians’ (140) was immediately disproven. Rather, the team found a ‘genetic continuity in situ [that] maintained a predominantly Egyptian configuration’ (155) from pre-Dynastic to much later times, even though there is also much evidence of continuous Egyptian contact with surrounding peoples. Crucially, the investigations revealed far greater correlation between pre-Dynastic and later Dynastic Egyptians and Nubians, and (for instance) modern Somalis and even Europeans, than between Nile Valley dwellers and west African and sub-Saharan Neolithic groups: ‘Their [early Egyptian] craniofacial morphology has nothing whatsoever in common with [that of] sub-Saharan Africans. Our data, then, provides no support for the claim that there was a “strong Negroid element” [Asante, 1990] in Predynastic Egypt’ (145). Even pre-Dynastic Nubians proved to have had little genetic connection with sub-Saharan Africans.
These are noticeably strong conclusions in a research report that remains otherwise circumspect and tentative, although it does also dismiss claims that ancient Egyptians had to be either ‘Caucasoid’ or ‘Negroid’ as ‘hopelessly simplistic, misleading, and basically wrong’ (156). The fairly conciliatory proposition of Martin Bernal that ancient Egypt was ‘basically African’ (Black Athena 1: 242) is labelled as ‘misleadingly simplistic’ (156). But to conclude that the evidence will bear no stronger argument than the proposition that ‘Egyptians were Egyptians’ (159) is surely also too cautious, and seems to be prompted more by contemporary North Atlantic ethnic sensitivities than by historical credibility.
The evidence does elicit other interpretations, as Podzorski had already suggested. Oliver and Fage had suggested earlier that ‘physical types found in predynastic and early dynastic burials’ show a population ‘indistinguishable’ from the modern Beja, Danakil and Somali (1988, 13); that is, peoples of the desert and coast east of the Nile – in other words, descendants of the nomadic, pre-Dynastic cattle-and-boat people of the eastern desert now identified by Toby Wilkinson (2003). Frank Yurco has also proposed a sharper identification to match these craniometric and genetic investigations: ‘The peoples of Egypt, the Sudan, and much of East African Ethiopia and Somalia are now generally regarded as a Nilotic continuity, with widely ranging physical features … but with powerful common cultural traits, including cattle pastoralist traditions’ (1996d, 67).
Writing in the same volume as Yurco and the Brace group (Celenko, 1996), Keita, Boyce and Ehret reiterate the point that although ‘a study of 12th Dynasty DNA shows that [Egyptians] had multiple lines of descent’ and ‘Old- and Middle-Kingdom statuary shows a range of characteristics’, including ‘variations on the narrow-nosed, narrow-faced morphology also seen in various East Africans’, the overall evidence suggests that ‘the origins of Egyptian ethnicity lay in areas south of Egypt’ (Celenko, 1996, 23–25).
S.O.Y. Keita’s careful examination of crania of the early Dynastic period deriving from Abydos in mid-Egypt to Kerma in mid-Nubia leads him to make bolder claims. Using Hiernaux’s morphology (1975) of two basic ‘Black African’ phenotypes, the ‘Broad African’ (or ‘extreme Negroid’) and the ‘elongated African’ (or Nilotic), he categorises the examined Nile Valley crania as overwhelmingly of an ‘Elongated African’ or Nilotic type. He confirms that despite the presence of about thirty per cent of heterogeneity in the examined samples, the remains of pre-and proto-Dynastic populations of the Middle Nile Valley exhibit a striking continuity. Supporting Fekri Hassan’s findings of 1988, he sums up: ‘The peopling of what is now the Egyptian Nile Valley, judging from archaeological and biological data, was apparently the result of a complex interaction between coastal northern Africans, “neolithic” Saharans, Nilotic hunters, and riverine proto-Nubians, with some influence and integration from the Levant’ (1992, 251), but with proto-Nilotic peoples forming the basic stock. It will be noticed that the possibility of a west African ‘Negroid’ ancestry is wholly absent from all of these scenarios.
