Istwa Nou

The Aquatic way of life held on along the rivers and lakes even as the climate dried, and the expanding pastoral Nilo-Saharan communities appear to have absorbed those groups repeatedly, taking in their political and cultural ideas at the same time. Sacred kingship is the one that carried furthest. It was worked out among people who fished and hunted hippopotamus in a Sahara full of water, and it passed to herders and grain farmers by absorption. The institution that reached its most elaborate form in the divine pharaoh started with fishermen. The two African inventions of pottery grew out of the same transformations. West African potters made cooking vessels from the start. In the eastern Sahara the earliest pots included water carriers as well as cooking ware, and among the herding and grain growing peoples of the mid Holocene the pot became the instrument for boiling grain into porridge. The pot and the porridge are both African, and both are older than their Near Eastern counterparts.

In the sixth millennium BCE the descendants of the Nilo-Saharan communities that had put together an economy of cattle herding and grain farming moved west with it. They crossed the Sahel and the southern Sahara, reaching the Hoggar range in what is now southern Algeria and the great bend of the Niger. That is a run of more than three thousand kilometres inside a thousand years. The older way of life, built on fishing and the resources of standing water, held on wherever waterways survived and lost ground everywhere else as the wet Sahara dried. What moved with the herds was more than an economy. Languages moved, matrilineal kinship arrangements moved, and the ceramic traditions that would later flow east and north into the Middle Nile went along too. The Sahel belt, a strip of semi-arid grassland running the whole width of the continent, became a corridor. The states of the western Sudan were built later on the population base laid down in that thousand years.