Black Genesis (9 page)

The crested ibis sign (
),
akh
in ancient Egyptian, is an ideogram that denotes a supernatural being or entity of light or, more simply, a “light spirit.” So when
ta-akhet-iu
(people of the land of Akhet) is written with this
akh
sign coupled with the sign for “land” and the ideogram of three squatting divinities wearing an ostrich feather (
), we must read it as “land of the akh” or “land of the light spirits,” or, simply, “land of spirits.” Indeed, both the American Egyptologist Henry Breasted and the British Egyptologist Wallis Budge, in their independent translations of Pepi II's letter to Harkhuf, rendered the term
ta-akhet-iu
as “land of
spirits.”
⁴²
Even though “spirits” in this context implies inhabitants of a cosmic or imaginary land, the same cannot be said for the land of Yam, which is a geographical reality somewhere southwest of Egypt. Could the akh people also mean “ancestor spirits”? If so, who were these mysterious people whom Pepi II claimed populated the kingdom of Yam?

A detailed study of the letter of Pepi II was made by the French Egyptologist and philologist Charles
Kuentz,
⁴³
who reminds us that in Egyptian hieroglyphs the general idea of a divinity or spirit is given by the sign of a human figure donning the typical tress beard and squatting (
). Yet this was not the case in Harkhuf 's time, when a different sign—the falcon on a standard (
)—was used to denote “divinity.” Thus, the sign used in the letter of Pepi II as the ideogram in “land of the akh/spirits” (
) must therefore mean something else—something that should fit this geographical context of the region. One of Kuentz's colleagues, the German philologist A. Wiedemann, noted that this sign (
) appears in the Pyramid Texts to denote an African people. This is also confirmed by Kuentz, who wrote: “The determinative
which is placed
after
, denotes in the Unas Inscriptions the names of
Negroes.
”
⁴⁴

Kuentz also noted that in both the Harkhuf inscriptions and the letter of Pepi II, the names of African peoples are followed by the same determinative (
) used in the name for “the people of the Ahket land” (that is, the people of Yam). There can be no doubt, therefore, that these people were regarded as black-skinned. We will discuss this issue in more detail in chapter 5. Meanwhile, let us see what Carlo Bergmann has to say about the newly discovered Uwainat Inscriptions of Marai and Borda.

THE ROAD TO YAM AND TEKHEBET

Bergmann agreed with the Egyptologists who studied the Uwainat Inscriptions: they revealed two geographical locations, Yam and Tekhebet. Here is what he says of the Yam location:

. . . [I]ts geographical position has been misleadingly assigned to a “location between the first and second cataracts . . . further south than . . . Tumas, most likely also west of the Nile or . . . on either side of it . . . and south of the
oases.
⁴⁵
One reason for this misconception may be that, due to their social backgrounds, which are mainly upper or upper middle class, Egyptologists have for a century confused their own physically exhausting experiences in this region with the fitness levels of the ancients (e.g., Harkhuf or Weni and their followers) and have considerably underestimated the abilities of these people to travel to far away destinations even under unfavourable environmental
conditions.
⁴⁶

Bergmann then asserts that the final destination of the Abu Ballas Trail he discovered in 1999,

. . . continues from Gebel Uweinat further to the southwest [a fact that] is already indicated by the geographical position of the Mentuhotep II inscription site which is located on the south of Gebel Uweinat. Where does it lead to? Most probably to Yam and/ or to Tekhebet! Although it is a prominent
muhattah
[water station] along the route, the pottery hill of Abu Ballas, from which the trail gets its name, must be viewed as just one amongst many of the road's way [water] stations. So in the light of the new discoveries, the current name of the ancient road is neither appropriate nor accurate. In fact, it has definitely become obsolete. Therefore, a more suitable name is suggested: “The Road to Yam and
Tekhebet.”
⁴⁷

With all this in mind, we must now return to Nabta Playa and review in greater detail what the astronomer Kim Malville discovered there. This is crucial to our investigation, because much hinges—indeed, perhaps everything hinges—on his interpretation of the alignments of the megaliths that are found there.

SAHARA CLIMATE CYCLES: ANOTHER LINK TO THE STARS?

Before we look more closely at the initial discoveries at Nabta Playa, we must review the current knowledge of climate changes in the Sahara. In this process, we will see how yet another intriguing piece to the puzzle of early human's intimate association with the heavens links to Nabta Playa.

