Black Genesis: The Prehistoric Origins of Ancient Egypt

Figure 5.3. Numerous prehistoric hand signatures and, lower left, people depicted as if reflected in a natural crack in the
rock. The lower central group is possibly a depiction of a ritual. Mestekawi-Foggini cave, southwest Gilf Kebir.
We woke at the crack of dawn and drove southward until we reached the edge of Uwainat. There, we stopped to visit
yet another cave with rock art that was discovered by Mark Borda in 2007. The cave is on the northern edge of Uwainat,
and its entrance is tucked behind a ridge, which makes it almost invisible unless you know exactly where to look (which
might explain why it was not discovered before 2007). We were, in fact, the first modern visitors to enter this cave since
its original inhabitants had abandoned it millennia ago. The cave was half filled with sand up to 1 meter (3 feet) below
the ceiling, which actually worked best for us, because most of the rock art was on the ceiling, like a prehistoric Sistine
Chapel. The sand allowed us to see the rock art at very close range.
The drawings were of a much better quality than those we saw at Gilf Kebir. Not only were the ancient scenes more
elaborate and showed more detail, but the colors—blacks, browns, reds, yellows, and whites—were extremely vivid, as if
they had been painted the day before (see plate 14). The cattle were clearly tame and domesticated, and some of them
were even shown with halters and leashes or with decorations on their bodies. The men were depicted as tall, slim, and
agile. They were black-skinned and wore white ivory bands on their arms and thighs. They also had loincloths resembling
those worn later by ancient Egyptians. On some of their heads were ornate hats, and many carried sticks, spears, and
bows. The women wore skirts, necklaces, armbands, and earrings. A striking aspect of the renderings of the people was
their heads, which were depicted either as wearing masks or symbolically as animal forms (long, rectangular snout, bright
eyes, and ears near the top of the head). These animal-form heads, possibly cowlike, might have been representative of the
central role that cattle played in the lives of these people. Some of them bore a striking resemblance to the early
depictions of the Egyptian god Seth, a god of the desert regions whom the ancient Egyptians associated mythologically
with the origin of dynastic Egypt itself. The Sahara scholar and rock art expert Dr. Jean-Loic le Quellec of the French
CNRS (Centre National de Recherches Scientifique) is of the opinion that the “cave of swimmers” is a prehistoric
precursor and probable influence of rituals found in the much later pharaonic Coffin Texts and Book of the Dead. He
thinks the “swimmers” are performing an afterlife journey into the watery afterworld, which he relates to the mni.w (the
dead who had sunk into the other world) and which confront a mythical Beast, which he related to the ancient Egyptian
beasts or monsters, mmyt, which swallow the dead in the so-called Judgement Scene of the Book of the Dead. According
to Quellec the ancient Egyptians kept the memory of the origins in the Sahara and even may have periodically carried out
pilgrimages to revisit their ancestral lands.
Figure 5.4. Bauval and Marai examine newly discovered cave art in April 2008. Note that the back wall of the cave
appears to be constructed of megalithic blocks.
The memory of the ancient lands must have lasted for a long time, and was perhaps progressively mythified,