9700–5500 BCE: (The Assimilation of Aquatic Communities by Pastoral Nilo-Saharans — The Aquatic Way of Life Remaining Viable Along Streams and Lakes While th…

9700–5500 BCE: (The Assimilation of Aquatic Communities by Pastoral Nilo-Saharans — The Aquatic Way of Life Remaining Viable Along Streams and Lakes While the Expanding Pastoral Nilo-Saharan-Speaking Communities Assimilated Aquatic Groups and Their Cultural and Political Ideas Such as Sacred Kingship into Their Own Cultures, Two Separate African Inventions of Ceramic Technology Emerging in Tandem with These Evolving Subsistence Systems — the Third and Fourth Earliest Such Inventions in World History): The Aquatic way of life remained viable right along the streams and lakes, and the expanding pastoral Nilo-Saharan-speaking communities appear often to have assimilated Aquatic groups and their cultural and political ideas, such as sacred kingship, into their cultures. Even more notably, in two far distant African regions the evolving new ways of subsistence emerged in tandem with a major technological development: two separate inventions of ceramic technology — the third- and fourth-earliest such inventions in world history. The West African inventors utilized the new technology from the beginning to make cooking pots. In the eastern Sahara, the earliest pottery among the Nilo-Saharan-speaking inventors included vessels for carrying water as well as for cooking food. Later, among the early mid-Holocene Nilo-Saharan herding and grain-cultivating peoples in particular, pots became important for the cooking of grains in the form of porridge. The detail about sacred kingship is the one that resonates most deeply with the later history of the Nile Valley. The Aquatic communities — those fishing and hippo-hunting peoples of the green Sahara’s waterways — had developed the institution of sacred kingship, and when the expanding pastoral Nilo-Saharans absorbed them, they absorbed this institution along with the people who practiced it. Sacred kingship did not originate among pastoralists or grain farmers. It originated among fishermen. The institution that would eventually find its most elaborate expression in the divine pharaoh of Egypt had its roots in the Aquatic Civilization of Middle Africa, among communities whose economy was built on the waters of a Sahara that no longer exists. And the ceramic technology that emerged alongside these subsistence transformations was not a luxury. It was a necessity — the vessel that made grain porridge possible, the container that made water portable, the tool that turned raw grain into edible food. The pot and the porridge: two of the humblest objects in human material culture, and both of them African innovations that preceded their Near Eastern counterparts by millennia.