6000–5500 BCE onward: (The Scholarly Consensus on the Middle Nile Culture Area — Fekri Hassan’s Groundbreaking 1988 Article Introducing This Perspective, Dav…

6000–5500 BCE onward: (The Scholarly Consensus on the Middle Nile Culture Area — Fekri Hassan’s Groundbreaking 1988 Article Introducing This Perspective, David Wengrow and Coauthors Bringing These Findings Up to Date in Antiquity, Showing the Emergence from 6000–5500 BCE Onward of a Shared Complex of Cultural Developments Called the Primary Pastoral Community Extending from South of the Nile Confluence to El-Badari in Middle Egypt, the Economy Not Wholly Pastoral but Also Including Grain Collecting Cultivating and Harvesting): The existence of this common cultural world is now becoming the general understanding among the archaeologists who have contributed so greatly, over the past four decades, to widening and deepening knowledge of those regions and times. The noted Egyptian archaeologist Fekri Hassan introduced this emerging perspective to a wider readership in a groundbreaking 1988 article in the Journal of World Prehistory. More recently, David Wengrow and his coauthors bring these findings up to date in the journal Antiquity. They show that what took place was the emergence, from 6000–5500 BCE onward, across the whole expanse — from a couple hundred kilometers south of the Abbai and White Nile confluence to as far north as El-Badari in Middle Egypt — of a shared complex of cultural developments, what they have called the primary pastoral community. The economy of this culture area was not wholly pastoral. A variety of evidence, both linguistic and archaeological and from human dental remains, reveals that collecting, cultivating, and harvesting of grains and other crops took place as well. The scholarly consensus has shifted decisively. What four decades ago was a radical proposition — that Egyptian civilization grew out of a cultural continuum stretching deep into Sudan — is now the working framework of the field’s leading practitioners. Hassan, Wengrow, and their colleagues have demonstrated through rigorous archaeology what Ehret’s linguistic and comparative cultural evidence had long implied: the foundations of ancient Egypt were laid not in the Delta or the Mediterranean littoral but in the vast pastoral and agricultural landscape of the middle Nile, a landscape that was African to its core.