(Egypt’s African Roots Flowing Northward — Africans Living Deep in the Continent Initiated and Contributed to the Same Trajectories of Change and Development…

(Egypt’s African Roots Flowing Northward — Africans Living Deep in the Continent Initiated and Contributed to the Same Trajectories of Change and Development as Peoples in Other Parts of the World Usually Just as Early and Sometimes Earlier, Early Egyptian Culture Itself Having Had Deep African Historical Roots, in the Fifth and Fourth Millennia BCE Predynastic Egyptians Becoming Participants in a Wider Specifically African Cultural Sphere of Cross-Cultural Interaction and Exchange Extending from Well South of the Sahara in Modern-Day Sudan Northward to Middle Egypt, the Key Influences That Shaped the Political and Cultural Foundations of Predynastic and Old Kingdom Egypt Having Flowed Northward from the Lands and Peoples South of Egypt and Not the Other Way Around): As the preceding chapters have revealed, in technology as well as in the great economic transitions of early world history, Africans living deep in the continent initiated and contributed to the same trajectories of change and development as peoples in other parts of the world — usually just as early, and sometimes earlier. Early Egyptian culture itself had deep African historical roots. In the fifth and fourth millennia BCE, predynastic Egyptians became participants in a wider, specifically African cultural sphere — a sphere of cross-cultural interaction and exchange that extended from well south of the Sahara in modern-day Sudan northward to Middle Egypt. The key influences that shaped the political and cultural foundations of predynastic and Old Kingdom Egypt flowed, more often than not, northward from the lands and peoples south of Egypt, and not the other way around. Ehret repeats his earlier conclusion with deliberate emphasis: the cultural traffic flowed northward. The sacral kingship, the astronomical knowledge, the burial practices, the royal iconography, the Divinity religion — these did not originate in the Delta and diffuse southward to Nubia. They originated in the Middle Nile Culture Area and flowed northward into Egypt. Egypt did not civilize Africa. Africa civilized Egypt — not as a one-time event but as a continuous process of cultural enrichment that lasted for two thousand years before the first pharaoh wore the double crown. The phrase Ehret repeats is the thesis of the entire book in miniature: “Ancient Egypt’s Africanity was much more than just geographical. Its African cultural and political roots were primary and foundational.”