Agriculture As Evidence of an African Egypt.

[Mentuemhat]

In the world of Academia, the controversial question of the biocultural origins of Ancient Egypt has been largely defined as a struggle between the south as represented by The Horn of Africa, which is equated with 'black' or subsaharan Africa, and the North as represented by the northernmost part of Egypt and the adjacent Palestine/Syria region, where North Africa is esentially seen as an extension of the Middle East. It was argued in the early part of Ancient Egyptian historiography that the population of AE were South West Asians from the Syria/Palestine region who bought the light of civilization to the docile and submissive African savages. So it was assumed that all the accoutrements of civilization were brought from South West Asia such as sophisticated religious and socio-political systems , language and writing systems, and ofcourse pastoral and settled modes of Agriculture.(keita, 1993; Wendorf et al, 1998). Agriculture, especially seemed most evident of this supposed theory, as some of the most important crops such as wheat and barley and ofcourse livestock, especially sheep and goats were all derived from Southwest Asia.

However more recently the consensus has moved away from Southwest Asia to Africa as the origin of these major aspects of Ancient Egyptian civilization. Analysis of language for instance has shown Ancient Egyptian being closer to languages spoken in the Horn of Africa, such as Somali, than in the middle East; the archaeological evidence also points out similarities between the culture of Ancient Egypt and its African or Nubian neighbours further south ( Ehret 1996). In a matter of fact such evidence attest to the idea of Dynastic culture being formulated in the south close to modern day Sudan and then moving up north(Bard, 2000). But the most decisive evidence has proven to be in the field of population biology:Recent studies on crania and skeletal remains show ancient Egyptians mapping closest to Africans, especially Sudanic and North East African peoples as opposed to neighbouring Southwest Asians. (Keita, 1993) Recent Genetic studies (Stevanovitch, 2004) placing the origins of Ancient egypt in East Africa have been the most recent addition to the plethora of biological evidence proving the Africanity of Ancient Egypt.

Agriculture however has not been as reliable or decisive as these other areas of study in proving the Africanity of Ancient Egypt. Southwest Asia until recently in historiography, has held the pride of place in being the great innovator in the arts of agriculture; it was assumed that the transition between hunting and husbanding, foraging and cultivating took place somewhere in the Levant, then spread later to Ancient Egypt and the rest of Africa. It just seemed too farfetched to assume that agriculture in Africa could have been an indigenous African development. As mentioned earlier, the most important domesticates and crops were not indigenous to the continent, but instead came from the Levant. One also has to consider the historical blight that Africa has suffered as a result of European colonialism. The only way that the European enslavement and subsequent colonization of Africans could be justified was through the demonization and caricature of Africans as inferior or uncivilised. This led to among other things the ingenious theory of the Hamitic race (Aaron Kamushiga, 2003; Keita, 1993) where every example of what Europeans considered as high culture or civilzation in Africa was explained away as the result of a wandering race of Hamites( dark skin white people) originally from Eurasia or the so called Middle East. Ofcourse the Biological evidence more than sufficiently refutes these old worn out racial theories, however remnants of these old theories remain, continuing to resist ideas such as the early domestication of animals or cultivated crops in Africa.

Christopher Ehret in defending Africa as the earliest example of domesticated cattle in human history explains in an interview with World History Connected:

The older generation of scholars have trouble seeing that the archaeology is there. They try to find reasons that it's not there. They say, well, you don't have enough cattle bones. I want hundreds of cattle bones, not tens of cattle bones. They have all kinds of excuses, but I think it's the remnant thinking based on early western European racism and just the general assumption that African history didn't begin as early. People believe that everything in Africa had to come from somewhere else.

But even more recent discoveries in the Sahara or rather the Green Sahara keep challenging this racial remnant thinking. In 2000, a paelaentologist on a fruitful hunt for dinosaur bones in the Tenere desert of Niger, accidentally dicovered the largest assemblage of human graves associated with the Neolithic Green Sahara, exhibiting evidence of Kiffian an Terenian cultures demonstrating a transition from sedentary lifestyles revolving around intense hunting and fishing to pastoral agriculture centred around domesticated cattle kept not for its meat but instead milk and posibly blood ( Paul C. Sereno et al 2008). However the most well known studies of the Sahara are related to the eastern Sahara, which in relation to Ancient Egypt is known as the Western Desert, specifically the Nabta Playa site in the Nubian Desert. The seminal study of that region was published by Wendorf in the year 1998.

