The emergence of food-producing communities

Apparently some six million or seven millionyears old, this creature is thought to have stood upright and combined otherhominin characteristics with a brain of chimpanzee size.1During th

The emergence of food-producing communities

human evolutionafrica is immensely old its core is an elevated plateau of rocksformed between 3,600 million and 500 million years ago, rich in minerals butpoor in soils Unlike other continents, Africa’s rocks have experienced littlefolding into mountain chains that might affect climate Lateral bands of tem-perature, rainfall, and vegetation therefore stretch out regularly northwardsand southwards from the equator, with rainforest giving way to savanna andthen to desert before entering the belts of winter rainfall and Mediterraneanclimate on the continent’s northern and southern fringes The great exception

is in the east, where faulting and volcanic activity between about 23 million and

5 million years ago created rift valleys and highlands that disrupt the lateralclimatic belts

This contrast between western and eastern Africa has shaped African history

to the present day At early periods, the extreme variations of height aroundthe East African Rift Valley provided a range of environments in which livingcreatures could survive the climatic fluctuations associated with the ice ages

in other continents Moreover, volcanic activity and the subsequent erosion ofsoft new rocks in the Rift Valley region have helped the discovery and dating

of prehistoric remains Yet this may have given a false impression that humansevolved only in eastern Africa In reality, western Africa has provided the earliestevidence of human evolution, a story still being pieced together from survivingskeletal material and the genetic composition of living populations The storybegins some six million to eight million years ago with the separation of thehominins (ancestral to human beings) from their closest animal relatives, the

ancestors of the chimpanzees The skull of the first known hominin, thropus tchadensis, was discovered in 2001 by an African student examining the

Sahelan-shores of an ancient Lake Chad Apparently some six million or seven millionyears old, this creature is thought to have stood upright and combined otherhominin characteristics with a brain of chimpanzee size.1During the followingfive million years, a wide variety of other hominins, mostly known as Australo-pithecines, left remains chiefly in eastern and southern Africa They ate mainlyvegetable food, had massive facial skeletons but small brains, and probably did

6

Emergence of food-producing communities 7

much climbing but increasingly walked upright, as is demonstrated by theirfootprints astonishingly preserved from more than 3.5 million years ago in beds

of volcanic ash at Laetoli in Tanzania

Australopithecines eventually became extinct, but human beings are bly descended from lightly-built Australopithecines or an ancestor shared withthem An important stage in this evolution was the deliberate chipping of stones

proba-to use for cutting Found at Rift Valley sites in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Tanzaniafrom 2.6 million years ago, these tools are associated especially with remains

of a hominin known as Homo habilis Some believe him to be on the main line

of human descent, although others group him with the Australopithecines asone of several near-human creatures of the period.2

Some 1.8 million years ago, a more clearly human creature entered the

archae-ological record Homo ergaster (from a Greek word meaning work) was to

sur-vive with remarkably little development for over a million years Of modernhuman height with an easy walking posture and a larger, more complex brain,these creatures were adapted to life in open woodlands, may have learned touse fire, and made the more sophisticated stone tools known as hand-axes thatwere to remain the chief human implements in durable materials until some

250,000 years ago The earliest examples of Homo ergaster and hand-axes come

from lakeside sites in eastern Africa, but similar stone tools have been foundwidely in the continent, although seldom in tropical forest At an early stage

in his history, Homo ergaster is also found in Eurasia Each Old World

conti-nent now became an arena for evolution Europe produced the Neanderthals,with brains of modern size but distinctive shape In Africa a similar transition,beginning perhaps 600,000 years ago in Ethiopia, gradually produced anatom-ically modern people The earliest, still with many archaic features, have beenfound in the Awash Valley from about 160,000 years ago Later examples haveappeared at other sites chiefly in eastern and southern Africa Alongside thisphysical evolution went changes in technology and culture as hand-axes gaveway to smaller and more varied stone tools, often designed to exploit localenvironments Some specialists attribute this growing adaptability to the need

to respond to the extreme fluctuations of temperature and rainfall that beganabout 600,000 years ago, owing to variations in the earth’s proximity and angletowards the sun

