THE FIRST EGYPTIANS

The earliest examples of the use of stone monumentally at Nabta, one of the most important of the desert sites which have been studied increasingly in recent years, date to t, 7000 BC. This is long before any comparable constructions of worked slabs and blocks of stone can be detected in any other ancient context. But more extraordinary still is the evidence that these early inhabitants of the western desert aligned their stone constructions to the cardinal points and to the solstices; the constructions which they left behind them have been described as ‘calendar circles’.3 Thus these early settlers were true pioneers, for thousands of years later the builders of the pyramids at Giza also established the extraordinary precision of their constructions by aligning with the constellations and by studying the movements of the planets and stars.4

Near the calendar circles were found stone covered burials of cattle from the same time.5 This alone shows how profoundly deeply rooted were the cattle cults of historic Egypt. Indeed, it might be said that the cattle cults and particularly the worship of the bull represent the oldest form of ‘religion’ to survive in Egypt. The king’s identification as a great wild bull and the multitude of gods in bovine form represent a great diapason which echoes throughout the whole of Egyptian history, from the very earliest days to its latest manifestation.

The people of Nabta moved north and eastwards, towards the Valley, as the region desiccated, the consequence of another shift in the African monsoon at the beginning of the fourth millennium and it was they who were responsible for the beginnings of Egypt’s long and wonderful preoccupation with monumental stone architecture. They also contributed to the melange of peoples who were responsible for the social diversity and complexity which typifies early Egypt leading, at the end of the fourth millennium, to the appearance of the kingship. It is clear from this evidence that the deserts played a crucial role, one that was at least as important in the formulation of the historic Egyptian personality, as did the more populous Nile Valley. It is to the people of the deserts that Egypt in historic times was indebted for the original initiatives which led at last to the flowering of the remarkable civilization that it became.

One singular conclusion that the archaeologists working in this area have arrived at in investigating sites in the far south of the country is that the tradition of pottery-making is vastly older in Egypt than had previously been recognized.6 Pottery has been recovered from Egyptian sites dating to the ninth millennium, far earlier than the first pottery yielding sites in south west Asia, which were always believed to have been anterior to any examples from Egypt. The pottery in the southern Sahara is found in association with hunter-fisher communities which settled on the shores of permanent lakes rich in fish and large game like hippopotamus. Their experience was to be mirrored in Arabian sites many millennia later.

To the northwest of the Nabta Playa is Bir Kiseba,7 another of the important early desert settlements which was especially identified with the hunters who followed the herds of wild cattle from further south in Africa. At Tushka,8 on the Nile north of Abu Simbel, a remarkable discovery was made of the burials of two humans whose graves were surmounted by the bucrania of wild bulls. Nearby were burials of cattle and the whole area was clearly of ritual or cultic importance. The Tushka burials have been dated to 14,500 years before the present.

The practice of marking graves with bucrania is well known throughout antiquity but Bir Kiseiba is vastly more ancient than any other example known. It demonstrates the length of the relationship between humans and cattle and how enduring was the cultic aspect of that relationship. Nearly ten thousand years after the Tushka bucrania burials the bucrania of wild bulls, more than three hundred of them, were mounted around the mastaba of high-status burials at Saqqara and in the Third Dynasty, c.2650bc in the great funerary complex built for King Netjerykhet a wild bull’s skull was ceremonially interred in a stone-lined chamber in the southern court of the Step Pyramid enclosure (see Chapter 7).

Dakhleh too was inhabited from 7000 BC, its early inhabitants, like those of Nabta, being drawn from the early waves of migrants who eventually contributed their genes to the founder stocks of the historic Egyptian people. Later, in Neolithic times, the inhabitants built large hut circles and were responsible for a rich repertoire of rock art. In the Old Kingdom they built a large temple and a palace for the governor of the district at Ayn Asil.9 Dakhleh lies some four hundred kilometres due west of Thebes. It maintained contact with the Valley throughout the Old Kingdom period, though evidence of activity in the Early Dynastic period is relatively slight.

Remarkable though these early communities are, they are not the oldest evidence of modern humans in Egypt. The earliest burial found in the Valley is of a child at Taramsa Hill, near the Ptolemaic temple of Hathor at Dendera; the burial is dated to c,55,000 years before the present.10 At Nazlet Khater, near Tahta, the burial of a man has been dated to c, 30,000 years before the present.11 They are presently the oldest known, fully modern humans to be found in Egypt.

The presence of these communities, the calendar circles and the cattle burials all indicate that the communities were already moving towards an ordered social structure, perhaps with some form of hierarchy and evidently with individuals who practiced special occupations and others who directed the communal efforts in respect of them. It might be said that the whole fabric of later historic Egypt might be seen by the evidence from these remote settlements.

PREDYNASTIC CULTURES - EL BADARI

Around 5000 BC the earliest Egyptian villages appear. The communities which they formed were small no more at best than a few hundred people living together in flimsy huts, close enough to the river to share in its benefits but generally settling themselves on little hillocks or raised ground, sensibly enough, to avoid the flood when it came.