But before we proceed it would make sense to define what the Green Sahara is. The Green Sahara refers to a period in history when the Sahara was not always desert or hyper-arid. It is supposed to have begun by 10 000 BC, as a result of an upward shift of the monsoon rain system of Africa. This led to increased rainfall which inturn led to the greening of the Sahara, that is a radical change of the climatic environment leading to the rise of eco-systems that one could associate in many ways with the modern day Sahel and Serengeti.This meant seasonal rains with their temporary or permanent playas; vast grasslands and typical Serengeti fauna such as hippopotami, crocodile and wildebeests. Fred Wendorf describes the Eastern Sahara or Egypt's western desert during this period:

Before 12,000 years ago the summer monsoon
system of tropical Africa moved
northward as far as southern Egypt, and
during the more moist phases brought
rainfall variously estimated on the identifications
of wood charcoal to have been
between 50 and 100 mm/year (Neumann
1989; Barakat 1995), and on the basis of
associated fauna between 100 and 200
mm/year (Wendorf and Schild 1980: 236).
Some interpretations based on sediments
place the rainfall much lower, around 30
mm/year (Kropelin 1993). Whatever the
amount, the precipitation was limited and
highly seasonal; both plants and animals
indicate that most of the rain fell during
the summer months. The rainfall was also
unpredictable, droughts, were frequent,
and some areas may have received no rain
at all for long periods (Wendorf et al.
1984). These limited rains during the early
Holocene caused seasonal lakes and
ponds to develop in the depressions previously
hollowed out by the wind. The
Western Desert was still a dry and unpredictable
environment, with no permanent surface water and few resources. Only
small animals could live there, the largest
of which were two varieties of gazelles,
together with hares, jackals, lizards, rodents,
and desert foxes, all of which could
exist on dew or moisture from vegetation.
Cattle, regarded as domestic, were also
present. Limited as it was, the Holocene
moist period in the Western Desert lasted
about 5000 years, until around 5900 cal
B.P., and at several intervals it supported
reasonably large, but highly mobile human
populations who existed by large and
small animal pastoralism, hunting, and intensive
gathering of a wide variety of wild
plants.

Basil Davidson in his classic documentary 'Nile Valley Civilizations' also gives a fair idea of what life in that period was like.
[Green Sahara[/URL]

In regards to Ancient Egypt, the part of the Sahara which is of interest is the Western Desert. In the world of Egyptology, The Green sahara episode of the Western Desert is often referred to as The Saharan Neolithic. There are many who are wary of using the word Neolithic to speak about this period in history, as the word neolithic often refers to Levantine Agriculture defined by the domestication of crops and well established Horticulture. Whereas in the case of the Saharan neolithic we are speaking of Pastoral Agriculture defined largely by the domestication of Cattle and the invention of Ceramics and pottery ( invented 2000 years before the middle East). For that reason some have suggested that Saharan Ceramic would be more appropriate. (Stan Hendricx and Pierre Vermeersch, 2000). But besides pastoralism, these people also relied heavily on intensive hunting, fishing and more interestingly the intensive collecting and harvesting of wild grains such as millets and sorghum, which were also processed using grindstones. This latter activity, in the world of archaeology is seen as the evolutionary step to crop cultivation. Interestingly enough, Wendorf did come across possible evidence of sorghum being purposely cultivated; it was not fully determined though whether or not this posed sufficient evidence for crop domestication as opposed to simply the intensive harvesting of wild grains. Christopher Ehret, a historian specializing in linguistics, on the other hand, as is typical of him, seems to possess more confidence in the sophistication of this Nile/Sahara culture:

Well, the language evidence says that there was early agriculture. You go back to the word for "cattle-raising" in Nilo-Saharan. It's not in the proto-language, it's in one of the branches. A few hundred years later, you get words for "cultivation," so you know they're cultivating, not long after they begin to raise some cattle. All we have after the first cattle are some sorghum seeds, and people argue whether those were domestic or wild. But the language evidence says that they were cultivating the sorghum. And the archaeology indirectly supports the language evidence. The Nilo-Saharans have granaries, we know that. By 7200 or 7300 BCE, they've got sedentary sediments. Yeah, you can have people collecting wild grasses really intensively and putting the grasses in a granary. However, the intensive grass collectors we know about didn't have granaries this big. So the language evidence and the archaeology both provide evidence of cultivation.

