Istwa Nou

Wheat and barley, originally Middle Eastern crops, reached Middle Egypt from the Levant, and every account of early Egyptian agriculture says so. During the same centuries other crops were moving north into Egypt from Sudan and the Horn of Africa. Melons, gourds, cowpeas, which are the black-eyed peas of American kitchens, and the castor-oil plant are the notable ones. That half of the traffic rarely appears in print. The evidence for both flows is equally good, so the asymmetry comes from somewhere other than the record. Civilisation arriving in Africa from the Near East is a comfortable thing to describe. African crops feeding the emerging Egyptian state is an awkward one. The linguistics settles it anyway. The Egyptian word for watermelon is a Nilo-Saharan loan, so the plant and its name came downriver together. Egyptian farming was supplied from two directions, and the southern half of the diet mattered as much as the northern half.

Three hundred kilometres southwest of Aswan, in country that is now open desert, there was a lake that filled in the rains. By the middle of the fifth millennium BCE the people who watered cattle there had turned the place into a ritual centre. They erected megalithic arrays, including a circle of stones that works as a calendar and five separate alignments, each pointed at the rising position of a particular star. Every material indication at Nabta Playa and across the wider region says the builders were Nilo-Saharan speakers, the same livestock-raising communities whose pottery and burial customs were moving north down the Nile. The date is the point. The Great Pyramid at Giza went up a full thousand years after these stones were set. The astronomy that later gets described as an achievement of the Egyptian priesthood was already being practised by African pastoralists in the desert, who read the sky closely enough to fix its motions in stone.