David Phillipson, a professor of African archaeology, directs the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge in England . . .
“As the Sahara dried and became less suited and eventually unsuited to habitation, people ultimately had to move out, whether it be southward or to the east into the Nile Valley,” Phillipson said.
“And this [study] helps [us] to understand the apparent rather sudden development of intensive settlement by sophisticated societies in the Nile Valley ’round about five or six thousand years ago.”45
Michal Kobusiewicz and Romuald Schild are both renowned anthropologists who have studied Nabta Playa under the aegis of the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. After pointing out that the ancient Egyptian pharaonic state was formed around 3300 BCE, they commented that “we already know that soon after this date, drought forced the [Nabta Playa] herdsmen to abandon their lands . . . and so where might they have gone, if not to the relatively close Nile Valley? They brought with them the various achievements of their culture and their belief system. Perhaps it was indeed these people who provided the crucial stimulus towards the emergence of state organization in ancient Egypt.”46
Schild and Kubusiewicz also call “these people” prehistoric herdsmen, prehistoric pastoralists, Neolithic cattle herders, and sub-Saharans. The term Black, however, is clearly avoided. As we have seen, the ancient sub-Saharan people were of the pre-Tebu Black race whose ancestors inhabited the Tibesti and Ennedi Mountains of northern Chad—but who really were the Tebu? How did they look? In the 1860s, the German explorer Gerhard Rohlfs was among the first Europeans who had made contact with the elusive Tebu people.
Their stature is svelte, their members fine, their disposition light and swift; they have lively eyes, their lips are a bit tough, their nose is small but not snubbed, and their hair is short but less wiry than the Negroes. . . . All other travelers who made contact with the Tebu have noted that their physical traits tend more towards the Negro . . . their customs and traditions are also nearer to that of the Negro . . . the land of the present day Tebu is located south of Fazan, in the north of Lake Chad . . .47
Plate 1. Satellite map of the Egyptian Sahara (produced in part using Google Earth)
Plate 2. Djedefre Water Mountain, central cartouche, east face
Plate 3. Mahmoud Marai (left) and Mark Borda with the newly discovered Uwainat Inscriptions, November 2007
Plate 4. Two views of the megaliths that were arranged on top of CSA before CSA was excavated. These appear to be shaped as if fitted together or symbolic of connection. Images taken October 2003. As of April 2008, one of these megaliths was removed, possibly to the Nubian Museum.
Plate 5. A human figure emerging from the head of a large animal, possibly a lion, in the midst of a group dance. This appeared to us to be reminiscent of modern shamanic imagery (in which a shaman enters the mind of a powerful animal as part of a ritual). Lower left, a large orb, possibly the sun or moon, with a single hand. Mester Kawai-Foggini cave, southwest Gilf Kebir.
Plate 6. Domestic scene with cattle at the Uwainat cave
Plate 7. Human with cattle on a leash, Uwainat cave
Plate 8. Robert Bauval with herder near Assiut
Plate 9. Nubian boatman at Aswan. Behind the boatman can be seen the Island of Bigeh, near Philae, and the remains of the entrance of a doorway built by Augustus that led up a stairway to a temple, the pronaos, built by Ptolemy XII.
Plate 10. Elder at Siwa Oasis
Plate 11. Elder at Siwa Oasis
Plate 12. Prehistoric carving of cattle ca. 8000–6000 BCE, Gilf Kebir
Plate 13. Prehistoric carving of cattle ca. 8000–6000 BCE, Karkur Talh, Uwainat. Note how the cow is ornate with body harness or perhaps a blanket.
Plate 14. Cattle, Borda Cave, northern Uwainat, ca. 6000–4000 BCE. Note spotted cow.
Plate 15. Models of cows, Eleventh Dynasty, ca. 2000 BCE. Courtesy of the Cairo Museum.
Plate 16. Cow goddess Mehet-Weret (“Great Flood”) representing the yearly inundation of the Nile, ca. 1500 BCE. This goddess is sometimes linked to Isis.
Plate 17. The cow godess Hathor, New Kindom, ca. 1500 BCE. Note the stars on her body. Hathor’s cult is attested from earliest times.
Plate 18. The goddess Isis with cow horns, suckling the child Horus
Plate 19. The Step Pyramid at Saqqara
Plate 20. The head of the Sphinx. Note “Negroid” features.