At this point, the study of human evolution has interacted with two lines

of research into the genetic composition of living populations One line cerns mitochondrial DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), one of the bodily sub-stances transmitting inherited characteristics Because this passes exclusively(or almost exclusively) from the mother, its lineage can be traced back withoutthe complication of mixed inheritance from two parents at each generation

con-In addition, mitochondrial DNA is thought to experience numerous smallchanges at a relatively regular pace Scientists have therefore compared the

2 The emergence of food-producing communities.

Emergence of food-producing communities 9

mitochondrial DNA of living people in order to estimate the point in the past

at which human beings shared a single female ancestor Although the detailsare controversial, most researchers believe that this was between 250,000 and150,000 years ago, or in the broad period when the first anatomically modernpeople appear in the fossil record Initially, these ancestors of modern humansspread within the African continent, where the oldest surviving lineages ofmitochondrial DNA exist among the San (‘Bushmen’) of southern Africa andthe Biaka Pygmies of the modern Central African Republic About 100,000 yearsago, some of these anatomically modern people from eastern Africa expandedbriefly into the Middle East, but apparently they did not establish themselvespermanently there With this exception, anatomically modern people appear

to have been confined to Africa for some 100,000 years, spreading from the east

to other parts of the continent A subsequent expansion took them to parts

of Asia by at least 40,000 years ago and from there to Europe Gradually theyabsorbed or replaced earlier hominins throughout the world.3

The mitochondrial and fossil evidence for this ‘Out of Africa’ thesis hasbeen reinforced by a second line of genetic research The Y-chromosome thatdetermines male gender is inherited only from fathers and consequently canalso be traced back to a common ancestor, generally estimated at between150,000 and 100,000 years ago The oldest surviving strains of the chromosomeare confined to Africans, especially San, Ethiopians, and other groups of ancienteastern African origin After a long period of differentiation, strains derivedfrom these groups diffused through the continent before being carried beyond

it All men outside Africa have Y-chromosomes sharing a mutation that isestimated to have taken place in an African ancestor at some point betweenabout 90,000 and 30,000 years ago.4

If anatomically modern people emerged in Africa and expanded to late the world, a fundamental problem is to identify and explain their moder-nity, the advantage they enjoyed over earlier hominins Some specialists suspectthat a crucial breakthrough – perhaps in the functioning of the brain – tookplace during the period of expansion between 60,000 and 40,000 years ago.More point to an accumulation of smaller advances over as much as 300,000years The best-documented accomplishment was the replacement of heavy,standardised hand-axes by smaller, specialised tools, eventually mounting tiny,sharpened stones (microliths) in shafts or handles Such industries might usematerials brought from scores or hundreds of kilometres away and establish dis-tinct regional styles, the most remarkable being the Howieson’s Poort Industry

repopu-in southern Africa some 80,000–60,000 years ago, whose makers collected frepopu-ine-grained stones from long distances to shape the earliest known microlithictools The first bone tools appeared at much the same period, possibly asbarbed fishing harpoons on the Semliki River in the eastern Congo – althoughthe dates there are disputed – and as shaped points at Blombos Cave on the

fine-southern coast of South Africa Marine environments were among the firstspecialised resources to be exploited, from at least 100,000 years ago in Eritreaand South Africa Less tangible innovations included the deliberate collection

of coloured pigments (found at a Zambian site more than 170,000 years ago)and the use of red ochre and eggshell beads Many archaeologists regard suchornamentation as an example of the symbolic behaviour that is a key compo-nent of human modernity Another component is artistic decoration, whichmay have appeared some 70,000 years ago in scratched engravings on boneand ochre at Blombos Cave The most important form of symbolic behaviourmay have been language, but although some believe that human ancestors werephysically capable of speech by about 300,000 years ago, it is not yet known –although widely suspected – that language was the crucial advantage enablinganatomically modern people to repopulate the world

