Black Genesis

by Robert Bauval

  Figure 5.2. Image of dancers at the Mestekawi-Foggini cave, southwest Gilf Kebir

  Figure 5.3. Numerous prehistoric hand signatures and, lower left, people depicted as if reflected in a natural crack in the rock. The lower central group is possibly a depiction of a ritual. Mestekawi-Foggini cave, southwest Gilf Kebir.

  We woke at the crack of dawn and drove southward until we reached the edge of Uwainat. There, we stopped to visit yet another cave with rock art that was discovered by Mark Borda in 2007. The cave is on the northern edge of Uwainat, and its entrance is tucked behind a ridge, which makes it almost invisible unless you know exactly where to look (which might explain why it was not discovered before 2007). We were, in fact, the first modern visitors to enter this cave since its original inhabitants had abandoned it millennia ago. The cave was half filled with sand up to 1 meter (3 feet) below the ceiling, which actually worked best for us, because most of the rock art was on the ceiling, like a prehistoric Sistine Chapel. The sand allowed us to see the rock art at very close range.

  The drawings were of a much better quality than those we saw at Gilf Kebir. Not only were the ancient scenes more elaborate and showed more detail, but the colors—blacks, browns, reds, yellows, and whites—were extremely vivid, as if they had been painted the day before (see plate 14). The cattle were clearly tame and domesticated, and some of them were even shown with halters and leashes or with decorations on their bodies. The men were depicted as tall, slim, and agile. They were black-skinned and wore white ivory bands on their arms and thighs. They also had loincloths resembling those worn later by ancient Egyptians. On some of their heads were ornate hats, and many carried sticks, spears, and bows. The women wore skirts, necklaces, armbands, and earrings. A striking aspect of the renderings of the people was their heads, which were depicted either as wearing masks or symbolically as animal forms (long, rectangular snout, bright eyes, and ears near the top of the head). These animal-form heads, possibly cowlike, might have been representative of the central role that cattle played in the lives of these people. Some of them bore a striking resemblance to the early depictions of the Egyptian god Seth, a god of the desert regions whom the ancient Egyptians associated mythologically with the origin of dynastic Egypt itself. The Sahara scholar and rock art expert Dr. Jean-Loic le Quellec of the French CNRS (Centre National de Recherches Scientifique) is of the opinion that the “cave of swimmers” is a prehistoric precursor and probable influence of rituals found in the much later pharaonic Coffin Texts and Book of the Dead. He thinks the “swimmers” are performing an afterlife journey into the watery afterworld, which he relates to the mni.w (the dead who had sunk into the other world) and which confront a mythical Beast, which he related to the ancient Egyptian beasts or monsters, mmyt, which swallow the dead in the so-called Judgement Scene of the Book of the Dead. According to Quellec the ancient Egyptians kept the memory of the origins in the Sahara and even may have periodically carried out pilgrimages to revisit their ancestral lands.

  Figure 5.4. Bauval and Marai examine newly discovered cave art in April 2008. Note that the back wall of the cave appears to be constructed of megalithic blocks.

  The memory of the ancient lands must have lasted for a long time, and was perhaps progressively mythified, following a process that has been well documented in ethnology in many other places in Africa. Perhaps the rituals even demanded a periodic return to ancient cult places . . . like the great shelter of the Wadi Sura. In this way the memory of the ancient vision of the land of the dead, as well as the land of origins, would have been preserved.58

  The recent finding of Bergmann and Borda fully support this hypothesis, and to which we also agree.

