The First Ethiopians. Malvern van Wyk Smith

Patricia Podzorski’s very detailed ‘Examination of Predynastic Human Skeletal Remains from Naga-ed-Dêr’ (1990), which focuses on a cache of human remains from just north of Abydos collected by Flinders Petrie around 1900 and neglected ever since.

      Podzorski’s findings are cautious but telling. Working before the general availability of DNA genetic testing and its dramatic revelations of population movements and affiliations (Sykes, 2001; Oppenheimer, 2003), she nevertheless comes to the clear conclusion that most of her subjects were ‘delicately built … [with] high foreheads, very slight brow ridges, moderate alveolar prognathism and slight to moderate occipital ridges’ (92), and with hair ranging from reddish brown to black, straight, wavy or curly, but ‘never kinky in texture’ (85). She is sceptical about whether any of these features could be regarded as ‘Negro’ traits, but she is equally sure that ‘biologically, the populations of Upper Egypt and Lower Nubia seem to have been continuous and stable throughout the Predynastic Period’ (93). So who could these pre-Dynastic Egyptians have been?

      As we have already seen, ethnic differentiation in Dynastic representational art is, outside the later New Kingdom, often ambiguous. In addition, invasions and migrations in and out of an area as anciently settled and as significant a civilisational thoroughfare as the Nile Delta, or up and down a river as central to early human cultural development as the Nile, must have been so complex and of such long duration that the process can now be retrieved only fragmentarily and speculatively, except in its obvious outcome: ethnic homogeneity must have disappeared at a very early stage. Peter Mitchell usefully sums up the broad process: ‘Archaeology shows that the origins of Ancient Egyptian society lay in the complex interaction between long-established populations along the Nile, the Saharan herders … and, in a few specific ways, the inhabitants of Palestine, Syria, and Mesopotamia’ (2005, 67).

      But who were these ‘long-established populations’ and ‘Saharan herders’? Bruce Trigger reminds us that the Nile Valley ‘is the only region of Africa where human settlement stretches without a break across the Sahara from the southern shore of the Mediterranean to the centre of the continent’, and that it is best to speak of a ‘Nile Valley continuum’ on which Egyptians occupy mainly a northerly and Nubians ‘an intermediate position’ (1978a, 27). In similar vein, Jean Leclant speaks of the whole of north-east Africa as part and product of ‘the great Palaeosaharan culture’ (1997a, 73). Such views are encouraged by our age’s sensitivity to the dangers of racial stereotyping and an anxiety to counter the historical realities of discrimination. But the results can be confusing, and a simple ‘melting pot’ theory of Egyptian culture will not advance our investigations much.

      Anthony Leahy, in his ‘Ethnic Diversity in Ancient Egypt’ (1995), speaks of an ‘incessant movement of different ethnic groups into Egypt throughout the Pharaonic period’ or ‘over several millennia’ (225), but concludes his examination of the New Kingdom ethnographic scenes in temple art already referred to by insisting that it ‘is clear that the Egyptians chose to define themselves as darker than the peoples of Libya and the Near East but lighter than their southern neighbours’ (226).

      But who would these Egyptians have been, the products of millennia of ethnic heterogeneity, whose later ethnic semiotics (dare one say, prejudices?) could nevertheless yet be so ‘clear’? When with Yaacov Shavit we reject, as we must, simplistic Afrocentrist claims that the ancient Egyptians were ‘a homogeneous, pure black race’ (146), do we discount along with such ‘pure blacks’ the many other, often smaller, ancient African peoples? As ‘delicately built’ as Podzorski’s pre-Dynastic Upper Nile population, sometimes, like ancient Egyptians, yellow-brown in colour, and as non-negroid in physiognomy as in language and culture, such populations – now confined to the deserts of southern Africa (the Khoisan) or remote parts of Tanzania (the Hadza and Sandawe) or the Sahara (the Twa) – were 10 000 years ago still spread across much of north-eastern, central and southern Africa, from Eritrea to the Cape of Good Hope.