One of the more important finds at Nabta Playa is a series of rock megaliths interpreted by experts(such as Wendorf) to have religious and astronomical value. As far as many experts are concerned it is the earliest example of social complexity and organisation in the region, possibly a socio-cultural proto type for the subsequent development of dynastic Egypt. Espellialy when one takes into context the relevance of cattle to these peoples. It seems that cattle were idependently domesticated by these people as early as 9000 BC. Cattle bones were found buried in connection to what some experts have interpreted as religious or spiritual veneration. This is signifigant as the later Egyptians had the veneration of cows as being central to their spiritual lives. An even earlier study by Frankfort had linked the cultural traditions of other African Nilotic peoples, such as the Nuer and Shilluk (who most likely emerged from the final dessertification of the Sahara, although Frankfort would have not known it at the time). These populations, even to this present day possess pastoral agricultural lifestyles quite similar to that deduced from investigating the material culture of these Nilo-saharans of the Western Desert. For instance, they relied on their cattle primarily for its milk and blood as oppossed to its meat; also the seasonal nature and harsh conditions of their environment led to peculiar belief and spiritual systems such as that of the King as the Rain Maker God as was the case of Ancient Egypt. Remarkably, such cultural traditions are not simply limited to Eastern Africa but are shared by African populations throughout Western and Central Africa. This seems to be evidence of a common cultural substratum shared by these African peoples during their period of residence in the Green Sahara, before it dried up forcing them to resettle in their respective parts of the African continent. Simon Simonse in a book with a title which explains it own self well enough-- "Kings and Gods as Ecological Agents: Reciprocity and Unilateralism in the Management of Natural Order ", demonsrates the concept of the Rainmaker king among the Lulubo and Lokoya in the southernmost tip of the Sudan in Central Africa:

This type of drama is most elaborate in the case of the Rainmaker. Of the various public concerns the weather has the greatest dramatic potential. Rains are capricious and localised. Rain falls over a period of 9 months. Its timeliness is a precondition for the two main harvests. The tension is particularly high in June when the first crop is about to be harvested and the annual period of hunger is peaking. The power of Rainmakers is built on this suspense. If they manage the rains well they gain in prestige. If the rains fail the community turns against its Rainmaker blaming him or her of drought. For as long as the drought persists, the confrontation between the king and his community will escalate.... It may ultimately lead to the Rainmaker being killed. In the area I studied I identified 26 cases of accomplished killings of kings within living memory. As the crisis deepens and the need for a solution rises all members of the community, including women and children, are gradually drawn into the process.

We can see something quite similar in the intriguing history of 18th Century Oyo empire of Nigerian Yoruba as noted by A.I Asiwaju and Robin Law, in the "History of West Africa". It is an account of the political struggles between the Alafin, the God-king of the Oyo and the Oyo Mesi a group of powerful nobles who were responsible for holding the Alafin accountable to the people of oyo. It could be interpreted as an amplification and elaboration of the drama mentioned earlier among the more rural Lulubo and Lokoya, transported to the grander, more urbanised and somewhat more romantic setting of courtlife in 18th century Yorubaland:

