The origin of the Egyptians has been a long-standing source of contention among Egyptologists. Speculation concerning this issue has continued from Jean-François Champollion and the first days of Egyptology through to figures such as Flinders Petrie and up to the present time. In recent years the ancient Egyptian race controversy has given the debate extra impetus, despite the fact that academia has reached a broad consensus on the issue.
Most scholars, in explicit rejection of the dynastic race theory, view the Egyptians as having been ethnically continuous since the predynastic era: their actual origins being the Nile Valley and the Sahara. The Nile Valley, a convenient corridor from mankind's African origins to the north, was possibly first reached by australopithicenes: over time, throughout the Paleolithic, Nilotic culture evolved, centered around hunting and fishing. Periodically, however, migrations from the Sahara occurred, as climate change drew African peoples onto the Sahara in periods when it was green and, in Hoffman's phrase, "the desert bloomed", and then expelled them from it when the true desert conditions returned. Scholars now speculate that, as at the end of the epipaleolithic (circa 5000 BC) the Sahara grew hotter, a Saharan people with cattle pastoralist traditions moved into the Nile Valley, where they mingled with the indigenous Nilotic people: from this union grew Badarian culture, a combination of Saharan pastoralism and Nilotic hunting and fishing.
Notes
editReferences
edit- Hoffman, Michael A (1979). Egypt before the Pharoahs. Alfred A Knopf. ISBN 0-394-41049-1.
- Frank Yurco, "An Egyptological Review" in Mary R. Lefkowitz and Guy MacLean Rogers, eds. Black Athena Revisited. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. p. 62-100
- W. Wetterstrom, "Foraging and Farming in Egypt: The Transition from Hunting and Gathering to Horticulture in the Egyptian Nile Valley". The Archaeology of Africa: Food, Metals, and Towns, T. Shaw et al eds. London: Routledge, 1993
- S.O.Y Keita. "Studies of Ancient Crania from North Africa", American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 1990
