the second, much more elusive yet more pertinent to my theme, deals with how the ancient Egyptian worldview, evolving over three to four millennia, might have processed, articulated and mythologised such putative origins and connections. The proposition that ancient Egypt was ‘African’ in a number of fundamental ways may now be broadly accepted even if, as we have seen, there were complex admixtures at every stage of its evolution. That ancient Egyptians, however, had an image of themselves that we would now recognise as ‘African’ is a claim that must remain highly contentious, may be largely anachronistic, and is hardly amenable to proof – yet is all the more intriguing for those very reasons.
A major obstacle to any resolution is that the Egyptian record, whether in written or graphic form, is frustratingly silent about any contact with Africa apart from the barest epigraphic mentions of military campaigns and trading expeditions into, for example, Yam, Kush or Punt. The lack in surviving Egyptian literature of any national epic, any substantial historiography or body of chronicles (apart from highly stylised and severely attenuated king-lists such as the Palermo Stone or Turin Papyrus), any coherent ensemble of foundational myths, and any geo-historical account of Egyptian ventures beyond the Nile Valley (apart from the highly formulaic and generalised rhetoric of pharaonic monuments), has frequently been lamented (Kemp, 1989, 20; 1995, 680; Shavit, 2001, 39–40).
This silence means that any investigation such as this one has to proceed by surmise and inference. No historiographic impulse seems to have moved the Egyptians beyond the ceaseless sequencing of pharaohs in an ageless cycle or the mythology of death, resurrection and repetition. Their world was not the product or expression of historical process, but an enigmatic ritualised hieroglyph of the divine pharaonic presence, and of the pharaoh’s constant intercession and interaction with the forces, the gods, of the cosmos.
Such a paradigm of thought and belief made the Egyptian worldview fundamentally different from that of the Greeks (Iversen, 1961). All historical or real events, and the stylised monumental semiotics devised to record them, were deeply immersed in a matrix of formulaic allegory and hieratic rhetoric devised as magic utterance, not as verifiable narrative. Time itself was totemic, symbolic, atemporal: concerned not with linearity and historicity, but with seasonal, cosmic and ancestral cycles.
But intriguingly, there is a notion here of time, of generational sequence, of undying ancestral presence, and of the close intimacy between this world and the next that many observers would now recognise as particularly ‘African’ – in the words of François Kense: ‘Most [African] societies [view] the past and the present as forming an uninterrupted continuum. Continuity between generations, emphasised through ancestral worship and kinship relationships, ensures that the present [is] understood largely through an identification with forebears’ (1990, 138). Kense could be describing ancient Egyptian practice. We shall return to the significance of the Egyptian ‘ritualization of rule’ (Baines, 1995b, 130) and the other issues raised here for a broader assessment of Egypt-in-Africa, but we need to attend first to other fundamental links that may be made between ancient Egypt and its African neighbours.
Another way of approaching Egypt’s ancient Africanness is to explore the links between major demographic movements and the linguistic foundations of prehistoric north Africa. As we have seen, genetic and skeletal investigations indicate fairly clearly who the ancient Egyptians were not, and these findings are borne out by demographic and linguistic evidence. The Late Pleistocene desertification of the Sahara between about 70 000 and 14 000 years ago, and the consequent withdrawal of its populations to the east, north and south, where they continued to develop broadly in mutual isolation had the further consequence of determining north Africa’s three major language groups (Shaw et al., 1993, 18). J.H. Greenberg’s classification of these language groups into Afro-Asiatic, Nilo-Saharan and Niger-Congo (1966, 1981), of which Nilo-Saharan is the most diverse and probably the oldest (Sutton, 1981), is now widely accepted (Trigger, 1978a; Ehret and Posnansky, 1982; Diakonoff, 1989; Oliver, 1991; Iliffe, 1995; Picton, 1995) even while still being refined (Blench, 1993; Ehret, 1993). The fourth major and oldest African language phylum is a loose group of hunter-gatherer click languages, of which various Khoisan exemplars are the most familiar; we shall come to these in due course.
