Black Genesis (7 page)

It is thus perhaps relevant to note in passing that Djedefre was the first royal devotee of a new solar cult devised by the priests of Heliopolis, and he was also the first pharaoh to incorporate into his name the word Re (the sun god) and to add Son of Re to his royal
titles.
³¹
His (now) truncated pyramid at Abu Ruwash, which stands some 7 kilometers (about 4 miles) north of the Giza plateau, is thought by some to have been the first sun temple and, like his mountain temple in the Sahara, was also made to face the rising sun due east. Clearly, the new symbolism brought into the royal cult by Djedefre is intensely solar and may have been the stimulus for his successors in the fourth dynasty, such as the pharaohs Khafre and Menkaure, builders of the second and third pyramids at Giza, also to add Re to their names. This new solar cult was even more prominent with the kings of the fifth and sixth dynasties, who built sun temples at Abu Ghorab, a few kilometers south of Giza. Oddly, it was the kings of the sixth dynasty whom Harkhuf and his father, Iry, had so diligently served by finding the way to the kingdom of Yam. At any rate, we will take a closer look at all this in chapter 6.

Meanwhile barely a few years after Carlo Bergmann's discovery of Djedefre Water Mountain, another chance discovery of a similar water mountain was made by a German team of anthropologists, but this time the site was a staggering 700 kilometers (more than 400 miles) south of Dakhla and deep inside Sudan, adjacent to the town of Dongola. To everyone's surprise this other water mountain contained prehistoric rock art perfectly matching that of the mysterious Djedefre Water Mountain. This rock art was studied by the German anthropologist Rudoph Kuper.

[T]he isolated but identical presentation of the water ideograms [near Dongola] more than 700 kilometers south of the Dakhla area . . . bears implications for the question of early Egyptian relations with Sudanese Nubia. It suggests a line or a network of communication across the Eastern Sahara as late as the early third millennium BC. . . . The new evidence supports the scenario that even after 3000 BC the Libyan Desert was not completely void of human activity. In its southern part, cattle keepers could survive as late as the second millennium BC. . . . Apparently, the Egyptian Nile Valley and the oases were connected with these regions and farther African destinations beyond by a network of donkey caravan routes crossing southern
Egypt.
³²

What Kuper seems to be saying is that prehistoric Black people living in the Egyptian Sahara not only were able to communicate with others as far south as Dongola in Sudan but also were probably still around when the pharaohs of the early dynasties (ca. 2500–2100 BCE) sent their emissaries, such as Harkhuf, into the Sahara. In 1990, German archaeologist G. Burkhard found a small rock mound 30 kilometers (about 19 miles) south of Dakhla that had on it prehistoric petroglyphs of wild animals and also an ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic inscription—“Regnal year 23, the steward Meri he goes up to meet the Oasis
Dwellers”
³³
—tentatively dated to the sixth dynasty (and thus contemporary with Harkhuf). This discovery prompted Rudolph Kuper to consider the possibility that the ancient Egyptians might have reached the extreme southwest region of the Egyptian Sahara, perhaps as far as Gilf
Kebir.
³⁴
The reason for Kuper's uncanny prediction was his awareness of the existence of a hill some 200 kilometers (about 124 miles) southwest of Dakhla known as Abu Ballas Hill (Father of Pots Hill, or Pottery Hill), which had been discovered in 1918 by the British explorer John Ball. Strewn all along its base were hundreds of large clay pots dated to the Old Kingdom (ca. 2500–2100 BCE) as determined by the hieroglyphic engravings found on the hill. What was the purpose of this place? Why did it have all those large clay pots? Count Almasy had visited Abu Ballas Hill in the 1930s, and he had suggested that it was a very ancient water station or supply outpost, a sort of donkey filling station, along a long-forgotten route that may have linked the oasis of Dakhla to Gilf Kebir and perhaps
beyond.
³⁵
As it turned out both Almasy and Kuper would be proved correct by none other than the indefatigable Carlo Bergmann.

THE ABU BALLAS TRAIL

The mystery of Abu Ballas Hill was finally solved in 1999 by Carlo Bergmann. In the course of a whole year, from March 1999 to March 2000, Bergmann explored on foot the region southwest of Dakhla oasis and discovered some thirty other water stations with similar large, clay pots set almost equidistant to one another, like a hop-skip-and-jump trail or, more poetically, a string of pearls along a 350-kilometer (217 mile) stretch of desert. The midpoint of this trail was Abu Ballas Hill, and the whole created an almost straight highway from Dakhla to Gilf Kebir. The conclusion was inevitable: this was the long-forgotten ancient caravan trail predicted by
Almasy.
³⁶
This discovery amounted to an intellectual explosion for the academics, for here was hard, irrefutable evidence that the pharaohs did after all travel into the deep desert and probably even made contact with the descendants of the prehistoric people who lived there. Further, all this was happening forty-five hundred years before Prince Kemal el Din discovered Gilf Kebir. Here is how the pharaohs did it.

