From Slave to Pharaoh: The Black Experience of Ancient Egypt

Introduction

INTRODUCTION 1 espite its course through inimical terrain and its periodic interruption by cataracts (see map 1), the Nile constitutes one of the truly great and most easily negotiated transit corridors in the world. It also provides security and a guarantee of life. A community living along its banks is sheltered from hostile incursions from almost any point of the compass. Although it is a simple matter to keep in touch with people on the other side of the cataract, one need not fear them, for it is extremely dif~cult to bring major force to bear across such a natural obstacle. The permanence of the food stocks seems a heaven-sent blessing: an abundance of ~sh, fowl, and game eliminates the need to wander in search of them and provides for a continuum in human settlement over millennia. From the time of the desiccation of the erstwhile savannah terrain in the eastern Sahara and the enforced movement of human groups towards the Nile (c. 50,000 b.p.), the evidence militates in favor of the continuity and longevity of ethnic groups in northeastern Africa from the mid-Sudan to the Mediterranean. The old notion of waves of “races” _owing up the Nile Valley, effecting cultural change and improvement, is now known to be as erroneous as it was simplistic.1 New ideas need not come by means of invasion: occasionally they are indigenous and may parallel similar discoveries elsewhere which are wholly unrelated. Already towards the close of the last glaciation in Europe, for example (c. 14,000–12,000 b.p.), the communities in Lower Nubia which go under the label “Qadan” culture were experimenting with harvesting grasses and possibly arti~cial cultivation.2 This early trial of agriculture—the knowledge appears not to have survived—does not alter the fact that quite independently in the Mediterranean woodlands of the Levant similar domestication of cereals and animals was taking place;3 and it was awareness of these experiments which eventually stimulated similar attempts in the Lower Nile and Delta. D Map 1. Nubia, Kush, and Sudan. Human societies invite comparative “grading” on the basis of intellectual achievement, technology, sophistication in art, and organizational complexity. This is both inevitable and invidious. But it is nonetheless true that at certain times and places energy and imagination appear to concentrate and to be stimulated in a limited number of centers, around which other communities revolve as “lesser breeds without the law” (in the perception of the “center” of course!). Regionality and the parochialism that attends it had already set in by 20,000 b.p. in northeastern Africa .4 Lower Nubia, Dongola, and the region of Khartoum gradually evolved their own individual and distinct culture sequence, related to but clearly different from the culture sequences in Egypt proper north of the First Cataract. Although they shared an artistic tradition with Egypt and imported commodities from and were stimulated by the ceramic styles of the north,5 the prehistoric Nubians were disadvantaged by the reduced agricultural potential of the river valley south of Aswan. With surer food stocks and easier access to international transit corridors, the inhabitants of the Nile Valley between Aswan and the Mediterranean looked as though they had been especially favored by the Fates. This feeling, a subconscious rationalization of climatological and geographical determinants , must have appeared to have been con~rmed when, during the last quarter of the fourth millennium b.c., a new phenomenon was born at the apex of the Delta, namely, a political regime that we today would call a “monarchy.” Moreover, this new system of governance claimed a territorium embracing not merely a circuit described by one day’s march from the “center” but the entire length of the Nile Valley, where a single ethnic and linguistic group resided! This was shortly to turn Aswan and the cataract region of Elephantine into the Nubian frontier for all time.6 North of this point lay Egypt, Egyptianness, and organization; south, foreign land, foreignness, and disorder.7 If the content of the last sentence re_ects how the Egyptians thought of Nubia—and it does, as we shall see—it did not exactly correspond to reality in the years immediately preceding and following 3000 b.c., for the inhabitants of Lower Nubia in the second half of the fourth millennium had established themselves and their culture in a series of independent chiefdoms of some sophistication...