Post by anansi on Sept 7, 2024 22:10:36 GMT -5
How did African civilizations develop without outside influence, and why did they not last as long as civilizations in other continents?
Because you are looking at Africa, a whole continent as one big country locked in and sealed off, look at it this way, the civilizations of Mesopotamia the Americas, North and South influenced each other nearest to them first and foremost, so were those of South Asia and North East Asia, going back thousands and continued for hundreds of yrs, well Africa was pretty much the same, the problem is you don’t know much about African history and civilizations in general, most of all it’s origins, one commentor replied to this question, that Civilization in Africa started 2000yrs after the Sumerians, well that’s simply not true, Kmt with it’s antecedent Ta-Seti started roughly the same time as Sumer, high culture and urbanism came to west Africa from about 2′500 BCE and that trend continued for thousands of years, spreading influence far and wide, because history is all about migrations and connections, and as far as civilizations goes some out lasted their counterparts elsewhere if you look at the culture and civilizations of Kmt, Kush and the proto Wagadu civilization leading to the Ghana empire thousands of yrs later.
Ruins of the ancient town of Dakhlet el Atrouss-I in south-eastern Mauritania, that was built during the classic Tichitt phase (1600BC-1000BC). Measuring over 300ha and with an estimated population of 10,000 at its height, the town is one of Africa’s oldest urban settlements.
Dry stone buildings through the ages.
West African agricultural history entered a new stage around the sixth millennium, with the cultivation of two new crops, Guinea yams and oil palms. The technological signature of this development was the adding of polished stone axes to the West African Microlithic toolkit.
The new crops and tools opened the way for communities of the Benue-Kwa branch of Niger-Congo to spread between 5000 and 3000 bce into the rainforest zones of West Africa, from modern-day Côte d’Ivoire to Cameroon.
With polished stone axes they could clear forest for raising yams and oil palms, both of which require direct sunlight. An additional technological innovation probably dating to this period was the invention by the Benue-Kwa of broadlooms for weaving raffia-cloth. After 3000 bce one offshoot of the Benue-Kwa group, the Bantu, carried the yam-based variety of West African agriculture farther southward and eastward through the equatorial rainforests of central Africa.
Far to the east, the Northern Sudanians, a Nilo-Saharan people of the southern eastern Sahara, took a very different first step toward agriculture. In the mid-tenth millennium bce, a belated shift to wetter conditions spread Mediterranean climate, with cool-season rains and Mediterranean wild animals, most notably the cow, south to the middle of the Sahara. Contemporaneously, tropical grassland and steppe environments advanced north to the middle of the Sahara. The Northern Sudanians, following the climatic shift northward, encountered cattle at the interface of the two climatic regimes and, between 8500 and 7200 bce, initiated the earliest herding of cattle in worldhistory.6Like the Ounjougou people 2,500 kilometers to the west, they collected wild but, differently, they ground their grain into flour.
Around 7200 bce a new development appeared in the eastern Saharan archaeology: neighborhoods of substantial homesteads, with thornbush cattle pens, round houses, and grain storage pits, and with sorghum as the notable grain. The linguistic evidence in this case strongly backs these indirect archaeological indicators that the Northern Sudanians of this era had begun to cultivate. They had important contacts, too, with the contemporary Afrasian communities immediately east of them in the Red Sea Hills region.
These communities spoke early daughter dialects of the proto-Cushitic language. In the second half of the seventh millennium, the northernmost Cushites, ancestral to the modern-day Beja (the Medjay of the ancient Egyptians), were the intermediaries in the diffusion of sheep from the Middle East to their Northern Sudanian neighbors. Even earlier, the Cushites began, like the Northern Sudanians, to raise cattle, and they either collected or cultivated sorghum.
The Northern Sudanians of the ninth millennium, along with a closely related set of Nilo-Saharan peoples, whom the archaeologist J. E. G. Sutton called the ‘Aquatic Civilization of Middle Africa,’ participated also in a second independent African invention of ceramic technology. The aquatic societies responded in a different fashion to the mid-ninth-millennium climatic amelioration. They became specialist fishing and hippopotamus-hunting peoples along the new rivers and lakes of the Sahara, and in the later ninth millennium they spread this economy westward across the southern Sahara.
