Spark of the Pharaohic Nile River Valley Complex

[Dawn2Earth]

This thread is about

Saharan Climate History

Spark of Pharaonic Civilization



(Picture above is a clickable link)

It was against the backdrop of a now diminished climatic blessing from above that mankind first realised his impetus to move on to the greener pastures of Statehood and a more citified way of life. Where there now lies the largest desert anywhere on the globe once lay an enormous Savannah, smack in the middle of which lay an expansive watershed feeding rivers that flowed all the way from the Tibesti Mountains and emptied out in the Mediterranean Sea. Prior to that Savanna the region had undergone an extremely arid phase where what inhabitants Northern Africa had lived on the Nile.



The Sahara had progressed from an earlier extremely arid phase, probably of virtually no human residence. There were now the heavily forested banks of a River Nile, which was much wider. African savanna existed in place of desert, open to moonsoon. With much of what is modern North Africa's Coastal regions likely submerged under sea, uninhabited swamps and marshes lay during this wet phase era where the modern day Sahara's population is most dense -- which is where Coastal North Africa's Delta now empties out into the Mediterranean Sea.

"Located at the southern fringes of the Libyan Desert, Wadi Howar is the largest dry river system in the presently hyper-arid and uninhabitable Eastern Sahara, stretching over 1,100 km from its source area in eastern Chad to the Nile. Geoscientific investigations have shown that during the early Holocene this wadi was the Nile's most important tributary from the Sahara. Later, it became a chain of freshwater lakes and marshes supported by local rainfall, until it ultimately became extinct about 2,000 years ago. A once ecologically favoured area of settlement and communication route between the inner regions of Africa and the Nile valley, Wadi Howar bears abundant prehistoric sites providing evidence of important population movements and interregional cultural contacts."

[/i]

[link]

[link 2]

"[before 5000 B.C.] the Delta [was] virtually uninhabitable."

- Atlas of Ancient Egypt (Cultural Atlas of) - John Baines; Hardcover, page 59, ISBN: 0871963345, Publisher: Facts on File (July 1, 1980)

When the Sahara desert as we today know it begins to manifest marks the end of this African Savannah of Eden and the beginning of humanity's first centralized governments along the Nile and Niger River Valleys, as well as elsewhere.

"Before 2000 BC, what is today the southern Sahara was inhabited by significant numbers of herders and farmers. On the rocky promontories of the Tichitt-Walata (Birou) and Tagant Plateaus in modern day Mauritania, they built what are considered among the earliest known civilizations in western Africa. Composed of more than 400 stone masonry settlements, with clear street layouts, some settlements had massive surrounding walls while others were less fortified. In a deteriorating environment, where arable land and pasturage were at a premium, the population grew and relatively large-scale political organizations emerged - factors which no doubt explain the homogeneity of architecture, settlement patterns, and material culture (e.g., lithic and ceramic traditions). This agro-pastoral society traded in jewelry and semi-precious stones from distant parts of the Sahara and Sahel, while crafts, hunting, and fishing were also important economic pursuits...Their elites built funerary monuments for themselves over a period extending from 4000 to 1000 BC."

- Ray A. Kea, and Mauny, R. (1971), “The Western Sudan” in Shinnie: 66-87.

- Monteil, Charles (1953), “La Légende du Ouagadou et l’Origine des Soninke” in Mélanges Ethnologiques (Dakar: Bulletin del’Institut Francais del’Afrique Noir)

Climate-Controlled Holocene Occupation in the Sahara: Motor of Africa's Evolution
Rudolph Kuper and Stefan Kröpelin*

"Radiocarbon data from 150 archaeological excavations in the now hyper-arid Eastern Sahara of Egypt, Sudan, Libya, and Chad reveal close links between climatic variations and prehistoric occupation during the past 12,000 years. Synoptic multiple-indicator views for major time slices demonstrate the transition from initial settlement after the sudden onset of humid conditions at 8500 B.C.E. to the exodus resulting from gradual desiccation since 5300 B.C.E. Southward shifting of the desert margin helped trigger the emergence of pharaonic civilization along the Nile"

- Collaborative Research Center 389 (ACACIA), University of Cologne, Institute of Prehistoric Archaeology, Africa Research Unit, Jennerstraße 8, 50823 Köln, Germany.