The climate in the Egyptian Sahara is harsh, sometimes even violent. The first night of our April 2008 expedition to Uwainat (told in more detail in chapter 5) was spent on an elevated pass somewhere in the deep, open desert. It was strangely cold at night, considering the extreme heat of daytime, and we shivered under our many layers of covers—from our cotton underwear to the padded sleeping bags—as the temperature plummeted to almost freezing during the late hours of the night. The reason for such huge temperature swings from day to night is due to the almost lunarlike conditions of the landscape and cloudless sky. The sun blazes in daytime, but after sunset the heat begins to whoosh out into space, sending the thermometer down toward the zero-degrees-centigrade mark. From this lack of clouds also comes the hyperaridity of the region, which is considered by climatologists as the driest on Earth. In deserts such as California's Death Valley there is some life—sparse plants, cacti, insects, lizards, occasional foxes, and even coyotes—but in the Egyptian Sahara, especially around places such as Nabta Playa, there seems to be no life at all. There are no plants, no animals, not even insects—only sand and rocks, blowing dust, drifting sand dunes, fossils, loose pebbles and compacted desert pavement, loose boulders, and bedrock outcrops. In other words, the deep Egyptian Sahara is the location on Earth most like the Martian landscape.

But it was not always so. In November 1981, the NASA space shuttle
Columbia
carried a radar-imaging camera from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory that was designed to view through the sands of the Sahara and “see” what was beneath. When the radar camera was trained on the Egyptian Sahara, it picked up the contours of dried-out ancient rivers and lakes beneath the
sands.
¹
This discovery jumpstarted a revolution in our understanding of the drastic climate changes of the ancient Sahara. We now know that the long-term climate of the Sahara has undergone violent swings.

Around 12,000 BCE, Earth's sea level rose suddenly more than 20 meters (about 66 feet) in less than two hundred
years.
²
This was the direct result of catastrophic glacial melting that heralded the beginning of an eight-thousand-year period scientists call the end of the last ice age, when sea levels rose 120 meters (almost 400 feet) essentially to the level they are today. The Mediterranean Sea also rose, causing the climate of the Sahara to fluctuate and change. Around 9000 BCE the monsoon rains moved north over what is now southwestern
Egypt,
³
drawn up possibly by low pressure over the collapsing ice sheets in the distant
north.
⁴
This ended a protracted dry period and brought in a humid period congenial to human and animal existence. Not surprisingly, soon thereafter the earliest human artifacts appear in the sediments at Nabta Playa. These sediments, which archaeologists are still digging through today, lie in and around the ancient
playa,
or seasonal lake (now permanently dry), and on top of much more ancient bedrock.

The surface of the now-covered bedrock was scoured by constant winds during many thousands of years of dry periods leading up to 9000 BCE. An area of softer bedrock was scoured more deeply by the winds, which created the depression that filled with water every summer season to become the playa during the monsoon season. This lasted to around 3500 BCE, after which the region became the hot, hyperdry place that it is today. The last humid period in the Egyptian Sahara, which lasted from about 9000 BCE to 3500 BCE, seems also to have ended abruptly. Yet scientists also know that there have been several humid periods before this last one. Paleoclimatologists are finding that humid or wet periods in the Sahara occur with curious regularity, which suggests that these periods might be linked to Earth's cyclical geological changes. Paleoceanographer and marine geologist Peter B. deMenocal studied sediment cores from the eastern Atlantic Ocean to measure the past climate of the Sahara. These sediments, which were originally created by wind-carried dust and sand that then settled to the bottom of the ocean to form layers, act as graduations for measuring climate changes over long periods of time in the same way that rings in tree trunks can tell us of annual weather variations. The phases of the humid periods that deMenocal found in the ocean sediments matched those that the geologists found in the sediment layers at Nabta Playa. DeMenocal was able to show that the humid Sahara periods occurred regularly, about every twenty thousand years, and, furthermore, that they always began and ended suddenly. According to deMenocal, the cause of these sudden climate fluctuations from humid to dry were linked to the cyclical changes of Earth's motion with respect to the fixed
stars.
⁵

The basis of deMenocal's research relating climatic changes to the fixed stars began in 1920. Interestingly, in that same year Ahmed Hassanein and Rosita Forbes undertook their fateful expedition to the Kufra oasis (which eventually led to the discovery, a few years later, of the massifs of Jebel Uwainat and Gilf Kebir), and in that year the Serbian mathematician Milutin Milankovitch (1879–1958) published his controversial paper that would become a foundation in the science of climate
change.
⁶
The Milankovitch Curve, as his theory is known, was based on an elegant and simple notion: the small, gradual, annual changes in Earth's orbit around the sun as well as the spin of its axis when considered over many thousands of years will create sizeable recurring cycles causing Earth to receive sometimes more, sometimes less light and heat from the sun, which will cause significant climate changes. These changes are the result of three phenomena of Earth's movements:
precession, obliquity,
and
eccentricity.

