Istwa Nou

Between 5500 and 3000 BCE people in widely separated parts of the world invented loom weaving, independently of one another, and Africans were among the earliest to do it. Standard periodisation has no room for this. The sixth to third millennia BCE are labelled by metal, Chalcolithic and then Bronze Age, and the labels put the weight on technologies at which the Near East and Europe excelled. Cloth matters to a complex society as much as copper does. It is worn, traded, taxed and used to mark rank. There is still no Textile Age in the standard sequence and no epoch named for the loom. Drawn that way, the periodisation would put Africa at the head of the earliest phase, and the received story of technological progress would look different enough that people would notice. Which technologies get to name an era is a decision, and it was made by people with an interest in the answer.

Priesthoods and ranked societies were forming in the Nilo-Saharan lands around Nabta Playa and in neighbouring parts of Nubia during the fifth millennium BCE. The trend completed itself along the river toward the end of the fourth, when a drier Sahara pushed people onto the floodplain and concentrated them there, most heavily in Upper Egypt. The first large territorial state may have had its centre at Qustul, south of Egypt proper, among Nilo-Saharan speakers whose rulers were already using the regalia that the small emerging states of Upper Egypt used and that Old Kingdom pharaohs would use after them. Qustul's authority extended south into what is now Sudan, as much as two hundred kilometres west of the Nile, and into the country east of it as well. Set the sequence out in order and the question of whether ancient Egypt belongs to African history stops being a question. It was assembled over two thousand years by African communities in constant contact.