From the Delta to the Delta: Natural Conditions and Settlers on the Main Nile in the Fifth Millennium BC. Part I (Introductory)

Abstract

The 5th millennium BC is marked by the transition to agriculture in the Egyptian Nile valley, rather late for the Fertile Crescent. This was preceded by the Quaternary epic of discovery of the Nile banks by hominids, from the Olduvian Pithecanthropus of the lower Palaeolithic to the Neolithic settlers of the Predynastic period, who laid the socio-economic foundation of the Pharaonic civilization. In the Pleistocene geological epoch, the Main Nile underwent a complex evolutionary transformation from palaeo-rivers with such powerful watercourses as the Prenile to the much inferior in volume Neonile on which, at the 2nd marine isotope stage (27.8–14.7 ka) when the Sahara was a hyperarid desert, comparatively frequent Paleolithic sites of gatherers, fishermen and hunters arose in Upper Egypt and Lower Nubia (the archaeological cultures Halfa, Fakhuri, Qadan, Ballana, Silsila, Afia, Makhadma et al.). Warming and humidification of the climate with the onset of the 1st marine isotope stage was accompanied by an “abrupt return” of the summer monsoon rains to East Africa and an episode of the “Wild Nile” with the incision of the River, which probably made its Egyptian valley unsuitable for settlement by the beginning of the Holocene (11700 ± 99 ka); thus, the Epipalaeolithic is represented here by rare industries of Elkab in Upper Egypt and Karun in the Fayum oasis. At the same time, from the 9th millennium BC there was an increase in the population of the Sahara, where during the African humid period of the early Holocene grassy and woody savannahs were spreading. The Nile Delta with its “historical” network of branches had not yet formed and represented a barren sandy plain which (as well as the Valley) was unsuitable for life and the establishment of the food-producing economy. Simultaneously in Sudan, in the Gezira region at the confluence of the White and Blue Nile, an inner delta was formed, which may have been the cause of the later Neolithization of the lower reaches of the Main Nile.