These advances towards behavioural modernity progressed further withinAfrica during a period beginning about 40,000 years ago Early in that period,men in the Nile Valley undertook complex underground mining for the stonepreferred for their tools, much the earliest industry of its kind known anywhere

in the world Microlithic tools were then in use on the fringes of the equatorialforest They became common in the East African highlands by 20,000 yearsago, appeared at that date also in southern Africa, spread into western andnorthern Africa during the next 10,000 years, and thereafter became ubiquitous.Arrow-heads, appearing about 20,000 years ago, enabled hunting bands to addbirds and the more dangerous animals to their prey Forager-hunters, probablyancestral Pygmies, established themselves permanently in the equatorial forest.Fishing became an increasingly important activity Human settlements weregenerally still transient, or at best seasonal, but the increasing care given toburials – appearing in southern Africa about 10,000 years ago – suggests agrowing territorial sense The remains of some 200 people of this microlithicperiod excavated from a cave at Taforalt in Morocco show few signs of violence,but they do show close interbreeding, high mortality among children andinfants, and many routine miseries such as arthritis

The most striking evidence of symbolic behaviour during the microlithicperiod was rock-painting, which dates back at least 28,000 years in southernAfrica For the future, however, the most important development was the for-mation of Africa’s four language families These are so distinct from one anotherthat no relationship among them has been reconstructed, implying separatedevelopment over many millennia They coincide to some extent with geneticdifferences and perhaps with physical characteristics arising from natural selec-tion of those best fitted to survive and reproduce in particular environments.Thus the San forager-hunters of southern Africa possessing the oldest strains

of Y-chromosomes and mitochondrial DNA – together with probably relatedKhoikhoi pastoralists – speak distinctive ‘click’ languages possibly forming a

Emergence of food-producing communities 11

3 African language families in recent times Source: Adapted from J H Greenberg, The

languages of Africa (3rd ed., Bloomington, 1970), p 177.

loose and therefore ancient family The only other speakers of these Khoisanlanguages are small groups in eastern Africa, where the San may have originatedbefore spreading southwards as successful forager-hunters San share the oldestsurviving Y-chromosomes with some Ethiopians, whose languages belong to

a second ancient family, Afroasiatic, which embraces Cushitic, the Semiticlanguages of Ethiopia, Arabic, Hebrew, the Berber tongue of North Africa,the Hausa language of northern Nigeria, and, in the past, ancient Egyptian.Afroasiatic probably originated in the broad Ethiopian region at least 8,000years ago and possibly much earlier Many of its speakers were of the lightly built,Afro-Mediterranean type depicted in ancient Egyptian art In this they came

to contrast with the characteristically tall and slender Nilotic peoples whoselanguages belonged to a third, Nilo-Saharan family, which may have originated

in the broad Saharan region at least as early as Afroasiatic Nilo-Saharan may

be distantly related to the fourth family, the Niger-Congo languages, which arespoken predominantly by Negroid peoples and are thought to have divided intoWest Africa’s modern languages over at least the last 8,000 years As will be seen,three of these families were associated with centres of intensive food gatheringand production, the exception being Khoisan Superior access to food may well

have enabled speakers of the three families to expand demographically andabsorb scattered forager-hunters whose distinct languages no longer survive.

savanna herding and agricultureThe addition of herding and agriculture to foraging and hunting economiespermitted larger populations, but the change is difficult to identify in the archae-ological record, especially in Africa where natural species were so numerous.What appear to be cattle bones may have belonged to wild rather than domesticbeasts Remains of root crops like yams rarely survive, while grain may havebeen collected from wild grasses rather than cultivated Pottery is no proof ofagriculture, nor even are grinding-stones, which may have been used to crushwild grains or pigments such as ochre The origins of African food-productionare therefore contentious and there is often a wide gap between the linguisticevidence, which generally suggests early origins for agriculture and herding,and archaeological research, which usually gives later dates Nor is it even clearwhy people should have begun to produce food at all The idea that food pro-duction originated in the Near East and spread through Africa where it waseagerly adopted by starving hunter-gatherers is untenable Study of modernforager-hunters suggests that some can obtain more nutrients with less effortand more freedom than most herdsmen or agriculturalists Skeletal evidencefrom the Nilotic Sudan suggests that one consequence of food-productionthere was malnutrition Another was probably disease, for several infectioushuman diseases were probably contracted from domestic animals, while theclearing of land for agriculture encouraged malaria and the larger populations