The discovery of a boat representation on a pebble dating to the early seventh millennium BC, according to the associated pottery and the contextual radiometric determinations, is worth some comment.
www.antiquity.ac.uk/projgall/usai/
Drier climates, 6500–5500 bce, then shrank many Saharan streams and lakes, shifting the balance of advantage away from the aquatic communities. As a result, in the sixth millennium the descendants of the Northern Sudanians spread their agripastoral economy across the southern Sahara, displacing or assimilating many of the aquatic communities.
Where perennial water resources existed, such as along the Nile, the aquatic livelihood persisted, but combined now with herding and probably cultivation. The inhabitants of the Khartoum Neolithic site of 5000 bce along the Nile participated in a particularly notable invention, of cotton textile technology, attested by their possession of spindlewhorls. As with ceramic technology, here also African societies were leaders in innovation in the early agricultural eras.
The history of cotton teaches a striking lesson as well that peoples with no knowledge whatsoever of each other can and do arrive at parallel inventions. The domestication of cotton as a fiber plant for textile production took place separately in three distant parts of the globe: the eastern Sudan of Africa, India, and the New World. In each region the inventors of cotton weaving domesticated their own indigenous species of cotton. The evidence from Khartoum places this development as early in Africa as in India.
THE ERA OF AGRICULTURAL ELABORATION,
6500–3500 BCE
..................................................................................................................
Parallel to trends in other world regions of early agriculture, so also in Africa the period
6500–3500 bce was a time of growth in the variety and proportional contribution of
agriculture to the diet. The Niger-Congo farmers brought two savanna legumes, the
African groundnut (Vigna subterranea) and the black-eyed pea (V. unguiculata), into
cultivation during this time. The Sudanic agripastoralists of the southern Sahara and
the Sahel added melons and gourds of several varieties to their original emphasis on
sorghum, and also began raising castor beans, spreading these crops to ancient Egypt by or before the third millennium bce. Niger-Congo farmers and Sudanic agripastoralists separately domesticated an additional major grain crop, pearl millet (Pennisetum glaucum). In the Ethiopian highlands reconstructed early farming lexicon reveals that the Cushites during this time began to supplement their stock raising with two highland African grain crops, finger millet and t’ef.
The seventh to fourth millennium bce was also a period of world history in which crops and animals domesticated in one seminal region first spread to other such world regions.
From pulling Mesopotamian war chariots to grinding grain in the Middle Ages, donkeys have carried civilization on their backs for centuries. DNA has now revealed just how ancient humans’ relationship with donkeys really is.
The genetic instruction books of over 200 donkeys from countries around the world show that these beasts of burden were domesticated about 7,000 years ago in East Africa, researchers report in the Sept. 9 Science.
www.sciencenews.org/article/donkey-domestication-dna-east-africa
{ This mean Africans were transporting donkeys to Sumer as pack animals, these are your Red Sea Hills Nahasi}
In Africa between 6000 and 4000 bce, Cushitic peoples domesticated the donkey, native to the Red Sea hills and the arid foothills of the northern Ethiopian highlands.
Donkeys then spread via Egypt to the Middle East, where they became the earliest important beasts of burden. Sheep and goats, as noted, spread the opposite direction even earlier, in the second half of the seventh millennium, and rapidly became important animals in the Sudanic and Cushitic agripastoral traditions.
From the Sudanic herders both goats and cattle spread west to the Niger-Congo societies of
West Africa, again at a still uncertain period, but certainly before 3000 bce. An early crop of the Sudanic agripastoralist tradition, sorghum, may have spread equally early to the Niger-Congo cultivators. African groundnuts and black-eyed peas diffused the other way, from Niger-Congo farmers to their Sudanic and Cushitic counterparts, reaching as far as northern Kenya by the third millennium bce.
An especially interesting historical problem far from being solved is the question of how three important grain crops domesticated in Africa, sorghum, pearl millet, and finger millet, reached India between 3000 and 1000 bce, without passing through the Middle East first. Might seagoing trade have already connected northwestern Africa and India by that time?
