It has become a tmism that ancient Egypt was a gift of the Nile because the river’s flooding brought new life into the valley in the late summer of every year. Egypt was, therefore, essentially a rich oasis amid the very extensive expanse of the Sahara. This, however, has not always been the case: the very earliest inhabitants of Egypt lived in a different kind of environment. First, the climate was not always as arid as it is now (modem Upper Egypt being one of the most arid regions in the world), oscillating instead between the present hyperaridity and a dry Sahelian condition. Secondly, the river itself was not always a meandering river in a wide floodplain, with its late summer high floods. During some periods, the Nile was either reduced to a series of independent ephemeral wadi basins or had a generally low discharge, choked by its own huge floodplain deposits. It brought its rich alluvia into Egypt only when its headwaters reached back to Ethiopia. Finally, although the river clearly brought life to Egypt, it has also brought about the erosion of older archaeological deposits—we should, therefore, not be surprised to find that only very scarce remains from the earliest occupation have been preserved.
Because of its geographical position, Egypt certainly served as an important conduit for early humans migrating from East Africa towards the rest of the Old World. We know that early Homo erectus left
Africa and arrived in Israel as early as i.8 million years ago. There is, therefore, no reason to doubt that small bands of Homo erectus visited and probably stayed in the Nile Valley. Unfortunately, only very sparse evidence of this event is available and, worse still, it cannot be dated, because circumstantial evidence is also very poor. In some Early and Middle Pleistocene deposits, isolated choppers, chopping tools, and flakes, similar to those associated with early hominids in East Africa, have been recovered in gravel quarries at Abbassiya, as well as in Theban gravel deposits. However, most of these published ‘artefacts’ are probably not of human origin and all of them are from secondary deposits.
World History
