The First Ethiopians. Malvern van Wyk Smith
and westward movement of peoples or cultural influences from the regions of the upper Nile. In this construction of history the Nilotic peoples [are] sometimes given a key connecting role in the creation of a pan-African, or at least a Bantu, civilization that [is] held to display the same fundamental characteristics everywhere, deriving from the common base of an agricultural revolution, iron-age technology, pastoralism, and religio-political ideas first seen in the Nile Valley – for example ‘sacred kingship’ (2001, 301–302).
Unfortunately, there is virtually no evidence for this eminently reasonable ‘construction’. A recent collection of essays, Ancient Egypt in Africa (2003), edited by David O’Connor and Andrew Reid, is committed to re-orientating the questions and directions of research, but cannot come up with many new answers. The editors ask, reasonably:
[W]as Ancient Egypt to some, or even much, of Africa the source of sophisticated cultures as Greece was to much of Europe, or, did Egyptian civilization incorporate fundamental African concepts markedly different from those dominant in the ancient Near East and the Mediterranean lands? (1)
These are crucial questions that will occupy us repeatedly in the present study, but O’Connor and Reid are stymied both by the failure of most contributors to come up with startling answers and their own confession that there is ‘virtually no evidence for Ancient Egypt in the greater part of the African continent’ and, conversely, ‘no evidence of direct [African] contact with Ancient Egypt’ (5).
Other volumes in the laudable series Encounters with Ancient Egypt, of which the O’Connor and Reid collection is a part, are mostly totally silent on Egyptian-African synergies, despite general editor Peter Ucko’s explicit recognition that ‘the place and role of Ancient Egypt within African history … has rarely been considered jointly by Egyptologists and Africanists’ (Series Editor’s Foreword, all volumes). Yet, as we shall see, such recent attempts as have been made to explore putative connections have often been so fanciful and contentious that one is forced to sympathise with professional Egyptologists who have felt that they have no choice but to respond with ‘indifference, dismissal, or [only] cautious acceptance’, as two other editors in the series put it (MacDonald and Rice, 2003, 2). An exciting new departure is suggested by Toby Wilkinson’s work, mentioned above. His Genesis of the Pharaohs explores the implications of his re-examination of Eastern Desert rock art for our understanding of the African origins of Egyptian civilisation, and argues convincingly that the fertile wadis of the area between the Nile and the Red Sea were between 5000 and 4000 BCE home to the cultures that became the civilisation of ancient Egypt. We shall return to these findings.
Much has, of course, changed in our understanding of the millennia-long encounter between Egypt and Nubia. The 1960s campaign to save the archaeological remains of Nubia, precipitated by the rising waters of the Aswan High Dam, brought about a shift in the world’s curiosity about the ancient relationships between Egypt and the lands to its south, and initiated crucial archaeological work, which continues in the Middle Nile region, between the Second and Sixth Cataracts. In recent decades, these Nubian ventures have inspired a number of major international exhibitions, for example at the Brooklyn Museum (Hochfield, Riefstahl and Wenig, 1978), the Brockton Art Museum (Kendall, 1982), the British Museum (Davies, 1991; Welsby and Anderson, 2004), the Indianapolis Museum of Art (Celenko, 1996), the Institut du Monde Arabe (Wildung, 1997) and, perhaps most spectacularly, the 1995–1996 ‘Africa: The Art of a Continent’ exhibition shown in London, New York and Chicago (Phillips, 1995). All revealed a radical shift in our understanding of ‘Egypt in Africa’, as the Indianapolis exhibition was named. All made it clear that from Aswan to Meroë, throughout at least the three millennia of Dynastic Egyptian history, there existed at different times and along different stretches of the Nubian Nile, a series of powerful kingdoms that repeatedly challenged Egyptian superiority, and at all times both posed threats and offered synergies that would result in complex, fraught and dynamically changing relationships among the peoples of the greater Nile region.