Plate 21. The Nilometer on Elephantine Island at Aswan
Plate 22. The rock-cut tomb of Harkhuf at Aswan (west bank)
Plate 23. A hunting scene found in the Kifah cave. Photo courtesy of Mark Borda.
Plate 24. Rock painting of cattle, goats, and other animals found in the Kifah cave. Photo courtesy of Mark Borda
Plate 25. The temple of Hathor at Dendera
When Rosita Forbes traveled to the oasis of Kufra with Ahmed Hassanein in 1921, she became the first European woman to encounter the Tebu—some two hundred of them still living in the Kufra region. Sir Harry Hamilton Johnston, the great British explorer and diplomat who wrote the introduction to Forbes’s book, comments on that region and the Tebu people.
It is one of the vestiges of a formerly well-watered country ten, twenty or more thousand years ago. To it [Kufra] came, long ago, when the intervening desert was much more traversable, clans of Tu, Tebu or Tibu people, nowadays the dominant population of Fazan and Tibesti. . . . They are seemingly of considerable antiquity, the Garamantes of Herodotus and the Romans, the Tedamansii of Claudius Ptolemeaus, the Alexandrian geographer of the second century. They represent one of the numerous races between the White man and the Negro, but in their purer and more northern extension they are a people with a preponderance of White man stock. The skin is dark-tinted and the hair has a kink, a curl about it. . . . They do not differ very much, facially, from the Hamitic people of Northeast Africa . . .48
It was a small contingency of Tebu people that Ahmed Hassanein had in fact encountered at Jebel Uwainat in 1923 (see chapter 2). He called them Goran, which is another name for these ancient people. There were one hundred fifty of them, ruled by a king called Herri. In Hassanein’s words, here is what happened when he woke up one morning in Wadi Karkur Talh at Uwainat:
As I opened my eyes a figure stood near me that seemed to be part of a pleasant dream. She was a beautiful girl of the Goran, the slim graceful lines of whose body were not spoiled by the primitive garments she wore. She carried a bowl of milk, which she offered with shy dignity. I could only accept it and drink gratefully. . . . A Tebu appeared with a parcel of meat of the waddan or wild sheep. I gave him macaroni and rice and he went away happy. After we had eaten I went to see some relics of the presence of men in earlier times. . . . I had got talking with one of the Gorans, and having satisfied myself about the present inhabitants of Ouenat, I asked him whether he knew anything about any former inhabitants of the oasis. He gave me a startling answer. “Many different people have lived round these wells, as far back as anyone can remember. Even djinns have dwelt in that place in olden days.” “Djinns!” I exclaimed. “How do you know that?” “Have they not left their drawings on the rocks?” he answered. With suppressed excitement I asked him where. He replied that in the valley of Ouenat there were many drawings upon the rocks, but I could not induce him to describe them further than saying that there were “writings and drawings of all the animals living and nobody knows what sort of pens they used, for they wrote very deeply on the stones and Time has not been able to efface the writings.” Doing my best not to show anything like excitement, I inquired whether he could tell me just where the drawings were. . . . I gathered that Ouenat was the pied-a-terre of Tebus and Goran. . . . With these drawings in mind, then, I took Malkenni who had joined the caravan at Arkenu, and towards sunset he led me straight to them. They were in the valley at the part where it drew in, curving slightly with a suggestion of the wagging tail. We found them
on the rock at the ground level. I was told there were other similar inscriptions at half a day’s journey, but as it was growing late and I did not want to excite suspicion, I did not go to them. There was nothing beyond the drawings of animals, no inscriptions. It seemed to me as though they were drawn by somebody who was trying to compose a scene. . . . On their wall of rock these pictures were rudely, but not unskillfully carved. There were lions, giraffes and ostriches, all kinds of gazelle, and perhaps cows, though many of these figures were effaced by time . . . I asked who made the pictures, and the only answer I got came from Malkenni, the Tebu, who declared his belief that they were the work of the djinn.49
Djinns and the Rock Art at Jebel Uwainat
In chapter 2 we saw that Hassanein went on to speculate that the reason Malkenni and the Tebu thought the rock art was created by djinns was because it depicted giraffes and other animals that had not been in the area for thousands of years. We also saw that if the rock art scenes are taken as literal representations, some show strange activities, such as a human floating in thin air near the head of a giraffe. In one cave at Gilf Kebir, there are numerous images of a human form merging with or morphing out of animals—which is so reminiscent of modern shamanic ceremonialism that we started calling it the Cave of the Shamans. This, then, might be another reason why Malkenni and the modern Tebu attributed the rock art to djinns.
