Istwa Nou

A macehead is a shaped stone fitted to a club. In the sixth millennium BCE people were laying them in graves in Sudan, in communities along the Nile confluence whose languages belonged to the Nilo-Saharan family. Only later did the object turn up regularly in the graves of Upper and Middle Egypt. It travelled the same corridor that carried pottery styles, burial habits and loanwords downstream, and it changed jobs on the way, from an offering to the dead into a badge of royal power. By about 3100 BCE that transformation was complete. The Narmer macehead, a carved stone sphere showing the king who joined the two halves of Egypt, is one of the objects every Egyptology course puts on the first slide. Its family tree runs south. The item chosen to commemorate the founding of pharaonic Egypt came out of the Nilo-Saharan world that made pharaonic Egypt possible.

Languages record their debts. When early Egyptian took words for important cultural items from Nilo-Saharan languages, it took them from the communities upriver, and each borrowing marks a transaction. A people does not usually borrow a word without borrowing the thing, the practice or the technique it names. So the vocabulary works as a register of what moved and which way it went. The archaeology of the Nile valley had already shown the flow: pottery styles, maceheads and burial customs appearing in Sudan first and turning up in Egypt afterwards. The linguistic evidence is independent of the archaeology and it agrees with it. Both say that the cultural foundations of ancient Egypt were assembled in large part out of material that came from the Nilo-Saharan-speaking south. The relationship usually described as Egypt civilising Nubia runs the other way through most of the period in which those foundations were laid.