Into this highly speculative and controversial debate, Stephen Oppenheimer (2003) has introduced a set of new possibilities. According to his genetic research, much of the population of North Africa, including the northern Nile Valley, stems from a return to Africa, enforced by the last Ice Age, of populations from the Levant some 30 000 years ago. As he puts it, ‘Genetic palaeontology [now] brings clarity to a field of near-medieval confusion’ (347). He sums up as follows:
North Africa has been populated by recent southward migrations of typical European and Levantine lines. The oldest indigenous North African mtDNA line, sometimes referred to as the Berber motif, is dated to have arrived from the Levant about 30 000 years ago…. About one-eighth of maternal gene lines in North Africa come from more recent migrations from sub-Saharan Africa, and over half are recent movements south from Europe…. All this adds up to a view of both Europe and North Africa as recipients of ancient migrations from further east (63).
Elsewhere he suggests that the Levantine or Berber motif may well date back even earlier, to 40 000 years ago (139). These possibilities differ entirely from and posit a much earlier date than those enshrined in the ‘Hamitic hypothesis’ of Sir Flinders Petrie and others (discussed in Chapter 1), according to which Nile Valley civilisation was founded by an eastern ‘Dynastic race’. Oppenheimer’s findings do, however, confirm that Neolithic Nile Valley cultures were the product of complex demographic dynamics and migrations in an area relatively isolated from the rest of Africa, but impinged upon, over a very long period, by the world of the Near East. This also explains why, as the Brace team working in Cambridge had already found, the pre-Dynastic skeletal remains of the Naqada population reveal more affinity with modern Somalis and even Europeans than with sub-Saharan Africans.
Oppenheimer’s work on the genetic patterns among north-east African populations is not unique. He points out that ‘geneticists are now in a race to study Ethiopians, some of whom may be descended from the source population of that single [out-of-Africa] exodus’ (67) that would populate the whole earth – but would also, of course, leave behind in Africa large human groups that may have had little further impact on the development of world populations until relatively recent times.
More recently, James Shreeve has suggested that the ‘group of hunter-gatherers, perhaps just a few hundred strong’ (2006, 62) that left Africa as recently as 50 000 years ago to give rise to all of the rest of non-African extant humanity, may have their most direct living African counterparts among the Khoisanoid peoples of southern Africa. These people, in turn, along with the Hadzabe of eastern Africa, are ‘the remnants of a once continuous population’ of hunter-gatherer communities who once inhabited Africa from the Cape to the Nile Valley, and who have now largely disappeared (Wells, 2006, 145–9).
In South Africa itself, palaeontologists who have re-examined a skull found in the 1950s near the Eastern Cape village of Hofmeyer have concluded that it is the remains of a 36 000-year-old individual who was of the same type as the African migrants who left Africa 30 000 to 40 000 years ago to colonise Europe and Asia (Gosling, 2007). ‘He would not [have looked] like modern Africans or like modern Europeans, or like modern Khoisan people’ but his skull ‘was found to have a very close affinity with the fossil skulls of Europeans of the Upper Palaeolithic’, claims one member of the team, Alan Morris. For the present study, such findings reconfirm that the identities of the ancient populations of northeast Africa, including Neolithic Egyptians, cannot be predicated on that of any modern African peoples, but must be regarded as having been part of a very ancient nexus of Upper Palaeolithic populations: ‘African’ indeed, yet markedly different from any modern Africans.
Also relevant here is the work of Bryan Sykes (2001) and his Oxford team on the thirty-three great mitochondrial ‘clans’ to which the whole human race belongs, research that might in due course indicate more clearly how ancient Egyptians related to other African peoples. What we already know is that of these thirty-three clans, thirteen (forty per cent) are largely native to Africa even though the continent has only thirteen per cent of the world’s population. Indeed, according to Spencer Wells, ‘current genetic data indicate that indigenous people belonging to [the LO group – one of the oldest] are found exclusively in Africa’ (2006, 176). Such findings confirm that Homo sapiens has been present in Africa much longer than elsewhere – ‘there has been time for new clans to form and become distinctive and recognizably different from one another’ (276) – but surely have other implications as well.
Although African genetic sequences show much greater diversity than those now endemic in Europe or Asia, apparently members of only one of these thirteen clans emigrated from Africa in the crucial exodus of 60 000–80 000 years ago (Oppenheimer argues it was 80 000 years ago; Shreeve and Morris favour dates as recently as 40 000 years ago) and their descendants have peopled the rest of the world (Wells, 2006, 277).