  Central to the cave ceiling was a domestic scene, with bags or gourds probably filled with milk or grain, hanging from the roof of a house. There were three types of cows: black and white, all white, and white and brown with black spots. These were drawn in very realistic postures—walking, grazing, or being herded to a watering hole. We took photographs from every angle in order to have a detailed record for our own files. Oddly, outside the cave there were no visible signs of human presence as far as we could make out.*42

  Figure 5.5. Cattle and people at Uwainat cave

  It is likely that any such evidence lay buried under the sand that had filled the floor of the cave, drifting in and out over the millennia. Our imaginations ran wild: we conjured images of the hardy people who must have lived here thousands of years ago and who, perhaps, hailed originally from the Tibesti Mountains. The rock art they left behind made it easy for us to visualize their women milking cows or grinding seeds and cereals while their men went hunting or chipped stones to make knives and arrow or spear heads and the elderly sat outside at night, pondering the stars. The most thrilling part of this experience was finally to see with our own eyes those mysterious black-skinned ancestors that once navigated the desert, learned the art of husbandry, followed basic agriculture, practiced the rudiments of astronomy and timekeeping, and then finally moved eastward toward the Nile, toward Egypt, carrying their precious cargo: knowledge, which was to spawn a great civilization.

  We resumed our journey, skirting the eastern flank of Uwainat Mountain, reaching the Sudanese border early in the afternoon. On our way south we steered clear of a small sign fixed on a metal pole (we examined the sign and saw that it said, in Arabic, misr [Egypt] on one side and sudan on the other, and our handheld GPS indicated it was a few kilometers off the actual border). Continuing south, we drove across the border and around the mountain and found ourselves on the south flank of Uwainat late in the afternoon. Here, the remoteness and utter mystery of this strange place took hold of us. The landscape was otherworldly, and we felt as though we were astronauts landing on an alien planet for the first time. It was very tempting to start exploring, but night was falling fast, so we decided to camp in a sandy bowl set against a rocky mound some 5 kilometers (3 miles) from the mountain.

  We hardly slept that night; the excitement was too great. We refrained from lighting a fire in order not to attract SLA rebels that may have been roaming the region. Just a few weeks before, a group of foreign tourists had been kidnapped in this area, and our unarmed military escort was extremely nervous about being here on the Sudanese side of the border. In the morning, at the first break of light, we quickly lifted camp, packed our gear, and set off toward the massif of Uwainat. We headed for the twin peaks that dominated the ridge and toward the place where Marai and Borda had seen the pharaonic inscriptions a few months before. As we drove there, one of the drivers suddenly let out a shout. He had apparently spotted part of a human skeleton sticking out of the sand. We stopped and rushed to examine the shallow burial. It was not prehistoric but was much younger, probably less than a century old. Likely the skeleton belonged to a Tebu nomad or Bedouin. Our drivers could tell he was a Muslim from the way the body was laid. As Muslims themselves, our drivers uttered a brief prayer and covered the exposed part of the skeleton with more sand.

  We resumed our drive toward the twin peaks and parked the vehicles at the foot of a rocky slope. Then we all walked in silence, following Marai, still under the somber mood of seeing the lonely burial a few minutes before. After a trek of ten minutes or so, Marai stopped and pointed to a large boulder that rested precariously halfway up the rocky slope. We recognized the boulder from the photographs that Mark Borda had sent us in December. We quickly clambered up the slope, and finally, there they were: pharaonic inscriptions carved on the south face of the boulder.

  After Marai and Borda, we were the first modern visitors actually to see them after some unknown ancient Egyptian scribe had crudely carved them thousands of years ago. It was a thrilling and rewarding feeling—perhaps a bit like Howard Carter must have felt when he discovered Tutankhamun’s tomb. We knew from the translations that had been made by the Egyptologists in London that the inscriptions dated from about 2000 BCE and likely belonged to an envoy sent by King Mentuhotep II to rendezvous here with peop
le from the kingdoms of Yam and Tekhebet. It was truly exciting to see with our own eyes this extremely ancient message carved thousands of years ago. It was rather like finding a message in a bottle in a vast ocean of sand. We felt privileged and, in a curious way, humbled. We knew the difficulty of such a trip from the Nile Valley, even in our well-equipped, four-wheel-drive vehicles, and we marveled at those unknown ancient Egyptians who had braved the journey on foot with their caravan of donkeys, traveling several months in such conditions.