And population genetics seem to reflect this history:

"A recent archaeological study reveals
that during a desiccation period in North Africa, while the
eastern Sahara was depopulated, a refugium existed on the
border of present-day Sudan and Egypt, near Lake Nubia,
until the onset of a humid phase around 8500 BC
(radiocarbon-calibrated date). The rapid arrival of wet
conditions during this Early Holocene period provided an
impetus for population movement into habitat that was
quickly settled afterwards. Hg E-M78* representatives,although rare overall, still occur in Egypt, which is a hub
for the distribution of the various geographically localized
M78-related sub-clades. The northward-moving rainfallbelts during this period could have also spurred a rapid
migration of Mesolithic foragers northwards in Africa, the
Levant and ultimately onwards to Asia Minor and Europe,
where they each eventually differentiated into their
regionally distinctive branches."

- Vincenza Battaglia et. al. 2009, Y-chromosomal evidence of the cultural diffusion of
agriculture in southeast Europe

They reference this text:

Kuper R, Kro¨pelin S: Climate-controlled Holocene occupationin the Sahara: motor of Africa’s evolution. Science 2006; 313: 803 – 807.

[Dawn2Earth]

More detailed information on what was going on in what is now SSAfrica here.

Additional information on the subject:

Cultural Characteristics

Dynastic culture originates as part of the mixture cultures of a vast expansive wetlands area, especially that near the Nile and White Nile rivers.

What makes this first part (two quotes) so interesting is the fact that not only do many researchers think they may have spotted the birthplace of Phaoronic 'Egyptian' culture, but that cultural traits that can be seen in a number of West African groups have also been spotted.

[Sefar Tassili N' Ajjer painting]

Tassili Ajjer painting

[Dogan dance ritual]

the Dogon, the people who thought of Sirius as a triple-star before the West discovered it.

The Tassili n’Ajjer: birthplace of ancient Egypt?

The fact that these were shamans was supported by the presence of masks, an instrument often worn by shamans during religious ceremonies. If anyone still was not convinced that these people went “out of their minds” to paint these scenes, McKenna noted the geometric structures that surrounded the shamans, which for McKenna and other specialists was evidence of the trance state that the painters had entered for painting

Other researchers, notably Wim Zitman, have identified an astronomic connotation to the various figures. He specifically focuses his attention on the so-called “swimmer”, depicted at Ti-n-Tazarift, and argues that this is in fact the depiction of a constellation. He also argues for a connection between the rock paintings of the Tassili and the origin of the Egyptian civilisation, wondering whether the shamans of the Tassili might not have been the “Followers of Horus” that have been the subject of so much speculation in the past decade by the likes of Robert Bauval and Graham Hancock. Rather than from the mythical Atlantis, might they have come from a region southeast of the Atlas mountains, i.e. the Tassili?

...

For Wilkinson, these rock paintings show that pre-Pharaonic Egyptians were not settled flood-plain farmers, but semi-nomadic herders who drove their cattle in between the lush riverbanks and the drier grasslands. He also identified that several of these paintings were located around ancient trade routes. For a “semi-nomadic people”, it is by no means a long stretch of the imagination to argue that they trekked throughout the savannah, from east to west and backwards. And thus, in Pre-dynastic Egypt, Egypt and the Tassili were more than likely “one”.

...

Though the Tassili paintings are by far the best known, they are not the only area where such paintings can be found. Nearby areas such as Acacus and Messak have revealed similar rock paintings. It confirms that the Tassili was not an isolated incident, but part of a larger whole.

...

For Wilkinson, the rock paintings in southern Egypt provide proof that it is there that we should look for the “Genesis of the Pharaohs” (the title of his book). For Zitman, the origin of ancient Egypt can be found in a culture and area that stretches into the Tassili, where there is the pose painted on a cliff face in Sefar that would later adorn the front walls of several Egyptian temples. And that cannot be a coincidence. Furthermore, it also coincides with what Lhote wrote: “The most common profile suggested that of Ethiopians, and it was almost certainly from the east that these great waves of pastoralist immigrants came who invaded not only the Tassili but much of the Sahara.”

- Philip Coppens, Investigative Journalist

[link]

Examination of certain rock paintings in the Tassili-N'Ajjer suggests the presence of proto-Fulani cultural traits in the region by at least the fourth millennium B.C. Tassili-N'Ajjer in Algeria is one of the most famous North African sites of rock painting. Scholars specializing in Fulani culture believe that some of the imagery depicts rituals that are still practiced by contemporary Fulani people.

