Northeast Africa

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Northeast Africa

Northeast Africa, or Northeastern Africa, or Northern East Africa as it was known in the past, encompasses the countries of Africa situated in and around the Red Sea. The region is intermediate between North Africa and East Africa, and encompasses the Horn of Africa (Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Somalia), as well as Sudan, South Sudan, Libya,and Egypt. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] The region has a very long history of habitation with fossil finds from the early hominids to modern human and is one of the most culturally and linguistically diverse regions of the world, being the home to many civilizations and located on an important trade route that connects multiple continents. [8] [9] [10] [11] [12]

Mainstream scholars have situated the ethnicity and the origins of predynastic, southern Egypt as a foundational community primarily in northeast Africa which included the Sudan, tropical Africa and the Sahara whilst recognising the population variability that became characteristic of the pharaonic period. [13] [14] [15] [16] Pharaonic Egypt featured a physical gradation across the regional populations, with Upper Egyptians having shared more biological affinities with Sudanese and southernly African populations, whereas Lower Egyptians had closer genetic links with Levantine and Mediterranean populations. [17] [18] [19]

See also

References

  1. ↑ White, Donald; White, Arthur P. (1996). "Coastal Sites of Northeast Africa: The Case Against Bronze Age Ports" . Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt. 33: 11–30. doi:10.2307/40000602. ISSN   0065-9991. JSTOR   40000602.
  2. ↑ Swain, Ashok (December 1997). "Ethiopia, the Sudan, and Egypt: The Nile River Dispute" . The Journal of Modern African Studies. 35 (4): 675–694. doi:10.1017/S0022278X97002577. ISSN   1469-7777. S2CID   154735027.
  3. ↑ Sadr, Karim (30 January 2017). The Development of Nomadism in Ancient Northeast Africa. University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN   978-1-5128-1854-3.
  4. ↑ Schandelmeier, Heinz; Thorweihe, Ulf (14 December 2017). Geoscientific Research in Northeast Africa. CRC Press. ISBN   978-1-351-44524-5.
  5. ↑ "Northeast Africa is neither geographically or climatically uniform. Internally it varies widely in altitude, rainfall patterns, river systems, soil types and vegetation cover. In most historical studies the region is also further divided according to strict cultural and political boundaries. It is unusual, for instance, to compare the Sudan with the countries of East Africa, or Ethiopia with anything but itself. Yet the study of the history of ecological relationships makes possible, at the same time that it requires, a recognition of a broader outline to the region which not only acknowledges, but knits together its diverse range of societies".Johnson, Douglas H.; Anderson, David M. (26 June 2019). The Ecology Of Survival: Case Studies From Northeast African History. Routledge. pp. 1–15. ISBN   978-1-000-31615-5.
  6. ↑ Reid, Richard J. (24 March 2011). Frontiers of Violence in North-East Africa: Genealogies of Conflict Since C.1800. Oxford University Press. pp. 1–25. ISBN   978-0-19-921188-3.
  7. ↑ Kendie, Daniel (1988). "Northeast Africa and the World Economic Order". Northeast African Studies. 10 (1): 69–82. ISSN   0740-9133. JSTOR   43661171.
  8. ↑ Mitchell, Peter; Lane, Paul (2013-07-04). The Oxford Handbook of African Archaeology. OUP Oxford. ISBN   978-0-19-162615-9.
  9. ↑ Klees, Frank; Kuper, Rudolph (1992-01-01). New light on the Northeast African past : current prehistoric research: Contributions to a symposium, Cologne 1990. Heinrich-Barth-Institut.
  10. ↑ Hepburn, H. Randall; Radloff, Sarah E. (2013-03-14). Honeybees of Africa. Springer Science & Business Media. ISBN   978-3-662-03604-4.
  11. ↑ Daniel, Kendie (1988). NORTHEAST AFRICA AND THE WORLD ECONOMIC ORDER. Michigan, US. pp. 69–82.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  12. ↑ Project MUSE. (2020). Northeast African Studies . Retrieved March 22, 2020. "This distinguished journal is devoted to the scholarly analysis of Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti, Somalia, and Sudan, as well as the Nile Valley, the Red Sea, and the lands adjacent to both."
  13. ↑ "There is now a sufficient body of evidence from modern studies of skeletal remains to indicate that the ancient Egyptians, especially southern Egyptians, exhibited physical characteristics that are within the range of variation for ancient and modern indigenous peoples of the Sahara and tropical Africa. The distribution of population characteristics seems to follow a clinal pattern from south to north, which may be explained by natural selection as well as gene flow between neighboring populations. In general, the inhabitants of Upper Egypt and Nubia had the greatest biological affinity to people of the Sahara and more southerly areas.”Lovell, Nancy C. (1999). "Egyptians, physical anthropology of". In Bard, Kathryn A.; Shubert, Steven Blake (eds.). Encyclopedia of the Archaeology of Ancient Egypt. London: Routledge. pp. 328–331. ISBN   0415185890.
