John Ray has suggested that ancient Egyptian ‘was merely one of a whole series of languages or dialects, spoken in the areas of the Sahara and Arabian deserts, which disappeared, or coalesced, with the increasing desiccation of these regions after the last pluvial phase’, a process that would explain ‘the apparent isolation’ of ancient Egyptian ‘which is otherwise so puzzling’ (1986, 313), even though the language is clearly Afro-Asiatic. But once again the implication is that ancient Egyptian, and hence its bearer culture, while African and even Nilotic, was not so in any straightforward and easily comprehensible way. Whatever the origins of Afro-Asiatic, its occupation of the Egyptian Nile Valley was relatively swift, and occurred in prehistoric times.
More importantly, this commonality of language (which may have included the Nubian A-Group as well), must have derived from and maintained a considerable Egyptian-Nilotic cultural unity, and thus some sense of difference from the rest of greater north-east Africa: ‘Egypt was culturally unified from the Naqada II phase onwards, well before its political unification was attested by written evidence’ (Midant-Reynes, 2000, 238). Toby Wilkinson’s demonstration that the Badarian-Naqada I culture of the eastern desert was the seedbed of pre-Dynastic Egypt is commensurate with the evidence that ancient Egypt’s linguistic roots lay east of the Nile, not to its south. Barry Kemp concludes:
All the evidence at our disposal points to the fact that the same ancient Egyptian language was spoken from Elephantine to the Mediterranean for as far back as we can see. This probably applies to the Predynastic Period, despite the differences in material culture between Upper and Lower Egypt (1989, 37).
Ancient Egyptians and post-A-Group Nubians eventually embraced two quite different linguistic destinies – Afro-Asiatic and Nilo-Saharan respectively – however close their cultural and even ethnic affinities may originally have been. David Edwards argues that this linguistic divergence is paralleled by other socio-cultural separators. He identifies a range of cultural practices shared by pre-Dynastic Nile Valley peoples from Middle Egypt to south of Khartoum, up to the period of aridification of the Sahara that intensified from the fourth millennium BCE onwards, but then detects a parting of the ways until, by the time of some re-establishment of contact in the third millennium, ‘we see the meeting of two very different worlds’ (2004, 40). Burial practices, for instance, had come to vary greatly between pharaonic Egypt and Kushite Nubia. A crucial linguistic shift had taken place, summed up by Frank Yurco: pre-Dynastic ‘Naqadan Egyptians, A-Group and C-Group [Nubian] peoples were very similar and interrelated … with more continuities than differences in their background’; but by late Old Kingdom times, ‘the C-Group spoke a language not understood by the Egyptians’ (2001, 46). Such divergence reflects, and must partly explain, the subsequent historical parting of the ways between the cultures north and south of the First Cataract.
While Afro-Asiatic was developing and diversifying in north-east Africa and the Levant, the third major language family of North Africa, Niger-Congo, emerged in the vicinity of the great bend of the Niger River (Blench, 1993b, 137). It was, or would become, the dominant language group of sub-Saharan West Africa, and of the ‘Broad African’ or ‘Negroid’ peoples. It subdivides into two further comprehensive groupings. One is located between Senegal and Cameroon, and finds expression in widely diversified but related languages, suggesting a slow process of migration and diversification over at least 5 000 years. The other group constitutes the far more closely related Bantu languages, which spread through a vast area of central, eastern and southern Africa. Their strong family likenesses suggest a history of rapid dispersal over the last 2 000 years (Oliver and Fage, 1988, 16–18).
