and ritual practices, some originating in Sudan before appearing in Egypt. Herding mobility created a pattern of social and cultural integration, which allowed for internal variations that were later accelerated by the intensification of stockbreeding as a mode of livelihood (Wengrow 2003, 133–34; Wengrow et al. 2014).
During this early period we see the beginnings of the “bovine idiom” common to various Nile Basin societies in different epochs. Training the horns of display cattle into different formations has been practiced along the Nile from Neolithic times through the Egyptian Old Kingdom and the kingdoms of Kerma and Meroe (Wengrow 2006, 56; Welsby 1996, 154) to present-day South Sudanese pastoralists (Evans-Pritchard 1940a, 45; Lienhardt 1961, 16–17; Buxton 1973, 7). Cattle burials are also a practice of some antiquity. Cattle have been found buried in early Neolithic cemeteries in middle Egypt and central Sudan, sometimes within human burials, sometimes separately (Wengrow 2003, 128; 2006, 56–59). Ox skulls and whole ox skeletons have been found in royal tombs and other important gravesites in Nubia, Kerma, and Meroe (Adams 1977, 157, 197, 407; Welsby 1996, 91). The sacred Apis Bulls in dynastic Egypt had their own burial rites. In more recent times cattle in southern Sudan have also been slaughtered and buried in the foundations of shrines, as with Ngundeng Bong’s Mound (the “Pyramid of Dengkurs”) among the Nuer, constructed in the 1890s (Johnson 1990, 53–54; 1994, 93).
Cattle burials point to the continued ritual importance of cattle among herding societies from Neolithic times in Egypt to present-day South Sudanese pastoral communities, and this, rather than some fanciful “pyramid” within the swamps, is the real point of comparison between ancient and modern societies. Insofar as modern pastoral communities have shared interests in cattle, the sacrifice of cattle becomes an “affirmation of community interests” (Lienhardt 1975, 229), an interpretation that might apply to the ritual importance of cattle burials involving sacrifice in the past. Religious shrines among Western Nilotic–speaking pastoralists are often constructed as cattle barns (luak), and even large conical mound shrines built of mud imitate this shape and are referred to as luaks (Howell 1948, 1961; Mawson 1989; Johnson 1990). Some Dinka extend the sacred image to a primordial past by claiming that their ancestors originated in the “luak of creation” (F. Deng 1980, 251). But even when detached from an association with fixed shrines, cattle become “wandering shrines” when dedicated to specific divinities (Evans-Pritchard 1940a, 209).
The points of comparison go beyond the physical treatment of cattle in life or death and are found in the symbolism associated with the divine. The Nuer often refer to divinity by the “poetic epithet” of Tutgar, an ox-name derived from a majestic bull with wide, spreading horns, sometimes represented as holding the universe or the earth between them (Evans-Pritchard 1956, 4). Like Tutgar, the sacred Apis Bull of New Kingdom Egypt was also often depicted with spreading horns embracing not the earth, but the sun. The comparison between Tutgar and the Apis Bull goes beyond horn formations and takes us directly to the Sudanic religious color symbolism associated with divinity, the sky, rain, and lightning.
The Apis Bulls were black with a white mark on their heads, said to be conceived by a lightning bolt and to have the image of an eagle on their backs. These symbolic associations with the divine are part of the cluster of ideas expressed in ancestral Sudanic religions and are found in many modern South Sudanese societies. Lightning is associated with divinity. The combination of black and white colors in cattle as well as in birds and other animals evokes the image of rain and rain clouds, also associated with divinity. Dinka and Nuer name an animal with a white head and black (or dark) body after the fish-eagle (kuei) because of its similar black and white markings (Lienhardt 1961, 11–14, 162; Evans-Pritchard 1940a, 41; 1956, 31–32, 53–54, 81; Buxton 1973, 6–7, 385).