What may surprise is that Egypt was not an initiating region of these seminal developments.
The indigenous Afrasian communities of the Egyptian Nile in the seventh millennium were still hunter gathers.
They gradually transformed their subsistence economy by adopting two staple crops, barley and wheat, along with sheep and goats from the Middle Eastern center of domestication.
Melons, gourds, and donkeys reached them from the Sudanic agripastoralists to the south; surprisingly, cotton did not. Word borrowings in ancient Egyptian confirm that Sudanic herders also significantly influenced Egyptian beliefs and practices relating to cattle.
THE SECOND GREAT TRANSITION:AFRICAN
BEGINNINGS
By the fifth millennium bce, the growing variety and productivity of agriculture brought about a growth in the size and density of human populations, such that a Second Great Transition, from villages and tiny local political units to towns and states, began to take place in several world regions. Historians have long identified Egypt as an early locus of this transition in the African continent.
But because of the dominant Western idea of Egyptian exceptionalism, what historians have often not recognized is that the formative area of ancient Egyptian culture, southern Upper Egypt, was the northern outlier of a wider nexus of emerging complexity in the fourth millennium.
The first evidence of emerging complexity in the fifth millennium appeared not along the Nile itself, but in the then steppe country west of northern Lower Nubia.
Stelae and stone rings in Cemetery N at Aniba, C-Group chiefdom, photo by Steindorff
Three hundred kilometers from the river, the inhabitants of Nabta Playa erected an extensive megalithic archaeoastronomical array. The associated burials, of both cattle and people, reveal a wealthy pastoral society, with a complex ritual basis, in existence centuries before similar complexity in Upper Egypt.
Kerma; the royal tomb during excavation, and a reconstruction of the superstructure of the royal tomb, photo and illustration by C.Bonnet
The royal pyramids of el-Kurru
A further progression toward social and political complexity followed in the fourth millennium bce, this time along the Nile itself, with states and the first towns appearing between the Nile-Abbay confluence in the south and southern Upper Egypt in the north.
The city-state of Kerma emerged as the dominant political force between 2 450 BC 1 450 BC, controlling the Nile Valley between the first and fourth cataracts, an area as large as Egypt. The Egyptians were the first to identify Kerma as 'Kush' and over the next several centuries the two civilisations engaged in intermittent warfare, trade, and cultural exchange.
Because of the relative archaeological neglect of Nubia, just two excavated sites, Shaheinab and Qustul, provide most of our knowledge of this era south of Egypt.
The two towns lay respectively at the far northern and far southern ends of a thousand-kilometer stretch of cultural commonality along the Nile. On sites of ritual importance the people of this Middle Nile culture built large conical earthen mounds, reshaped since then by rain and wind into more formless-seeming tumuli. Ritual sites of this type represent a very long-lived cultural and political tradition, lasting in some cases down to recent centuries.
Qustul was the capital of wealthy kings from the mid-fourth millennium bce up almost to the unification of Egypt late in the millennium. Like the earlier Nabta Playa pastoralist sites, the Qustul sites include numerous cattle burials. Pictorial documents in the royal graves explicitly depict the kings of the Qustul state as having conquered Upper Egypt. There is no a priori reason to reject these claims.
If one sets aside the received notion of Egyptian exceptionalism, it is quite evident, as the archaeologist Bruce Williams argues, that here was a kingdom every bit as significant as its late pre dynastic contemporaries in Upper Egypt. Behind the rise of the highly centralized kingship of dynastic Egypt may have been an additional factor, the adoption in late pre-dynastic Upper Egypt of elements of the rituals and royal ideology of the Qustul kingdom.
Early Egyptian royal tombs, before the shift to pyramid building in stone, were covered with a conical mound of earth, mimicking the practice known as early as the fourth millennium in Nubia and still prevalent 2,000 years later in the kingdoms to the south. These outward resemblances accompany resemblances in ideology as well, from the special ritual significance accorded cattle to the claims of both Sudanic and Egyptian kings to a degree of personal sacredness unparalleled in the Middle East. Did Upper Egyptian rulers build their power in the later fourth millennium bce by adopting legitimizing ideas from Nabta Playa and Qustul? The outward signs, at least, favor that proposal.