The survival, back in Africa, of thirteen still-identifiable clans might well suggest that far from Africans constituting ‘a homogeneous pure black race’ (Shavit, 2001, 146), of whom the Egyptians were an unproblematic part, the prototypical peoples of Africa actually diversified far earlier and may have kept apart for far longer than their coevals in the rest of the world. Large sections of Africa’s indigenous populations may be only remotely related to the African Pleistocene peoples from among whom came the crucial ‘out of Africa’ migration. Oppenheimer’s findings show that the hunter-gatherer peoples who once inhabited the whole eastern part of Africa from north to south and who, as we have seen, may have provided the root stock of non-African humanity, probably became distinctive from their West African counterparts as long as 140 000–190 000 years ago (Oppenheimer, 2003, 40 and Appendix I). In other words, there is a greater genetic difference between the ancient hunter-gatherer populations of eastern and southern Africa and the ‘broad African’ populations of West Africa than between any other human group on earth.
It has clearly become unsatisfactory to subsume such substantially separate identities under a single pan-African rubric of ‘Negroid’, as J. Ki-Zerbo does in his ‘Editorial Note’ to the first volume of the UNESCO General History of Africa (1981, 276–279), and which S.O.Y. Keita finds an unacceptable ‘product of philosophical idealism’ (1992, 247). To argue that Africa is inhabited by only ‘two major “racial” groups … living on either side of the Sahara’, the ‘Arab-Berber group’ and the ‘Negro group’, and, furthermore, to advocate ‘the basic genetic unity of [all] peoples south of the Sahara … settled over a very vast area stretching from South Africa as far as the northern part of the Sahara’ (Ki-Zerbo 268–269), may be politically astute, but is so generalised as to be meaningless, quite apart from flying in the face of the genetic evidence. It also tells us nothing about ancient Egyptians, who lived neither south nor north of the Sahara.
Africa has for aeons been inhabited by people who range from smaller, light-skinned, gracile-featured hunter-gatherer peoples to the very different, more robust, black-skinned, heavily featured Negroid peoples; to assign them all to a ‘basic genetic unity’ is no more illuminating than to consign, say, the French and the Chinese to the same gene pool.
We are dealing here with two sets of very different albeit interrelated questions. One set is historical, genetic, ethnographic and archaeological; the other is mythographic, circumstantial and political. The first pertains to whether and to what extent the civilisation of ancient Egypt was African in origin and character; the second, much more elusive yet more pertinent to my theme, deals with how the ancient Egyptian worldview, evolving over three to four millennia, might have processed, articulated and mythologised such putative origins and connections. The proposition that ancient Egypt was ‘African’ in a number of fundamental ways may now be broadly accepted even if, as we have seen, there were complex admixtures at every stage of its evolution. That ancient Egyptians, however, had an image of themselves that we would now recognise as ‘African’ is a claim that must remain highly contentious, may be largely anachronistic, and is hardly amenable to proof – yet is all the more intriguing for those very reasons.
A major obstacle to any resolution is that the Egyptian record, whether in written or graphic form, is frustratingly silent about any contact with Africa apart from the barest epigraphic mentions of military campaigns and trading expeditions into, for example, Yam, Kush or Punt. The lack in surviving Egyptian literature of any national epic, any substantial historiography or body of chronicles (apart from highly stylised and severely attenuated king-lists such as the Palermo Stone or Turin Papyrus), any coherent ensemble of foundational myths, and any geo-historical account of Egyptian ventures beyond the Nile Valley (apart from the highly formulaic and generalised rhetoric of pharaonic monuments), has frequently been lamented (Kemp, 1989, 20; 1995, 680; Shavit, 2001, 39–40).
This silence means that any investigation such as this one has to proceed by surmise and inference. No historiographic impulse seems to have moved the Egyptians beyond the ceaseless sequencing of pharaohs in an ageless cycle or the mythology of death, resurrection and repetition. Their world was not the product or expression of historical process, but an enigmatic ritualised hieroglyph of the divine pharaonic presence, and of the pharaoh’s constant intercession and interaction with the forces, the gods, of the cosmos.