  14. ↑ “The data clearly suggests that the population in southern Egypt became more diverse as the society more complex (Keita 1992). Egyptian society seems never to have been “closed”, and it is hard to believe that the modal phenotype could have remain unchanged, especially if social and sexual collection were operating. However, it is important to emphasize that, while the biology changed with increasing local social complexity, the ethnicity of Niloto-Saharo-Sudanese origins did not change. The cultural morays, ritual formulae, and symbols used in writing, as far as can be ascertained, remained true to their southern origins”.Keita, S. O. Y. (1993). "Studies and Comments on Ancient Egyptian Biological Relationships". History in Africa. 20: 129–154. doi:10.2307/3171969. ISSN   0361-5413. JSTOR   3171969. S2CID   162330365.
  15. ↑ |p.85–“The physical anthropological findings from the major burial sites of those founding locales of ancient Egypt in the millennium BCE, notably El-Badari as well as Naqada, show no demographic indebtedness to the Levant. They reveal instead a population with cranial and dental features with closest parallels of those of other longtime populations of the surrounding areas of northeastern Africa, such as Nubia and the northern Horn of Africa. Members of this population did not come from somewhere else but were descendants of the long-term inhabitants of these portions of Africa going back many millennia.”Ehret, Christopher (20 June 2023). Ancient Africa: A Global History, to 300 CE. Princeton: Princeton University Press. pp. 83–86, 97, 167–169. ISBN   978-0-691-24409-9. Archived from the original on 22 March 2023. Retrieved 20 March 2023.
  16. ↑ p.355 - “The importance of iconographic sources was emphasized in the main. Säve-Söderbergh and Leclant stressed that the links indicated by cave paintings between the vast expanses of the Sahara and the banks of the Nile nodded to a migration of peoples of the Sahara and groups from the South to the valley –something confirmed by research over the last thirty years. Diop set out to return Egypt to its southern African hinterland by systematically using Pharaonic statues and art to support his point of view. Although a debate on the north-south orientation of a ‘civilizing’ wave of peoples in the valley had prevailed up to that point, the avalanche of new data now made this idea redundant, suggesting instead the image of a growing and unifying political movement in the valley from south to north that repositioned its starting point back in time: in Upper Egypt, digs at the Uj tomb of King Scorpion at the Abydos necropolis push back the origin of the first Horus back to circa 3250 BCE, and the resumption of excavations at Nekhen led to the exhumation of the famous ‘Elephant Kings’ of Hierakonpolis (Nekhen) which have no inscriptions and date back even further to circa 3700 BCE.”
    p.356 - “It quantified the key impact of sub-Saharan populations and found a clear link between the Siwi and the peoples of North-East Africa. We could continue with work by Zakrzewski on the predynastic population of Nekhen, investigations by Crubezy which traced the boundaries of the ancient Khoisan settlement to Upper Egypt, where its faint traces remain identifiable, and Keita’s work, as the most groundbreaking.”'
    p.356 - “Hence the work by Cerny’s team highlighting the close links between the peoples of Upper Egypt, North Cameroon and Ethiopia – the Cameroon people living in the Mandara mountains speaking Chadic languages, and the Ethiopians speaking Kushitic languages, prior to Ge’ez being spread throughout the region during the Aksumite period. This broadens the linguistic debate to include language families that had been little studied or used in comparisons that have long focused on the East.” Anselin, Alain. "Review of Ancient Civilizations of Africa: General History of Africa Volume II " in (General history of Africa, IX: General history of Africa revisited. pp. 355–75.
  17. ↑ Zakrzewski, Sonia R. (April 2007). "Population continuity or population change: Formation of the ancient Egyptian state". American Journal of Physical Anthropology. 132 (4): 501–509. Bibcode:2007AJPA..132..501Z. doi:10.1002/ajpa.20569. PMID   17295300. When Mahalanobis D2 was used, the Naqadan and Badarian Predynastic samples exhibited more similarity to Nubian, Tigrean, and some more southern series than to some mid- to late Dynasticseries from northern Egypt (Mukherjee et al., 1955). The Badarian have been found to be very similar to a Kerma sample (Kushite Sudanese), using both the Penrose statistic (Nutter, 1958) and DFA of males alone (Keita,1990). Furthermore, Keita considered that Badarian males had a southern modal phenotype, and that together with a Naqada sample, they formed a southern Egyptian cluster as tropical variants together with a sample from Kerma
  18. ↑ "Southern Egypt and Nubia are geographically co-extensive, with populations grading into each other. The absorption of Qustul’s people would have reinforced this. There is biological overlap of these populations in origin, but ongoing admixture is also apparent."Keita, S. O. Y. (September 2022). "Ideas about "Race" in Nile Valley Histories: A Consideration of "Racial" Paradigms in Recent Presentations on Nile Valley Africa, from "Black Pharaohs" to Mummy Genomest". Journal of Ancient Egyptian Interconnections.
  19. ↑ Hassan, Fekri. "The African Dimension of Egyptian Origins (May 2021)".
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