Two notable kingdoms persisted in Nubia through the Old Kingdom period. The more powerful state, Kerma, ruled the Dongola Reach in Upper Nubia and probably other lands farther south. The great fortifications at Buhen in Lower Nubia, built by the rulers of the Middle Kingdom, 2040–1700, after their conquest of the northern Sai kingdom, suggest an Egyptian concern with the potential threat from Kerma farther south. The placement of Kerma’s capital at the northern end of its territories, closest to Egypt, may mean that the rulers of Kerma felt a similar concern about Egypt, or simply that they situated their court to better oversee trade with Egypt. The massive royal funerary sites at Kerma city give a sense of the power of this kingdom at its height.
But as almost the sole excavations relating to the Kerma state, they leave us little idea of urban life more generally in Kerma and no knowledge of how much farther south Kerma’s power might have extended.
www.donsmaps.com/egypt5.html
Town life along the river grew in importance, even as the drying of the Sahara in the fourth millennium brought the Nabta Playa culture to an end.
Because of the relative archaeological neglect of Nubia, just two excavated sites, Shaheinab and Qustul, provide most of our knowledge of this era south of Egypt.
The two towns lay respectively at the far northern and far southern ends of a thousand-kilometer stretch of cultural commonality along the Nile. On sites of ritual importance the people of this Middle Nile culture built large conical earthen mounds, reshaped since then by rain and wind into more formless-seeming tumuli. Ritual sites of this type represent a very long-lived cultural and political tradition, lasting in some cases down to recent centuries.
Qustul was the capital of wealthy kings from the mid-fourth millennium bce up almost to the unification of Egypt late in the millennium. Like the earlier Nabta Playa pastoralist sites, the Qustul sites include numerous cattle burials. Pictorial documents in the royal graves explicitly depict the kings of the Qustul state as having conquered Upper Egypt. There is no a priori reason to reject these claims.
If one sets aside the received notion of Egyptian exceptionalism, it is quite evident, as the archaeologist Bruce Williams argues, that here was a kingdom every bit as significant as its late pre dynastic contemporaries in Upper Egypt. Behind the rise of the highly centralized kingship of dynastic Egypt may have been an additional factor, the adoption in late pre-dynastic Upper Egypt of elements of the rituals and royal ideology of the Qustul kingdom.
Early Egyptian royal tombs, before the shift to pyramid building in stone, were covered with a conical mound of earth, mimicking the practice known as early as the fourth millennium in Nubia and still prevalent 2,000 years later in the kingdoms to the south. These outward resemblances accompany resemblances in ideology as well, from the special ritual significance accorded cattle to the claims of both Sudanic and Egyptian kings to a degree of personal sacredness unparalleled in the Middle East. Did Upper Egyptian rulers build their power in the later fourth millennium bce by adopting legitimizing ideas from Nabta Playa and Qustul? The outward signs, at least, favor that proposal.
Two notable kingdoms persisted in Nubia through the Old Kingdom period. The more powerful state, Kerma, ruled the Dongola Reach in Upper Nubia and probably other lands farther south. The great fortifications at Buhen in Lower Nubia, built by the rulers of the Middle Kingdom, 2040–1700, after their conquest of the northern Sai kingdom, suggest an Egyptian concern with the potential threat from Kerma farther south. The placement of Kerma’s capital at the northern end of its territories, closest to Egypt, may mean that the rulers of Kerma felt a similar concern about Egypt, or simply that they situated their court to better oversee trade with Egypt. The massive royal funerary sites at Kerma city give a sense of the power of this kingdom at its height.
