Black Genesis: The Prehistoric Origins of Ancient Egypt

perspective. We must also acknowledge that Dr. Hawass, as a deputy minister of the Egyptian government, could well be
under pressure from various contemporary sociopolitical sources. It is reasonable, then, to suppose that not all of his
commentaries are motivated purely by dispassionate analysis of events from four or five thousand years ago but may be
colored in small part by contemporary sociopolitical concerns. Yet the modern Egyptian government has been a leader in
the terribly difficult, indeed Herculean, contemporary efforts to transcend the ages-old rivalry between Egypt and Israel as
evidenced for example by the 1979 peace treaty for which Egyptian president Anwar Sadat shared the Nobel Peace Prize.
If in some sense, therefore, there is a subliminal struggle going on among the various currently powerful ethnonationalist
and subnationalist groups in Egypt today regarding claims of the origin of the civilization that built the pyramids, then it
seems that the emerging answer should serve not to inflame but to defuse the situation—because the answer is that the
origins stem not from any of these groups but from Black Africans. Certainly it was the Black Africans of Egypt who,
over the subsequent ages, melded with a number of other colors and ethnicities and thus essentially are today the same
people of Egypt who should be extremely proud of the ancient accomplishments of their heritage.
CONSOLIDATING THE EVIDENCE
Other than the visual evidence of prehistoric rock art at Uwainat and Gilf Kebir, we will also see here and in chapter 6
that there is even more supporting evidence of a Black African origin in further analysis of the astronomical alignments
at Nabta Playa and other prehistoric sites in the Egyptian Sahara. Meanwhile, in 2002, three decades after Nabta Playa
was discovered, anthropologists Fred Wendorf and Romuald Schild published their overall views in the Journal of the
Polish Academy of Science [Archaeologia Polona] affirming that
[t]he tumuli, calendar, stele alignments and megalithic constructions, all concentrated around western shores of the
then already dried ancient Lake Nabta, indicate that this area was an important ceremonial centre in the late and final
Neolithic. The complexity of the arrangements, and enormous amount of closely managed work put into the
construction of the megalithic constructions, indicate that the cattle herders of the South Western Desert created an
early complex society with the presence of a religious and/or political control over human resources for an extended
period of time. Common contacts of the Desert Dwellers with the Nile Valley inhabitants are indicated by frequent
presence of raw material and ceramics originating in the Nile Valley. These contacts of cattle pastoralists with
Predynastic, agricultural groups in the Nile Valley may have played an important role in the emergence of a
complex, stratified society in the Great River Valley. . . . Physical anthropology of rare skeletal remains found in the
late early, middle and late Neolithic suggests racial association of the populations with Sub-Saharan or black groups
. . . 44
Other eminent anthropologists were more categorical. In National Geographic News of July 2006, this article
appeared:
The pharaohs of ancient Egypt owed their existence to prehistoric climate changes in the eastern Sahara, according to
an exhaustive study of archaeological data that bolsters this theory.
Starting at about 8500 B.C., researchers say, broad swaths of what are now Egypt, Chad, Libya and Sudan
experience a “sudden onset of humid conditions.” . . . During this time the prehistoric people of the eastern Sahara
followed the rains to keep pace with the most hospitable ecosystems.
But around 5300 B.C. this climate-driven environmental abundance started to decline, and most humans began
leaving the increasingly arid region.
“Around 5,500 to 6,000 years ago the Egyptian Sahara became so dry that nobody could survive there.” Said
Stefan Kröpelin, a geoarchaeologist at the University of Cologne in Germany and study co-author. . . .
Among their findings, the researchers provide further evidence that the human exodus from the desert about 5,000
years ago is what laid the foundation for the first pharaoh’s rule . . .
David Phillipson, a professor of African archaeology, directs the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at
the University of Cambridge in England . . .
“As the Sahara dried and became less suited and eventually unsuited to habitation, people ultimately had to move
out, whether it be southward or to the east into the Nile Valley,” Phillipson said.
“And this [study] helps [us] to understand the apparent rather sudden development of intensive settlement by