At the Tin Tazarift site, for instance, historian Amadou Hampate Ba recognized a scene of the lotori ceremony, a celebration of the ox's aquatic origin. In a finger motif, Ba detected an allusion to the myth of the hand of the first Fulani herdsman, Kikala. At Tin Felki, Ba recognized a hexagonal carnelian jewel as related to the Agades cross, a fertility charm still used by Fulani women.

Rock Art Paintings [link]

[Western Desert of Egypt picture]

The period when sub-Saharan Africa was most influential in Egypt was a time when neither Egypt, as we understand it culturally, nor the Sahara, as we understand it geographically, existed. Populations and cultures now found south of the desert roamed far to the north. The culture of Upper Egypt, which became dynastic Egyptian civilization, could fairly be called a Sudanese transplant. Egypt rapidly found a method of disciplining the river, the land, and the people to transform the country into a titanic garden. Egypt rapidly developed detailed cultural forms that dwarfed its forebears in urbanity and elaboration. Thus, when new details arrived, they were rapidly adapted to the vast cultural superstructure already present. On the other hand, pharaonic culture was so bound to its place near the Nile that its huge, interlocked religious, administrative, and formal structures could not be readily transferred to relatively mobile cultures of the desert, savanna, and forest. The influence of the mature pharaonic civilizations of Egypt and Kush was almost confined to their sophisticated trade goods and some significant elements of technology. Nevertheless, the religious substratum of Egypt and Kush was so similar to that of many cultures in southern Sudan today that it remains possible that fundamental elements derived from the two high cultures to the north live on.

Egypt and Sub-Saharan Africa: Their Interaction, Encyclopedia of Precolonial Africa, by Joseph O. Vogel, AltaMira Press, Walnut Creek, California (1997), pp. 465-472

Quote:

The discoveries at Nabta Playa suggest the possibility of a previously unrecognized relationship between the Neolithic people living along the Nile and pastoralists in the adjacent Sahara which may have contributed to the rise of social complexity in ancient Egypt. This complexity, as expressed by different levels of authority within the society, forms the basis for the structure of both the Neolithic society at Nabta and the Old Kingdom of Egypt. It was this authority at Nabta which made possible the planned arrangement of their villages, the excavation of large, deep wells, and the construction of complex stone structures made of large, shaped and unshaped stones. There are other Nabta features which are shared by the two areas, but which appear suddenly and without evident local antecedents in the late Predynastic and early Old Kingdom in the Nile Valley. These include the role of cattle to express differences of wealth, power and authority, the emphasis on cattle in religious beliefs, and the use of astronomical knowledge and devices to predict solar events. Many of these features have a prior and long history of development at Nabta.

Late Neolithic megalithic structures at Nabta Playa

In his Genesis of the Pharaohs, Toby Wilkinson shines new light on the Predynastic by demonstrating that the majority of rock drawings in the Eastern Desert of Upper Egypt date to Naqada I (c. 4000–3500 BC). Since the petroglyphs depict wild African fauna, hunters with bows and dogs, and men herding cattle, it is clear that the now nearly lifeless region up to 100 km east of the Nile between Quft and Hierakonpolis was at this time a well-watered, well-populated, game-rich savanna. That the rock artists were not mere isolated pastoralists but also part-time Nile dwellers is evident because their works commonly include boats. This implies that the artists probably moved from river to range in seasonal cycles. Because of this, and the fact that so many of the drawings echo subjects in later Egyptian art, Wilkinson makes a compelling case that the rock artists were the ancestors of the dynastic Egyptians. His conclusion: “the heavy reliance of these people on herding and hunting rather than agriculture suggests that their roots — and indeed the roots of Egyptian civilization — lay not so much along the Nile but in the pre-arid Sahara.”

Genesis of the Pharaohs: Genesis of the ‘Ka’ and Crowns?

"This sub-Saharan culture is likely to be the predecessor of the Egyptians."

Source

Also see: Ancient Egyptian as an African Language, Egypt as an African Culture

"Ancient Egyptian civilization was, in ways and to an extent usually not recognized, fundamentally African. The evidence of both language and culture reveals these African roots.

The origins of Egyptian ethnicity lay in the areas south of Egypt. The ancient Egyptian language belonged to the Afrasian family (also called Afroasiatic or, formerly, Hamito-Semitic). The speakers of the earliest Afrasian languages, according to recent studies, were a set of peoples whose lands between 15,000 and 13,000 B.C. stretched from Nubia in the west to far northern Somalia in the east. They supported themselves by gathering wild grains. The first elements of Egyptian culture were laid down two thousand years later, between 12,000 and 10,000 B.C., when some of these Afrasian communities expanded northward into Egypt, bringing with them a language directly ancestral to ancient Egyptian. They also introduced to Egypt the idea of using wild grains as food.

