Rock art clue to nomad ancestors of Egyptian pyramid builders

Stone age cattle herders left religious imagery which was to re-emerge in Valley of Kings

Rock art etched on cliff walls in the eastern Sahara more than 6,000 years ago could spell out the answer to one of archaeology's great puzzles - where the ancient Egyptians came from.

The pyramid builders made their first entry in the archaeological record 5,000 years ago. This appearance was so abrupt that it has provoked fantasies of alien landings, mysterious civilisations or an invading master race. But in Genesis of the Pharaohs, published on Monday by Thames and Hudson, the Cambridge Egyptologist Toby Wilkinson presents a different picture.

The people who carved the great temples of Memphis and the elaborate tombs of the Valley of the Kings were once stone-age nomadic cattle herders who every summer, when the Nile flooded, took their herds to the fresh grass of the uplands.

They left a painstaking record of religious imagery, much of it to reappear 2,500 years later in the Valley of the Kings.

The origins of the Nile civilisation have been a hot topic for many decades. "They don't seem to have an ancestry, they don't seem to have any period of development, they just seem almost to appear overnight," said Dr Wilkinson.

"This has left people pondering, and of course it has been fertile ground for the unorthodox who suggest it was all planted by aliens, or visitors from Atlantis."

He and colleagues followed research by a German scholar, Hans Winkler, who before his death in the second world war published one preliminary report on rock art in what is now desert between the Red Sea and the Nile.

"It was never clear from his work whether what he found was all there was, or whether there was much, much more. The answer is there is a huge amount more, the place is littered with Egyptian rock art.

"There are some sites where the tableaux covered by the art are enormous - high cliff faces - and one has to imagine that these are the temples of prehistoric Egypt, these are sacred places to which people came back on a regular basis."

Dr Wilkinson's survey pinpointed hundreds of sites at which, 1,000 years before the founding of ancient Egypt, cattle herders had left intricate carvings of hippos and crocodiles, cattle, and above all, boats carrying godlike figures.

Each had been painstakingly "pecked" into the rock by an artist with a stone stylus. There are no written records. There is almost no other evidence of the people who fashioned the stories in the rock.

But the carvings tell of seasonal nomads who would have left the river valley with the annual flooding, and taken their herds to what had once been grassland savannah.

"I think one of the most striking things is the shape of the boat, with an upright prow and an incurved, sickle-shaped stern, very distinctive in the rock art.

"It is found throughout Egyptian history, and particularly in the Valley of the Kings, where it is quite specifically a divine boat, a boat associated with the king's voyage in the afterlife. I feel strongly that this particular shape of boat, already, in 4000BC, is associated with the spiritual dimension."

Some motifs in the desert stone explain other Egyptian puzzles. "On the coffin of Tutankhamun, there is the king, holding across his chest symbols of kingship which people have never thought about - and these are symbols of animal husbandry. Why does the king wear a bull's tail, why does he carry a crook?"

I'd really hesitate before accepting this guy's theory. Just because he's found the art of long ago cattle herdsmen in the region of Egypt near the pyramids doesn't mean that the Pharoahs descended from them. This article gives no other info about why there is a link, other than local and artwork. Think about it. The pyramid age came from nowhere, and spanned only a few centuries. Where did the spark come from, the technology, the ideas, everything? And why pyramids? Things that we can't build today, how did cattle herders figure this out, and why go to the trouble? More importantly, if these people were simple nomads, then where did the manpower come from to build such things? And more than that. Where did the surplus food come from to feed the army of workers? You have to have a well organized state to produce the surplus needed to feed work crews. One final point. Watch the news. Those regions of the world have hardly evolved over the centuries. You still have nomads and cattle herders roaming thru the desert etc. They haven't changed. Can you imagine these people creating the culture needed to build pyramids?