1. Precession is a gyrating motion of Earth's axis, which causes the planet to wobble like a spinning top, making a complete cycle every twenty-six thousand years or so.
   
2. Obliquity is the angle of tilt that Earth's axis makes with the plane of its orbit around the sun. This angle moves up and down in a slow cycle of about forty-one thousand years, known as the obliquity of the ecliptic. Today the angle is 23.4 degrees, but, for example, in 5000 BCE it was about 24.1 degrees. Like the precession cycle, astrophysicists today can calculate with a great deal of accuracy exact changes in past and future
   obliquity.
   ⁷
   
3. Eccentricity is the elongatedness (that is, the
   perihelion
   and
   aphelion
   ) of Earth's elliptical orbit around the sun, which changes in a complex cycle of about one hundred thousand years.
   ^*4
   

Precession and the Zodiacal Belt

The sun at the equinoxes (March 21 and September 22) is located in the sky against a backdrop of a particular group of stars or constellations that lie along the so-called zodiacal belt. Every year the position of the sun along the zodiacal belt at the equinoxes moves, or
pre
cesses,
a tiny amount so that, in about twenty-six thousand years, the sun makes a complete cycle around the entire zodiac. Although the precise number of years per each full precession cycle always changes a bit, astrophysicists today can calculate the duration of precessional cycles, past and future, with a great deal of
accuracy.
⁸

These three effects—precession, obliquity, and eccentricity—when taken together, cause long-term climate change every twenty thousand to twenty-six thousand years—such as, for example, the great ice ages known to have occurred in the distant past. Around ten thousand years from now, Earth will be closest to the sun in midsummer, as it was about ten thousand years ago. This approximate twenty thousand–year perihelion cycle is caused essentially by the precession of the equinox cycle, and it is shortened somewhat by the change in the eccentricity cycle.

This brings us back to Peter deMenocal, for while studying the sediment layers of the eastern Atlantic Ocean bed, he found that specifically in the Sahara region the climate had switched from wet to dry every twenty thousand years or so over hundreds of thousands of years, and that such switches had taken place quite suddenly. Searching for the causes of these sudden switches, it occurred to deMenocal that the Milankovitch Cycle matched very well the wet-dry
cycle.
⁹
DeMenocal found that the most recent switch from wet to dry occurred around
3500 BCE
¹⁰
in a time frame that could be “felt within one
lifetime.”
¹¹
Let us immediately highlight the fact that 3500 BC is when, according to anthropologists, the prehistoric people of Nabta Playa abandoned their ceremonial site and departed from the Sahara . . . and also when, according to Egyptologists the predynastic phase of the ancient Egyptian civilization is supposed to have begun.

TRACKING THE STARS

Living all their lives in the open desert under the clear, cloudless sky, the prehistoric people of the Sahara were highly tuned to changes in the position of the celestial bodies, and the evidence at Nabta Playa shows that they were not only aware of the long-term motion of precession but also that they must have placed great importance on this stellar cycle, because it seemed to affect the climate of the Sahara and, consequently, their ability to survive in this region that depended so much on suitable seasonal wet conditions.

We are fully aware, of course, that scholars and historians of astronomy attribute the knowledge of precession—and even the awareness of it—not to ancient cultures, but rather to the Greeks when Hipparchus of Nicaea supposedly discovered this phenomenon in 120 BCE. As we will see in chapter 6, however, this consensus no longer stands to close scrutiny, and the new evidence shows, if not proves, that the ancient pre-Hellenic cultures were aware of precession and may even have recorded its long effect in the astronomical alignments of their megalithic monuments. To put it more bluntly, Hipparchus did not discover precession; he
rediscovered
it. It is now a fact and not a theory that humid periods occurred every twenty thousand years or so during the past two hundred thousand years, which directly affected the movements and the culture of the people living in the Egyptian Sahara region. It is also a fact and not a theory that these humid periods were directly linked to precession and the apparent displacement of the stars during these twenty thousand years or so. In addition, it is a fact that the Sahara in Egypt is now generally regarded by paleoanthropologists as one of the crucibles, indeed if not the principal crucible, of civilization.

Is it possible, then, that the ancient megalith builders of Nabta Playa somehow knew that there was a correlation between the cycle of the climate and the cycle of the stars? It may seem to us that this is entirely possible for a people that lived for millennia in a region where the conditions forced them to perform daily and nightly observations of the sun and stars and develop a great knowledge of the celestial cycles and, eventually, incorporate this knowledge into the ceremonial complexes at Nabta Playa.