The First Ethiopians. Malvern van Wyk Smith
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