of food-producing societies sustained diseases that could not have survivedamong scattered forager-hunters Given Africa’s abundant wild produce, thedrudgery of food-production can have been tolerable to prehistoric people only

if it offered marked advantage over their previous lifestyle as a result of majorchange in their circumstances

Most experts believe that the crucial changes stimulating food-production

in Africa, as in Latin America, were climatic changes, especially in the ern half of the continent Africa has no single climatic pattern, but, broadlyspeaking, the period from about 30,000 to 14,000 years ago was exceptionallycool and dry in most of the continent except the south, partly owing to theangle of the earth’s axis towards the sun Most of Lake Victoria’s floor was dry

north-as recently north-as 13,000 years ago, when the Sahara and its environs were probablyuninhabited This may have concentrated population into favoured areas likethe lower Nile Valley There is evidence as early as 20,000 to 19,000 years ago ofintensive exploitation of tubers and fish at waterside settlements in southernEgypt near the First Cataract, soon followed by the collecting of wild grain.Initially seasonal, these settlements grew larger during the following millennia;

by 12,000 years ago some were permanent and had substantial cemeteries Yet

Emergence of food-producing communities 13

these developments did not lead to food-production Instead, the angle of theearth’s axis shifted, temperature rose in all but southern Africa, and around12,000 years ago the arid phase in the tropical climate gave way to exception-ally high rainfall Devastating floods poured through the lower Nile Valley anddrove its inhabitants into the surrounding plains

From about 12,000 to 7,500 years ago, the northern half of Africa was muchwetter than it is today The Sahara contained relatively well-watered highlands,even the notoriously arid Western Desert of Egypt supported sparse grazing,and Lake Turkana in the East African Rift Valley rose about 85 metres aboveits present level Across the width of Africa from the Niger to the Nile, cultureswith a degree of similarity took shape Archaeological research shows that theirpractitioners formed some permanent settlements; used stone, wood, and bonetools; and lived by fishing, hunting, and collecting vegetable foods, includingwild grains, the exact mixture varying with each local environment From theeighth millennium bc, they made Africa’s earliest known pottery in a style,known as dotted wavy-line, which came to be used from southern Libya andthe Dogon Plateau in modern Mali to Khartoum, Lake Turkana, and possibly asfar south as Lake Victoria Their most remarkable survival is an 8,000-year-olddugout canoe, eight metres long, excavated from the shore of Lake Chad, thesecond oldest boat known anywhere in the world.5 These people were mainly

of Negroid race and were probably responsible for spreading Nilo-Saharanlanguages throughout the region, where they are still widely spoken

Some analysts of Nilo-Saharan languages believe that the practitioners ofthis high-rainfall culture kept livestock and cultivated grain For livestock, thismay be true; excavators at Nabta Playa and Bir Kiseiba, pond-basins in the aridwestern desert of Egypt, believe that they have unearthed remains of domesti-cated cattle from 9,000 or 10,000 years ago, as early as anywhere in the world,and the likelihood of independent domestication is supported by evidencefrom mitochondrial DNA that African cattle have long been genetically dis-tinct from those of other continents.6By about 7,000 years ago, cattle-herdinghad certainly spread to highland areas in the central Sahara It reached NorthAfrica during the following millennium, somewhat later than the herding ofsheep and goats, which probably came from southwestern Asia because Africahad no suitable wild species In North Africa, this pastoral culture was prac-tised by ancestral Berber peoples In the Saharan highlands it left magnificentrock-paintings

