Vanessa Davies (Bryn Mawr)
Recent evidence points to the roots of Egyptian culture to the south, in Nubia (Wengrow, David, Michael Dee, et al. 2014, Smith 2020, both building on the statements of Mokhtar 1981 and Hassan 1988; also, Wendorf and Schild 2011). This work counters incorrect statements made in the 19th and early 20th century by historians who claimed that Africa had no history and by Egyptologists who claimed that the cultural remains along the Nile were not African in origin and who sought to divorce ancient Egyptian culture from its African context. Nubian or Meroitic culture was occasionally allowed an African origin. Despite the field of Egyptology largely abandoning such absurd ideas (e.g., de Morgan 1897), there has recently been a return to these notions in prominent journals and in popular media. As a result, a concerted effort has arisen to lay out the evidence of the African origins of Nile Valley cultures.
During the era of the Green Sahara (10,000–6,000 years ago), nomadic pastoralists herded goats and cattle across grassy expanses of land, traversing north–south and east–west routes across northern Africa. In that nomadic world, population groups exchanged thoughts, goods, traditions, and genes. The cultural remnants of those herding cultures are visible in the iconography of ancient Nilotic cultures in Egypt and Nubia and also in some modern nomadic cultures in the area (Smith 2020). As population groups settled up and down the Nile, movements of people, goods, and ideas persisted along riverine and desert routes. Continued interactions between Egyptians and Nubians led to multicultural communities and a hybridized material culture.
Centering the study of Nile Valley cultures from the perspective of the Mediterranean inadvertently gives credence to the incorrect ideas described above, undermines the work being done to correct those ideas, and marginalizes the ongoing entanglements between Nubia and Egypt (Buzon et al. 2016). Such disregard of those cultures’ Africanity has long been opposed by scholars of African descent whose writings on the topic have renewed relevance today. In the early 20th century, intellectuals like Pauline Hopkins, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Marcus and Amy Jacques Garvey took their arguments to the doorstep of the young discipline of Egyptology and engaged with the leading Egyptologists of their day to resituate the Nile Valley in its African context.