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 the Nile Delta developed a mobile pastoralism of mixed herds and shared materials and ritual practices, some originating in Sudan before appearing in Egypt. Herding mobility created a pattern of social and cultural integration, which allowed for internal variations that were later accelerated by the intensification of stockbreeding as a mode of livelihood (Wengrow 2003, 133–34; Wengrow et al. 2014).
During this early period we see the beginnings of the “bovine idiom” common to various Nile Basin societies in different epochs. Training the horns of display cattle into different formations has been practiced along the Nile from Neolithic times through the Egyptian Old Kingdom and the kingdoms of Kerma and Meroe (Wengrow 2006, 56; Welsby 1996, 154) to present-day South Sudanese pastoralists (Evans-Pritchard 1940a, 45; Lienhardt 1961, 16–17; Buxton 1973, 7). Cattle burials are also a practice of some antiquity. Cattle have been found buried in early Neolithic cemeteries in middle Egypt and central Sudan, sometimes within human burials, sometimes separately (Wengrow 2003, 128; 2006, 56–59). Ox skulls and whole ox skeletons have been found in royal tombs and other important gravesites in Nubia, Kerma, and Meroe (Adams 1977, 157, 197, 407; Welsby 1996, 91). The sacred Apis Bulls in dynastic Egypt had their own burial rites. In more recent times cattle in southern Sudan have also been slaughtered and buried in the foundations of shrines, as with Ngundeng Bong’s Mound (the “Pyramid of Dengkurs”) among the Nuer, constructed in the 1890s (Johnson 1990, 53–54; 1994, 93).
Cattle burials point to the continued ritual importance of cattle among herding societies from Neolithic times in Egypt to present-day South Sudanese pastoral communities, and this, rather than some fanciful “pyramid” within the swamps, is the real point of comparison between ancient and modern societies. Insofar as modern pastoral communities have shared interests in cattle, the sacrifice of cattle becomes an “affirmation of community interests” (Lienhardt 1975, 229), an interpretation that might apply to the ritual importance of cattle burials involving sacrifice in the past. Religious shrines among Western Nilotic–speaking pastoralists are often constructed as cattle barns (luak), and even large conical mound shrines built of mud imitate this shape and are referred to as luaks (Howell 1948, 1961; Mawson 1989; Johnson 1990). Some Dinka extend the sacred image to a primordial past by claiming that their ancestors originated in the “luak of creation” (F. Deng 1980, 251). But even when detached from an association with fixed shrines, cattle become “wandering shrines” when dedicated to specific divinities (Evans-Pritchard 1940a, 209).
The points of comparison go beyond the physical treatment of cattle in life or death and are found in the symbolism associated with the divine. The Nuer often refer to divinity by the “poetic epithet” of Tutgar, an ox-name derived from a majestic bull with wide, spreading horns, sometimes represented as holding the universe or the earth between them (Evans-Pritchard 1956, 4). Like Tutgar, the sacred Apis Bull of New Kingdom Egypt was also often depicted