The main implications of the geo-linguistic history sketched above must be clear: for the crucial early millennia of their evolution, Niger-Congo and Afro-Asiatic languages, cultures and peoples were wholly isolated from one another, separated not only by the arid desert of the Late Pleistocene, but later also by the ‘fragmentation belt’ of Nilo-Saharan cultures and speakers that would come to stretch between them. Until the great Bantu migrations of relatively recent times (from about 1000 BCE – Phillipson, 1977, 227–239), Nilo-Saharan speakers and cultures constituted a massive demographic, cultural and linguistic barrier between Afro-Asiatic-speaking north-east Africa and Niger-Congo-speaking west and west-central Africa (Sutton, 1981; Greenberg and Dalby, 1981). R. de Bayle des Hermens, writing on the prehistory of the Zaire Basin, puts it bluntly: ‘Nothing in the [Central African] industries of the Middle and Upper Palaeolithic, nor in the Neolithic, nor in cave art … gives ground for belief that there were any contacts with the people living in the Sahara’ (1981, 530).
Thurstan Shaw, asking why there was no Bronze Age in sub-Saharan Africa and virtually no Bronze-Age contact between Egypt and the rest of non-Nubian Africa, suggests that the fourth and third millennia BCE, when the crucial pre-Dynastic developments in the Nile Valley were taking place, constituted also the first stages of the final desiccation of the Sahara, when people once again moved out to the desert’s extremities, with the result that the Sahara ceased to be ‘an indirect link between Egypt and West Africa’ for some 3 000 years, before the camel helped to re-establish some contact (1981, 628). In simple terms, until historic times, there was virtually no connection between the peoples of Egypt and West Africa.
It is, of course, dangerous to assume that speakers of related languages will necessarily share common cultural and ethnic origins (or the other way round, as we have just seen with Egypt and Nubia). Bruce Trigger has warned: ‘Nowhere has the confusion of culturally acquired characteristics with biologically inherited ones produced more bizarre and dangerous myths than in respect to north-eastern Africa’ (1978, 27). He is referring to the ‘Hamitic hypothesis’, but the caveat holds more generally.
Nevertheless, the linguistic evidence suggests that the prehistoric language map of North Africa follows the ethnographic contours of the same area quite well – Ehret speaks of ‘a strikingly good fit geographically and chronologically’ (1993, 108): predominantly ‘extreme Negroid’ or ‘Broad African’ speakers of Niger-Congo languages in the west; Saharan-Nilotic or ‘Elongated African’ speakers of Nilo-Saharan tongues in the south-central Sahara, much of the Sahel and eventually in East Africa; and lastly, a relatively tight ensemble of speakers of Afro-Asiatic in north-east Africa. As we have seen, these speakers of Afro-Asiatic languages were Nilotic but not Negroid, African in origin, but not solely so – the ancestors or close relatives of modern Egyptians, Libyans, Berbers, Somalis and even Ethiopians, but not of West Africans. They were also part of and descended from other Nilotic-Saharan peoples so ancient as to make the debate about whether ancient Egyptians were ‘black’ or ‘Negroid’ somewhat irrelevant.
Bruce Trigger, having issued his caveat about the ‘Hamitic hypothesis’, goes on to propose a model for the ancient occupation of the Nile Valley that some may regard as no less fanciful. He posits an ancient Lower Nubian population of ‘remarkably stable genetic composition’, deriving from ‘a highly successful hunting and gathering population that was widely distributed in the sub-Saharan savanna belt in the sixth millennium BC … that has variously been described as “Caucasoid”, “Sudanese Negro”, or even hesitatingly “Boskopoid”, that is, related to the modern Bushman population of Southern Africa’ (1978a, 29). The term ‘Boskopoid’ is now rejected by palaeoanthropologists and cultural historians (Bonner, 2007; Dubow, 2007), but Trigger’s general point needs attention.
These ‘new’ actors in my unfolding story of north-east African ancestries, the Neolithic hunter-gatherers, were members of Africa’s oldest identifiable surviving population groups, and were speakers of its oldest language phylum, the so-called click languages (Greenberg, 1966; 1981, 306; Blench, 1993b, 133).
These languages and their speakers now only survive as isolates in the arid vastnesses of southern Africa (San Bushmen) and central Tanzania (the Hadzabe and Sandawe), but it is generally agreed that they are the vestiges of a huge cultural, ethnic and linguistic ‘substratum that has all but disappeared’ (Blench, 1993b, 135), yet that before 5000 BCE occupied Africa from its southern shores,