By 1932, however, the Tebu/Goran of Uwainat had completely disappeared. Thus, when Ralph Bagnold and his colleagues organized an expedition to Uwainat in 1938, under the sponsorship of the Egypt Exploration Society, they found only scant remains of these people at Karkur Talh: “Tibu [Goran] remains: In Karkur Talh many traces were found of the Guraan who formerly used to visit the wadi. Most of these were probably left by the band of fugitives who fled here after the French occupation of the Ennedi-Tibesti Highlands . . . there was no evidence that the Tibu had been in the region for a number of years.”50
In addition, when Count Almasy was at Gilf Kebir and Uwainat in 1936, he took a Tebu man, Ibrahim, as his guide. Ibrahim recounted how a certain Tebu chief called Abdel Malik had been given permission by the Senussi of Kufra to graze his camels in the region. Abdel Malik discovered a lush valley at Gilf Kebir where he could graze his camels. He then left a written testimony that mentioned the origins of the Tebu people: “I, Abdel Malek, have the following to say concerning the valley I discovered: the Kufra oasis did not always belong to the Arabs. From time immemorial it was the land of the Tebu who owned all the places in the desert for ages. . . .”51
Ibrahim then told Almasy: “We, the Tebu, [are] the original inhabitants of this desert . . .”52
OUT OF THE SAHARA AND INTO THE NILE VALLEY
For many years a team of anthropologists headed by Rudolph Kuper and Stefan Kröpelin of Cologne University in Germany have been studying prehistoric sites and climatic changes in the Egyptian Sahara and the sub-Sahara in Chad, Sudan, and Libya. After analyzing radiocarbon samples from hundreds of prehistoric archaeological sites, they concluded that the climatic changes correlated with the movement of prehistoric people during the past twelve thousand years. The evidence also showed that there was a stable humid period from 8500 BCE to 5300 BCE, after which the people and their cattle—the same cattle people of Nabta Playa, Gilf Kebir, and Jebel Uwainat?—escaped the drying of the Sahara and spread pastoralism throughout the continent, and, perhaps, add Kuper and Kröpelin, “helped trigger the emergence of pharaonic civilization along the Nile.”53 This view is today shared by many anthropologists, including climatologists such as Professor Peter B. deMenorcal of Columbia University, who affirmed that “however fast the drying occurred, it pushed people out of north-central Africa, and that climatically forced migration might have led to the rise of the Pharaohs and Egyptian civilization.”54
The speed at which the Sahara changed from a lush green savanna to the barren, arid, waterless desert that it is today has been a bone of contention among climatologists for many decades. In the early years geoclimatologists were generally gradualists—that is, against the idea of any rapid changes. More recent measuring methods, however, have indicated very swift changes in some locations of the Sahara. Then, in 2005–2006, Kuper and Kröpelin studied deep core samples from Lake Yoa, in the Tibesti-Ennedi region of northeastern Chad, and found evidence there for a slow desertification that occurred over several millennia from about 10,000 BCE to 3500 BCE. It seems, then, that there was a combination of very rapid change in some areas and more gradual regional change as the monsoon pattern moved and continuously reshaped itself. In any case, it seems the drying process eventually drove the prehistoric people out of the Sahara—meanwhile giving them ample time across many generations to develop animal domestication; basic agriculture; art; primitive sign writing; the knowledge of how to move large stones and construct complex megalithic structures; and knowledge of the simple principles of navigation, orientation, and timekeeping with the sun and stars. In other words, they acquired the practical and intellectual tools for building a civilization by the time they migrated into the Egyptian Nile Valley around 3500 BCE.
Let us now take a closer look at Lake Yoa near the Tibesti-Ennedi highlands. This region warrants a closer investigation, for it lies in the extended direction of Bergmann’s Abu Ballas Trail, which has as its starting point Dakhla oasis and passes through the Gilf Kebir and Jebel Uwainat massifs.
