Black Genesis

by Robert Bauval

  THE ABU BALLAS TRAIL

  The mystery of Abu Ballas Hill was finally solved in 1999 by Carlo Bergmann. In the course of a whole year, from March 1999 to March 2000, Bergmann explored on foot the region southwest of Dakhla oasis and discovered some thirty other water stations with similar large, clay pots set almost equidistant to one another, like a hop-skip-and-jump trail or, more poetically, a string of pearls along a 350-kilometer (217 mile) stretch of desert. The midpoint of this trail was Abu Ballas Hill, and the whole created an almost straight highway from Dakhla to Gilf Kebir. The conclusion was inevitable: this was the long-forgotten ancient caravan trail predicted by Almasy.36 This discovery amounted to an intellectual explosion for the academics, for here was hard, irrefutable evidence that the pharaohs did after all travel into the deep desert and probably even made contact with the descendants of the prehistoric people who lived there. Further, all this was happening forty-five hundred years before Prince Kemal el Din discovered Gilf Kebir. Here is how the pharaohs did it.

  In ancient times the essential commodities for such a trip were, of course, water and food, as well as water and fodder for the beasts of burden. It is well known that the camel was not introduced into Egypt before 500 BCE, so that the only other means of desert transport in the Old Kingdom was the donkey (Equus asinus). Harkhuf claimed to have taken three hundred donkeys for his journey to Yam, and donkey caravans are also attested on temple and tomb reliefs as early as the first dynasties. Also, on one of the large clay pots at Abu Ballas there is a drawing of a donkey confirming that this animal had carried the pots and presumably other goods to this location in the desert. The donkey is an excellent desert traveler and can easily carry loads of sixty kilograms (about a hundred thirty pounds) and walk 15 kilometers (about 9 miles) per day and can go three days without water. A fully grown and healthy donkey will need about 2 to 3 liters of water and about 3 kilograms of fodder each day, which together will add 5 to 6 kilograms (about 13 pounds) per day to the load he must carry. A one-way trip from Dakhla to the edge of Gilf Kebir will take a minimum of twenty days and thus will require a total load of 120 kilograms (about 265 pounds) for each donkey, to which we must add another 30 kilograms (about 60 pounds) for the containers that carry the water and food as well as basic traveling equipment plus the food and water for the person leading the donkey (estimated at 50 kilograms—about 110 pounds—per load). Conservatively, then, each donkey must be able to carry at the start of the journey at least 200 kilograms (440 pounds). This, of course, is impossible. A donkey walking at normal pace in such grueling conditions can carry only 60 to 80 kilograms without buckling under the load.

  Figure 2.5. Abu Ballas Pottery Hill discovered in 1918. Photographs courtesy of Carlo Bergmann and Mark Borda.

  Theoretically, the payload can be reduced by taking extra donkeys, but there are an optimum number of donkeys for the trip, because each extra donkey will also require water and food. The optimum number of donkeys per person is three to four. Sharing the load makes the total load for each about 185 kilograms, which is still not possible for a donkey to carry. It should be clear, then, that in order to undertake this journey, the donkey can start off with a load of only 60 to 80 kilograms, and then, when the water and food are used up, there must be refueling stations along the way—at least two spread equidistant along the way to Gilf Kebir. This assessment explains the need for the large Abu Ballas Hill watering station and also another large one that was discovered by Carlo Bergmann, which he named Muhattah Jaqub (Jacob’s Station), located between Dakhla oasis and Abu Ballas Hill. These principal watering stations had to be kept fully supplied with water and food when a donkey caravan expedition was planned, which also explains the need for the thirty small stations that Bergmann discovered in between. In other words, the small stations along the trail were used only for the resupply of the Muhattah Jaqub and Abu Ballas Hill main stations. It was these last two that serviced the caravans and ensured that there was a supply of water and food all the way to the final destination. “But what was the final destination of the caravans?” asked the anthropologist Frank Förster.

