Istwa Nou

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.

The Egyptian archaeologist Fekri Hassan set out the argument for a common cultural world along the middle Nile in a 1988 article in the Journal of World Prehistory. David Wengrow and his coauthors brought it up to date in Antiquity, and it is now the working assumption of the archaeologists who have done most to expand knowledge of these regions over four decades. What they describe is a shared complex of developments emerging from around 6000 to 5500 BCE across a huge span, from a couple of hundred kilometres south of where the Abbai meets the White Nile as far north as El-Badari in Middle Egypt. They call it the primary pastoral community. The name understates the economy. Linguistic evidence, archaeology and human dental remains all show these people collecting, cultivating and harvesting grain and other crops alongside their herds. The foundations of ancient Egypt were laid across that landscape, and the landscape was African throughout.