The Southern Periphery of Egypt in the Predynastic Period: Nubia in the Fifth and Fourth Millennia BC

Nubia is the region located across the border of present Egypt and Sudan and extends between the First and the Sixth Cataract of the Nile River. Different cultural groups lived within ancient Nubia, but were not politically unified. Since the 5th millennium BC, this region acted as the southern periphery of the rising kingdom of ancient Egypt especially thanks its trading connections. Its relationship with Egypt was not reciprocal as Egypt depended more on Nubia than vice versa. While the Egyptian Nile Valley featured a vast alluvial plain, which supported sedentism, the Nubian Nile Valley was intersected by a series of rocky outcrops, which formed cataracts affecting the extent of the floods and impeding navigability. Consequently, sedentary settlements were not a successful form of adaptation in Nubia. Nomadism was more successful in the arid Nubian landscape and supported a higher independence from Egypt, as it allowed Nubians to avoid the needs for a great dependence on large quantities of resources, human labor, and political relations. Therefore, two opposite, but complementary, hierarchical systems were established: one based on agriculture with sedentism in Egypt and the other based on pastoralism with nomadism in Nubia. As the Egyptian dynastic kingdom developed c. 3200 BC, Nubia remained peripheral, but never became a ‘marginal’ political landscape and was able to sustain alternative pathways to power, which reached their peak with the rise of the Kerma civilization c. 2500 BC. As a matter of fact, at least three different peripheries, at different distances from Egypt, developed in Nubia according to the varying relationships/impacts they were able to have as a result of their landscape, social history, and proximity to Egypt. Differences between Egyptian and Nubian populations always remained in their material cultures, settlement systems, economic practices, political organizations, environment adaptations, as well as languages of different linguistic families.