Kingdoms of South Africa - Nile Valley States

Much of Africa's pre-history involves a great deal of uncertainty in which small windows of opportunity to view events can be gained through archaeology. The various stages of the African Palaeolithic are covered, as is the African Neolithic and African Iron Age.

It was out of these latter two phases that the earliest stages of state-formation emerged along the Nile Valley, at all points between the Nile delta in the north and covering the modern states of Egypt, Sudan, South Sudan, and Ethiopia. The cultural roots of Egyptian and Nubian kingship lay in their Neolithic period, around 6000-4000 BC, and especially as the Sahara increasingly desiccated and people were forced to congregate near the Nile (see feature link).

During the course of the fifth millennium BC Neolithic mobility in the Nile valley and adjacent regions led to a convergence of cultural features which can be documented from Khartoum all the way to the el-Badari district of middle Egypt. This was a form of cultural horizon which was created by a Neolithic population of multiple ethnic origins. In time these people would intermix and gel to form two great civilisations.

The overarching division of ancient Egypt's ancient past into 'Old Kingdom', 'Middle Kingdom', and 'New Kingdom' is not rooted in ancient sources. It began to be used by Egyptologists only in the nineteenth century using terms which were modelled on contemporary European nation state histories. This dating scheme is now canonical for the historiography of ancient Egypt, with the result that the political history of ancient Nubia (now in northern Sudan) is often uncomfortably slotted into it.

In the earliest proto forms of these states cereal farming was still a marginal pursuit in the Nile basin, but pastoralism had a more widespread take-up to confirm the adoption of a Neolithic lifestyle. Domesticated animals included cattle, sheep, and goats as sources of meat and milk.

The population of the early Nubian state was not the large sedentary population of Egypt. Instead it was still highly mobile and even seasonal, with pastoralists coming and going between seasons and only submitting to Nubian authority when they were in the region. The power of Nubian rulers was based more on attraction than it was on coercion as it straddled the world between Neolithic farmers and savannah pastoralists.

For much of the third and second millennia, seasonal grazing lands and wadi systems which were fed by reliable summer rains extended as far north as the Dongola Reach. The pre-eminent centre of Kushite religious and political power lay in the Kerma basin near the third cataract of the Nile, where evidence exists of elephant, hippopotamus, lion, and giraffe, alongside plentiful remains of livestock. This situation persisted into the early part of the second millennium BC during Egypt's 'New Kingdom' phase.

It can be argued that Kush was likely the first kingdom in sub-Saharan Africa. It may well have inherited its basis as a trade-orientated polity from the earlier A-Group of lower Nubia which flourished in the fourth millennium BC.

A phase of exceptional political violence accompanied the establishment of the first royal dynasties to claim sovereignty over the whole of Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt. It has been known for over a century that some of Egypt's earliest rulers of the 'First Dynasty' around 3000 BC went to the afterlife accompanied by the corpses of hundreds or even thousands of retainers who appear to have been ritually killed upon the death of the pharaoh and at least one queen.

Such victims seem to have been drawn almost exclusively from the inner circles of those very rulers. Upon the death of a king or queen their successor appears to have presided over the death of the predecessor's courtly entourage, or at least a large portion of it.

Such ritual violence seemingly mirrored internal violence which forged the unification of Egypt's 'Two Lands' (the 'Valley' and the 'Delta'), along with external violence on its outer borders, notably the dismantling of the A-Group polity.

By 3000 BC the regular movement of people, ideas, and goods between Egypt and Nubia had been replaced by a frontier zone, with Egyptian rulers enjoying largely unmediated access to the gold and mineral deposits of the Nubian deserts.

Egypt's southern border at Elephantine Island on the first cataract at Aswan was fortified during the first dynasty and, by no later than the beginning of the 'Old Kingdom' around 2650 BC, a permanent garrison was established which overlooked the Nile at Buhen, deep within lower Nubia.

Early Ethiopia's origins are much later. An apparently indigenous proto-Aksumite Iron Age state kingdom known as D'mt was established in northern Ethiopia and Eritrea, with its capital at Yeha in northern Ethiopia. It was only briefly influenced by Saba due to the latter's hegemony of the Red Sea. It was also succeeded in the third century BC by Axum itself which thrived as Kush faded.

African Kingdoms

East Africa & North Africa

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