The First Ethiopians. Malvern van Wyk Smith

Lower Nubia’s A-Group culture, which is contemporaneous with the Egyptian proto- and early-Dynastic period, and which centred on an area around Qustul just south of Abu Simbel, flourished around 3100–2800 BCE, and seems to have had strong affinities with its northern equivalent (Edwards, 2004). Francis Geus’s investigations of Nubian A-Group burials of around 3500–2000 BCE have revealed that they are ‘hardly distinguishable from Egyptian Amratian [i.e., Naqada I] counterparts’, while at the same time ‘display[ing] many affinities with those of the southerly areas’ (1991, 59). Frank Yurco suggests that these are all expressions of the ‘Khartoum Variant traditions of the Sudan’ (2001, 32). Indeed, Bruce Williams has argued (1980, 1996), on the basis of the University of Chicago’s excavations of Nubian A-Group tombs at Qustul in the 1960s, that a well-ordered pre-Dynastic pharaonic culture existed there ‘several generations before the rise of the first historic Egyptian dynasty’ (1980, 12) and inspired and provided the essential features of early Dynastic statehood in Upper Egypt. For Williams, ‘A-Group Nubia and [early] Egypt shared a common pharaonic heritage’, the forebears of Dynastic Egypt derived from the Khartoum Neolithic, and it may have been ‘the A-Group kingdom itself [that] united Egypt’ (1996, 96).

      Such a direct lineage and intervention is challenged by scholars such as William Adams (1977), Peter Lacovara (1996) and Joseph Wegner (1996), and Williams may have interpreted the limited evidence (notably the so-called Qustul or Horus Incense Burner, an artefact replete with pharaonic motifs) too enthusiastically in support of his argument. Nevertheless, in view of the complex dynamics of changing power relations, mutual influences and resistances that marked the rapid emergence of the early Dynastic state in Upper Egypt round about 3200 BCE, one may have to agree with Wiliams’s thesis in its more general form: ‘Egypt and Nubia shared a core of pharaonic institutions, rulers, deities, officials, and representations that began long before Egypt became a unified state’ (1996, 95). We shall also see that a broadly common population group occupied Upper Egypt and much of Nubia at this stage (Keita, 1992). However, the question is not so much one of how ‘long before’ the founding of Dynastic Egypt this common heritage existed, but of how long afterwards it was remembered by the Egyptians – or at least subsumed in their institutions, art and cultural practices; and of how such cultural traces might have affected later Egyptians’ perceptions of both their own ‘Africanness’ and their relation to their southern neighbours.

      The evidence looked at so far suggests that another way to assess the ‘Africanness’ of ancient Egypt is to determine what vestiges Egypt’s African origins may have left in Dynastic culture; whether these would have been perceived as such; and how such perceptions may have been revised, transformed and even mythologically ritualised over succeeding millennia to produce, by Late Dynastic and Hellenistic times, a set of strictly demarcated images of ‘Egyptians’ on the one hand and of ‘Nubians’ and ‘Ethiopians’ on the other – images that would then inform later Mediterranean cultures. The evidence is, paradoxically, elusive yet pervasive, controversial at the particular level, yet overwhelming in ensemble.

      An opening clue is provided by the findings of a research team from the University of Michigan, which re-examined the skeletal material collected by Flinders Petrie between 1895 and 1906 at Naqada and Giza, now in the Duckworth Laboratory, Cambridge, and (as we have seen) analysed by Podzorski in the 1980s. The question guiding the investigations was simple: ‘Who in fact were the ancient Egyptians, and to whom were they most closely related?’ (Brace et al., 1996, 132). Genetic, cranial and nasofacial measurements were correlated with research findings gleaned from many parts of the Mediterranean world, including data derived from archaeological remains of other African and Near-Eastern people of the pre-Dynastic period.