A new religion came with them as well. Its central tenet explains the often localized origins of later Egyptian gods: the earliest Afrasians were, properly speaking, neither monotheistic nor polytheistic. Instead, each local community, comprising a clan or a group of related clans, had its own distinct deity and centered its religious observances on that deity. This belief system persists today among several Afrasian peoples of far southwest Ethiopia. And as Biblical scholars have shown, Yahweh, god of the ancient Hebrews, an Afrasian people of the Semitic group, was originally also such a deity. The connection of many of Egypt's predynastic gods to particular localities is surely a modified version of this early Afrasian belief. Political unification in the late fourth millennium brought the Egyptian deities together in a new polytheistic system. But their local origins remain amply apparent in the records that have come down to us.

During the long era between about 10,000 and 6000 B.C., new kinds of southern influences diffused into Egypt. During these millennia, the Sahara had a wetter climate than it has today, with grassland or steppes in many areas that are now almost absolute desert. New wild animals, most notably the cow, spread widely in the eastern Sahara in this period."

Christopher Ehret
Professor of History, African Studies Chair
University of California at Los Angeles

[Dawn2Earth]

[Link] to Dana Marniche's thread.

Originally posted by King_Scorpion:
Release Date: April 1, 2011
384 Pages

Originally posted by dana marniche:
Until recently the early global presence of culturally- related people affiliated with sub-Saharan Africans has not been truly acknowledged, and Europeans have prefered to see the linkages in megalithic sites and pyramids around the world as due to UFOs or some archaic archetypal connection of primitive humanity.

Former construction engineer Robert Bauval on national radio in the U.S. "Coast to Coast" spoke early this morning of the black culture found at Nabta Playa in the Nubian desert which he says moved up into Egypt founding civilization there thousands of years ago.

The author of, Black Genesis and Fingerprints of the Gods, spoke on the national radio show Coast to Coast of how a Tibu woman was discovered by a United Arab Republican out in the desert south of Egypt in the early 20th century. The woman took him to see her "king" in Jebel Uweinat who told him about how his ancient people had a very ancient culture there.

In this way Western man came to learn about the rock art of Jebel Uweinat and its rock art which began when the area was still tropical. After discovering the rock art they were taken to Gilf Kebir where rock art thought to date from the neolithic displayed a tall and equally black people.

Bauval said it was found the ancient people of these neolithic cultures moved into Nabta Playa around 7-8000 years B.C. based on carbon dating and built early megalithic sites including a mini-stone henge thousands of years before the stone-henge of Britain. The sites included archeological evidence of a cattle cult once believed to have been restricted to later times in Egypt and Nubia.

The sites also showed they were constructed on an astronomical basis that used the same three constellations or "star systems" that were found in the structure of the great pyramid.

Bauval and other geolists and astro-physicists who have studied Nabta Playa also believe the great pyramid and sphinx were built much earlier than Egyptologists and especially Zahi Hawass would like to believe.

Bauval also said that Nabta Playa people may have come from Annadi (one of the earliest neolithic Saharan sites) and says archeologists studying the ancient megalithic sites around the world are coming to find many of the structures were built possessing similar alignments and other measurements that may perhaps be explained by the rise of a culture that spread around the globe between 10 - 15,000 BC

The radio show also mentioned a possibly earlier site found in south Africa with a similar astronomical founding.

Much of what Bauval said is of course in line with what earlier anthropologists spoke of. An archaic black civilization using a similar complex of cultural elements that "diffused" from Africa to Europe and western Asia and through there finally to southern Asia and Central America.


These elements included totemism, agriculture with the used of irrigational structures, megaliths based on astronomical knowledge, matrifocal societies and great mother Goddess worship, veneration of heavenly bodies i.e., consciousnesses of stars planets, the Sun and moon in relationship to the human soul or etheric body, "the dual organization" of society and deities, similar burial practices, and to a lesser degree divine kingship, mummification and a cattle cultus.

G. Elliot Smith and other anthropologists determined the skeletons associated with these early sites to be of brown Mediterranean or "hamitic" type. Recent findings by Brace, Hinahara and others conclude on the basis of genetically determined traits of crania that these early agriculturalists were indeed connected both with Central Africans and East Africans or so called "hamites".

