in the village of the “wizard” Guek Ngundeng. Having viewed the remains of the step pyramids at Meroe and declared them debased African versions of Egyptian prototypes, his imagination raced backward and forward in time. “A pyramid!” he exclaimed. “What pyramid? Who has been buried there, thousands of years ago: demigod, priest, or Ethiopian king? And wizards? What sorcery are they practicing, what is this, what is still living there in those impenetrable swamps?” (Bermann 1931, 19).
This encounter illustrates how the history of Sudan has often been obscured by the assumptions of Egyptology. Influences flowed in one direction from the Egyptian heartland, and a conical mud shrine in the “impenetrable swamps” of the Upper Nile could only be understood as a degenerate pyramid. Yet, as the archaeologist David Wengrow reminds us, the ancient civilizations of the Nile Valley and Near East “were the products of interaction and exchange, rather than isolation.” They were “the outcome of mixtures and borrowings, often of quite arbitrary things, but always on a prodigious scale” (2010, 13, 175). Recent advances in archaeology and historical linguistics now recognize that ancient Egypt, rather than being the source of all invention, often built on innovations originating further up the Nile. Exchanges and borrowings flowed both down- and upriver between the Nile’s African heartland and the civilizations along its middle and lower reaches, contributing to the spread of a shared pool of cultural ideas and practices from which Nile Basin societies drew, however distant from each other in time or space. The peoples of southern Sudan, whose geographical, political, and cultural isolation from the rest of Africa is commonly assumed, were active participants in these exchanges and interactions.
Nilo-Saharan Populations
Most South Sudanese belong to the Nilo-Saharan language family, the bearers of the ancient Sudanic civilization that originated in the Middle Nile, stretching from the Niger bend to the Red Sea coast. In the differentiation of languages and the movement of populations through and beyond the Sudanic belt over several millennia, Nilo-Saharan peoples “drew on a common fund of basic ideas about politics, social relations, and religion” (Ehret 2001a, 224).
The homeland of the ancestral Nilo-Saharan speakers straddled the two Niles from their confluence southward to Lake No. The two primary branches of Koman and Sudanic began to emerge some thirteen thousand years ago. The modern representatives of Koman include today’s Gumuz, Uduk, and Koma located along the Sudan-Ethiopian borderlands, close to their ancestral homeland. The more numerous Sudanic branch is further subdivided into Central and Northern subbranches. The modern representatives of Central Sudanic include the Bongo and the so-called Fartit (Yulu, Kresh, Aja, Golo, and so on) of the Bahr el-Ghazal basin, and the Moru, Madi, and Lugbara in the present-day South Sudan–Uganda borderlands. The modern representatives of Northern Sudanic are more widely spread geographically and more divergent linguistically. They include the Nubian languages of the Sudan-Egyptian border, Fur and Daju in Darfur, many of the languages of the Nuba Mountains, Gâmk in the Ingessana hills of Blue Nile, Surmic speakers of southwest Ethiopia and southeast South Sudan (Murle, Didinga, Larim, and Mursi), the Western Nilotes (Dinka, Nuer, Atuot, Shilluk, Anuak, Mabaan, Acholi, and Pari), Eastern Nilotes (Bari, Mandari, Lotuho, Lokoya, Toposa, Jiye, Nyangatom in South Sudan, and Turkana and Maasai in Kenya), and the Southern Nilotes of Eastern Africa (Ehret 2001b).
Geographically South Sudan connects East Africa’s Great Lakes to the sahelian steppe of Sudan. Topographically it is an “irregularly shaped basin,” elevated around its perimeters, drained in the west by the rivers of the Nile-Congo watershed and in the east by the Sobat-Pibor system, both converging on the main channel of the Nile and the central sudd swamp. South Sudan’s soils are broadly divided into alluvial clays and heavy loams in the east, and lighter laterite soils of the ironstone plateau in the west. The alluvial clays, found in the former provinces of Upper Nile and Jonglei, parts of Eastern and Central Equatoria, and much of Bahr el-Ghazal, are high in nutrients and covered by tall grass and woodlands, beneath which lie South Sudan’s known oil reserves. The eastern clay plains are flat, with almost no slope, and are prone to waterlogging in the rains and cracking in the dry season. Permanent settlements are possible only on a few slightly elevated sandy ridges. The ironstone plateau covers most of the former provinces of Bahr el-Ghazal, and Western and Central Equatoria. Its soils are better drained than the clays, with lower nutrients, covered by broad-leafed woodlands and forests, and able to support larger populations in permanent settlements (SDIT 1955, 3–4).
Table 2.1 Some languages of South Sudanese and related peoples
Average yearly rainfall increases along a north-south axis, with much drier conditions experienced along the northern border with Sudan. With its higher rainfall, its network of waterways, its waterlogging clay soils and central swamp, the southern Sudan has always been a wetter region than the northern territories of the Middle Nile, a factor influencing long-term population movements. In the wetter conditions throughout northeast Africa approximately twelve to five thousand years ago, the central swamp and the pattern of seasonal flooding covered a greater area and extended farther north than today, and this is one reason why the area was settled later than the central Nile Valley. Drier conditions began to set in some five thousand years ago, and it is likely during this period that previously inaccessible areas of the region were populated, contributing to the differentiation between languages and social groups (Harvey 1982, 14–17).
The first peoples to spread south of the Bahr el-Ghazal flood basin were the Central Sudanic–speaking societies, with the Bongo and so-called Fartit speakers settling south of the Bahr el-Ghazal and the ancestral Moru, Madi, and Lugbara speakers reaching the northwestern part of the East African Rift. About four thousand years ago the ancestral Nilotic speakers began moving south from the eastern Middle Nile Basin as the central sudd swamp began to shrink. During the last millennium BCE the Western Nilotes separated into ancestral Dinka, Nuer, and Luo as they spread throughout the region between the two Niles; the Eastern Nilotes settling in the central Equatoria region began to diverge into ancestral Bari, Toposa, and Lotuho-speaking communities; and the ancestral Didinga-Murle entered the area of southwestern Ethiopia and southeastern southern Sudan (Ehret 1982, 22–27; 2001a, 247; 2002, 126, 388). From the thirteenth through the nineteenth centuries CE there were further movements of Western Nilotic-speaking societies around, through, and out of the central swamp region as new and hardier breeds of cattle were introduced, allowing for longer-range movement (David 1982a, 54–55; 1982b, 86–88).
This compressed chronological summary might give the impression of large-scale population movements of whole peoples over a relatively short time, but the linguistic evidence reveals “a complex array of human interactions, involving often the extensive amalgamation of people from formerly separate societies” (Ehret 1982, 34), as the next chapter describes.
Sudanic Civilization, Sacred Bulls, and Symbols of Power
The Sudanic Civilization emerging out of the Nilo-Saharan tradition along the middle Nile between eleven and eight thousand years ago had a number of distinctive features. These included the domestication of cattle and indigenous wild grains such as sorghum, and the creation of a pottery tradition some two thousand years before similar developments in the Middle East. A parallel aquatic tradition, recalled in the fishing spear (bith) so symbolically important in modern Nilotic religions, involved the intensification of hunting and gathering riverine resources along the expansive networks of rivers and major lakes. A cluster of monotheistic ideas developed around a single divinity associated with the sky, rain, and lightning (the antithesis of “animism”) and the emergence of sacral chiefship or kingship where both the office and the person of the king were associated with divinity but where the king was not divine (Ehret 2001a; 2002, 61–94).
The dominant cultural features that gave the early Neolithic Nile Valley its distinctive character came from its “primary pastoral communities.” During the fifth millennium BCE human populations from Sudan’s Gezira to