  They must have stayed here for some time, because, lower down the slope, we could see some stone rings that might be the leftover rims of habitations. How many ancient Egyptians had come here? Did the intrepid Harkhuf also come here? Who were the mysterious people from Yam and Tekhebet that they had met here, and from where had they come? Had they come from the Tibesti-Ennedi highlands of Chad some 700 hundred kilometers (435 miles) farther to the southwest? More important: Did the ancient Egyptians know that they were meeting their own ancestors?

  Figure 5.6. The April 2008 expedition team anticipating the first showers in eight days upon seeing the tarmac road again. Left to right: Robert Bauval, Dustin Donaldson, Michele Bauval, Mahmoud Marai, Bryan Hokum, Lyra Marble, Thomas Brophy, and soldier Muhammad. Drivers Muhammad and Aziz are taking the photo.

  All these questions formed a tantalizing web of hints and clues in our minds, but we knew it was time to return to the Nile Valley to look more closely at the place where Egyptologists say the ancient Egyptian civilization supposedly began.

  6

  THE CATTLE AND THE STAR GODDESSES

  About the time the rains were falling off in the desert, the people in the Nile Valley suddenly started taking an interest in cows, building things with big stones, and getting interested in star worship and solar observatories. . . .

  FRED WENDORF, THE NEW SCIENTIST, JULY 28, 2000

  The . . . risings of Sirius had been observed on Elephantine throughout all periods of ancient Egyptian history.

  RONALD A. WELLS, SOTHIS AND THE SATET TEMPLE ON ELEPHANTINE

  The Egyptians . . . were the first to discover the solar year, and to portion out its course into twelve parts. They obtained this knowledge from the stars.

  HERODOTUS, THE HISTORIES, BOOK II

  TAMING THE AUROCH

  In our modern world we take much for granted. One is the common domestic cow—one of the most gentle, most accommodating, and most useful animals on our planet. When we drive along a country road or walk past an open field and see these gentle and docile animals grazing or lazily walking about, we may give them a fleeting glance, but we soon forget about them. To ancient people, however, cattle were the main display of prosperity. The pharaohs of Egypt, for example, not only measured their wealth by the number of cattle they possessed but also were themselves, as were many of their gods and goddesses, identified with cattle. Yet if cattle were of great importance to the ancient Egyptians, they were of crucial importance to the prehistoric people of the Sahara. Their very survival depended on cattle. Without cattle they simply could not have existed in the harsh conditions in which they lived. Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to say that without cattle there would have been no civilization, at least in the way we understand the word civilization today.

  When and from where, however, did cattle come, and what did humans do before cattle were domesticated?

  Scientists agree that the now extinct auroch, or Bos primigenius, is the ancestor of domesticated cattle. The auroch, however, was a much larger and certainly a much more ferocious creature than our common farm cow. Its height was more than 2 meters (7 feet), and it weighed as much as 2 tons. The male auroch was black with faint stripes, and the female was reddish brown. It is probable that the ancestor of the auroch itself existed in Africa some one million years ago and eventually spread to Asia and Europe around two hundred fifty thousand years ago. At first, and for many thousand of years that followed, the auroch was hunted for food by prehistoric man—a feat that must have been quite terrifying and very dangerous indeed, requiring many able hunters who could work together to bring down such a wild and powerful beast. Then, around 8000 BCE, the auroch was finally domesticated, although we don’t fully understand where and how. Only a few years ago scientists thought domestication of cattle had originally taken place in Turkey or southwest Asia and that, somewhere along the line, the domesticated breed spread into other parts of the world. Recent research in the mitochondrial DNA of cattle stock from Africa, Asia, and Europe, however, strongly suggests that there was not one domestication event, but several, which occurred independently in each continent in roughly the same epoch.

  Normally, domestication of cattle and other animals follows the establishment of agriculture, but there are exceptions. In Africa, for example, domestication took place before agriculture or even without agriculture. The Masai of eastern Africa are well-known herders who do not practice agriculture, yet their lives are completely interwoven with cattle: their protein intake—milk, blood, and sometimes meat—is almost totally derived from their cattle. The Masai very rarely kill their cattle for food except on rare occasions, such as important feasts or celebrations. The evidence from Nabta Playa strongly suggests that the prehistoric people there treated their cattle in very much the same way. Furthermore, carbon-14 and other dating methods used by Fred Wendorf indicated that the cattle there were domesticated some ninety-five hundred years ago, making Nabta Playa the earliest known domestication center in the world. In view of this startling conclusion, let us take a closer look at the mysterious cattle people of Nabta Playa, for clearly they were far more sophisticated and resourceful than we previously thought.

