Istwa Nou

The image of Egypt as a narrow green ribbon of farmland cut through desert describes a landscape that only came into being late in the fourth millennium BCE. For the four thousand years before that, from the tenth millennium to the seventh, the picture was reversed. Vegetation and wildlife spread across the Sahara, which opened enormous stretches of country away from the river to people collecting wild grain and hunting. On the Nile itself flood levels ran high enough that the banks were largely abandoned early in the Holocene. So the communities laying the cultural groundwork for what became Egypt were steppe people. They lived on grassland that ran west and east of the river and joined without a break to the Sudan in the south, and they would not have recognised the country the pharaohs later governed. The gift of the Nile describes the position Egypt was forced into by drought. It says nothing about where Egypt came from.

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.