Gift of the Nile? Climate Change and the Origins and Interconnections of Egyptian Civilization within Northeast Africa

Author(s): Stuart Smith

Year: 2015

Summary

The Greek historian Herodotus, cribbing from Hecataeus of Miletus, famously wrote, "Any sensible person sees at once… that the Egypt to which the Greeks sail is land acquired by the Egyptians and a gift of the river…." Scholars today see the same basic landscape as Herodotus did before them in Egypt and northern Sudan, a narrow strip of green fed by the Nile and surrounded by an absolute desert. This distinctive ecology thus continues to play a central role in models for the origins of the ancient Egyptian state that downplay ancient Egypt’s broader African interconnections. From the 1930’s through the present day, however, an group of deep desert explorers and archaeologists have documented that during the Neolithic period much of the Sahara was a vast grassland with seasonal and perhaps permanent lakes. This paper discusses evidence from recent research, including data from the UCSB Dongola Reach Expedition, that points to interlinkages between the cultures of the Upper Egyptian Nile, the Sahara and Sudanese Nubia, demonstrating how interaction combined with climate change in the form of a punctuated but gradual desiccation of the Sahara contributed to the rapid emergence of the Egyptian state while maintaining robust connections across northeast Africa.

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Cite this Record

Gift of the Nile? Climate Change and the Origins and Interconnections of Egyptian Civilization within Northeast Africa. Stuart Smith. Presented at The 80th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, San Francisco, California. 2015 ( tDAR id: 396560)

Keywords

Geographic Keywords
AFRICA

Spatial Coverage

min long: -18.809; min lat: -38.823 ; max long: 53.262; max lat: 38.823 ;