Black Genesis (23 page)

Plate 22. The rock-cut tomb of Harkhuf at Aswan (west bank)

Plate 23. A hunting scene found in the Kifah cave. Photo courtesy of Mark Borda.

Plate 24. Rock painting of cattle, goats, and other animals found in the Kifah cave. Photo courtesy of Mark Borda

Plate 25. The temple of Hathor at Dendera

When Rosita Forbes traveled to the oasis of Kufra with Ahmed Hassanein in 1921, she became the first European woman to encounter the Tebu—some two hundred of them still living in the Kufra region. Sir Harry Hamilton Johnston, the great British explorer and diplomat who wrote the introduction to Forbes's book, comments on that region and the Tebu people.

It is one of the vestiges of a formerly well-watered country ten, twenty or more thousand years ago. To it [Kufra] came, long ago, when the intervening desert was much more traversable, clans of Tu, Tebu or Tibu people, nowadays the dominant population of Fazan and Tibesti. . . . They are seemingly of considerable antiquity, the Garamantes of Herodotus and the Romans, the Tedamansii of Claudius Ptolemeaus, the Alexandrian geographer of the second century. They represent one of the numerous races between the White man and the Negro, but in their purer and more northern extension they are a people with a preponderance of White man stock. The skin is dark-tinted and the hair has a kink, a curl about it. . . . They do not differ very much, facially, from the Hamitic people of Northeast
Africa . . .
⁴⁸

It was a small contingency of Tebu people that Ahmed Hassanein had in fact encountered at Jebel Uwainat in 1923 (see chapter 2). He called them Goran, which is another name for these ancient people. There were one hundred fifty of them, ruled by a king called Herri. In Hassanein's words, here is what happened when he woke up one morning in Wadi Karkur Talh at Uwainat:

As I opened my eyes a figure stood near me that seemed to be part of a pleasant dream. She was a beautiful girl of the Goran, the slim graceful lines of whose body were not spoiled by the primitive garments she wore. She carried a bowl of milk, which she offered with shy dignity. I could only accept it and drink gratefully. . . . A Tebu appeared with a parcel of meat of the
waddan
or wild sheep. I gave him macaroni and rice and he went away happy. After we had eaten I went to see some relics of the presence of men in earlier times. . . . I had got talking with one of the Gorans, and having satisfied myself about the present inhabitants of Ouenat, I asked him whether he knew anything about any former inhabitants of the oasis. He gave me a startling answer. “Many different people have lived round these wells, as far back as anyone can remember. Even
djinns
have dwelt in that place in olden days.” “Djinns!” I exclaimed. “How do you know that?” “Have they not left their drawings on the rocks?” he answered. With suppressed excitement I asked him where. He replied that in the valley of Ouenat there were many drawings upon the rocks, but I could not induce him to describe them further than saying that there were “writings and drawings of all the animals living and nobody knows what sort of pens they used, for they wrote very deeply on the stones and Time has not been able to efface the writings.” Doing my best not to show anything like excitement, I inquired whether he could tell me just where the drawings were. . . . I gathered that Ouenat was the
pied-a-terre
of Tebus and Goran. . . . With these drawings in mind, then, I took Malkenni who had joined the caravan at Arkenu, and towards sunset he led me straight to them. They were in the valley at the part where it drew in, curving slightly with a suggestion of the 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 swift changes in some locations of the Sahara. Then, in 2005–2006, Kuper and Kröpelin studied deep core samples from Lake Yoa, in the Tibesti-Ennedi region of northeastern Chad, and found evidence there for a slow desertification that occurred over several millennia from about 10,000 BCE to 3500 BCE. It seems, then, that there was a combination of very rapid change in some areas and more gradual regional change as the monsoon pattern moved and continuously reshaped itself. In any case, it seems the drying process eventually drove the prehistoric people out of the Sahara—meanwhile giving them ample time across many generations to develop animal domestication; basic agriculture; art; primitive sign writing; the knowledge of how to move large stones and construct complex megalithic structures; and knowledge of the simple principles of navigation, orientation, and timekeeping with the sun and stars. In other words, they acquired the practical and intellectual tools for building a civilization by the time they migrated into the Egyptian Nile Valley around 3500 BCE.

Let us now take a closer look at Lake Yoa near the Tibesti-Ennedi highlands. This region warrants a closer investigation, for it lies in the extended direction of Bergmann's Abu Ballas Trail, which has as its starting point Dakhla oasis and passes through the Gilf Kebir and Jebel Uwainat massifs.