Black Genesis: The Prehistoric Origins of Ancient Egypt

wagging tail. We found them on the rock at the ground level. I was told there were other similar inscriptions at half a
day’s journey, but as it was growing late and I did not want to excite suspicion, I did not go to them. There was
nothing beyond the drawings of animals, no inscriptions. It seemed to me as though they were drawn by somebody
who was trying to compose a scene. . . . On their wall of rock these pictures were rudely, but not unskillfully carved.
There were lions, giraffes and ostriches, all kinds of gazelle, and perhaps cows, though many of these figures were
effaced by time . . . I asked who made the pictures, and the only answer I got came from Malkenni, the Tebu, who
declared his belief that they were the work of the djinn. 49
Djinns and the Rock Art at Jebel Uwainat
In chapter 2 we saw that Hassanein went on to speculate that the reason Malkenni and the Tebu thought the rock art was
created by djinns was because it depicted giraffes and other animals that had not been in the area for thousands of
years. We also saw that if the rock art scenes are taken as literal representations, some show strange activities, such as
a human floating in thin air near the head of a giraffe. In one cave at Gilf Kebir, there are numerous images of a human
form merging with or morphing out of animals—which is so reminiscent of modern shamanic ceremonialism that we
started calling it the Cave of the Shamans. This, then, might be another reason why Malkenni and the modern Tebu
attributed the rock art to djinns.
By 1932, however, the Tebu/Goran of Uwainat had completely disappeared. Thus, when Ralph Bagnold and his
colleagues organized an expedition to Uwainat in 1938, under the sponsorship of the Egypt Exploration Society, they
found only scant remains of these people at Karkur Talh: “Tibu [Goran] remains: In Karkur Talh many traces were found
of the Guraan who formerly used to visit the wadi. Most of these were probably left by the band of fugitives who fled
here after the French occupation of the Ennedi-Tibesti Highlands . . . there was no evidence that the Tibu had been in the
region for a number of years.” 50
In addition, when Count Almasy was at Gilf Kebir and Uwainat in 1936, he took a Tebu man, Ibrahim, as his guide.
Ibrahim recounted how a certain Tebu chief called Abdel Malik had been given permission by the Senussi of Kufra to
graze his camels in the region. Abdel Malik discovered a lush valley at Gilf Kebir where he could graze his camels. He
then left a written testimony that mentioned the origins of the Tebu people: “I, Abdel Malek, have the following to say
concerning the valley I discovered: the Kufra oasis did not always belong to the Arabs. From time immemorial it was the
land of the Tebu who owned all the places in the desert for ages. . . .” 51
Ibrahim then told Almasy: “We, the Tebu, [are] the original inhabitants of this desert . . .” 52
OUT OF THE SAHARA AND INTO THE NILE VALLEY
For many years a team of anthropologists headed by Rudolph Kuper and Stefan Kröpelin of Cologne University in
Germany have been studying prehistoric sites and climatic changes in the Egyptian Sahara and the sub-Sahara in Chad,
Sudan, and Libya. After analyzing radiocarbon samples from hundreds of prehistoric archaeological sites, they concluded
that the climatic changes correlated with the movement of prehistoric people during the past twelve thousand years. The
evidence also showed that there was a stable humid period from 8500 BCE to 5300 BCE, after which the people and
their cattle—the same cattle people of Nabta Playa, Gilf Kebir, and Jebel Uwainat?—escaped the drying of the Sahara
and spread pastoralism throughout the continent, and, perhaps, add Kuper and Kröpelin, “helped trigger the emergence of
pharaonic civilization along the Nile.” 53 This view is today shared by many anthropologists, including climatologists
such as Professor Peter B. deMenorcal of Columbia University, who affirmed that “however fast the drying occurred, it
pushed people out of north-central Africa, and that climatically forced migration might have led to the rise of the
Pharaohs and Egyptian civilization.” 54
The speed at which the Sahara changed from a lush green savanna to the barren, arid, waterless desert that it is today
has been a bone of contention among climatologists for many decades. In the early years geoclimatologists were generally
gradualists—that is, against the idea of any rapid changes. More recent measuring methods, however, have indicated very