But as almost the sole excavations relating to the Kerma state, they leave us little idea of urban life more generally in Kerma and no knowledge of how much farther south Kerma’s power might have extended.
www.researchgate.net/publication/289833647_Africa_in_World_History_The_Long_Long_View
www.academia.edu/19519311/_Cultural_entanglement_at_the_dawn_of_the_Egyptian_history_a_view_from_the_Nile_First_Cataract_region_Origini_Prehistory_and_Protohistory_of_Ancient_Civilizations_XXXVI_93_123
areadyscribe.com/blog/f/the-nubian-qustul-incense-burner-controversy
Because you are looking at Africa, a whole continent as one big country locked in and sealed off, look at it this way, the civilizations of Mesopotamia the Americas, North and South influenced each other nearest to them first and foremost, so were those of South Asia and North East Asia, going back thousands and continued for hundreds of yrs, well Africa was pretty much the same, the problem is you don’t know much about African history and civilizations in general, most of all it’s origins, one commentor replied to this question, that Civilization in Africa started 2000yrs after the Sumerians, well that’s simply not true, Kmt with it’s antecedent Ta-Seti started roughly the same time as Sumer, high culture and urbanism came to west Africa from about 2′500 BCE and that trend continued for thousands of years, spreading influence far and wide, because history is all about migrations and connections, and as far as civilizations goes some out lasted their counterparts elsewhere if you look at the culture and civilizations of Kmt, Kush and the proto Wagadu civilization leading to the Ghana empire thousands of yrs later.
Ruins of the ancient town of Dakhlet el Atrouss-I in south-eastern Mauritania, that was built during the classic Tichitt phase (1600BC-1000BC). Measuring over 300ha and with an estimated population of 10,000 at its height, the town is one of Africa’s oldest urban settlements.
Dry stone buildings through the ages.
West African agricultural history entered a new stage around the sixth millennium, with the cultivation of two new crops, Guinea yams and oil palms. The technological signature of this development was the adding of polished stone axes to the West African Microlithic toolkit.
The new crops and tools opened the way for communities of the Benue-Kwa branch of Niger-Congo to spread between 5000 and 3000 bce into the rainforest zones of West Africa, from modern-day Côte d’Ivoire to Cameroon.
With polished stone axes they could clear forest for raising yams and oil palms, both of which require direct sunlight. An additional technological innovation probably dating to this period was the invention by the Benue-Kwa of broadlooms for weaving raffia-cloth. After 3000 bce one offshoot of the Benue-Kwa group, the Bantu, carried the yam-based variety of West African agriculture farther southward and eastward through the equatorial rainforests of central Africa.
Far to the east, the Northern Sudanians, a Nilo-Saharan people of the southern eastern Sahara, took a very different first step toward agriculture. In the mid-tenth millennium bce, a belated shift to wetter conditions spread Mediterranean climate, with cool-season rains and Mediterranean wild animals, most notably the cow, south to the middle of the Sahara. Contemporaneously, tropical grassland and steppe environments advanced north to the middle of the Sahara. The Northern Sudanians, following the climatic shift northward, encountered cattle at the interface of the two climatic regimes and, between 8500 and 7200 bce, initiated the earliest herding of cattle in worldhistory.6Like the Ounjougou people 2,500 kilometers to the west, they collected wild but, differently, they ground their grain into flour.
Around 7200 bce a new development appeared in the eastern Saharan archaeology: neighborhoods of substantial homesteads, with thornbush cattle pens, round houses, and grain storage pits, and with sorghum as the notable grain. The linguistic evidence in this case strongly backs these indirect archaeological indicators that the Northern Sudanians of this era had begun to cultivate. They had important contacts, too, with the contemporary Afrasian communities immediately east of them in the Red Sea Hills region.
These communities spoke early daughter dialects of the proto-Cushitic language. In the second half of the seventh millennium, the northernmost Cushites, ancestral to the modern-day Beja (the Medjay of the ancient Egyptians), were the intermediaries in the diffusion of sheep from the Middle East to their Northern Sudanian neighbors. Even earlier, the Cushites began, like the Northern Sudanians, to raise cattle, and they either collected or cultivated sorghum.
The Northern Sudanians of the ninth millennium, along with a closely related set of Nilo-Saharan peoples, whom the archaeologist J. E. G. Sutton called the ‘Aquatic Civilization of Middle Africa,’ participated also in a second independent African invention of ceramic technology. The aquatic societies responded in a different fashion to the mid-ninth-millennium climatic amelioration. They became specialist fishing and hippopotamus-hunting peoples along the new rivers and lakes of the Sahara, and in the later ninth millennium they spread this economy westward across the southern Sahara.