No less than eighteen Alafin reigned in the course of the century, and if we are to believe the traditions none of these werewas permitted to die a natural death, every one dying by murder or suicide. The principal features of these troubles was conflict between the Alafin and and the Oyo MesI.The latter sought to increase their power by asserting a right to dispose the Alafin, and by securing greater influence in thechoice of the successor to the throne. Ajagbo's successor Odarawu was formally rejected by the Oyo Mesi, in the name of the people of Oyo, and obliged to commit suicide. The next Alafin, Karan was likewise declared rejected but sought to defy the pressure for his suicide, only to bekilled in an insurrection.These incidents securely established the right of the Oyo Mesi to remove the Alafin, and this right was frequently exercised thereafter.At the death of the Alafin Ojigi,the conqueror of Dahomey,in the 1730s, the Oyo Mesi further strengthened their position by effecting an alteration in the systemsystem of succession to the throne. Earlier, it had been normalfor the eldest son of the Alafin to be formallyrecognized as heir apparent, with the title Aremothough his succesion still required the formal consentof the Oyo Mesi. At the death of Ogigi, however, theOyo Mesi refused to sanction the succession of the Aremo,and compelled him instead to committ suicideand the enforced suicide of the Aremo at his father's death was established a normal procedure thereafter.

In pointing out the distinction between Mesopotamian and and Egyptian sociocultural and Kingship systems, Stuart Pigott in his "Dawn of Civilization" making reference to Cyril Aldred's "Egypt To the End of the Old Kingdom" confirms the centrality of the Raimaker King/God concept to Pharaonic Egypt:

In Mesopotamia the beginnings of little independent city-states under tutelary gods, rulers, councils and assemblies are perceptible, though later to be submerged in a familiar pattern of oriental despotism, but in Egypt from the beginning we are able to glimpse that essentially African figure, the omnipotent, rainmaking, god-king. The prehistoric cheiftain, a rainmaker and medicine-man, with magic power over the weather and therefore able to keep his people in health and prosperity becomes with the founding of the first dynasty, the Pharoah, a divine king being in command over the Nile and able to sustain and protect the nation.

Perhaps it would even be more useful to emphasize the importance of cattle to both Nilo-Saharans and their Egyptian counterparts. Wendorf and Schilds, in their 1998 paper making reference to Frankfort points out, the religious parallels and continuity between the cattle based pastoral lifestyles of Nilo-Saharans and the later Dynastic egyptians:

Another way of exploring
this is by examining those aspects of political
and ceremonial life in the Predynastic
and Old Kingdom that might reflect
impact from the Saharan cattle pastoralists.
In this we have been preceeded by
Frankfort (1978: 3–12) who, in his major
study of Egyptian and Mesopotamian religions
and political systems, argued that
the Egyptian belief system arose from an
East African substratum and was not introduced
from Mesopotamia. To support
his position Frankfort pointed to the similarities
in religious beliefs the early Egyptians
shared with Nilotic cattle pastoralists.
During the Old Kingdom, cattle were
a central focus of their belief system. They
were deified and regarded as earthly representatives
of the gods. A cow was also
seen as the mother of the sun, who is
sometimes referred to as the ‘‘Bull of
Heaven.’’ The Egyptian pharaoh was a god (similar to the Shillok king, and not an
intermediary to the gods as in Mesopotamia).
He was the embodiment of two
gods, Horus, for Upper Egypt, and Seth,
for Lower Egypt, but he was primarily Horus,
son of Hathor, who was a cow. Horus
is often depicted as a strong bull, and images
of cattle are prominent in Predynastic
and Old Kingdom art; in some instances
the images of bulls occur with
depictions of stars, a concept that goes
back to the Predynastic (Frankfort 1978:
172). Dead pharaohs were sometimes described
as the Bull in Heaven. Another
important Old Kingdom concept was Min,
the god of rain, who is associated with a
white bull, and to whom the annual harvest
festival was dedicated.
It is interesting to note that the emphasis
on cattle in the belief system of the Old
Kingdom is not reflected in the economy.
While cattle were known and were the
major measure of wealth, the economy
was based primarily on agriculture and
small livestock—sheep and goats. Frankfort
saw this emphasis on cattle as an indication
that the Old Kingdom beliefs
were part of an older stratum of East African
concepts. It seems likely, however,
that had Frankfort known that cattle pastoralists
were in the adjacent Sahara several
thousands years before the Predynastic,
he would have seen the Western
Desert cattle pastoralists as the more
likely source for the Old Kingdom religious
beliefs....

So much for that.