But Lower Nubia is now drowned in Lake Nasser (or, as Nubians significantly insist on calling it, the Nubian Sea), with important information about settlement patterns and ethnic identities and affiliations ‘irretrievably lost’ (O’Connor, 1991, 153). Still next to nothing is known about Egypt’s non-Nubian desert neighbours, such as the Medjay and the people of Punt. Furthermore, as David Jeffreys has pointed out, the promise of greater co-operation between Egyptologists and Africanist archaeologists held out by the Nubian salvage campaign ‘failed signally to happen to any lasting extent’ (2003, 7).
In such a vacuum of proven connections, fanciful theories about the foundational relations between the beginnings of Egypt and the rest of north-east Africa, usually invoking simplistic diffusionist and ethnographic explanations, continue to thrive. As Augustine Holl (1990) has demonstrated, much Africanist response to these lacunae in hard history simply reverses the untenable and ahistorical naïveties of classic hyperdiffusionism: ‘Afrocentrism is Europeanism with a black face…. It has borrowed all its categories of thinking from a Western tradition’, as Yaacov Shavit puts it (2001, 14). In what amounts to a parodic reworking of rampant colonialist diffusionism, Egypt either becomes the cradle of a black, Negro ascendancy, the source of all African cultures and their achievements; or, alternatively, drawing on the heritage of the whole continent, Dynastic Egypt is deemed to have been the distillation of African religious, philosophical, socio-political and cultural systems, from which Mediterranean civilisation derives. In the words of Yaacov Shavit, was ‘Pharaonic Egypt the “child of Africa” or the “mother of Africa”?’ (2001, ix).
R.L. Adams (1991) has dubbed this process ‘Nile-Valley Afrocentrism’, and it constitutes, ironically, a complete rehearsal of nineteenth-century racist diffusionist theories whereby all of African cultural achievement was thought to have originated in ancient Egypt (O’Connor and Reid, 2003, 7). There are further anomalies here. If Egypt was the source of all major African civilisations, where did its own pre-eminence derive from? If, on the other hand, pharaonic Egypt was the end-product of a solely African process, where in Africa were its antecedents? I shall show that this is not quite the way to pose these questions, and that there may be intriguing answers, but mainline Afrocentrist arguments tend to be readily undone on such simple binarist issues.
The project to recast world history as essentially an African or ‘black’ achievement has been extensively explored and dismantled by a number of historians, notably Yaacov Shavit, who succinctly sums up the Afrocentrist imperative:
Egypt, Nubia and Africa sprang from a common racial substratum, [and] shared the same philosophical concepts and customs, … the Egyptian language belongs to the family of African languages. For the Afrocentrists, this view or theory [has become] a scientific truth, an ideological faith, a political stand, a historical revelation and a redemption (2001, 206).
While Shavit is generous in his demonstration that ‘Afrocentrism was born as a result of disillusionment with political and social emancipation and with the non-fulfilment of [black] expectations’ (256) in America, his demolition of Afrocentrist versions of ancient African history excoriates ‘a jumble of fundamentalist naïveté, ignorance, and sophisticated manipulation’ (161), to which we shall return. Also implicated in the process of encouraging fundamentally flawed notions of an African Egyptian ascendancy have been genuine attempts by Western scholars who went to teach in African universities in the early flush of Africa’s post-independence period (during the 1960s and 1970s), and who sought to foster, often for the first time in the Western world, an appreciation of ancient African achievement. Their sometimes over-enthusiastic claims of African primacy became recruited in support of more questionable extrapolations. Two noticeable figures in this regard were Jean Vercouter and Jean Leclant, both centrally involved in valuable new ventures in Sudanese archaeology and both articulate spokespersons, as we have already seen, for a powerful Nubian presence in Dynastic origins, culture and identity. They have argued, along with many subsequent workers in Sudanese archaeology, for a much more even match and dynamic of power between Egypt and the Kushite kingdoms than has previously been acknowledged. Yet such insights have in many cases simply dwindled away in the sands of a rampant Afrocentrism that has failed to understand the processes