Such a paradigm of thought and belief made the Egyptian worldview fundamentally different from that of the Greeks (Iversen, 1961). All historical or real events, and the stylised monumental semiotics devised to record them, were deeply immersed in a matrix of formulaic allegory and hieratic rhetoric devised as magic utterance, not as verifiable narrative. Time itself was totemic, symbolic, atemporal: concerned not with linearity and historicity, but with seasonal, cosmic and ancestral cycles.
But intriguingly, there is a notion here of time, of generational sequence, of undying ancestral presence, and of the close intimacy between this world and the next that many observers would now recognise as particularly ‘African’ – in the words of François Kense: ‘Most [African] societies [view] the past and the present as forming an uninterrupted continuum. Continuity between generations, emphasised through ancestral worship and kinship relationships, ensures that the present [is] understood largely through an identification with forebears’ (1990, 138). Kense could be describing ancient Egyptian practice. We shall return to the significance of the Egyptian ‘ritualization of rule’ (Baines, 1995b, 130) and the other issues raised here for a broader assessment of Egypt-in-Africa, but we need to attend first to other fundamental links that may be made between ancient Egypt and its African neighbours.
Another way of approaching Egypt’s ancient Africanness is to explore the links between major demographic movements and the linguistic foundations of prehistoric north Africa. As we have seen, genetic and skeletal investigations indicate fairly clearly who the ancient Egyptians were not, and these findings are borne out by demographic and linguistic evidence. The Late Pleistocene desertification of the Sahara between about 70 000 and 14 000 years ago, and the consequent withdrawal of its populations to the east, north and south, where they continued to develop broadly in mutual isolation had the further consequence of determining north Africa’s three major language groups (Shaw et al., 1993, 18). J.H. Greenberg’s classification of these language groups into Afro-Asiatic, Nilo-Saharan and Niger-Congo (1966, 1981), of which Nilo-Saharan is the most diverse and probably the oldest (Sutton, 1981), is now widely accepted (Trigger, 1978a; Ehret and Posnansky, 1982; Diakonoff, 1989; Oliver, 1991; Iliffe, 1995; Picton, 1995) even while still being refined (Blench, 1993; Ehret, 1993). The fourth major and oldest African language phylum is a loose group of hunter-gatherer click languages, of which various Khoisan exemplars are the most familiar; we shall come to these in due course.
Greenberg’s classification has been substantially challenged only by some Africanists (Diagne, 1981, for example), but it is not difficult to see that their unease is inspired largely by two serious quandaries for Africanist hyperdiffusionism arising from Greenberg’s work. Firstly, his Afro-Asiatic may not be of sufficiently or necessarily autochthonous African origin to satisfy Afrocentrists. Secondly, his Nilo-Saharan, which eventually extended in what Dalby calls a ‘fragmentation belt … extending across Africa from the coast of Senegal in the west to the Ethiopian and East-African highlands in the east’ (Dalby, 1981, 311), must have been in reality as much as it is now in linguistic implication a powerful obstacle to any simplistic diffusion of a pan-African ‘Negroid’ language and culture that embraced both Egypt and west Africa. Diagne’s preference for Olderogge’s ‘great Zindj or Congo-Sahara family’ of languages is inspired by the laudable persuasion that ‘ethnocentricity has gone a long way to distort analysis of the material’, and that ‘Afro-Asiatic’ is merely the old ‘Hamito-Semitic’ made more respectable (Diagne, 1981, 246–247), but it simply turns African languages into a meaningless melée.
To return to Greenberg’s classification as elaborated by Dalby, Sutton, Blench, Ehret and others, the collective wisdom now holds that the oldest north African language, Nilo-Saharan, originated in the south-central Sahara during the Late-Pleistocene period of extreme aridity, somewhere between 18 000 and 13 000 years ago, from whence, and noticeably from the Early Holocene wet phase of about 8000–4000 BCE onwards, its derivatives would spread across Africa, from about the Niger bend to the Nile Basin ‘in a broad belt lying between a much shrunken Sahara and an enlarged equatorial forest’ (Sutton, 1981, 481). It was associated with what Sutton calls an ‘aquatic tradition’ based on the lakes and rivers of the Holocene, but in the northern and eastern parts also associated from an early stage with the cattle pastoralism developing in the eastern Sahara among speakers of Afro-Asiatic languages (Oliver 1991, 41–2). The earliest speakers of Nilo-Saharan in the Middle Nile Valley seem to have been of a Nubian-Nilotic stock – Hiernaux and Keita’s ‘Elongated African’ type.