By contrast, there is little if any archaeological evidence to support linguisticindications of the cultivation or domestication of crops during this high-rainfallperiod, suggesting that Africa was distinctive in practising herding before cropproduction In Egypt, domesticated wheat and barley, probably from south-western Asia, were cultivated in about 5200 bc at the Fayum depression, west ofthe lower Nile, and slightly later at Merimde, a substantial village of tiny mudhuts on the southwestern edge of the Nile Delta Claimed findings of earlier

domesticated grains in northern Africa have not survived scrutiny Instead,

by 7,000 years ago, there is evidence at Nabta Playa and in the Saharan lands of increasingly settled populations systematically collecting and grindingwild grains That this may have developed into deliberate cultivation has beensuggested especially for settlements in the middle Nile Valley around modernKhartoum, a summer-rainfall region where wheat and barley could not flour-ish and the dominant cereal was to be sorghum By 8,000 years ago, people onthe River Atbara, northeast of Khartoum, were collecting and grinding wildgrass seeds At Kadero, twenty kilometres north of Khartoum, a large settle-ment of the fifth millennium bc lived chiefly from cattle and great quantities ofsorghum, to judge from grain-impressions on pottery and ‘tens of thousands ofworn-out grindstones’ Yet the sorghum was wild, for the domesticated varietyhas not been found in the Khartoum region until roughly the time of Christ,having perhaps been domesticated elsewhere in northeastern Africa Onepossibility is that sorghum was cultivated in the Khartoum region for manycenturies without being domesticated Domesticated cereals differ from wildvarieties chiefly by retaining their grain in the ear until threshed, whereas wildplants disperse it profusely Food-collectors probably domesticated wheat andbarley by cutting ears, taking them home, threshing them, and sowing part ofthe harvest as seed, thereby gradually selecting those strains that best retainedthe grain in the ear Sorghum, however, had thick stalks easier to harvest bystripping the grain in the field, which would not have altered the species into adomesticated form Yet whether such cultivation without domestication tookplace in the tropical savanna remains uncertain.7

high-Similar uncertainty surrounds the origins of food-production in Ethiopia.Domesticated cattle existed there by the second millennium bc and perhaps

as early as the fourth Evidence from the local Cushitic languages also suggestsearly knowledge of millet, wheat, and barley, but there is no archaeologicalconfirmation of this before the first millennium bc, although Cushitic speakersmay well have cultivated these crops with the plough before Semitic-speakingimmigrants from southern Arabia reached Ethiopia at that time because theimmigrants adopted Cushitic words even for these essentials of their culture.Moreover, Ethiopians must have domesticated several distinctive local crops:

teff (a tiny grain), noog (an oil plant), and ensete (the banana-like staple of

southern Ethiopia)

Meanwhile food-production had also spread southwards into East Africa

By the fifth millennium bc, the high-rainfall culture of fishing, foraging, andpottery embraced the Lake Turkana region When rainfall declined thereafter,Nilo-Saharan speakers may have carried this culture and later the exploitation

of grain southward towards Lake Victoria, although there is as yet no logical confirmation of this Reduced rainfall may also have damaged grazinglands in the north while reducing disease further south, thereby encouraging

archaeo-a southwarchaeo-ard drift of parchaeo-astorarchaeo-alism tharchaeo-at rearchaeo-ached the Larchaeo-ake Turkarchaeo-anarchaeo-a archaeo-arearchaeo-a archaeo-around