Nonetheless many people continue to mistake the presence of South West Asian crops and animals in Ancient Egypt as evidence of Demic diffussion from the Levant. However the examination of the unique agricultural lifestyles of these peoples (not just Nilo Saharans but also the Predynastic cultures of Egypt) would seem to argue against that theory. Demic diffussion from the Levant would have meant a sudden introduction of a well established horticulture system from the Levant, however the archaeological records show the Predynastic Egyptians incorporating aspects of Levantine agriculture (namely individual crops and domesticates) on their own terms and at their own leisure into a preestablished indigenous semi-nomadic pastoral lifestyle, which also involved hunting and fishing. In other words, they may have imported sheep and goats from the levant, but not the idea of Agriculture. Ehret et al referencing Wetterstrom assert that much in " The Origins of Afro-asiatic":

Furthermore, the archaeology of northern Africa DOES NOT SUPPORT demic diffusion of farming from the Near East. The evidence presented by Wetterstrom indicates that early African farmers in the Fayum initially INCORPORATED Near Eastern domesticates INTO an INDIGENOUS foraging strategy, and only OVER TIME developed a dependence on horticulture. This is inconsistent with in-migrating farming settlers, who would have brought a more ABRUPT change in subsistence strategy. "The same archaeological pattern occurs west of Egypt, where domestic animals and, later, grains were GRADUALLY adopted after 8000 yr B.P. into the established pre-agricultural Capsian culture, present across the northern Sahara since 10,000 yr B.P.

And remarkably, examination of pre-neolithic and neolithic populatians from the Levant, namely the Mushabeans, Kebarans and Natufians, actually reveal that the spread of agriculture may have been the other way round--which means that agricultural tecnolgy may have diffussed initially from the Sothern Sahara moving gradually and steadily northward to South West Asia and eventually Europe.( Angel,1972; Bar-Yosef, 1985; Brace, 2005 ). According to Bar Yosef, the evidence of 'negroid' characteristics in Natufians is evidence of African populations from the Sahara, related to the Saharan Neolithic and predecessors of the Badarian (Angel, 1972), bringing the kind of innovative pre-agricultural activities such as the intense harvesting, storage and processing of wild grains into the Levant. This group would be the Mushabeans; their interaction with a native Levantine group, the Kebaran ( some even argue that the Kebaran may well have been an even earlier African group) lead to a kind of hybrid culture--known as the Natufians. And what of the Natufians? Well, according to the consensus of the scientific community these are the peoples responsible for inventing agriculture in the Levant, with their descendents being responsible for its spread in Europe. This is what Angel had to say about the relevance of the Natufians:

Against this background of disease, movement and pedomorphic reduction of body size one can identify Negroid traits of nose and prognathism appearing in Natufian latest hunters (McCown, 1939) and in Anatolian and Macedonian first farmers (Angel, 1972), probably from Nubia via the predecessors of the Badarians and Tasians....

Angel here is simply saying that 'negroid traits' in early neolithic peoples of Anatolia and Macedonia is evidence of Natufians, who can ultimately be traced back to a common biocultural substratum, which also branched into Egyptian Predynastic culture, in the Southern Sahara(Nubia) spreading their agricultural know how and technology to SouthWest Asians and Europeans who they intermarried with. The latest Craniofacial studies of Natufians and neolithic Europeans has drawn the same conclusion.(Brace et al, 2005).

But before digressing any further, the importance of Nilosaharans to the development of Dynastic culture should be specifically delineated, for a final time. Dynastic culture is believed to have been directly derived from the predynastic culture of Naqada established in the south of Egypt (Kathryn A Bard, 2000), even spreading deep into parts of Northern Sudan. The Naqadan culture in turn was derived from the even earlier cultures of the Badarian and the Tasian. The Tasian are believed to have originated directly from the Sudan, and the Badarians, mostly from the Western Desert(Stan Hendrickx and Pierre Vermeersch, 2000). The emergence of these Predynastic peoples happens at a time when the Eastern Sahara dries up for a final time around 4700 BC. So it would be fair to decribe these cultures and the resulting socio-political complexity which emerged from them, leading to the creation of Pharaonic Egypt, as essentially a bi-product of NiloSaharans resettling in the Nile Valley of Upper Egypt, after the final demise of the eco-systems of the Eastern part of the Green Sahara which supported their cattle based pastoral social and cultural systems.



