10,000–7000 BCE: (Forget the Gift of the Nile — The Environmental Setting of the Not-So-Deep-Time Story, During the Early Holocene Wet Phase the Spread of Ve…

10,000–7000 BCE: (Forget the Gift of the Nile — The Environmental Setting of the Not-So-Deep-Time Story, During the Early Holocene Wet Phase the Spread of Vegetation and Wildlife Across the Sahara Opening Lands Away from the River to Exploitation While High Flood Levels Led to the Abandonment of Areas Right Along the Nile, Ancient Egypt Before the Late Fourth Millennium Not Defined by the River but by the Wider Landscape): Before going further, Ehret insists that we understand the environmental setting of this history. Forget the idea of ancient Egypt as the gift of the Nile. That is a conception relevant only to periods dating after the late fourth millennium. During the early Holocene wet phase, from the tenth millennium down to the seventh millennium BCE, the spread of vegetation and wildlife across the Sahara opened the lands away from the river to effective exploitation by wild-grain collectors and hunters, while high flood levels along the Nile had already led early in the Holocene to the abandonment, for the most part, of the areas right along the river itself. This is a foundational reorientation. Every popular image of ancient Egypt — the narrow green ribbon of the Nile cutting through desert — describes a landscape that came into being only in the late fourth millennium BCE, when progressive desiccation forced populations back onto the river. Before that, for thousands of years, the people who were building the cultural foundations of what would become Egypt were not river people at all. They were steppe people, pastoralists and grain harvesters living across vast expanses of grassland that stretched west and east of the Nile, in a landscape that looked nothing like the Egypt of the pharaohs. The “gift of the Nile” is a description of pharaonic Egypt’s ecological prison, not its birthplace. The birthplace was the open steppe, the grasslands, the wide horizons of a greener Sahara — a landscape that was continuous with the Sudan to the south and that supported the culture area from which Egyptian civilization would emerge.