Sacred kingship came from fishing communities before it reached any throne

The Aquatic way of life held on along the rivers and lakes even as the climate dried, and the expanding pastoral Nilo-Saharan communities appear to have absorbed those groups repeatedly, taking in their political and cultural ideas at the same time. Sacred kingship is the one that carried furthest. It was worked out among people who fished and hunted hippopotamus in a Sahara full of water, and it passed to herders and grain farmers by absorption. The institution that reached its most elaborate form in the divine pharaoh started with fishermen. The two African inventions of pottery grew out of the same transformations. West African potters made cooking vessels from the start. In the eastern Sahara the earliest pots included water carriers as well as cooking ware, and among the herding and grain growing peoples of the mid Holocene the pot became the instrument for boiling grain into porridge. The pot and the porridge are both African, and both are older than their Near Eastern counterparts.

Anthropologists building their discipline in the nineteenth century kept finding regions where peoples of quite different origins had spent centuries in contact and had come to share deep features of culture, well past the superficial. Upper Egypt and the eastern Sudan belt were such a region from the sixth millennium BCE onward. Ehret calls the long south to north stretch the Middle Nile Culture Area. The label changes the question of Egyptian origins. Egypt did not come out of one ethnic group or one language community. It came out of a zone of sustained interaction among peoples with different linguistic and historical backgrounds, who over thousands of years of contact built a common stock of practices, ritual forms and material traditions. That makes Egyptian civilisation a regional outcome. To follow it you have to look south, into Nubia and Sudan, because half the culture area lay there and so did the origins of much that museum labels now file as distinctively Egyptian.

In northeastern Africa, among peoples speaking Cushitic languages, a third kind of clan religious figure goes back at least to the sixth millennium BCE. In some Soomaali-speaking parts of the Horn the waab or waaber is also called rooble, possessor of rain, which indicates plainly what people believed he could do. Holders of the office never became political rulers. They commanded reverence, and their views carried great weight whenever a community had a decision to make. That makes three inherited traditions of authority, all traceable to the sixth millennium BCE or earlier, in three different language families. The Nilo-Saharan sacral king fused spiritual and temporal power. The Niger-Congo kumo mediated between the living and the ancestors inside a matrilineal clan. The Cushitic rain possessor held religious standing that gave his voice weight without ever hardening into rule. Political authority has more than one origin story, and Africa preserves at least three of them.

Across the societies that speak Nilo-Saharan languages, the divine is understood as a single pervasive Spirit Force. Anthropologists working in a range of these communities settled on the word Divinity for it. The names used follow a consistent pattern: they tie Divinity to the sky, and through the sky to rain and often to lightning. People do call on particular named spirits for help, and they understand those spirits as manifestations of the one Divinity rather than as separate beings with standing of their own. Western theology has a term for exactly that relationship between the one and its appearances, hypostasis, and it took several centuries of argument to arrive at it. The Nilo-Saharan conception traces back to the ninth millennium BCE. It is a complete system with its own internal logic, and it sits alongside the Creator God of the Niger-Congo tradition as the second monotheism worked out in Africa long before comparable ideas surface anywhere in the Middle East.