The discovery of a boat representation on a pebble dating to the early seventh millennium BC, according to the associated pottery and the contextual radiometric determinations, is worth some comment.
www.antiquity.ac.uk/projgall/usai/
Drier climates, 6500–5500 bce, then shrank many Saharan streams and lakes, shifting the balance of advantage away from the aquatic communities. As a result, in the sixth millennium the descendants of the Northern Sudanians spread their agripastoral economy across the southern Sahara, displacing or assimilating many of the aquatic communities.
Where perennial water resources existed, such as along the Nile, the aquatic livelihood persisted, but combined now with herding and probably cultivation. The inhabitants of the Khartoum Neolithic site of 5000 bce along the Nile participated in a particularly notable invention, of cotton textile technology, attested by their possession of spindlewhorls. As with ceramic technology, here also African societies were leaders in innovation in the early agricultural eras.
The history of cotton teaches a striking lesson as well that peoples with no knowledge whatsoever of each other can and do arrive at parallel inventions. The domestication of cotton as a fiber plant for textile production took place separately in three distant parts of the globe: the eastern Sudan of Africa, India, and the New World. In each region the inventors of cotton weaving domesticated their own indigenous species of cotton. The evidence from Khartoum places this development as early in Africa as in India.
THE ERA OF AGRICULTURAL ELABORATION,
6500–3500 BCE
..................................................................................................................
Parallel to trends in other world regions of early agriculture, so also in Africa the period
6500–3500 bce was a time of growth in the variety and proportional contribution of
agriculture to the diet. The Niger-Congo farmers brought two savanna legumes, the
African groundnut (Vigna subterranea) and the black-eyed pea (V. unguiculata), into
cultivation during this time. The Sudanic agripastoralists of the southern Sahara and
the Sahel added melons and gourds of several varieties to their original emphasis on
sorghum, and also began raising castor beans, spreading these crops to ancient Egypt by or before the third millennium bce. Niger-Congo farmers and Sudanic agripastoralists separately domesticated an additional major grain crop, pearl millet (Pennisetum glaucum). In the Ethiopian highlands reconstructed early farming lexicon reveals that the Cushites during this time began to supplement their stock raising with two highland African grain crops, finger millet and t’ef.
The seventh to fourth millennium bce was also a period of world history in which crops and animals domesticated in one seminal region first spread to other such world regions.
From pulling Mesopotamian war chariots to grinding grain in the Middle Ages, donkeys have carried civilization on their backs for centuries. DNA has now revealed just how ancient humans’ relationship with donkeys really is.
The genetic instruction books of over 200 donkeys from countries around the world show that these beasts of burden were domesticated about 7,000 years ago in East Africa, researchers report in the Sept. 9 Science.
www.sciencenews.org/article/donkey-domestication-dna-east-africa
{ This mean Africans were transporting donkeys to Sumer as pack animals, these are your Red Sea Hills Nahasi}
In Africa between 6000 and 4000 bce, Cushitic peoples domesticated the donkey, native to the Red Sea hills and the arid foothills of the northern Ethiopian highlands.
Donkeys then spread via Egypt to the Middle East, where they became the earliest important beasts of burden. Sheep and goats, as noted, spread the opposite direction even earlier, in the second half of the seventh millennium, and rapidly became important animals in the Sudanic and Cushitic agripastoral traditions.
From the Sudanic herders both goats and cattle spread west to the Niger-Congo societies of
West Africa, again at a still uncertain period, but certainly before 3000 bce. An early crop of the Sudanic agripastoralist tradition, sorghum, may have spread equally early to the Niger-Congo cultivators. African groundnuts and black-eyed peas diffused the other way, from Niger-Congo farmers to their Sudanic and Cushitic counterparts, reaching as far as northern Kenya by the third millennium bce.
An especially interesting historical problem far from being solved is the question of how three important grain crops domesticated in Africa, sorghum, pearl millet, and finger millet, reached India between 3000 and 1000 bce, without passing through the Middle East first. Might seagoing trade have already connected northwestern Africa and India by that time?
