The First Ethiopians. Malvern van Wyk Smith
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,