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.

From 6000 BCE the peoples of the middle Nile shared far more than an economy. A body of common ideas and ritual practice took hold from south of the Nile confluence all the way north into the country where the Old Kingdom would later be founded. The people involved did not speak one language. As far north as the latitude of Aswan they spoke Eastern Sahelian tongues, a branch of Nilo-Saharan. From Aswan down to El-Badari in Middle Egypt they spoke dialects of what would become ancient Egyptian. The convergence went straight across that boundary and produced shared pottery styles, shared ceremonies and shared assumptions about the world on both sides of it. So the culture area was bilingual from the start, and the civilisation that grew out of it carried both inheritances. Egypt spoke an Afrasian language and practised a great deal that had come upriver from Nilo-Saharan speakers over three thousand years of contact.

Between about 6000 and 3300 BCE rainfall in northeastern Africa was falling, and it was still enough to keep a continuous belt of steppe and semidesert grassland alive from middle and southern Egypt far south into the Sudan. Some people did live close to the river, and lighter rains made that safer by reducing the risk of a flood that came too high. The majority lived away from it, running pastoral economies across wide country on both banks. This is the Egypt that gets left out. Its centre of gravity was the grassland rather than the floodplain, and its people were herders in regular contact with their southern neighbours across an open landscape with nothing in the way. There was no frontier between Egypt and Nubia during these three millennia, because there was no Egypt yet. There was one cultural zone reaching from the Nile confluence to Middle Egypt, and the communities inside it lived much the same way.