Black Genesis: The Prehistoric Origins of Ancient Egypt

to study the stars, perhaps even name some of the brighter ones and define the more striking of the constellations, such as
Orion and the Big Dipper. Surely they passed down their star lore over many generations. Because they were so
dependent on their cattle, it was appropriate that they might have noticed that the seven-star asterism of the Big Dipper
looked uncannily like the leg of a cow or bull, and that the large constellation of Orion appeared to be a striding giant
herdsman holding a staff. Further, it was most likey apt that the heliacal rising of the brightest star of all, Sirius, which
hung below Orion’s foot, was seen as a sort of beginning or rebirth or, better still, the start of the year to mark the
fertility of the coming lifegiving monsoon rains. Certainly these assumptions occurred to Wendorf and his team when
they worked at Nabta Playa, for it was reported in The New Scientist that
by 1998, Wendorf ’s team had found megaliths scattered right across the western edge of the playa. Hoping to
fathom what the nomads were up to, Wendorf invited University of Colorado astronomer Kim Malville to Nabta.
Malville confirmed that the stones formed a series of stellar alignments, radiating like spokes from the site of the
cow sculpture [Complex Structure A]. One of the alignments points to the belt of Orion, a constellation that appears
in late spring. Three more indicate the rising points of Dubhe, the brightest star in Ursa Major [Big Dipper], which
the Pharaohs saw as the leg of a cow. Most intriguing, though, is the parade of six megaliths marking the rising
position of Sirius—the brightest star in the sky—as it would have appeared 6800 years ago. By that time, says
Wendorf, the rains would have started their gradual retreat, and the alignments may have been an attempt to seek
help from supernatural forces. To Malville, this seemed an incredible coincidence. Sirius was also of great
importance to the civilisations of the Nile, which worshipped it as Sothis. The earliest known Egyptian calendars
were calibrated to Sothis’s appearance as a morning star, when the days were longest and monsoon rains flooded the
crop fields along the Nile. Sothis was depicted as a cow with a young plant between her horns. To later dynasties,
Sothis was known as Hathor—mother of the pharaohs. 7
We have seen that around the fifth millennium BCE the cattle people worked out a way to stay permanently at Nabta
Playa by digging deep wells to sustain them through the six months when the lake was dry from midwinter to
midsummer. Now they could grow some basic cereal crops and hunt hare and gazelle that also came to the lake when it
was full. They rarely, however, slaughtered their own cattle, for these were now considered sacred. They only used them
for milk and perhaps blood, very much like the Masai herders of eastern Africa. *47
With plenty of leisure time on their hands in the evenings and at night, their knowledge of the sky and its cycles
increased, and the cattle people thus began to develop complex ideologies of life and death and to devise rituals and
ceremonies to mark special days of the year. They gradually built the vast ceremonial complex we see today, using large
stones quarried from the nearby bedrock. In the intellectual and spiritual sense, they moved a few steps up the cultural
ladder to discard their cattle-people descriptor and become the Ru’at El Asam people, the megalith builders or, as we
now prefer to call them, the star people.
Thus life for these people went on peacefully for generations until around 3300 BCE, when huge changes in the
climate caused the lake to recede and the wells to dry up. It soon became obvious that they could not stay here much
longer. For centuries they had heard of a wonderful river valley in the east, a cornucopia of plenty, with miles upon miles
of banks of green pastures—a place where food and fresh water could be found in abundance. Indeed, their distant
ancestors had trade relations with the people of the Nile Valley and even more distant regions. Therefore, forced out by
the climate and lured by the legend of the great river, the people of Nabta Playa turned their attention east, toward the
place of the rising sun, and dreamed of a new life in the green valley yonder. When they could stay in the desert no more,
they rounded up their cattle, packed their meager belongings, and, leaving the ceremonial complex with its stone circle,
tumuli, and alignments that their ancestors had raised, they started their march to a new promised land. According to one
of the most prominent anthropologists of the Egyptian Sahara, Romuald Schild writes, “And where might they have gone
if not to the relatively close Nile Valley? They brought with them the various achievements of their culture and their
belief system. Perhaps it was indeed these people who provided the crucial stimulus towards the emergence of state
organization in ancient Egypt.” Fred Wendorf echoes these words: “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. Is it possible that the Nabta nomads migrated up the Nile,
influencing the great Egyptian dynasties?” 8 Fekry Hassan, professor of Egyptology at London University, adds: “It is very
likely that the concept of the cow goddess in dynastic Egypt is a continuation of a much older tradition of a primordial
cow goddess or goddesses that emerged in the context of Neolithic herding in the Egyptian Sahara.” 9