What may surprise is that Egypt was not an initiating region of these seminal developments.
The indigenous Afrasian communities of the Egyptian Nile in the seventh millennium were still hunter gathers.
They gradually transformed their subsistence economy by adopting two staple crops, barley and wheat, along with sheep and goats from the Middle Eastern center of domestication.
Melons, gourds, and donkeys reached them from the Sudanic agripastoralists to the south; surprisingly, cotton did not. Word borrowings in ancient Egyptian confirm that Sudanic herders also significantly influenced Egyptian beliefs and practices relating to cattle.
THE SECOND GREAT TRANSITION:AFRICAN
BEGINNINGS
By the fifth millennium bce, the growing variety and productivity of agriculture brought about a growth in the size and density of human populations, such that a Second Great Transition, from villages and tiny local political units to towns and states, began to take place in several world regions. Historians have long identified Egypt as an early locus of this transition in the African continent.
But because of the dominant Western idea of Egyptian exceptionalism, what historians have often not recognized is that the formative area of ancient Egyptian culture, southern Upper Egypt, was the northern outlier of a wider nexus of emerging complexity in the fourth millennium.
The first evidence of emerging complexity in the fifth millennium appeared not along the Nile itself, but in the then steppe country west of northern Lower Nubia.
Stelae and stone rings in Cemetery N at Aniba, C-Group chiefdom, photo by Steindorff
Three hundred kilometers from the river, the inhabitants of Nabta Playa erected an extensive megalithic archaeoastronomical array. The associated burials, of both cattle and people, reveal a wealthy pastoral society, with a complex ritual basis, in existence centuries before similar complexity in Upper Egypt.
Kerma; the royal tomb during excavation, and a reconstruction of the superstructure of the royal tomb, photo and illustration by C.Bonnet
The royal pyramids of el-Kurru
A further progression toward social and political complexity followed in the fourth millennium bce, this time along the Nile itself, with states and the first towns appearing between the Nile-Abbay confluence in the south and southern Upper Egypt in the north.
The city-state of Kerma emerged as the dominant political force between 2 450 BC 1 450 BC, controlling the Nile Valley between the first and fourth cataracts, an area as large as Egypt. The Egyptians were the first to identify Kerma as 'Kush' and over the next several centuries the two civilisations engaged in intermittent warfare, trade, and cultural exchange.
Because of the relative archaeological neglect of Nubia, just two excavated sites, Shaheinab and Qustul, provide most of our knowledge of this era south of Egypt.
The two towns lay respectively at the far northern and far southern ends of a thousand-kilometer stretch of cultural commonality along the Nile. On sites of ritual importance the people of this Middle Nile culture built large conical earthen mounds, reshaped since then by rain and wind into more formless-seeming tumuli. Ritual sites of this type represent a very long-lived cultural and political tradition, lasting in some cases down to recent centuries.
Qustul was the capital of wealthy kings from the mid-fourth millennium bce up almost to the unification of Egypt late in the millennium. Like the earlier Nabta Playa pastoralist sites, the Qustul sites include numerous cattle burials. Pictorial documents in the royal graves explicitly depict the kings of the Qustul state as having conquered Upper Egypt. There is no a priori reason to reject these claims.
If one sets aside the received notion of Egyptian exceptionalism, it is quite evident, as the archaeologist Bruce Williams argues, that here was a kingdom every bit as significant as its late pre dynastic contemporaries in Upper Egypt. Behind the rise of the highly centralized kingship of dynastic Egypt may have been an additional factor, the adoption in late pre-dynastic Upper Egypt of elements of the rituals and royal ideology of the Qustul kingdom.
Early Egyptian royal tombs, before the shift to pyramid building in stone, were covered with a conical mound of earth, mimicking the practice known as early as the fourth millennium in Nubia and still prevalent 2,000 years later in the kingdoms to the south. These outward resemblances accompany resemblances in ideology as well, from the special ritual significance accorded cattle to the claims of both Sudanic and Egyptian kings to a degree of personal sacredness unparalleled in the Middle East. Did Upper Egyptian rulers build their power in the later fourth millennium bce by adopting legitimizing ideas from Nabta Playa and Qustul? The outward signs, at least, favor that proposal.
