Black Genesis: The Prehistoric Origins of Ancient Egypt

Anne-Sophie von Bomhard, “was the most essential preoccupation of the Egyptian civilization.” 43 The ancient Egyptians
sought eternity through understanding of the long-term cycles of the sun and stars. Everything the ancient Egyptians did
—all monuments they built, all ceremonies and rituals they performed, all art and writings they created—were inspired by
the idea of eternity and how they could become part of it. We need only look at the pyramids to feel their inspiration.
Yet if the pyramids are a monumental legacy to eternity, then surely the ever-flowing Nile and its annual flood are
the living expression of it. Herodotus said that Egypt was “the gift of the Nile,” and the Egyptians themselves saw the
Nile as a sacred river, which had its source in heaven among the stars. 44 The Egyptologist Jean Kerisel writes, “the
mystery of the distant sources of the Nile and the inability to explain the mechanism behind the flooding of the river
which followed a regular calendar . . . must have nourished the image of divinity and the sense of eternity.” 45
The source of the Nile is the great lakes in the distant south, thousand of kilometers away, in central Africa and
Ethiopia. As we have seen, the annual flood is the direct product of the heavy monsoon rains that occur in midsummer,
which cause these great lakes to overflow and discharge their waters into the Nile. These very same monsoons once
reached the south of Egypt and created temporary lakes such as the one at Nabta Playa. According to standard
Egyptology, however, the ancient Egyptians never knew this. Indeed, the source of the Nile—and thus the cause of the
annual flood—were not known to modern humans until the late nineteenth century. Given our new evidence, however,
we can question to what extent we can say that the ancient Egyptians never knew that the monsoon flooding in the south
was the source of the annual Nile floods. Perhaps the ancient Egyptians did not know as we today think of knowing, but
in addition to the astronomical evidence, their origin stories suggest they did have some sort of awareness.
The ancient Egyptians represented the Nile as the god Hapy, a plump man with drooping breasts and a belly that
implied contentment and fulfillment. They imagined that its source was a cave leading into the underworld, the Duat. Yet
the Duat was also a starry world near the Milky Way. The Lord of the Duat was the god Osiris, with whom the dead
pharaohs were identified. Thus according to the Egyptologist J. Gwyn Griffiths, “Osiris is especially associated with the
Duat, a watery celestial region where he consorts with Orion and Sothis [Sirius], heralds of inundation and fertility. He is
also Lord of Eternity . . .” 46 And Mark Lehner writes that “the word for ‘Netherworld’ was Duat, often written with a
star in a circle, a reference to Orion, the stellar expression of Osiris in the underworld. Osiris was the Lord of the Duat,
which, like the celestial world (and the real Nile Valley) was both a water world and an earthly realm.” 47 The seemingly
contradictory fact that there was a celestial Duat and an underworld Duat can be explained by the observation of what
actually happens in the sky: the stars journey in the sky after they rise from east to west, and they journey in the
underworld—that is, below the horizon—from west to east, after they set. What added to this earth-sky connection for
the Duat was the visible feature of a celestial Nile near Orion. As the historian and astronomer Alan Chapman aptly puts
it: “was not the life-giving Nile itself reflected in the very heavens themselves, in the form of the Milky Way?” 48 The
American Egyptologist Mark Lehner also points out that “the Milky Way was the ‘beaten path of the stars,’ although it
was also a watery way. . . . In fact, the vision is that of the Nile Valley at inundation.” 49 Further, the mythologist Lucie
Lamy adds: “If Egypt is a reflection of the sky, then divine beings sail on the waters of the Great River which animate the
cosmos: the Milky Way.” 50 Robert Bauval had published the same idea in 1989 when he wrote, “a major feature of the
After-world often mentioned in the Pyramid Texts is the ‘Winding Waterway,’ which was, in all probability, seen as a
celestial counterpart of the Nile.” 51
THE SACRED YEARLY INUNDATION
Each year, the Nile started to swell in mid-June and spilled its water on the adjacent valley. Herodotus, who journeyed in
Egypt in the fifth century BCE, commented: “about why the Nile behaves precisely as it does I could get no information
from the priests nor yet from anyone else. What I particularly wished to know is why the water begins to rise at the
summer solstice, continues to do so for a hundred days, and then falls again at the end of that period, so that it remains
low throughout the winter until the summer solstice comes round again in the following year.” 52
What Herodotus wanted to know, and what the Egyptians could not or would not tell him, was that the reason the
Nile behaved in its mysterious way was because of the monsoon rains in the distant south, which, in a sense, regulate the
flow and level of the river. Even after the monsoons receded south out of Egypt and the rains that had once drenched the
dry Sahara each summer came to an end, much of the downpour of the rainwaters did, in fact, still reach Egypt via the
Nile.