      The results were fascinating. Petrie’s original assessment that the Naqada population of about 4000–3200 BCE constituted a ‘New Race’ of ‘invaders … entirely different to any known among native Egyptians’ (140) was immediately disproven. Rather, the team found a ‘genetic continuity in situ [that] maintained a predominantly Egyptian configuration’ (155) from pre-Dynastic to much later times, even though there is also much evidence of continuous Egyptian contact with surrounding peoples. Crucially, the investigations revealed far greater correlation between pre-Dynastic and later Dynastic Egyptians and Nubians, and (for instance) modern Somalis and even Europeans, than between Nile Valley dwellers and west African and sub-Saharan Neolithic groups: ‘Their [early Egyptian] craniofacial morphology has nothing whatsoever in common with [that of] sub-Saharan Africans. Our data, then, provides no support for the claim that there was a “strong Negroid element” [Asante, 1990] in Predynastic Egypt’ (145). Even pre-Dynastic Nubians proved to have had little genetic connection with sub-Saharan Africans.

      These are noticeably strong conclusions in a research report that remains otherwise circumspect and tentative, although it does also dismiss claims that ancient Egyptians had to be either ‘Caucasoid’ or ‘Negroid’ as ‘hopelessly simplistic, misleading, and basically wrong’ (156). The fairly conciliatory proposition of Martin Bernal that ancient Egypt was ‘basically African’ (Black Athena 1: 242) is labelled as ‘misleadingly simplistic’ (156). But to conclude that the evidence will bear no stronger argument than the proposition that ‘Egyptians were Egyptians’ (159) is surely also too cautious, and seems to be prompted more by contemporary North Atlantic ethnic sensitivities than by historical credibility.

      The evidence does elicit other interpretations, as Podzorski had already suggested. Oliver and Fage had suggested earlier that ‘physical types found in predynastic and early dynastic burials’ show a population ‘indistinguishable’ from the modern Beja, Danakil and Somali (1988, 13); that is, peoples of the desert and coast east of the Nile – in other words, descendants of the nomadic, pre-Dynastic cattle-and-boat people of the eastern desert now identified by Toby Wilkinson (2003). Frank Yurco has also proposed a sharper identification to match these craniometric and genetic investigations: ‘The peoples of Egypt, the Sudan, and much of East African Ethiopia and Somalia are now generally regarded as a Nilotic continuity, with widely ranging physical features … but with powerful common cultural traits, including cattle pastoralist traditions’ (1996d, 67).

      Writing in the same volume as Yurco and the Brace group (Celenko, 1996), Keita, Boyce and Ehret reiterate the point that although ‘a study of 12th Dynasty DNA shows that [Egyptians] had multiple lines of descent’ and ‘Old- and Middle-Kingdom statuary shows a range of characteristics’, including ‘variations on the narrow-nosed, narrow-faced morphology also seen in various East Africans’, the overall evidence suggests that ‘the origins of Egyptian ethnicity lay in areas south of Egypt’ (Celenko, 1996, 23–25).

      S.O.Y. Keita’s careful examination of crania of the early Dynastic period deriving from Abydos in mid-Egypt to Kerma in mid-Nubia leads him to make bolder claims. Using Hiernaux’s morphology (1975) of two basic ‘Black African’ phenotypes, the ‘Broad African’ (or ‘extreme Negroid’) and the ‘elongated African’ (or Nilotic), he categorises the examined Nile Valley crania as overwhelmingly of an ‘Elongated African’ or Nilotic type. He confirms that despite the presence of about thirty per cent of heterogeneity in the examined samples, the remains of pre-and proto-Dynastic populations of the Middle Nile Valley exhibit a striking continuity. Supporting Fekri Hassan’s findings of 1988, he sums up: ‘The peopling of what is now the Egyptian Nile Valley, judging from archaeological and biological data, was apparently the result of a complex interaction between coastal northern Africans, “neolithic” Saharans, Nilotic hunters, and riverine proto-Nubians, with some influence and integration from the Levant’ (1992, 251), but with proto-Nilotic peoples forming the basic stock. It will be noticed that the possibility of a west African ‘Negroid’ ancestry is wholly absent from all of these scenarios.

      Into this highly speculative and controversial debate, Stephen Oppenheimer (2003) has introduced a set of new possibilities. According to his genetic research, much of the population of North Africa, including the northern Nile Valley, stems from a return to Africa, enforced by the last Ice Age, of populations from the Levant some 30 000 years ago. As he puts