Emergence of food-producing communities 15

2500 bc and continued southward through the Rift Valley These pastoralistsmay have been Cushitic speakers who spread widely through East Africa, whereisolated groups in north-central Tanzania still speak these languages Linguisticevidence suggests that the Cushitic speakers knew of cereals, but there is noarchaeological evidence that they cultivated them Later, during the first mil-lennium bc, other pastoralists penetrated southward from the Sudan regionand occupied the high East African grasslands, probably speaking Nilo-Saharanlanguages, although these linguistic identifications are necessarily speculative.The desiccation that drove food-producers southward into East Africa alsoimpelled southward expansion in the west During the third millennium bc,declining rainfall in the Sahara obliged its pastoralists either to concentrate inespecially favoured areas or to drift southward into the river valleys draininginto Lake Chad and the Niger, free now to exploit regions where the bush hadhitherto been dense enough to support tsetse flies carrying trypanosomes fatal

to cattle By the first half of the second millennium bc, cattle were herdedclose to the top of the Niger bend and on the southern shores of Lake Chad.Shortly afterwards, the first strong archaeological evidence of crop domestica-tion within Africa appears at Dhar Tichitt in modern Mauritania, a large cluster

of stone-built villages where domesticated pearl (or bulrush) millet was vated for perhaps a thousand years until that region in turn became too dry foragriculture Domesticated millet quickly diffused southward Small quantitieswere grown on the southern shores of Lake Chad by 1200 bc and in the north

culti-of modern Burkina Faso shortly thereafter

Most strikingly, by the middle of the second millennium bc, domesticatedmillet, sheep and/or goats, small local cattle, and pottery with Saharan affini-ties were all components of the economy at Birimi, a settlement close to thenorthern edge of the West African forest in modern Ghana This was an outlier

of the Kintampo culture whose other sites, further south in the forest, show theexploitation of oil-palm and the use of ground-stone axes, probably for forestclearance Savanna food-production had met the distinct culture of the WestAfrican forest

forest agricultureThe distinctions between food-collection, cultivation, and domestication areeven more difficult to trace in the forest than in the savanna Animal bonessurvive poorly in forest soils The staple crops that came to be used were notcereals but yams and bananas, which leave few archaeological traces Foraginghad a long history in the forest, but the first indication of more settled life is theappearance of pottery over 7,000 years ago at Shum Laka in the Cameroun grass-fields, close to the forest edge This did not necessarily imply agriculture; neitherdid the appearance a millennium later of ground-stone axes or the exploitation

of oil-palms from the fourth millennium bc Linguistic evidence suggests that

yams may also have been exploited, and possibly cultivated, throughout thisperiod, but this has not yet been demonstrated archaeologically By contrast,archaeologists claim to have discovered banana phytoliths (minute mineral par-ticles found within plants) in southern Cameroun from the last millennium bc,implying that this Asian plant must have spread through the equatorial regionduring earlier centuries despite the lack of evidence of its cultivation furthereast This claim raises such difficulties that it awaits further confirmation.8The forest margin of Cameroun and Nigeria was the region from whichBantu speakers gradually expanded throughout the southern half of Africa AllBantu languages form only one sub-branch of the Niger-Congo family Theirmost closely related languages cluster on the border between Cameroun andNigeria, so that was almost certainly the Bantu homeland It is likely that theBantu languages were carried by colonists who also took agricultural skills intoregions where they were hitherto unknown, probably often transmitting them

to existing populations Descendants of these colonists still possess able genetic as well as linguistic homogeneity Theirs was one of the greatestmigrations in human history, but it was an immensely complicated and gradualdispersal across the continent by families and small groups of cultivators, not

consider-a mconsider-ass movement by orgconsider-anised bodies of pioneers

The history of this dispersal is contentious and little understood By about

3000 bc, Bantu speakers with stone tools, pottery, and common words for yamand oil-palm were probably moving slowly down the western equatorial coast.They reached the Libreville area of modern Gabon by 1800 bc and continued

at least as far as the Congo estuary As they did so, some broke away inlandthrough the forest to reach the middle Ogooue Valley by about 1600 bc and theupper river by 400 bc Others penetrated to the River Congo, where some slowlycolonised the tributaries leading into the inner Congo basin from about 400 bc,while others moved more quickly up the main waterways until, at about 1000

bc, they reached the eastern edge of the equatorial forest in the broad area of thegreat East African lakes There they settled in well-watered valleys permittingcultivation of their forest crops