THE SOURCE?
Lake Yoa is among the largest of a series of small lakes in the Ennedi that are located just 100 kilometers (62 miles) from the Tibesti highlands. All of these lakes total some 20 square kilometers (12 square miles) of surface water and were once part of a giant lake during the humid periods of the Sahara, between 13,000 BCE and 3500 BCE. These lakes have a natural hydrological system that is unique in the world: because they are constantly fed with fresh water from underground aquifers and are also protected by a natural matting of reeds that reduces the evaporation effect, their water stays fresh in spite of the extreme heat and superaridity of the region that normally would lead to high evaporation and, consequently, high water salinity. In addition, the water from the higher lakes perpetually filters through the surrounding sand dunes and into the lower lakes, thus replenishing them with fresh water. Such conditions are ideal for human settlement in an otherwise inhospitable environment. As we have already seen, these lakes lie in the extended direction of the Abu Ballas Trail that runs southwest of Uwainat. The Tibesti-Ennedi region where these lakes are located is full of prehistoric rock art that resembles that of Uwainat, and there are also prehistoric tumuli or tombs that recall those of Nabta Playa. It seems almost certain, therefore, that the sub-Saharan people of the Tibesti-Ennedi highlands migrated north into the Sahara, perhaps during more humid phases, when the desert was green and fertile, which explains the sixty-seven human skeletons found at Gebel Ramlah, near Nabta Playa, in 2002 by Schild and Wendorf. These remains were declared to be those of a Black sub-Saharan people.
MEET THE ANCESTORS
In the autumn of 2000, a team of paleontologists led by Dr. Paul Sereno of the University of Chicago were exploring the western part of the Tenere Desert when they made a startling discovery at a place called Gobero, near the old Tuareg caravan village of Agadez. Here, partly buried in the sand, were dozens of human skeletons amid a proliferation of stone tools and potsherds. Many of the skeletons were in a fetal position, with legs tightly pulled up against their chests and hands tucked close to their chins. Near the human skeletons were animal bones, including those of antelope, giraffe, and hippopotamus. According to Sereno, “Everywhere you turned, there were bones belonging to animals that don’t live in the desert. . . . I realized we were in the Green Sahara.”55
As we saw in chapter 3, for the past couple of hundred thousand years or so the Sahara has fluctuated between wet and dry phases caused by cyclical changes in Earth’s motion, including the precession of the equinoxes, combined with other cyclical geologic processes. The most recent wet phase beg
an after about 10,500 BCE, when the seasonal monsoons of central Africa again migrated north, bringing rain and fertility to a broad strip of land in the southern part of the Sahara running from the Nile in Egypt to the Atlantic coastline of Morocco. This wet phase brought into the Sahara fauna and people from the south, where, at first, they survived as hunter-gatherers, but then, with the change in climate, converted into pastoralists. In 2006, to find out more about what happened to these ancient people, Sereno teamed with the Italian archaeologist Elena Garcea of the University of Cassino, and together they re-examined the prehistoric skeletons of Gobero.
Garcea was very impressed by the large number of skeletons, which far outnumbered all others she had seen in the Sahara. She also directed her attention to the potsherds that were all around the skeletons and was quick to recognize on some of them the tiny dot marks that were typical of the Tenerian prehistoric herders that roamed the Sahara from 4000 BCE to 2500 BCE. What she found odd, though, was the pottery with wavy lines that Garcea attributed to the Kiffian, a fishing people who had lived in this same region thousands of years before the Tenerian, roughly from 6000 BCE to 4500 BCE. Garcea was baffled as to how the Kiffian and Tenerian peoples, whose presence here was separated by five hundred or more years, had used the same burial grounds. Garcea and Sereno also explored a dry lake nearby and found fishing hooks and harpoons made of bone and the remains of large Nile perch, crocodiles, and hippopotamus—all evidence of the Kiffian fishing people’s presence in this area. Yet what could have induced the Tenerian, centuries later, to bury their own people in the cemetery of the Kiffian? According to Garcea, “. . . perhaps the Tenerian found the Kiffian burials and recognized this place as sacred. It’s possible they thought these bones belonged to their own ancestors.”56
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