Just a quickie for Dennis
I wrote
> > The Qostul cemetry is too late for the "Dynastic Race" Dennis.
The
> > entry point of the Dynastic Race with their high prowed boats is
> > clearly shown through the Eastern Desert Wadis.
> >
> Qostul is contemporaneous with Naqadah I/II.
Dennis replied
> Basically, I don't believe in a "Dynastic Race". Maybe these
high-prowed
> boats, depicted at Qostul, were going the other way?
> Menes and the earliest kings of united Egypt are clearly seen as
coming from
> Upper Egypt.
Dennis, I would refer you to Beatrix Midant-Reynes' excellent book
recently published, "The Prehistory of Egypt: From the First
Egyptians
to the first Pharaohs". She says of the Nubian A group "Following
the
example of the Naqada culture, A Group society appears to have
undergone a process of 'hierarchization', judging from certain sites
and tombs, such as the well-built domestic structures discovered by
Smith at Afia in 1961, the rich tombs of cemetery 137 at Sayala, and
those of cemetery Lat Qustul, published by Bruce Williams (1987)....
There can be no doubt that the A group was a product of the Naqada-
culture explosion. The development of commerce along the Nile and
the
subsequent emergence of high quality craftsmanship led to the
development of anchorage points - 'trading posts' - the purpose of
which was to ensure that the Naqada potentates [the 'dynastic race..
my interpolation] were able to transfer materials from the south to
the north, and this transfer took place in terms of reciprocity, but
later, under the first rulers of dynastic Egypt, became radically
aggressive.....
The A Group, whose subsistence pattern was at first pastoralist and
later agriculturally based, owed its uniqueness (as well as its
wealth) to a system of exchange and distribution with which the whole
social and economic structure was integrated, However, it was this
very dependence on the exchange system that was to be its ruin.
Indeed the flow of Egyptian imports suddenly stopped at the beginning
of Dynasty 1, as about the same time as indigenous products
vanished... it seems that the key to [this] problem is actually to be
found not in Nubia itself but in the Egyptian segment of the Nile
Valley, at the end of the Naqada period..."
She goes on to show that the ta-shert (people of the bow) as the
Egyptians called them, from dynasty 1 were brought into a new
relationship, as tribute providers, rather than as reciprocal
traders.
This elimination of the middle men is what caused the collapse of the
A group culture.
Thus when Dennis wrote
> > >There is also a palace(?) wall reminiscent of the funeral house
of
> > >Zoser (3rd dynasty). There are also some indecipherable signs -
the
> > >precursors of hieroglyphics?
I replied
> > No, copies of hieroglyphs
Dennis replied
> I don't think so. These pre-date Narmer's Pallette, and the
pictograms of
> the hieroglyphs are clearly fundamentally African in their imagery.
True, but one must not underestimate the African-ness of Egypt either
(your point, and a good one). Nevertheless as Midant-Reynes shows,
Nubian A group was derivative and dependent on Naqada, and their
experiments with writing (so swiftly curtailed possibly by Pharaoh
Djer (if not Aha or Narmer himself)) were also derivative of Naqada
moves in the same direction under Ka and Selk (Scorpion).
Thus when Dennis writes
> So, the only problem I find with your Saharan hypothesis is the
18000-16000
> gap. And for me, this still leaves Semitic coming across the Horn
of
Africa
> and up through Arabia, with proto-Egyptian languages moving
northwards on
> both sides of the Nile valley, Berber (possibly) heading
north-west,
Chadic
> west where it became very influenced by Bantu (Niger-Kordofanian),
with
> Cushitic and Omotic roughly staying put.
No Dennis. As you see proto-Egyptian moved south to Nubia, not
north.
Berbers stayed in situ, there is no evidence of arrival of a
non-indigenous, non-autochthonous people into the Berber area for any
time at least after Aterian, whilst we find evidence of Cushitic and
Omotic as coming from the west. Capsian bladelets in Kenya, and the
microburins that are a key cultural marker of their technology
"studied by Tixier (1963)" has clear "connection with the Magreb
Epipaleolithic...
Where did these bladelet and microlithic technologies originate?
Far from being restricted to the Nile Valley, these industries
constitute the essential components of the neighbouring cultures in
the Near East and the Magreb. They run from the Euphrates to the
Atlas Mountains, along the entire Mediterranean coast...
In the Magred and Cyreniaca, the Iberomaurusian followed the
Aterian... Given the lack of any intermeduary stage, it seems that
the
levallois [Neanderthaloid - my interpolation] pendiculate points,
were
simply replaced by the backed bladelets of the Ibero-Maurusian which
account for anything between 40 to 80 per cent of the toolkit. La
Mouillah points and Ouchtata retouches are found in varying
proportions. Microburins are present (sometimes in very small
numbers) at all of the sites..."
Dennis, this is all evidence of Atlas origins, subsequently spread
across the whole if the Sahara, the Sudan, down to Kenya Capsian,
into
Egypt and across through Sinai into the Middle East. These are all
areas subsequently occupied by Afro-Asiatics. Neolithic Cushitic
sites at Sourre, and Somali sites at Mandera, are derivative of this
spread, and are much later. It is difficult to bridge the gap which
your analysis shows exists. For your hypothesis to be correct, one
would expect Ethiopia to be the centre of the cultural dispersal,
Yemen and the Sudan being second, and Egypt and the Sahara being
third. In actual fact it all runs to the opposite direction. Atlas
is first, Sahara is second, Egypt and the Sudan is third, Kenya and
the Sinai is fourth, and Ethiopia is last, with Yemen not having any
connections at all until late pre-Dynastic/Early Dynastic times.
Finally regarding origins of agriculture... "Between 8600-8000BP, the
Levantine process of Neolithicisation sprang into action spreading
out
from the core zone in central Anatolia, then Mediterranean fringe and
the Levant, with the foundation of Byblos, and the desert regions
stretching from Sinai to southern Mesopotamia, which had been
abandonned since the end of the Epipaleolithic. The rearing of
ovicaprids is already attested by then, at the same time as the
famous
white vessels in plaster and lime, the first ceramics are produced in
the northern Levant (le Miere 1979). But it was especially in the
next period from 8000 BP to 7600BP that the Near East began to
produce
a diverse range of ottery shapes, styles and decoration.
Around 8000 BP, the PPNB both in Sinai and over a large area of the
near east came to a sudden end, doubtless a result of increasing
aridity, in a process of climate change similar to that in North
Africa. The reoccupation of the desert regions at that date, by
groups practicing a separate economy from that of the sedentary
agriculturalist-pastoralists whose progress we have already followed,
puts a new slant on the origins of nomadic pastoralism in the Levant.
Many aspects of the archaeological record suggest an itinerant
subsistence pattern involving adaptation to a less favourable
pattern,
such as the retrun to [Capsian-like, my interpolation] circular
houses
with stone bases, an adoption of a particular [African] toolkit
('sites with burins'), and a clear domestication of ovicaprids at
certain sites, compared with the presence of hunted species only at
others."
Dennis, together with the much earlier appearance of the Tagalagal
ceramics in the Sahara, and the appearance of micro-burins at the
crucial horizon associated with the beginnings of nomadic pastoralism
in Sinai - all point to the AA peoples and the arrival in the Near
East of the proto-Semites. There is no other period, and no other
movements that work, both archaeologically, genetically and
linguistically half as well.
Hope this helps
John