Each of the three principal predynastic cultures identified in Upper Egypt was to leave some definitive impress on the historical period. The first is that identified with the site of the village of El Badari, on the east bank of the Nile, further to the north than its two successors, the earlier named for the site at El Amra (Naqada I), the later for El-Gerza (Naqada II), with Naqada III immediately preceding the unification and the First Dynasty.

The Badarian people were farmers and knew of the cultivation of crops and the management of herds; it is not clear whence their civilization came or from where they themselves originated. They seem to have been fisher folk and evidently kept an access to the Red Sea open, as shells from its shores were used for their adornment. More particularly, they seem to have had contact to some quite substantial degree with western Asia, for the sheep and goats they bred are considered to be of a south-western Asiatic strain. However, it is now apparent that spasmodic, selective herding of animals had been conducted in Egypt from very early times, from long before the first permanent settlements were established in the Valley.

The Badarians appear to have lived in tents or in shelters made of skins. Their domestic economy, in addition to the evidence of animal domestication, must have been quite advanced as they made bread, traces of which have been found in their burials. The probability is that the harvesting and grinding of wild grains and cereals was practiced at a very early date. When they encountered the western Asiatic breeds of ovicaprids and later cattle, which were hardier and better suited to life in the Valley, the Badarians began to adopt them as their own. The circumstances in which that encounter happened are not known however.

Like the Sumerians, who wore woollen kilts or skirts made of sheepskin, the Badarians dressed in animal skins. This has suggested that they may have come from a cooler climate where such clothing would not have been so inappropriate as it must have been for a people living in climatic conditions such as those which prevailed in Egypt although, admittedly, the climate was somewhat more benign than it became later. The Badarians thus seem to be responsible for the first suggestion of Egypt’s contact with lands to the east of the Nile Valley, at virtually the earliest period possible. Though they were living, in all probability, barely above subsistence level, they did have the leisure and the ability to develop crafts and skills from which the mighty Egyptian culture of the dynastic future was to stem. Already they seem to have developed a degree of trade with other peoples, including perhaps the importation of wood from the Syrian coast. They had established religious cults, a somewhat higher proportion of female figurines amongst their grave goods suggesting a faith more goddess-oriented than that which prevailed in Egypt in later times, when male gods tend to predominate. The figures are often very graceful, both men and women represented as dancers, their hands raised above their heads, a gesture which may also be in imitation of the horns of cattle; one of the most significant connections of the population of predynastic Egypt is with the cattle people of the Valley and these little figurines are an early manifestation of it. However, though the female figurines are notable, the Badarians produced impressive representations of cloaked and bearded males, in ivory and clay. They also manufactured a very striking range of combs in ivory; the shape of these is distinctly African and is like the combs used even today by Africans and those of African descent.

The Badarians were remarkably skilled for a people who must be presumed to have moved from something like a Neolithic society to a sedentary state. They carved in bone and, in all probability, in wood; their carvings have a notable power. But the most notable of all their products is their pottery.

Badarian pottery is highly distinctive. The style was retained by potters over many generations, even after the Badarian culture had been subsumed into that of its successors. The most frequently encountered Badarian pots are fired to a bright red or brown finish, often with the tops of the vessels burned black, the result it is believed of the pot being inverted in the ashes of the kiln. The fabric of the pots is remarkable; more remarkable still is that the earliest of them are often the finest in the quality of their fabrication. The walls of early Badarian vessels are fired to a hardness which approaches that of metal and they are often eggshell-thin. It is not known how the Badarians acquired the knowledge of the techniques of firing their kilns to the high temperatures required to produce such wares, or how they controlled their firing. Even in their earliest products, Egyptian craftsmen showed skills of a quite exceptional and very demanding order.

It is remarkable that across the intervening Arabian deserts the contemporaries of the Badarians in Egypt, the early Ubaid potters of southern Iraq, also made pottery of the same exceptionally fine quality. This phenomenon, so unlikely in any event and doubly so with two apparently quite disparate peoples living relatively far from each other, is one of the most puzzling of the early, more or less simultaneous, developments of Egypt and of Sumer. A similar observation, marking a decline from the earlier to the later, may also be made of the exceptionally beautiful wares from Hassouna and Sammara in northern Iraq. They are the earliest of all Near Eastern pottery forms and the quality of the earliest is superlative.

The Badarian is essentially a southern culture; however, it is preceded in the north by peoples identified with two important sites in Lower Egypt. Of these the early inhabitants of the Fayum, the area of the great lake always to be celebrated throughout Egyptian history as perhaps the richest source of game for the hunt, left no traces of structures behind them. They may have been seasonal visitors to the area, like the people far away to the east in Arabia and the Gulf who camped on the East Arabian shore and lakeside sites and left behind them the fragmentary evidence of pottery of the type produced by the ‘pre-Sumerian’ Ubaid people in southern Mesopotamia.