6000 BCE onward: (Cultural Convergence — Wengrow et al.’s Expression for the Long-Term Process by Which the Peoples of the Middle Nile Culture Area Came to S…

6000 BCE onward: (Cultural Convergence — Wengrow et al.’s Expression for the Long-Term Process by Which the Peoples of the Middle Nile Culture Area Came to Share Not Only a Common Economy but a Body of Common Cultural Ideas and Ritual Practices, Taking Hold from South of the Nile Confluence Northward into the Later Founding Regions of Old Kingdom Egypt, the Linguistic Boundary at Aswan Separating Eastern Sahelian Nilo-Saharan Speakers to the South from Speakers of the Language That Would Become Ancient Egyptian to the North): From 6000 BCE onward the peoples of these lands came to share much more than just a common economy. They also participated, to use Wengrow et al.’s expression, in a long-term history of cultural convergence, with a body of common cultural ideas and ritual practices taking hold from south of the Nile confluence region northward into the later founding regions of Old Kingdom Egypt. As far north as the latitude of Aswan, the participants in this history of cultural interaction would have spoken languages of the Eastern Sahelian (also called Eastern Sudanic) branch of Nilo-Saharan. From Aswan to El-Badari in Middle Egypt they spoke dialects of the language that would evolve into ancient Egyptian. The cultural convergence crossed the linguistic boundary. This is perhaps the most important detail in the entire passage: the peoples who were building a shared culture across this vast region did not all speak the same language. South of Aswan they spoke Nilo-Saharan languages; north of Aswan they spoke the ancestor of Egyptian. And yet the cultural convergence was deep enough to produce shared ceramic styles, shared ritual practices, shared ideas about the world. Language was not a barrier to cultural exchange. The Middle Nile Culture Area was multilingual from the start, and the civilization that emerged from it carried the imprint of both linguistic traditions — Afrasian in its language but deeply shaped by Nilo-Saharan cultural contributions from the south. Ancient Egypt was not just Afrasian. It was the product of an Afrasian-Nilo-Saharan cultural synthesis, forged over three millennia of interaction in the grasslands of the middle Nile.