  Certainly not Gilf Kebir. The nearest places with permanent water are the Kufra Oasis in modern Libya some 350 km [more than 200 miles] to the northwest of the eastern fringes of the southern Gilf Kebir, and Gebel Uwainat some 200 km [about 124 miles] to the southwest. Kufra, however, surrounded by seas of sand is rather isolated. . . . Therefore, and for other reasons, it is to be assumed that the next leg of the route led towards Gebel Uwainat, the island-like most elevated feature in the whole of the eastern Sahara, which is provided with a number of rain-fed wells at its foot (in Arabic, Uwainat means “the small fountains”). From here it would be possible to reach more southern regions in the territory of modern Sudan or Chad. To date, however, no evidence has been found in the Gebel Uwainat, nor in the Gilf Kebir proper, that attests to an Egyptian presence there.37

  The German anthropologists Stefan Kröpelin and Rudolph Kuper had the same hunch as Förster, namely that the Abu Ballas Trail went on beyond Gilf Kebir, perhaps to Jebel Uwainat and also even beyond to Chad. “Its [the Abu Ballas Trails] final destination is still unknown . . . the nearest locality with permanent ground water lies at distances of 600 kilometers [373 miles] . . . in Jebel Uwainat, from where the trail might have continued to the ecologically superlative Ennedi Plateau or the outstanding lake region of Ounianga in Northeast Chad.”38

  Förster, Kröpelin, and Kuper wrote these words in early 2007. Little did they know that their hunch about Jebel Uwainat being a farther destination along the trail would be confirmed in just a few months. Such are the strange laws of synchronicity in human lives.

  THE EGYPTIAN TEACHER AND THE MALTESE BUSINESSMAN

  Mahmoud Marai is an Egyptian chemistry lecturer who, like Carlo Bergmann, dropped his career in the classroom for a more adventurous career in the desert. He set up a tour-operating business, taking tourists and adventurers into the deep desert, eventually specializing in trips dedicated to exploration. Mahmoud’s infatuation with the desert began when he was stationed at the oasis of Siwa during his military service. There, roaming the golden dunes at the edge of the Great Sand Sea, he was hit by the explorer’s bug, and his experience with the desert was love at first sight. Mahmoud just had to become involved with its barren beauty, its haunting and alluring isolation, and, of course, its many mysteries. Like others before him, he dreamed of finding the legendary lost oasis of Zarzora and going to places that were still unexplored. This strange pull that the desert has on some people is not uncommon. There is an inexplicable attraction to being alone in its vast emptiness where earth and sky seem to meet and become one. Somehow, the isolation from human habitation brings us closer to the essence of our humanity. There is an old Arab saying that God lives in the desert. To put it slightly differently, it feels as if it is not us but our soul that is alive when we roam the open desert, for it provokes a strange and very strong sensation that God is standing near us when we are alone in its vastness.

  At any rate, Marai’s enthusiasm for daring and challenging desert trips attracted the attention of many explorers. In the winter of 2007 a Maltese businessman, Mark Borda, hired Mahmoud Marai for a desert trek39 to Uwainat. The permits for this expedition were issued via Mahmoud Marai as a registered tour operator by the Ministry of Interior and the Egyptian military authorities, who are responsible for the safety of travelers and tours in the Western Desert. Borda and Marai had met the previous year through the intermediary of Carlo Bergmann. Borda’s objective was to search unexplored areas for anything that might be of scientific interest to scholars of geology, botany, archaeology, and anthropology. By carefully studying satellite imagery before the trip, Borda had drawn up an extensive list of targets. Upon his arrival at Jebel Uwainat, Borda immediately set about the task of surveying these targets systematically, very often with Marai accompanying him on his treks. They combed many areas in the lower slopes, wadis, and plateaus mainly southeast
of the Uwainat massif. Each day they trekked about 15 to 20 kilometers (9 to 12 miles), checking every nook, crack, and cave they encountered. This method paid off, and they found the locations of dozens of unreported prehistoric works of art.

  PHARAONIC INSCRIPTIONS! A CARTOUCHE OF A KING!

