Nilo-Saharans
The Nilo-Saharans are an ethnolinguistic group associated with the Nilo-Saharan languages, primarily located in the regions of the Sudan and the Sahara. They are recognized for their significant contributions to agriculture, particularly in developing and disseminating Sudanic agriculture between 9000 and 5000 B.C.E. This agricultural innovation spread south into eastern Africa around 3500 B.C.E. The Nilo-Saharans are also noted for establishing some of Africa's earliest states and societies, including notable groups like the Maasai and the Songhay.
Historically, the Nilo-Saharan peoples can be divided into two major groupings: the Northern Sudanians, who pioneered agriculture and the domestication of wild cattle and plants, and the Aquatic tradition peoples, who thrived on fishing and gathering along rivers and lakes. A shift in climate around 6500 B.C.E. favored the agricultural practices of the Northern Sudanian farmers, leading to their dominance in the region.
Culturally, the Nilo-Saharans developed early forms of monotheism, conceptualizing Divinity as a single force associated with nature. Political structures also evolved, with the emergence of sacral chiefship and later sacral kingship, influencing state-building in various African kingdoms, including ancient Egypt. This rich historical legacy showcases the pivotal role of Nilo-Saharan cultures in shaping the social and political landscapes of Africa.
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Nilo-Saharans
Date: beginning 9000-5000 b.c.e.
Locale: Central and eastern Africa
Nilo-Saharans
Nilo-Saharan peoples invented and spread a distinctive kind of agriculture across the vast Sudan belt of Africa between 9000 and 5000 b.c.e. and also brought that agriculture southward after 3500 into eastern Africa. They were also among the creators of the earliest great states of the African continent. Their modern-day descendants include many well-known societies, from the Maasai of East Africa to the Songay people of Mali in West Africa.
In the ninth millennium b.c.e., two major groupings of people emerged among the ancient Nilo-Saharans. The Northern Sudanians, residing in the southeastern Sahara—then a region of sparse grassland and steppes—were the initiators of the earliest indigenous African agriculture, Sudanic agriculture. Between 9000 and 7500 b.c.e., they participated, along with their eastern neighbors, the Cushitic Afrasan peoples, in domesticating the African variety of wild cattle. Then, around 7500 b.c.e., the Northern Sudanians began to domesticate several indigenous wild plants, most notably cotton and sorghum, both of which came to have worldwide importance. Until about 6500 b.c.e., however, they pursued their agricultural activities in only a few areas.
Through most of the rest of the southern Sahara, a different set of Nilo-Saharan peoples, belonging to the Aquatic tradition, predominated from 9000 to 6500 b.c.e. Along the then numerous rivers and lakes of the region, they pursued a water-based way of life, hunting hippos, fishing extensively, and gathering plant foods. First developed around 9000 b.c.e., the Aquatic livelihood spread rapidly across Africa from the bend of the Niger and the Hoggar Mountains in the west to as far east as the Nile River and Lake Turkana. For more than two thousand years, the Aquatic way of life prospered.
However, beginning around 6500 b.c.e., there ensued a one-thousand-year period of drier climate in which the rivers and lakes shrank, cutting into the food supplies of the Aquatic communities. Taking advantage of this shift of fortune, the Northern Sudanian farmers expanded far and wide across the southern Sahara, absorbing the Aquatic peoples into new societies. From 5500 b.c.e. onward, farming and cattle raising became the dominant means of livelihood all across the regions now called the Sudan and Sahel belts of Africa.
The Nilo-Saharan peoples developed the earliest version of monotheism known. From around the eighth millennium b.c.e., they came to believe in a single Divinity that undergirded existence. The Nilo-Saharan names for this belief are translated with the word “Divinity” rather than “god,” because the early Nilo-Saharans understood Divinity as more of a single force or condition of spirit than a discrete being. They symbolized Divinity’s power with celestial imagery, associating Divinity especially with rain and lightning. The Northern Sudanians, it is believed, spread this new belief during their periods of agricultural expansion.
Some of the early Nilo-Saharans also developed a potent and long-lived political ideology called Sudanic sacral chiefship. In this ideology, chiefs were deeply sacred persons, and their everyday human functions, such as eating, were hidden from the view of everyone. In several regions, this kind of chiefship evolved fairly soon into a sacral kingship, with the kings ruling over very small kingdoms. Along the middle Nile River, this level of rule arose no later than the fourth millennium b.c.e. In the Air Mountains region of the south-central Sahara, the archaeological evidence places its appearance in the third millennium b.c.e. Along with the rise of sacral kingship came a new custom, the killing and the burying of servants with a dead king, so that they could serve the king in the afterlife as they had in this world.
The ideas of Sudanic sacral kingship had a deep and lasting influence on the development of state institutions in the Sudan and Sahara of Africa. The Kerma kingdom (c. 2400-1570 b.c.e.) along the Nubian stretches of the Nile built its power on this basis, as did the much later kingdoms of Nobatia and Alwa (Alodia), before they adopted Christianity in the sixth century c.e. The famous later West African empire of Wagadu (c. 300-1200 c.e.), also called Ghana, was founded on these ideas. The Kanem and Borno empires of the central Sudan (800-1900 c.e.) had a Sudanic sacral basis. Most notably, the ancient Egyptians adopted key elements of this same political ideology in their earliest states. Until the Third Dynasty of the Old Kingdom, they followed the very Sudanic practice of burying servants along with the dead pharaohs. Both then and later, the pharaohs, unlike the kings of the nearby ancient Middle East, claimed the sacred status of gods themselves.
Bibliography
Bender, M. L. Topics in Nilo-Saharan Linguistics. Hamburg, Germany: Buske, 1989.
Ehret, Christopher. “Nilo-Saharans and the Saharo-Sudanese Neolithic.” In Archaeology of Africa, edited by Thurston Shaw, Paul Sinclair, Bassey Andah, and Alex Okpoko. New York: Routledge, 1993.