Two notable kingdoms persisted in Nubia through the Old Kingdom period. The more powerful state, Kerma, ruled the Dongola Reach in Upper Nubia and probably other lands farther south. The great fortifications at Buhen in Lower Nubia, built by the rulers of the Middle Kingdom, 2040–1700, after their conquest of the northern Sai kingdom, suggest an Egyptian concern with the potential threat from Kerma farther south. The placement of Kerma’s capital at the northern end of its territories, closest to Egypt, may mean that the rulers of Kerma felt a similar concern about Egypt, or simply that they situated their court to better oversee trade with Egypt. The massive royal funerary sites at Kerma city give a sense of the power of this kingdom at its height.
But as almost the sole excavations relating to the Kerma state, they leave us little idea of urban life more generally in Kerma and no knowledge of how much farther south Kerma’s power might have extended.
www.donsmaps.com/egypt5.html
Town life along the river grew in importance, even as the drying of the Sahara in the fourth millennium brought the Nabta Playa culture to an end.
Because of the relative archaeological neglect of Nubia, just two excavated sites, Shaheinab and Qustul, provide most of our knowledge of this era south of Egypt.
The two towns lay respectively at the far northern and far southern ends of a thousand-kilometer stretch of cultural commonality along the Nile. On sites of ritual importance the people of this Middle Nile culture built large conical earthen mounds, reshaped since then by rain and wind into more formless-seeming tumuli. Ritual sites of this type represent a very long-lived cultural and political tradition, lasting in some cases down to recent centuries.
Qustul was the capital of wealthy kings from the mid-fourth millennium bce up almost to the unification of Egypt late in the millennium. Like the earlier Nabta Playa pastoralist sites, the Qustul sites include numerous cattle burials. Pictorial documents in the royal graves explicitly depict the kings of the Qustul state as having conquered Upper Egypt. There is no a priori reason to reject these claims.
If one sets aside the received notion of Egyptian exceptionalism, it is quite evident, as the archaeologist Bruce Williams argues, that here was a kingdom every bit as significant as its late pre dynastic contemporaries in Upper Egypt. Behind the rise of the highly centralized kingship of dynastic Egypt may have been an additional factor, the adoption in late pre-dynastic Upper Egypt of elements of the rituals and royal ideology of the Qustul kingdom.
Early Egyptian royal tombs, before the shift to pyramid building in stone, were covered with a conical mound of earth, mimicking the practice known as early as the fourth millennium in Nubia and still prevalent 2,000 years later in the kingdoms to the south. These outward resemblances accompany resemblances in ideology as well, from the special ritual significance accorded cattle to the claims of both Sudanic and Egyptian kings to a degree of personal sacredness unparalleled in the Middle East. Did Upper Egyptian rulers build their power in the later fourth millennium bce by adopting legitimizing ideas from Nabta Playa and Qustul? The outward signs, at least, favor that proposal.
Two notable kingdoms persisted in Nubia through the Old Kingdom period. The more powerful state, Kerma, ruled the Dongola Reach in Upper Nubia and probably other lands farther south. The great fortifications at Buhen in Lower Nubia, built by the rulers of the Middle Kingdom, 2040–1700, after their conquest of the northern Sai kingdom, suggest an Egyptian concern with the potential threat from Kerma farther south. The placement of Kerma’s capital at the northern end of its territories, closest to Egypt, may mean that the rulers of Kerma felt a similar concern about Egypt, or simply that they situated their court to better oversee trade with Egypt. The massive royal funerary sites at Kerma city give a sense of the power of this kingdom at its height.
But as almost the sole excavations relating to the Kerma state, they leave us little idea of urban life more generally in Kerma and no knowledge of how much farther south Kerma’s power might have extended.
www.researchgate.net/publication/289833647_Africa_in_World_History_The_Long_Long_View
www.academia.edu/19519311/_Cultural_entanglement_at_the_dawn_of_the_Egyptian_history_a_view_from_the_Nile_First_Cataract_region_Origini_Prehistory_and_Protohistory_of_Ancient_Civilizations_XXXVI_93_123
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