  By November 27, Marai and Borda had already been walking and searching for nine days. On that day, just as they were about to arrive back at camp for lunch, Borda scanned with his powerful binoculars the last remaining section of boulders that lay strewn on a slope. They were in a region at the southern rim of Jebel Uwainat—which is some 50 kilometers (about 31 miles) into Sudanese territory—an area into which it is dangerous to venture. (In September 2008 a group of Italian tourists was kidnapped at Jebel Uwainat by rebels, and they endured a two-week ordeal before they were freed after a gunfight between the rebels and the Egyptian military.) As Borda panned with his binoculars, he suddenly saw an unmistakable shape on the surface of one of the larger boulders some 100 meters (about 328 feet) from where he stood. It was a shape that he had seen many times before—but only hundreds of kilometers from Jebel Uwainat.

  He exclaimed to Marai in disbelief, “There is a pharaonic cartouche on that boulder!” As he moved closer, focusing his eyepiece with growing excitement, he began to see hieroglyphic inscriptions inside and outside the cartouche (see plate 3). The two men could barely contain their excitement, for there it was, after decades of speculation, incontestable evidence that the ancient Egyptians managed to reach this remote place after all! The whole geography of ancient Egypt suddenly changed before their eyes. They immediately took dozens of digital photographs and carefully recorded the coordinates of the location with GPS. After leaving Jebel Uwainat, Borda also decided to check various prominent hills and rocky outcrops and managed to discover a magnificent cave with exquisite prehistoric art in a region previously considered void of such work. The images were not engraved but painted in bright colors. There were scenes showing slender Black men and women tending cattle, performing daily chores, and dancing and acting out rituals. The details and colors were so vivid that it was difficult to accept that they were thousands of years old. These works and the pharaonic inscriptions were by far more than Marai and Borda had dreamed of finding. Now they could return to Cairo with this historical trophy and an amazing story to tell.

  Upon their return, Mark Borda immediately flew to London to get a quick translation of the Uwainat Inscriptions, as they are now known. At the Institute of Archaeology, University College London, Borda showed the photographs to Maltese Egyptologist Aloisia de Trafford and British ancient languages specialist Joe Clayton of Birkbeck College. We can imagine how these scholars felt as they read the two lines of hieroglyphs, and their bewilderment and excitement upon seeing the words land of Yam in the ancient text . . . even more because, by a strange coincidence, Clayton had written a thesis on Yam.

  PHARAOH MENTUHOTEP’S ENVOY TO YAM

  The final translation of the Uwainat Inscriptions was a joint effort between Joe Clayton and Aloisia de Trafford, and their study and conclusions were published in an article coauthored with Borda in the July 2008 issue of the journal Sahara.40 They refrained from giving the exact location of the inscriptions for fear of tourist guides taking clients there. The inscriptions are rather faint and cannot be seen from the plains below. Fate would have it that Mark Borda happened to aim his binoculars in that precise direction, a visual lucky turn of the spade (although, as Borda later explained to us, he quite methodically and thoroughly surveyed all likely surfaces in targeted areas, and the inscription is located on a conspicuous boulder that would have been difficult to overlook). The inscriptions form a rough rectangle 0.74 by 0.84 meter (about 29 by 33 inches). The left portion of the rectangle shows a king sitting on a throne under a canopy opposite a large cartouche bearing his name. Above and below the king’s cartouche is written his royal title. The right portion of the rectangle has two lines of hieroglyphs, and beneath each there is a drawing of a man making offerings. Here is the translation by Clayton and de Trafford.

  (Left side)

  Son of Re, Mentuhotep [inside the cartouche]

  King of Upper and Lower Egypt [above cartouche]

  Horus living Forever [below cartouche]

  (Right side)

  Yam bringing incense [upper line]

  [images: man kneeling, holding a bowl; another man lying face down, holding a bowl?]