References*

----Angel, Biological Relations of Egyptians and Eastern Mediterranean Populations during pre-dynastic and Dynastic Times (1972)

----A.I Asiwaju and Robin Law, The History of West Africa (1985)

----Bard, Oxford History of Ancient Egypt (2010)

---Dr. Bar Yosef, Pleistocene connections between Africa and SouthWest Asia: an archaeological perspective, 1987

----Brace et al, The questionable contribution of the Neolithic and the Bronze Age to European craniofacial form.

--- Ehret, Interview with Christopher Ehret; World History Connected, (2003). ;Ancient Egyptian as an African Language, Egypt as an African Culture(1996). The origins of Afroasiatic (2004)

----Frankfort, Kingship and the gods. A study of ancient NearEastern religion as the integration of society and nature. Univ. of Chicago Press, Chicago (1978)

----Hendrickx and Vermeersch, The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt(2003)

---Kamushiga, Finally in Africa? Egypt, from Diop to Celenko (2003)

---Keita, Studies and comments on Ancient Egyptian Biological relationships (1993).

---Mystery Solver Blog, Africa Timeline Index and Other Issues, Trivia on the Natufians(2010); Examples of Cultural Similarities between those in the Nile Valley and those in other areas of Africa (2008).

----Pigott, Dawn of Civilization (1961)

---Sereno et al, Lakeside Cemeteries in the Sahara: 5000 Years of Holocene Population and Environmental Change (2010)

----Simon Simones, Kings and Gods as Ecological Agents: Reciprocity and Unilateralism in the Management of Natural Order (2006)

----Stevanovitch A, Gilles A, Bouzaid E, et al.Mitochondrial DNA sequence diversity in a sedentary population from Egypt (2004)

----Wendorf and Schild, Nabta Playa and Its Role in Northeastern African Prehistory (1998)

Stevanovitch A, Gilles A, Bouzaid E, et al. (2004) Mitochondrial DNA sequence diversity in a sedentary population from Egypt.Ann Hum Genet. 68(Pt 1):23-39

 

[Leonel]

Too long; didn't read

 

[Zardnaar]

To pseudo history. Didn't read. And to long.

 

[Huayna Capac357]

This should be boiled down for the simpler-minded ones of us (*cough* myself).

Also, this should be in World History.

 

[gangleri2001]

Did anyone read the OP?

 

[Holycannoli]

Is this a continuation of the last thread about ancient egypt that wound up getting locked? The last one was way too tedious.

 

[Dachs]

Did anyone read the OP?

No, because it's copypasta of an OP posted on various other strategy-game history forums.

 

[Skwink]

tl;dr.

 

[Mad Man]

I'll read more of it latter, for now I need a break or my mind will explode.

 

[Leonel]

Did anyone read the OP?

I gave up at "In the world of Academia"

 

[BuckyRea]

What part of Egypt isn't African?

 

[AL_DA_GREAT]

So where did all these black people go? How did they disappear?

 

[Lillefix]

What part of Egypt isn't African?

The Sinai peninsula actually.

 

[Ajidica]

Why should we care what ethnic group founded ancient Egypt or what their skin color was? Unless skin color was a meaningful part of Egyptian life, is it even relavent to modern Egyptology besides making some nationalists happy?

 

[Skwink]

Oh man not this again...

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

You know, abstracts and subheadings are parts of academic articles for a reason.

 

[Cynovolans]

I just skimmed through it but if it supports the archaic theory that Natufians started agriculture, and were for some reason black then I'm just going to pretend this thread doesn't even exist.

edit: it does

 

[Leonel]

So where did all these black people go? How did they disappear?

That reminds me of !!!ChocolateUSA! Man, I miss him. I wish he'd come back.

 

[Dumanios]

1: Dear Muhammad on a yacht, not this again...

2: Shouldn't this be in history?

3: Make the OP slightly shorter.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Moderator Action: Thread closed.