The author of the book being reviewed here doesn't claim that the Pharoahs did descend from the nomads in the region. He does say that some of the symbolism in the rock art was used to represent the religous power of the pharoahs, and the symbolism used in the classic Egyptan religions. That is a good indication that the culture of the Pharoahs did descend from the culture of the nomads.

You are mistaken about the pyramids coming from nowhere. We have excavated centuries of tombs that gradually increased in size and shape to become the pyramids. Then, the Egyptian kings suddenly stopped building them. Does that mean that the pyramid "culture' disappeared? No. The subsequent Pharoahs couldn't pay for any more, I think, and couldn't go any better, so why bother?

It's true, that cattle herders could not have built the Pyramids. Indeed, they did not, because there are 2,500 years or more between those cattle herders and the pyramids. Of course, the Egyptians who built the pyramids were still cattle herders, but they were also engineers, doctors, astronomers etc.

We can build those pyramids today, but why bother? We know how they could have built, even with simple hand tools. The Egyptians did have more than just simple hand tools, they had brains and more than two thousand years of development since those "simple" cattle herders.

....these people were simple nomads, then where did the manpower come from to build such things?

Again, there was more than 2,000 years between those simple nomads and the pyramids. Even cattle herder populations grow over time.

Where did the surplus food come from to feed the army of workers?

Farming appeared at some point, in the Nile valley, and probably early. Farmers in the Nile valley grew tremendously large crops without the benefit of technology. With the regular flooding of the Nile River they didn't need it. You have to have a well organized state to produce the surplus needed to feed work crews.

Egypt had a very well organized state, even before the first dynasty. People do not invent writing, as the Egyptians did, without great organization and beauracracy, apparently.

Watch the news. Those regions of the world have hardly evolved over the centuries. You still have nomads and cattle herders roaming thru the desert etc. They haven't changed. Can you imagine these people creating the culture needed to build pyramids?

Don't just watch television. Read a book. Read some history. Those regions led the world in many ways until the 15th century. I could go on and on about the basic technology that was invented in "those regions".

Trigonometry and geometry, for example, were invented in the middle east. The greeks and romans got it from them. A temple school has been dug up in Babylon. There were clay tablets there which appeared to be work books for geometry students.

Two thousand year old jewelry has been found that appears to have been electro-plated with gold. You need electricity for that. Well, it appears that primitive electric batteries have been found in Babylon that would have done the job.

Nomads? Shoot, there are nomads in the USA. Yes, I can imagine that these people created a culture capable of building the pyramids, and much else besides. I don't have your low opinion of people. People all over the world have built tremendous structures, and none of them needed space aliens or Atlantis to do it.

Yes, you bring up excellent examples, but it is exactly what I am debating. Electro plating, the Bagdad batteries, advanced math, the engineering of the pyramids, the examples go on and on. But that is the point. Where did the technology come from to do these things? Egyptian civilization seems to have sprung up about 4000 BC. What spark happened to them to allow such development? There are alternative, fascinating theories about the pyramids, and their time frames. This guy is just pedalling the same old ideas, goat herders settled down and developed a culture that for some reason deicided to build pyramids, nothing new here. And no, we couldn't build the pyramids today. There are stones that are too heavy for modern equipment to lift. So how did primitive people with copper tools and palm rope do this? We can debate this forever and never solve it. But this middle eastern culture circa 4000 BC is fascinating. On a similar topic, there is the Dogon people of Africa who have this strange ritual dance that they perform every 56 years IIRC that mimicks the Star Sirus A and its companion B. This is a remote tribe, with no contact with outsiders, yet they knew about the existence of Sirus B, eventhough it is an 'invisible' star that can only be seen with an x-ray telescope. And yes, Sirus B orbits aboput A every 56 years or so. How did the Dogon know this? Their legends tell of how they were given this knowledge by a 'lizard-like' god which came from Sirus in the distant past. This is similar to some of the ancient Egyptian gods. Is there a tie in here? A fascinating idea. I think there was a spark that started the whole civilization of this region. Thanks for the debate.

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