15,000 BCE onward: (The Very-Deep-Time Story as Cultural Transplantation, Not Merely Migration — The Movement of People from Farther South in Africa Bringing…

15,000 BCE onward: (The Very-Deep-Time Story as Cultural Transplantation, Not Merely Migration — The Movement of People from Farther South in Africa Bringing Not Only a New Subsistence Economy but Also a New Society with Its Language and Many of Its Cultural Ideas and Practices, the Incoming Culture Becoming Dominant While Still Retaining Features from the Previous Eras, Religion as a Key Domain Where This Cultural Process Plays Out): The very-deep-time story of ancient Egypt’s foundations is not only about the movement of people from farther south in Africa bringing a new subsistence economy north to the existing inhabitants of the Egyptian Nile regions. It is also the story of the establishment of a new society, with its language and many of its cultural ideas and practices brought in by those same immigrants. The new cultural blend that emerged drew strongly on the practices of the incoming people, even though still retaining cultural features from the previous eras. This is a crucial framing. What arrived in the Nile Valley around 15,000 BCE was not simply a new way of harvesting grain. It was an entire cultural package — a language, a set of social practices, a system of religious belief, a way of organizing the relationship between human communities and the natural world. The proto-North Erythraic speakers brought their world with them, and it was their world — modified, blended, enriched by contact with the existing population — that would form the cultural bedrock of ancient Egyptian civilization. Religion, Ehret notes, is one of the areas of culture where this kind of process often plays out most visibly, because religion is where a society’s deepest assumptions about the nature of reality are encoded. And it is in the religious vocabulary of the Afrasian languages that some of the most striking evidence for the African origins of Egyptian civilization can be found.