  BONES AND STONES

  We can recall that at Nabta Playa, Fred Wendorf and his team discovered a dozen tumuli on the west side of the site, which contained dismantled bones of cattle and, in one particular case, the complete, articulated skeleton of a young cow. The heads of the cows were all directed south, implying a religious ritual. In addition, when they excavated the largest of the so-called complex structures, CSA was found to contain a huge boulder fashioned in the rough shape of a cow, the so-called cow stone. This stone was removed from its original burial place by anthropologists with a makeshift derrick and was taken to the city of Aswan, where it was placed in the yard of the Nubian Museum.*43

  We also have seen that it was from the cow stone tumuli and CSA that long lines of upright stones emanated like spokes from a bicycle wheel toward the north and the east—with the former lines directed toward the Big Dipper and the latter lines toward Sirius and Orion’s belt. It should come as no surprise, therefore, to know that much later these three stellar asterisms were also targeted by ancient Egyptians and were even given intense cow and bull symbolism. Indeed, according to most Egyptologists and archaeoastronomers, it is only these three stellar asterisms that can be identified with any certainty from ancient Egyptian texts and drawings.1 The pharaohs knew the Big Dipper as Mesekhtyw, the thigh (of a bull or cow), and Sirius as Spdt, which was linked to the well-known cow goddesses Hathor and Isis.†44

  Orion was known as Sah, and this constellation was associated with Osiris and the pharaoh who, in turn, was also symbolized as a celestial bull and the celebrated Apis Bull of Memphis. Further, all of these clues involving cattle and megalithic astronomy specifically involving Sirius, Orion, and the Big Dipper strongly suggest a link across the centuries of religious ideologies between the prehistoric society of the Sahara and that of pharaonic Egypt. We will return to this and other links between the mysterious cattle/star rituals of Nabta Playa and the various stellar/ cow goddesses and gods of pharaonic Egypt, but first we must understand why the ancients associated their cattle with the rising of these stars2 and why this association was so important to the prehistoric black people of Nabta Playa.

  NAVIGATING THE SAND SEA

  As we saw in chapter 2, when Ahmed Hassanein trekked at night to reach Uwainat, his Tebu guide used the stars to navigate in t
he featureless desert landscape, very much as some do on the open sea. When we travel in open desert conditions without a compass or GPS, especially at night, it is extremely easy to become confused and lost, with no way of telling direction. In the daytime, traveling is very different: the sun’s shadow can be used to establish the cardinal direction at noon—but at night, and especially on a moonless night, only the stars can perform this role. As an example, we recall that on such a moonless night during our journey, we did not light any fires or lamps at our campsite in order not to advertise our position to SLA rebels or brigands. In such darkness it was nearly impossible for our campsite to be seen beyond a hundred meters (328 feet) or so. The only way to mark its position, therefore, was to use the stars as the Bedouins did. In such open, barren spaces, in fact, it soon becomes second nature to use the stars for navigating at night. Almost certainly the ancient cattle herders of the Sahara did the same. Indeed, these ancient people had all the time in the world to study the night sky, because they were there in the desert, night after night, from generation to generation, from century to century, perhaps even from millennium to millennium. They could become fully familiar with all the observable star cycles, including precession. It is also probable that when they finally became sedentary and settled permanently at Nabta Playa, the need for navigation became obsolete, and thus their practical knowledge of the stars was converted into a star religion with rituals and symbolic structures that, in their minds, allowed them to communicate with the sky gods. The same star religion, but in a much more elaborate form, was later practiced by the ancient Egyptians, or, as we now are beginning to suspect, was inherited from the star cattle people of the Sahara and was further developed.