From the delta to the Delta: Natural Conditions and Settlers on the Main Nile in the Fifth Millennium BC. Part II

Abstract

The primordial neolithization on the banks of the Nile River is associated with the archaeological culture of the Early Khartoum, or Khartoum Mesolithic. The bulk of its monuments date back to the 7th–6th millennia BC and is located on a long stretch of the river valley from the Gezira at the confluence of the White and Blue Nile to the 2nd cataract of the Main Nile at the current border of Sudan and Egypt. Khartoum Mesolithic shows a tendency of enlarging its sites southwards probably connected with a progress of settled way of life of the early Neolithic population of this stretch approaching to the Gezira. The latter at that time was dissected by the paleochannels of the inner Blue Nile delta that discharged into the White Nile and was a swampy fertile alluvial plain, very similar to the Egyptian Delta that was formed two or three millennia later. Favorable climatic conditions of the African Humid Period (about 14.8 — 5.5 cal. yr BP) did not favor the mass migration of the inhabitants of the blooming Sahara to the Nile, as evidenced by numerous sites of the Saharo-Sudanese Neolithic in the Western Desert. According to recent paleoclimatic reconstruction by S. Kröpelin, a large-scale demographic shift from the Desert to the River, caused by abrupt desiccation of the North Africa and resulted in the epoch-making progress of the Neolithic communities on the Nile, including Egypt, took place starting from 5300 BC. This model, however, contradicts the available scientifical data and has no archaeological confirmation. An absolute majority of studies at the junction of archeology and paleoecology show that cooling and aridization that could have caused a mass migration of people from the Sahara to the banks of the Nile, developed only with the completion of the Holocene Atlantic optimum and, in general, the African Humid Period in the 4th millennium BC having reached the extremum at about 4500 uncal. yr BP ≈ 3221 BC. All earlier manifestations of neolithization on the Nile from the natural point of view should be obviously explained primarily by the attractiveness for people of the Nile Valley itself or of its individual parts and basins, such as the delta of the Gezira.