In ancient times the essential commodities for such a trip were, of course, water and food, as well as water and fodder for the beasts of burden. It is well known that the camel was not introduced into Egypt before 500 BCE, so that the only other means of desert transport in the Old Kingdom was the donkey (
Equus asinus
). Harkhuf claimed to have taken three hundred donkeys for his journey to Yam, and donkey caravans are also attested on temple and tomb reliefs as early as the first dynasties. Also, on one of the large clay pots at Abu Ballas there is a drawing of a donkey confirming that this animal had carried the pots and presumably other goods to this location in the desert. The donkey is an excellent desert traveler and can easily carry loads of sixty kilograms (about a hundred thirty pounds) and walk 15 kilometers (about 9 miles) per day and can go three days without water. A fully grown and healthy donkey will need about 2 to 3 liters of water and about 3 kilograms of fodder each day, which together will add 5 to 6 kilograms (about 13 pounds) per day to the load he must carry. A one-way trip from Dakhla to the edge of Gilf Kebir will take a minimum of twenty days and thus will require a total load of 120 kilograms (about 265 pounds) for each donkey, to which we must add another 30 kilograms (about 60 pounds) for the containers that carry the water and food as well as basic traveling equipment plus the food and water for the person leading the donkey (estimated at 50 kilograms—about 110 pounds—per load). Conservatively, then, each donkey must be able to carry at the start of the journey at least 200 kilograms (440 pounds). This, of course, is impossible. A donkey walking at normal pace in such grueling conditions can carry only 60 to 80 kilograms without buckling under the load.

Figure 2.5. Abu Ballas Pottery Hill discovered in 1918. Photographs courtesy of Carlo Bergmann and Mark Borda.

Theoretically, the payload can be reduced by taking extra donkeys, but there are an optimum number of donkeys for the trip, because each extra donkey will also require water and food. The optimum number of donkeys per person is three to four. Sharing the load makes the total load for each about 185 kilograms, which is still not possible for a donkey to carry. It should be clear, then, that in order to undertake this journey, the donkey can start off with a load of only 60 to 80 kilograms, and then, when the water and food are used up, there must be refueling stations along the way—at least two spread equidistant along the way to Gilf Kebir. This assessment explains the need for the large Abu Ballas Hill watering station and also another large one that was discovered by Carlo Bergmann, which he named Muhattah Jaqub (Jacob's Station), located between Dakhla oasis and Abu Ballas Hill. These principal watering stations had to be kept fully supplied with water and food when a donkey caravan expedition was planned, which also explains the need for the thirty small stations that Bergmann discovered in between. In other words, the small stations along the trail were used only for the resupply of the Muhattah Jaqub and Abu Ballas Hill main stations. It was these last two that serviced the caravans and ensured that there was a supply of water and food all the way to the final destination. “But what was the final destination of the caravans?” asked the anthropologist Frank Förster.

Certainly not Gilf Kebir. The nearest places with permanent water are the Kufra Oasis in modern Libya some 350 km [more than 200 miles] to the northwest of the eastern fringes of the southern Gilf Kebir, and Gebel Uwainat some 200 km [about 124 miles] to the southwest. Kufra, however, surrounded by seas of sand is rather isolated. . . . Therefore, and for other reasons, it is to be assumed that the next leg of the route led towards Gebel Uwainat, the island-like most elevated feature in the whole of the eastern Sahara, which is provided with a number of rain-fed wells at its foot (in Arabic,
Uwainat
means “the small fountains”). From here it would be possible to reach more southern regions in the territory of modern Sudan or Chad. To date, however, no evidence has been found in the Gebel Uwainat, nor in the Gilf Kebir proper, that attests to an Egyptian presence
there.
³⁷

The German anthropologists Stefan Kröpelin and Rudolph Kuper had the same hunch as Förster, namely that the Abu Ballas Trail went on beyond Gilf Kebir, perhaps to Jebel Uwainat and also even beyond to Chad. “Its [the Abu Ballas Trails] final destination is still unknown . . . the nearest locality with permanent ground water lies at distances of 600 kilometers [373 miles] . . . in Jebel Uwainat, from where the trail might have continued to the ecologically superlative Ennedi Plateau or the outstanding lake region of Ounianga in Northeast
Chad.”
³⁸

Förster, Kröpelin, and Kuper wrote these words in early 2007. Little did they know that their hunch about Jebel Uwainat being a farther destination along the trail would be confirmed in just a few months. Such are the strange laws of synchronicity in human lives.