[zarahan]

I wonder about the "great mother goddess" worship. If Bauval means a figure like Hathor was in the mix, maybe, but Hathor is not a standard Eurasian "Great Mother" type before which all supposedly bow down. If Bauval means some sort of Mesopotamian style deity, his claim seems questionable. Egyptian religion was quite distinct from Mesopotamia, and had more in common with the cultures of Sudan and NE Africa. And tribes of some of the oldest African cultures like the San eschew supposedly "universal" "mother goddess" worship claimed by white feminists and other Eurasian boosters, in favor of unmistakably male deities. QUOTE:




Encyclopedia Britannica 1984 ed. Macropedia Article, Vol 6: "Egyptian Religion" , pg 506-508

"A large number of gods go back to prehistoric times. The images of a cow and star goddess (Hathor), the falcon (Horus), and the human-shaped figures of the fertility god (Min) can be traced back to that period. Some rites, such as the "running of the Apil-bull," the "hoeing of the ground," and other fertility and hunting rites (e.g., the hippopotamus hunt) presumably date from early times.. Connections with the religions in southwest Asia cannot be traced with certainty."
"It is doubtful whether Osiris can be regarded as equal to Tammuz or Adonis, or whether Hathor is related to the "Great Mother." There are closer relations with northeast African religions. The numerous animal cults (especially bovine cults and panther gods) and details of ritual dresses (animal tails, masks, grass aprons, etc) probably are of African origin. The kinship in particular shows some African elements, such as the king as the head ritualist (i.e., medicine man), the limitations and renewal of the reign (jubilees, regicide), and the position of the king's mother (a matriarchal element). Some of them can be found among the Ethiopians in Napata and Meroe, others among the Prenilotic tribes (Shilluk)." [170]


OTHER DATA:

Egyptian religion and an African substratum involving cattle. Frankfort (1978) in his 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.[171] Central to indigenous development was cattle as one central focus of the belief systems of the Old Kingdom. Concepts such as deification of cattle, a cow as the "mother of the sun" or the Egyptian pharaoh as a god (rather than an intermediary to the gods as in Mesopotamia), suggest strong native roots in the Nile Valley and East Africa rather than an outside influx. The pharaoh as sons of Horus, who was in turn son of Hathor the cow goddess, depictions o f Horus as a strong bull, the images of bulls in many depictions of the stars, dead pharaohs sometimes being described as 'the Bull of Heaven' and the Old Kingdom concept of Min, the god of rain, who is associated with a white bull and to whom the annual harvest is dedicated all indicate connections with indigenous predynastic cultures, with little significant need for outside influence from Mesopotamia or elsewhere to shape their development. [172]

www.zhs41.net/historyafrican/quotes.htm

[clouddesignc7]

Up.

(It's me What box aka Dawn2Earth)

[zarahan]

Good to see you active again. Good roundup o the Saharan foundations above. D you have anymore on the dating of Tichitt and other early cultures in West Africa? It is amazing how some folk keep insisting that not much happened in West Africa ubtil some Asiatics or Greeks arrived in Egypt to send negroes fleeing across the continent to populate West Africa, and/or bring West Africa civilization, and so on. I think that argument, in its various guises, is a false diffusionism. Elaborate cultures were already in place in West Africa without needing Egyptian ships sailing up the Gulf of Guinea, or massive platoons of Egyptian colonists moving west to explain why.

"Before 2000 BC, what is today the southern Sahara was inhabited by significant numbers of herders and farmers. On the rocky promontories of the Tichitt-Walata (Birou) and Tagant Plateaus in modern day Mauritania, they built what are considered among the earliest known civilizations in western Africa. Composed of more than 400 stone masonry settlements, with clear street layouts, some settlements had massive surrounding walls while others were less fortified. In a deteriorating environment, where arable land and pasturage were at a premium, the population grew and relatively large-scale political organizations emerged - factors which no doubt explain the homogeneity of architecture, settlement patterns, and material culture (e.g., lithic and ceramic traditions). This agro-pastoral society traded in jewelry and semi-precious stones from distant parts of the Sahara and Sahel, while crafts, hunting, and fishing were also important economic pursuits...Their elites built funerary monuments for themselves over a period extending from 4000 to 1000 BC."

- Ray A. Kea, and Mauny, R. (1971), “The Western Sudan” in Shinnie: 66-87.