  Tekhebet bringing . . . [lower line]

  [image: man kneeling, presenting a mountain goat]

  Clayton and de Trafford dated the inscriptions from the Middle Kingdom ca. 2000 BCE. This is, in any case, confirmed by the name of the king as well as the horizontal orientation of the hieroglyphs. The two proposed that the whole motif means that people from Yam and also from Tekhebet (a place of unknown location and, oddly, not mentioned in any other ancient Egyptian texts) came here to Uwainat to rendezvous with an Egyptian delegation sent by King Mentuhotep, probably Mentuhotep II, to present gifts to the pharaoh and also trade with his envoy. According to Clayton, de Trafford, and Borda:

  This new find in Uwainat adds another startling piece to this puzzle by revealing evidence for Egypt’s relations with two foreign lands and raises the possibility that these lands may have been located in sub-Saharan Africa, either south or southwest of Jebel Uwainat, possibly hundreds of kilometers further west of the Nile than previously thought.41

  Oddly, Clayton, de Trafford, and Borda do not mention the Tibesti-Ennedi highlands in northern Chad as a possible location of the legendary kingdom of Yam and/or the mysterious kingdom of Tekhebet—although they imply this by suggesting sub-Saharan Africa hundreds of kilometers south or southwest of Uwainat. This can be only either Sudan (south of Uwainat) or the Tibesti-Ennedi highlands in northern Chad (southwest of Uwainat). The latter are perhaps the most likely and most obvious place. Clayton, de Trafford, and Borda also avoided speaking of the Tebu or Goran people who originally came from the Tibesti Mountains, even though they presumably knew that Ahmed Hassanein had encountered a group of them at Jebel Uwainat in 1923. Although no one can tell for sure how long ago these black-skinned people inhabited the Tibesti-Ennedi highlands, these areas have an abundance of rock art similar to Uwainat that suggests a prehistoric origin. Today some three hundred fifty thousand Tebu still inhabit the Tibesti Mountains, although they have now converted to Islam and therefore no longer live by their old ways. It is highly likely that prehistoric rock art of the Tibesti-Ennedi highlands and the art found at Uwainat have a common origin. It is also very likely that the Tibesti-Ennedi highlands were the final destination of the Abu Ballas Trail. Surely, then, an expedition starting from Uwainat and heading to the Tibesti highlands would be the next logical step in the search for the fabled Land of Yam or Tekhebet. We will return to this intriguing issue in chapter 5. Meanwhile, we must examine the Uwainat Inscriptions regarding another issue, which was either not noticed or deemed unimportant by Clayton and de Trafford. This involves the form of the writing of the words Yam and Tekhebet. In both names is presented the same ideogram , which is usually translated as “hill land” or “foreign land” (that is, a place outside Egypt).

  Although these translations are basically correct, we must now consider them alongside the quasi-similar ideogram of “water mountain” that is found at Abu Ballas Hill and Muhattah Jaqub (the two main water refueling stations between Dakhla and Uwainat). These main water stations can hardly be described as mountains: Abu Ballas Hill is only 30 meters (about 98 feet) high, and Muhattah Jaqub is barely 25 meters (82 feet) high. On the other hand, the Tibesti-Ennedi highlands have the tallest mountains in the Sahara (3,450 meters; about 11,320 feet), and they are known to receive 120 millimeters (about 5 inches) of rain each year. These highlands in Chad, which are directly southwest of Jebel Uwainat and which would define an extension of the Abu Ballas Trail, are clearly befitting of the name Water Mountain.

  The ideogram for “mountain” is a two-peaked mound
(), but we have seen that when a circle (solar disk) is placed between the two peaks () it denotes the idea of “horizon,” known as akhet in ancient Egyptian. Now the sign to denote “land” is a flattened ellipse (), so when it is combined with the akhet sign () the meaning is “land of the horizon.” Furthermore, by adding the sign for “people” () the ideograms denote “the people of the land of the horizon,” or, more simply, “the horizon dwellers.”

  We can now recall that King Pepi II, in his letter to Harkhuf, uses the word akhet in connection to the land of Yam so that he refers to it as ta-akhet-iu (literally, “the people of the land of akhet”). Although many Egyptologists also translate this as “the horizon dwellers,” this is not actually correct, because in the letter of Pepi II, the word ta-akhet (the land of Akhet) is not written with the signs(), but with the combination of four signs: (1) crested ibis, (2) circle, (3) half circle, and (4) flattened ellipse (). Further, it is true that when these four signs are combined, they produce the phonetic sound akhet, but the meaning is quite different. However subtle, this difference provides a vital clue to the whereabouts of Yam. Let us see why.