Despite whatever associations they may have established with the Afro-Asiatic speakers of the northern Nile area, these Saharan pastoralists would retain their quite different Nilo-Saharan languages – ‘for most of its known history, the Nubian stretch of the Nile has been occupied by Nilo-Saharan-rather than Afroasiatic-speaking people’ (Oliver, 1999, 41). In other words, despite the ancient proximities and assumed interrelatedness of the populations of the ancient Nile Valley already noted, two quite different language families became domiciled along the river’s banks.
It was in the more northerly Nile Valley that the second major northern African language family – Afro-Asiatic – emerged. It may in fact have originated further south, in the Sudan (Blench, 1993, figure 7.2), although much controversy still surrounds the point of origin of Afro-Asiatic. Blench argues that proto-Afro-Asiatic – whose successors include ancient Egyptian, Semitic, Cushitic, Chadic and Berber – emerged in the central Sudan around 12500–10000 BP, then spread northwards down the Nile and further eastwards to become the dominant language family of north-east Africa. Ehret, however, has placed the origins of the other major North African language phylum, Nilo-Saharan, in virtually the same area, ‘in the general region of the Blue Nile between the Ethiopian highlands and the White Nile’ (1993, 108). This proposal not only explains the Nilo-Saharan character of Nubian-Nilotic languages as opposed to the Afro-Asiatic identity of those just further north; it underscores once again the intimate linguistic and cultural complexities of the Middle Nile Valley or the ‘Nilotic continuum’ mentioned earlier.
Controversial and even contradictory as some of these proposals may still be, what matters for my purposes is that both ur-language groups seem to have emerged in relatively close proximity in the Nile domains. Elsewhere Ehret and Posnansky argue that ‘the Afroasiatic homeland was somewhere along the Red-Sea hinterland of Africa’ and speculate on the parallel emergence here of two major north African populations that in turn generated the two major language phyla: ‘two widespread groupings of related stone-tool industries, one [speakers of Afro-Asiatic] about 18 000 years ago which eventually extended from the Horn across Africa, and the other [speakers of Nilo-Saharan] before 10 000 years ago which extended across the Sudan and the southern Sahel’ (1982, 7).
Remarkably, these two major language families remained quite different, one difference being that Afro-Asiatic would appear to have had strong southwest Asian elements in it from a very early stage, or even – pace the spectre of reviving a ‘Hamitic’ hypothesis – a partly Levantine developmental history. According to Roland Oliver, ‘It would be a fair hypothesis that [Afro-Asiatic] emerged from a series of dialects spoken in the valleys of the Jordan and the Nile during the enforced concentration of populations beside the rivers during the long dry periods between about 18000 and 8000 BC’ (1991, 40). From these nodes, the derivatives spread into the adjacent areas of the Levant, Arabia, north Africa and the eastern Sahara during the subsequent Holocene wet phases.
It has long been held that among the users of proto-Afro-Asiatic were the ancestors of the Berbers and the Tuaregs, who moved from the Levant into North Africa and mixed with Nilo-Saharan and Nile Valley peoples (Iliffe, 1995, 30–31; Kennedy, 1997, 8; Coulson and Campbell, 2001, 162). Stephen Oppenheimer’s hypothesis of a ‘Berber motif’ re-entering north-east Africa from the Levant some 30 000–40 000 years ago adds new dimensions to the argument that Afro-Asiatic has a complex and symbiotic north-east-African and Near Eastern developmental history.