In the color symbolism of South Sudanese cattle keepers the alternating pattern of light and dark is evocative of rain clouds, lightning in a dark sky, or stars in the night, all manifestations of divinity in one form or another (Lienhardt 1961, 12; B. Lewis 1972, 49; Buxton 1973, 385). Just as a black bull with a white head is named after the fish-eagle, so a spotted beast will be named after the leopard (kuac), and leopard skins have had royal or priestly associations as emblems of authority not only in ancient Egypt, which imported leopard skins from lands further south (Trigger 1976, 39, 56, 111; Baines 1995, 120; Williams 1997) but among such modern South Sudanese communities as the Dinka, Nuer, Anuak, and Acholi (Bedri 1948, 50, 57; Evans-Pritchard 1940a and 1956; Crazzolara 1953, 11; Lienhardt 1975, 224–26).
Recent interpretations of archaeological and historical evidence now suggest that the kingdoms of the Middle Nile were built on the foundations of the Sudanic Civilization and that, far from being replications of the Egyptian Pharonic model, the Nubian kingdoms of Kerma, Napata, and Meroe were early examples of Sudanic states (Edwards 1998, 2003; Fuller 2003; Ehret 2001a, 240–42, 245; 2002, 92–94, 149). These multiethnic, polyglot kingdoms with multiple centers of power derived their position more by gaining social influence over people than by absolute control over territory, a building of “wealth in people” that was later replicated in southern Sudan. The territories of Napata and Meroe extended just south of the confluence of the Niles, into the northern fringes of the proto-Nilotic homeland, with pastoralist groups located both within the state’s heartland and along and just beyond its periphery. Both states and nonstate peoples shared essentially the same systems of production, and the two lived in symbiotic tension as states attempted to expand relationships of power built on exchange, trade, and local alliances. It was through the ancient trading networks of the Nile Valley that valuable commodities from the peripheries, including animal skins with their symbolic value, found their way north, and it was through the economic means of trade that the relatively powerful Middle Nile states attempted to exert their influence over peripheral societies—patterns later repeated in recent times (James 1977, 107–8). To what extent the activities of the early Sudanic states contributed to the southward movements and internal differentiation of the proto-Nilotic-speaking societies has yet to be determined.
Forms of Sudanic sacral chiefship or kingship were practiced by states and by nonstate peoples. Among Western Nilotes both kings and sacral chiefs are associated with divine power. The Shilluk reth is seized by the spirit of the first reth, Nyikang, upon his installation (Howell 1953). The sacral chiefs of the Dinka, Atuot, and Nuer are imbued with ring—the priestly divinity Flesh (Lienhardt 1961, 135–46, 172, 227–30; Burton 1987, 84–85; Johnson 1994, 57–59). The human sacrifice associated with the burial of early Sudanic kings developed into socially sanctioned regicide in the country of the two Niles, where the king was not allowed to die a natural death lest the spiritual power inherent in the institution be diminished. Regicide was practiced not only among the Shilluk but also in the territory of the kingdom of Sinnar, once widely populated by Western Nilotic Luo speakers related to the Shilluk (Evans-Pritchard 1932, 60–61), and among many Dinka groups who bury alive their sacral chiefs, the bany bith spear masters (Lienhardt 1961, chap. 8). The Eastern Nilotes of Equatoria also practice regicide, dispatching their rainmaker kings in times of drought (Simonse 1992, chap. 17 and conclusion; Angok 2015).
It is important to reemphasize the point that the foregoing comparisons do not establish a direct unbroken relationship between modern and ancient Nile Basin societies (Wengrow 2003, 132). What they do establish is that Nile Basin peoples have been drawing on a common pool of ideas and symbols in a variety of ways over several millennia, often reinforced by two-way exchanges between societies of unequal power. They also further undermine the assertion of South Sudanese cultural isolation and reestablish South Sudan’s place within the broader range of African history.
3
Trees and Wandering Bulls
Describing the environment of southern Sudan in the 1870s, the nineteenth-century naturalist Georg Schweinfurth declared, “It has been a land without chalk or stone, so that no permanent buildings could be constructed; it has consequently reared a people which have been without chiefs, without traditions, without history” (1874a, 145). Neither traditions nor history are confined