      Some contributors to the Lefkowitz and Rogers response to Black Athena, perhaps from a laudable concern not to seem to be reconfirming ‘Hamitic’ theories about Egypt’s non-African roots, raise similar conundrums about the origins and identity of Egypt’s ancient population. Kathryn Bard, for instance, reminds us that Lower Egypt was once called Kmt, ‘Black Land’ (hence the Kemet of Asante’s title, mentioned earlier), but not because of the colour of its population but because of the silt-laden Delta floodplain, just as Upper Egypt was Dšrt, ‘Red Land’ (and hence our word ‘desert’) because of the colour of the Sahara (1996, 104). Ancient Egyptians, she argues, ‘were Mediterranean peoples, neither sub-Saharan Blacks nor Caucasian Whites…. Ancient Egypt was a melting pot; people of different ethnic identities migrated into the Nile Valley at different times in its prehistory and history’ (104). Yet Lefkowitz and Rogers, summing up the findings of Bard and several other contributors, conclude: ‘On the basis of the available evidence … the ancient Egyptians regarded themselves as ethnically distinct from other African peoples, as well as from the peoples of the Near East and Europe’ (1996, xii). Once again, there is some tension between acknowledging the complex historical origins of ancient Egypt, and allowing for the singular cultural perceptions Egyptians had of themselves.

      Furthermore, how ‘ancient Egyptians regarded themselves’ and what modern analysis of the demographic evidence might reveal are not necessarily the same thing. Frank Snowden, drawing on a lifetime’s research into aesthetic representations of blacks in the classical world (1970, 1983, 1989, 2001), argues for a radical distinction between Egyptian and Nubian types: ‘Egyptians and their southern neighbours were perceived as distinctly different physical types, [and] it was the inhabitants of Nubia, not the Egyptians, whose physical type most closely resembled that of Africans and people of African descent referred to in the modern world as Blacks or Negroes’ (1996a, 115). His ready assimilation of the ‘Nubian’ and ‘African’ type suggested here will need to be re-examined, but the earlier claim holds. Elsewhere he cites the archaeological evidence put forward by David O’Connor in support of the basic distinction: ‘Thousands of sculpted and painted representations from Egypt as well as hundreds of well-preserved bodies from cemeteries show that the typical physical type of Egyptian was neither Negroid nor Negro’ (Snowden 1996b, 107).

      There is, however, a danger here that such stark distinctions on the one hand, no less than diplomatic ‘melting pot’ explanations on the other, exacerbated by the continuing embarrassment of racist hyperdiffusionist theories (both Eurocentric or Afrocentric) noted in Chapter 1, may obscure the actual interest, complexity and duration of the demographic and ethnic processes that not only gave ancient Egyptian and Nubian people their actual identities, but, more importantly, conditioned their perceived identities – whether of themselves or of one another. In short, in order to arrive at some adequate surmise of who the ancient Egyptians thought they were, and how they both saw their African neighbours and also preserved or understood their own indebtedness to any ‘African’ origins, we must attempt to define the demographic, topographic and cultural provenance of ancient Egyptian civilisation rather more firmly than may now be fashionable – or even politic. As Susan Stephens suggests, ‘the peculiar fascination that Egypt and its symbolic realm hold in the western imagination’ (2003, 5) exacerbates the ideological premium placed on such investigations.

      It is now generally agreed that the crucial period, and essential stimulation, for the emergence of pre-Dynastic Egyptian culture was a series of alternating wet and dry phases in the Nile Valley and eastern Sahara during the early Holocene, that is, from about 12000 BP onwards (Wendorf and Schild, 1976; Close, 1992; Hassan, 1995; Butzer, 1995; Iliffe, 1995; De Flers, 2000; Edwards, 2004). Dubbed the ‘Neolithic Revolution’ by V. Gordon Childe, the process marked a relatively rapid advancement in the Middle Eastern populations, from mobile hunter-gatherer existence to sedentary farming practice and the settlement of the great river valleys of the Nile and Mesopotamia (Wells, 2006; Mithen, 2008). The systole and diastole of the Saharan climate over these millennia speeded up the clockwork of Nile Valley civilisation. Each wet spell dispersed human groups into a habitable desert, where they developed new skills