John Ray has suggested that ancient Egyptian ‘was merely one of a whole series of languages or dialects, spoken in the areas of the Sahara and Arabian deserts, which disappeared, or coalesced, with the increasing desiccation of these regions after the last pluvial phase’, a process that would explain ‘the apparent isolation’ of ancient Egyptian ‘which is otherwise so puzzling’ (1986, 313), even though the language is clearly Afro-Asiatic. But once again the implication is that ancient Egyptian, and hence its bearer culture, while African and even Nilotic, was not so in any straightforward and easily comprehensible way. Whatever the origins of Afro-Asiatic, its occupation of the Egyptian Nile Valley was relatively swift, and occurred in prehistoric times.
More importantly, this commonality of language (which may have included the Nubian A-Group as well), must have derived from and maintained a considerable Egyptian-Nilotic cultural unity, and thus some sense of difference from the rest of greater north-east Africa: ‘Egypt was culturally unified from the Naqada II phase onwards, well before its political unification was attested by written evidence’ (Midant-Reynes, 2000, 238). Toby Wilkinson’s demonstration that the Badarian-Naqada I culture of the eastern desert was the seedbed of pre-Dynastic Egypt is commensurate with the evidence that ancient Egypt’s linguistic roots lay east of the Nile, not to its south. Barry Kemp concludes:
All the evidence at our disposal points to the fact that the same ancient Egyptian language was spoken from Elephantine to the Mediterranean for as far back as we can see. This probably applies to the Predynastic Period, despite the differences in material culture between Upper and Lower Egypt (1989, 37).
Ancient Egyptians and post-A-Group Nubians eventually embraced two quite different linguistic destinies – Afro-Asiatic and Nilo-Saharan respectively – however close their cultural and even ethnic affinities may originally have been. David Edwards argues that this linguistic divergence is paralleled by other socio-cultural separators. He identifies a range of cultural practices shared by pre-Dynastic Nile Valley peoples from Middle Egypt to south of Khartoum, up to the period of aridification of the Sahara that intensified from the fourth millennium BCE onwards, but then detects a parting of the ways until, by the time of some re-establishment of contact in the third millennium, ‘we see the meeting of two very different worlds’ (2004, 40). Burial practices, for instance, had come to vary greatly between pharaonic Egypt and Kushite Nubia. A crucial linguistic shift had taken place, summed up by Frank Yurco: pre-Dynastic ‘Naqadan Egyptians, A-Group and C-Group [Nubian] peoples were very similar and interrelated … with more continuities than differences in their background’; but by late Old Kingdom times, ‘the C-Group spoke a language not understood by the Egyptians’ (2001, 46). Such divergence reflects, and must partly explain, the subsequent historical parting of the ways between the cultures north and south of the First Cataract.
While Afro-Asiatic was developing and diversifying in north-east Africa and the Levant, the third major language family of North Africa, Niger-Congo, emerged in the vicinity of the great bend of the Niger River (Blench, 1993b, 137). It was, or would become, the dominant language group of sub-Saharan West Africa, and of the ‘Broad African’ or ‘Negroid’ peoples. It subdivides into two further comprehensive groupings. One is located between Senegal and Cameroon, and finds expression in widely diversified but related languages, suggesting a slow process of migration and diversification over at least 5 000 years. The other group constitutes the far more closely related Bantu languages, which spread through a vast area of central, eastern and southern Africa. Their strong family likenesses suggest a history of rapid dispersal over the last 2 000 years (Oliver and Fage, 1988, 16–18).
The main implications of the geo-linguistic history sketched above must be clear: for the crucial early millennia of their evolution, Niger-Congo and Afro-Asiatic languages, cultures and peoples were wholly isolated from one another, separated not only by the arid desert of the Late Pleistocene, but later also by the ‘fragmentation belt’ of Nilo-Saharan cultures and speakers that would come to stretch between them. Until the great Bantu migrations of relatively recent times (from about 1000 BCE – Phillipson, 1977, 227–239), Nilo-Saharan speakers and cultures constituted a massive demographic, cultural and linguistic barrier between Afro-Asiatic-speaking north-east Africa and Niger-Congo-speaking west and west-central Africa (Sutton, 1981; Greenberg and Dalby, 1981). R. de Bayle des Hermens, writing on the prehistory of the Zaire Basin, puts it bluntly: ‘Nothing in the [Central African] industries of the Middle and Upper Palaeolithic, nor in the Neolithic, nor in cave art … gives ground for belief that there were any contacts with the people living in the Sahara’ (1981, 530).
