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

Abstract

Neolithic in the Nile Valley in the 5th millennium BC was spread from the Sudanese Gezira to Central Egypt in the form of year-round settlements and seasonal camps of hunter-gatherers mastering the cattle breeding. Some researchers argued that it was a kind of cultural community, but this rather contradicts the known archaeological facts, which also do not confirm the theory of mass migration of the Neolithic tribes of the Sahara to the Nile in that era because of climate drying. Generally, “a convincing Neolithisation model” for this macroregion is still an actual problem of the Egyptian-Sudanese archeology. In the north, in Upper Egypt with the main concentration closer to Asiut, there are sites of the early Neolithic cultures of Tasa and Badari (the former is also considered as the initial stage of the latter) which preferred plateaus, wadis and edges of the adjacent “deserts” to the river floodplain; nevertheless, some scholars claimed the “Tasians” already to have been farmers growing cereals, although the available archaeological data allow us to speak at best about the beginnings of agriculture in the sparsely populated Tasian-Badarian Egypt. In the south, close to the confluence of the White and Blue Nile from the Gezira to the Sixth cataract, the culture of Khartoum Neolithic dominated, replacing Early Khartoum (Khartoum Mesolithic), from which it differed economically by the transition to cattle breeding; any traces of agriculture in its area, as well as in the early sites of the Saharan-Sudanese Neolithic, are absent. Khartoum Neolithic apparently experienced some drying of its containing landscape in the second half of the 5th millennium BC, and this could hardly be favored by the warm and moist climate at the peak of the Atlantic thermal optimum of the Holocene; most likely, there was a change in the hydrology and hydrography of the river network in the area of concentration of this culture, associated with the stabilization of the “meandering” estuary channel of the Blue Nile in its current position.