THE EGYPTIAN TEACHER AND THE MALTESE BUSINESSMAN

Mahmoud Marai is an Egyptian chemistry lecturer who, like Carlo Bergmann, dropped his career in the classroom for a more adventurous career in the desert. He set up a tour-operating business, taking tourists and adventurers into the deep desert, eventually specializing in trips dedicated to exploration. Mahmoud's infatuation with the desert began when he was stationed at the oasis of Siwa during his military service. There, roaming the golden dunes at the edge of the Great Sand Sea, he was hit by the explorer's bug, and his experience with the desert was love at first sight. Mahmoud just had to become involved with its barren beauty, its haunting and alluring isolation, and, of course, its many mysteries. Like others before him, he dreamed of finding the legendary lost oasis of Zarzora and going to places that were still unexplored. This strange pull that the desert has on some people is not uncommon. There is an inexplicable attraction to being alone in its vast emptiness where earth and sky seem to meet and become one. Somehow, the isolation from human habitation brings us closer to the essence of our humanity. There is an old Arab saying that God lives in the desert. To put it slightly differently, it feels as if it is not us but our soul that is alive when we roam the open desert, for it provokes a strange and very strong sensation that God is standing near us when we are alone in its vastness.

At any rate, Marai's enthusiasm for daring and challenging desert trips attracted the attention of many explorers. In the winter of 2007 a Maltese businessman, Mark Borda, hired Mahmoud Marai for a
desert trek
³⁹
to Uwainat. The permits for this expedition were issued via Mahmoud Marai as a registered tour operator by the Ministry of Interior and the Egyptian military authorities, who are responsible for the safety of travelers and tours in the Western Desert. Borda and Marai had met the previous year through the intermediary of Carlo Bergmann. Borda's objective was to search unexplored areas for anything that might be of scientific interest to scholars of geology, botany, archaeology, and anthropology. By carefully studying satellite imagery before the trip, Borda had drawn up an extensive list of targets. Upon his arrival at Jebel Uwainat, Borda immediately set about the task of surveying these targets systematically, very often with Marai accompanying him on his treks. They combed many areas in the lower slopes, wadis, and plateaus mainly southeast of the Uwainat massif. Each day they trekked about 15 to 20 kilometers (9 to 12 miles), checking every nook, crack, and cave they encountered. This method paid off, and they found the locations of dozens of unreported prehistoric works of art.

PHARAONIC INSCRIPTIONS! A CARTOUCHE OF A KING!

By November 27, Marai and Borda had already been walking and searching for nine days. On that day, just as they were about to arrive back at camp for lunch, Borda scanned with his powerful binoculars the last remaining section of boulders that lay strewn on a slope. They were in a region at the southern rim of Jebel Uwainat—which is some 50 kilometers (about 31 miles) into Sudanese territory—an area into which it is dangerous to venture. (In September 2008 a group of Italian tourists was kidnapped at Jebel Uwainat by rebels, and they endured a two-week ordeal before they were freed after a gunfight between the rebels and the Egyptian military.) As Borda panned with his binoculars, he suddenly saw an unmistakable shape on the surface of one of the larger boulders some 100 meters (about 328 feet) from where he stood. It was a shape that he had seen many times before—but only hundreds of kilometers from Jebel Uwainat.

He exclaimed to Marai in disbelief, “There is a pharaonic cartouche on that boulder!” As he moved closer, focusing his eyepiece with growing excitement, he began to see hieroglyphic inscriptions inside and outside the cartouche (see plate 3). The two men could barely contain their excitement, for there it was, after decades of speculation, incontestable evidence that the ancient Egyptians managed to reach this remote place after all! The whole geography of ancient Egypt suddenly changed before their eyes. They immediately took dozens of digital photographs and carefully recorded the coordinates of the location with GPS. After leaving Jebel Uwainat, Borda also decided to check various prominent hills and rocky outcrops and managed to discover a magnificent cave with exquisite prehistoric art in a region previously considered void of such work. The images were not engraved but painted in bright colors. There were scenes showing slender Black men and women tending cattle, performing daily chores, and dancing and acting out rituals. The details and colors were so vivid that it was difficult to accept that they were thousands of years old. These works and the pharaonic inscriptions were by far more than Marai and Borda had dreamed of finding. Now they could return to Cairo with this historical trophy and an amazing story to tell.

Upon their return, Mark Borda immediately flew to London to get a quick translation of the Uwainat Inscriptions, as they are now known. At the Institute of Archaeology, University College London, Borda showed the photographs to Maltese Egyptologist Aloisia de Trafford and British ancient languages specialist Joe Clayton of Birkbeck College. We can imagine how these scholars felt as they read the two lines of hieroglyphs, and their bewilderment and excitement upon seeing the words
land of Yam
in the ancient text . . . even more because, by a strange coincidence, Clayton had written a thesis on Yam.