Thurstan Shaw, asking why there was no Bronze Age in sub-Saharan Africa and virtually no Bronze-Age contact between Egypt and the rest of non-Nubian Africa, suggests that the fourth and third millennia BCE, when the crucial pre-Dynastic developments in the Nile Valley were taking place, constituted also the first stages of the final desiccation of the Sahara, when people once again moved out to the desert’s extremities, with the result that the Sahara ceased to be ‘an indirect link between Egypt and West Africa’ for some 3 000 years, before the camel helped to re-establish some contact (1981, 628). In simple terms, until historic times, there was virtually no connection between the peoples of Egypt and West Africa.
It is, of course, dangerous to assume that speakers of related languages will necessarily share common cultural and ethnic origins (or the other way round, as we have just seen with Egypt and Nubia). Bruce Trigger has warned: ‘Nowhere has the confusion of culturally acquired characteristics with biologically inherited ones produced more bizarre and dangerous myths than in respect to north-eastern Africa’ (1978, 27). He is referring to the ‘Hamitic hypothesis’, but the caveat holds more generally.
Nevertheless, the linguistic evidence suggests that the prehistoric language map of North Africa follows the ethnographic contours of the same area quite well – Ehret speaks of ‘a strikingly good fit geographically and chronologically’ (1993, 108): predominantly ‘extreme Negroid’ or ‘Broad African’ speakers of Niger-Congo languages in the west; Saharan-Nilotic or ‘Elongated African’ speakers of Nilo-Saharan tongues in the south-central Sahara, much of the Sahel and eventually in East Africa; and lastly, a relatively tight ensemble of speakers of Afro-Asiatic in north-east Africa. As we have seen, these speakers of Afro-Asiatic languages were Nilotic but not Negroid, African in origin, but not solely so – the ancestors or close relatives of modern Egyptians, Libyans, Berbers, Somalis and even Ethiopians, but not of West Africans. They were also part of and descended from other Nilotic-Saharan peoples so ancient as to make the debate about whether ancient Egyptians were ‘black’ or ‘Negroid’ somewhat irrelevant.
Bruce Trigger, having issued his caveat about the ‘Hamitic hypothesis’, goes on to propose a model for the ancient occupation of the Nile Valley that some may regard as no less fanciful. He posits an ancient Lower Nubian population of ‘remarkably stable genetic composition’, deriving from ‘a highly successful hunting and gathering population that was widely distributed in the sub-Saharan savanna belt in the sixth millennium BC … that has variously been described as “Caucasoid”, “Sudanese Negro”, or even hesitatingly “Boskopoid”, that is, related to the modern Bushman population of Southern Africa’ (1978a, 29). The term ‘Boskopoid’ is now rejected by palaeoanthropologists and cultural historians (Bonner, 2007; Dubow, 2007), but Trigger’s general point needs attention.
These ‘new’ actors in my unfolding story of north-east African ancestries, the Neolithic hunter-gatherers, were members of Africa’s oldest identifiable surviving population groups, and were speakers of its oldest language phylum, the so-called click languages (Greenberg, 1966; 1981, 306; Blench, 1993b, 133).
These languages and their speakers now only survive as isolates in the arid vastnesses of southern Africa (San Bushmen) and central Tanzania (the Hadzabe and Sandawe), but it is generally agreed that they are the vestiges of a huge cultural, ethnic and linguistic ‘substratum that has all but disappeared’ (Blench, 1993b, 135), yet that before 5000 BCE occupied Africa from its southern shores, throughout its eastern grass and shrub lands, as far north as Eritrea (Murdock, 1959, 170–187; Oliver, 1978, 374–376; Coulson and Campbell, 2001, 30, maps 2 and 3). Their non-Negroid genetic identity can be traced back some 190 000 years (Sykes, 2001; Oppenheimer, 2003), and Spencer Wells says of the survivors of this once ubiquitous people: ‘Genetic data indicate that the San and Hadzabe are among earth’s oldest intact populations’ (2005, n.p.).
