Bruce Williams reports Nubian victories over Egypt and is disbelieved

Bruce Williams began publishing on the Qustul polity about forty years ago. Among the material recovered from the site were pictorial documents showing forces from Qustul making successful incursions into Upper Egypt. The images came out of royal Nubian tombs and they are not ambiguous. His conclusions met resistance in the field, and the resistance rested on a long-standing assumption that ancient Egypt was somehow in Africa without being of it. Under that assumption a Nubian kingdom projecting military power northward into Egypt was intolerable whatever the artefacts showed. More recent work has gone the other way. The Qustul state now appears to have been more influential than Williams first proposed. He was right, and the decades of refusal belong in the record alongside the finding, because they show a discipline deciding in advance which conclusions its own evidence would be permitted to reach.

Around the thirty-fourth century BCE the climate of the eastern Sahara turned sharply drier and stayed that way. Steppe and semidesert grassland that had carried herds for millennia became the desert it is now, though patches held on well enough to support marginal livestock raising as late as about 2000 BCE. The pastoralists living out there had to go somewhere. They moved out of the emerging desert and settled among the communities already living along the Nile. That is the event that produced the Egypt of the textbooks, the thin green ribbon dependent on an annual flood. Before it, this was open country with mobile herders and a river running through it. After it, thousands of people and their cattle were compressed onto a floodplain a few kilometres wide. The competition for land and the density of population that followed drove polities to grow and swallow one another until the whole valley was unified around 3100 BCE.