We knew Epipaleolithic hunter-gatherers in Nabta Playa—Bir Kiseiba had considerable amount of population of wild aurochs. We knew they had cattle cult, ritualistic funerary practices where the animal was very much one central piece. I think, if not domestication, they for sure did some handling of the animal way before the domestication of the cattle altogether anywhere. I think the linguistics, from the early layers of Nilo-Saharan, point to cattle as, not domesticated for farming purposes but for meat of primary disposition.
The cattle can very much have been domesticated by people of the Sudanic belt, goats and sheep were introduced by Afro-Asiatic speakers, donkeys, the first beast of burden, were domesticated by Cushities. The linguistic origin for cattle was indeed very original to Nilo-Saharan and not borrowings, unlike other domesticated animals that got diffused later.
You know what, in the early days, the Sudanic Civilization had stronger influence on Egypt than vice versa. Egypt lie to the periphery of a greater cultural sphere of interaction that went to the middle Nile. More influence came from this Sudanic civilization than the other way around. More loanwords for agricultural aspects, like edible gourds and watermelon (domesticated and native to Sudan), wooden trough, kind of beer, kind of cattle pen, other evidence from material culture, often in conjunction of botanical evidence, thornbush byre, a characteristic of the Sudanese Neolithic agricultural feature that spread to Egypt.
Another noteworthy technological development was the invention of cotton weaving in the sixth millennium B.C.E. That conclusion was reached through two lines of evidence, botanical and archeological. Cotton is a native wild plant of the Sudan belt, and was undoubtedly domesticated in the eastern part of Sudan, as botanical studies have shown. From the complimentary archeological position, discovering spindlewhorls, not only indirectly indicates early domestication of the plant, but further tells us that the cotton fibers were spun into threads. So far known, the earliest of these tools have been discovered, belonging to the Khartoum Neolithic site, dated to the sixth millennium B.C.E. Another from the fourth millennium B.C.E in a farming village called the Shaheinab. The archeologist who work in those places wrote two thick books sixty years ago, but did not know what those findings were so it was left unrecognized for a long time. Egypt, in contrast, did not get this technology, from what I believe, a diffusion, until much later. So skipped Egypt and went to the middle-east and into Indus Valley.
One crucial aspect of the origins of a unique sense of sacral kingship got spread as a package from Sudan. These kings used to bury their servants with them, for them to join in the afterlife, what was thought as a replicate of this one. Does this sound familiar? This was a tradition along a four thousand miles stretch, all the way from Ghana to the eastern Sahel, and started from the Eastern Sudan area before this practice was put in place in Egypt. That amount of land had less kingship tradition diversity than, the more cultural interactive near east that had much more differentiation from place to place. This unique tradition, was in fact, a deep culture that was not spread by everyday intersocial contact, but was a form of bedrock of a peoples social and ethnic self-identification.
These Sudanic peoples believed in a more "monotheistic" divine that contrasted the Egyptians (and unlike Egyptians, the Sudanic kings/chieftains did not consider themselves divine), but the latter peoples grafted this sacral aspect to kingship into their polytheistic religious environment. Egypt at the early and pre-days, was basically sourcing their culture from Upper Egypt, contemporaneously, considered a very north periphery of a wide Sudanic Civilization, so even if Egypt was not part of the integral Sudanic Civilization, there was cross-cultural influence that nested itself deep into Egyptian culture before uniting Upper and Lower and then kickstarting the dynastic periods. Before this happened, the biggest kingdom was Ta-Seti, a kingdom that ruled Upper Egypt from the 34th millennium B.C.E to the 32-millennium B.CE, but Upper Egypt defeated them completely because they had a larger population, better land for cultivation, etc., and subsequently merged Upper and Lower Egypt into one.
, How much do we know about these Al-Khiday people? Were their remains found in Egypt proper (or at least the area between first cataract and Egypt-Sudan border)?
