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.