Yet this was only the first phase of Bantu dispersal To the east and south of theequatorial forest lay savanna lands which Bantu speakers could colonise only

if they first added grain cultivation to their agricultural techniques Linguisticevidence suggests that they probably learned to grow cereals (chiefly sorghum)

in the Great Lakes region from Nilo-Saharan speakers who had brought the skillsouthward from the Nile Valley The Bantu probably also learned cattle-keepingfrom Nilo-Saharans and perhaps from the Cushitic-speaking pastoralists whohad moved southwards into East Africa through the Rift Valley, although there

is no firm archaeological evidence of either of these peoples in the Great Lakesregion And it was probably here that the Bantu learned a further skill: to workiron To appreciate this innovation, we must return to Africa’s wider history

The impact of metals

egyptstone-using peoples had pioneered the colonisation of africa.Their successors carried it forward with the aid of metals: first copper andbronze, then iron Only northern Africa had a bronze age; agriculturalists usediron to colonise most of eastern and southern Africa

The earliest evidence of metalworking in Africa comes from southern Egyptlate in the fifth millennium bc At first pure natural copper was probably used

to make pins, piercing instruments, and other small articles Smelting of per ore to remove impurities probably began in the first half of the fourthmillennium, either invented locally or imported from western Asia It caused

cop-no discontinuity in Egyptian history, for stone tools were widely used until thefirst millennium bc, but the new technique spread until a fixed weight of cop-per became Egypt’s standard unit of value Moreover, the innovation coincidedclosely with the creation of Africa’s first great agricultural civilisation in theNile Valley It was an African civilisation, for Egypt’s peoples, although hetero-geneous, contained a core of Afro-Mediterranean race and spoke an Afroasiaticlanguage Egyptian civilisation displayed many cultural and political patternslater to appear elsewhere in the continent, although Egypt also illuminatedwider African history by means of contrast

The contrast was rooted in the environment Pioneers had practised culture in the Fayum depression and on the southwestern edge of the NileDelta since about 5200 bc During the following millennium, desiccationdrove others from the eastern Sahara to settle on ridges bordering the NileValley, where lower floods made land available for pastoralism and agriculture.Dependence on the river made these settlers more amenable to political con-trol than Africans who retained their ancient freedom of movement Duringthe fourth millennium bc, both Lower Egypt (the Delta) and Upper Egypt(the narrow valley southwards to Aswan) practised a culture characterised byexploitation of the floodwaters, use of copper as well as flint, weaving of linencloth, trade with southwestern Asia, temples dedicated to deities like Horusand Seth (later prominent in the Egyptian pantheon), a social stratification

agri-17

4 The impact of metals.

Impact of metals 19

displayed by the plain graves of commoners and the elaborate painted tombs

of the elite, and several small kingdoms with walled capitals of sun-dried brick.How these kingdoms were unified remains obscure, but the first kings to rule

a united country gained power before 3100 bc and were buried at Abydos inUpper Egypt

This state, which lasted until the end of the Old Kingdom in c 2160 bc, wasmore centralised and authoritarian than its contemporaries in Mesopotamia.Its power is often attributed to regulation of the irrigation system, but this wasnot so The Nile Valley had no such system It depended on the natural flood-ing of the world’s most reliable river to produce a single annual grain crop, formulticropping probably became significant only in postdynastic times Workswere needed to control the flood’s power, to remove obstacles to its expansion,and to retain it on the land, but these were purely local works, directed bylocal officials like the provincial ‘canal-digger’ who was among Egypt’s earli-est administrators Pharaohs ceremonially inaugurated these works and theirViziers claimed responsibility for them, but the Old Kingdom’s records donot reveal a national bureaucracy dealing with irrigation; its natural tendencywas rather to strengthen the forces of provincial autonomy, which remainedpowerful throughout Egyptian history and on three occasions – the so-calledintermediate periods – triumphed temporarily over political unity