Greenberg’s classification has been substantially challenged only by some Africanists (Diagne, 1981, for example), but it is not difficult to see that their unease is inspired largely by two serious quandaries for Africanist hyperdiffusionism arising from Greenberg’s work. Firstly, his Afro-Asiatic may not be of sufficiently or necessarily autochthonous African origin to satisfy Afrocentrists. Secondly, his Nilo-Saharan, which eventually extended in what Dalby calls a ‘fragmentation belt … extending across Africa from the coast of Senegal in the west to the Ethiopian and East-African highlands in the east’ (Dalby, 1981, 311), must have been in reality as much as it is now in linguistic implication a powerful obstacle to any simplistic diffusion of a pan-African ‘Negroid’ language and culture that embraced both Egypt and west Africa. Diagne’s preference for Olderogge’s ‘great Zindj or Congo-Sahara family’ of languages is inspired by the laudable persuasion that ‘ethnocentricity has gone a long way to distort analysis of the material’, and that ‘Afro-Asiatic’ is merely the old ‘Hamito-Semitic’ made more respectable (Diagne, 1981, 246–247), but it simply turns African languages into a meaningless melée.
To return to Greenberg’s classification as elaborated by Dalby, Sutton, Blench, Ehret and others, the collective wisdom now holds that the oldest north African language, Nilo-Saharan, originated in the south-central Sahara during the Late-Pleistocene period of extreme aridity, somewhere between 18 000 and 13 000 years ago, from whence, and noticeably from the Early Holocene wet phase of about 8000–4000 BCE onwards, its derivatives would spread across Africa, from about the Niger bend to the Nile Basin ‘in a broad belt lying between a much shrunken Sahara and an enlarged equatorial forest’ (Sutton, 1981, 481). It was associated with what Sutton calls an ‘aquatic tradition’ based on the lakes and rivers of the Holocene, but in the northern and eastern parts also associated from an early stage with the cattle pastoralism developing in the eastern Sahara among speakers of Afro-Asiatic languages (Oliver 1991, 41–2). The earliest speakers of Nilo-Saharan in the Middle Nile Valley seem to have been of a Nubian-Nilotic stock – Hiernaux and Keita’s ‘Elongated African’ type.
Despite whatever associations they may have established with the Afro-Asiatic speakers of the northern Nile area, these Saharan pastoralists would retain their quite different Nilo-Saharan languages – ‘for most of its known history, the Nubian stretch of the Nile has been occupied by Nilo-Saharan-rather than Afroasiatic-speaking people’ (Oliver, 1999, 41). In other words, despite the ancient proximities and assumed interrelatedness of the populations of the ancient Nile Valley already noted, two quite different language families became domiciled along the river’s banks.
It was in the more northerly Nile Valley that the second major northern African language family – Afro-Asiatic – emerged. It may in fact have originated further south, in the Sudan (Blench, 1993, figure 7.2), although much controversy still surrounds the point of origin of Afro-Asiatic. Blench argues that proto-Afro-Asiatic – whose successors include ancient Egyptian, Semitic, Cushitic, Chadic and Berber – emerged in the central Sudan around 12500–10000 BP, then spread northwards down the Nile and further eastwards to become the dominant language family of north-east Africa. Ehret, however, has placed the origins of the other major North African language phylum, Nilo-Saharan, in virtually the same area, ‘in the general region of the Blue Nile between the Ethiopian highlands and the White Nile’ (1993, 108). This proposal not only explains the Nilo-Saharan character of Nubian-Nilotic languages as opposed to the Afro-Asiatic identity of those just further north; it underscores once again the intimate linguistic and cultural complexities of the Middle Nile Valley or the ‘Nilotic continuum’ mentioned earlier.
Controversial and even contradictory as some of these proposals may still be, what matters for my purposes is that both ur-language groups seem to have emerged in relatively close