The connections between irrigated agriculture and pharaonic rule wererather the system’s productivity – it has been estimated that peasants couldproduce three times their domestic requirements – its capacity to support aruling class, the peasant’s need for order and his vulnerability to exploitation,the state’s capacity to transport agricultural surplus by water and later to store

it, and especially the temptation that the surplus offered to those greedy forwealth and power Pharaohs exercised control by military, administrative, andideological means They were depicted as conquerors, but their agents wereshown as scribes, using their monopoly of the newly invented skill of literacy torepress autonomy elsewhere in society ‘Be a scribe’, counselled an ancient text

‘Your limbs will be sleek, your hands will grow soft.’ These officials collectedtax, sometimes with much brutality; in later centuries the rate seems to havebeen one-tenth of the harvest They propagated the royal culture whose gradualreplacement of provincial traditions was the chief achievement of early dynas-ties During the dry season, they managed the rotating gangs of conscriptedpeasants who built the gigantic public works of the Old Kingdom, not irriga-tion channels but the pharaohs’ pyramid-tombs The largest, built by PharaohKhufu (Cheops) in the mid third millennium bc, was 147 metres high andcontained 2,300,000 stone blocks averaging some 2.5 tonnes As the pyramidsrose, so peasant tombs disappeared almost entirely from cemeteries, suggest-ing impoverishment by central power Pharaohs were semidivine, could alonecommunicate directly with the gods, were responsible for the regular operation

of the natural order, and had been preceded on their throne by gods in unbrokensuccession since the creation Although modern research is revealing dynasticEgypt as a more fluid society than official ideologies suggested, with a livelysecular politics and extensive social and intellectual change, nevertheless Egyp-tian minds were confined by the uniqueness of their environment The worldoutside the Nile Valley was long seen as chaotic, the afterlife was imagined asthe Field of Reeds, and any innovation had to be presented as a restoration offlawless antiquity.

Although far more densely peopled than any other African region of thetime, Old Kingdom Egypt was still an empty land, with perhaps only one ortwo million people, to judge from indications of the cultivated area The num-ber may have risen to between 2.0 million and 4.5 million in the late secondmillennium bc and to a peak of 4 million to 5 million in the first centuries

ad.1 These figures imply extremely slow growth rates, well below 0.1 percent ayear, held down perhaps by the contraceptive effects of prolonged breastfeed-ing (of which there is evidence) and the high levels of mortality suggested bymortuary evidence and confirmed by later Roman census data, which showthat in addition to appalling mortality before age 15, half of those survivingdied in each subsequent decade Literary evidence refers to fever (presumablymalaria), while mummified remains show that Egyptians suffered from tuber-culosis, cancer, bilharzia, arthritis, and probably smallpox, but not (on presentevidence) leprosy or syphilis Population was most dense where the Nile Valleywas narrowest and most easily managed, but growth took place especially inthe difficult Delta environment, a world largely of marshland and pasture inOld Kingdom times but the target of systematic reclamation Colonisation andpermanent cultivation demanded such an investment of labour that privatelandownership emerged during the Old Kingdom and a class of great propri-etors with small tenant-cultivators gradually acquired much of the land By

c 1153 bc temples alone owned approximately one-third of Egypt’s cultivablearea The average peasant then cultivated about 1.25 hectares and showed moreconcern to bequeath his rights intact to his offspring than men elsewhere inAfrica would display for another three thousand years

Thanks in part to royal succession by primogeniture, which protected Egyptfrom the succession disputes so destructive to later African states, the OldKingdom enjoyed great stability until it came to an end in c 2160 bc Underits later pharaohs, its suffocating authoritarianism weakened as provincialloyalties penetrated the bureaucracy, diffusing wealth away from the court,depriving the regime of its capacity to build on the earlier monumental scale,perhaps undermining its ability to relieve food scarcity in bad years, and gen-erally robbing it of the Mandate of Heaven The First Intermediate Period(c 2160–1991 bc) came to be seen as a time of civil war, brief reigns, famine,and an influx of desert peoples This was too negative a picture, for it was