The Somalis and the Camel: a Historic Economic Development Toward Islamic Period

[Zak12]

Anyone who thinks nomads are incapable of building civilization are ignorant of history at best and intentionally dishonest at worst. Various nomadic cultures from the Arabs, to Turkics, to the ancient Scythians all had complex and developed societies with advanced trade networks and numerous towns and urban centers linking those networks together. Ibn Battuta flat out also describes a huge city like Mogadishu as being nomadic in character.

Even within Africa, nomadic cultures like the Tuaregs and Fula people had plenty of towns and kingdoms which dare I say, were more advanced than the farmer based societies of most of Sub-Sahara Africa. And of course, I'm sure many of you know how sedentary medieval Ethiopia was almost entirely devoid of any proper urbanism with its kings preferring nomadic encampments as their capitals.

 

[Three Moons]

Another classic by @The alchemist. I really hope a lot of the stuff discussed and revealed in this Culture section eventually makes its way into publication.

 

[Idilinaa]

Anyone who thinks nomads are incapable of building civilization are ignorant of history at best and intentionally dishonest at worst. Various nomadic cultures from the Arabs, to Turkics, to the ancient Scythians all had complex and developed societies with advanced trade networks and numerous towns and urban centers linking those networks together. Ibn Battuta flat out also describes a huge city like Mogadishu as being nomadic in character.

Even within Africa, nomadic cultures like the Tuaregs and Fula people had plenty of towns and kingdoms which dare I say, were more advanced than the farmer based societies of most of Sub-Sahara Africa. And of course, I'm sure many of you know how sedentary medieval Ethiopia was almost entirely devoid of any proper urbanism with its kings preferring nomadic encampments as their capitals.

I am starting to believe it's you people who think this way and trying to desperately force this narrative about. It's not Ethiopians but in response to me positioning the advantage of camels and it's importance in regional trade systems.

Empasizing ''nomads'' ignores the fact that a lot of nomads adopt agriculture or become settled people in towns. Thats what happened to all the groups who you have mentioned , including Somalis and nomads became thereby involved in a exchange system.

As i've tried to explain:

This is the problem with creating this fantasy of nomadic-sedentary opposition. Not only does it avoid economic analysis but it also disconnected from the interractions between farmers , towns people and nomadic herders and how urbanism has to do with accumulation of wealth and resources in one spot that trade/exchange draws in.

Ibn Batttuta doesn't say Mogadishu has a nomadic character, it was Ibn Khaldun that remarked this.

However Ibn Batutta talked about how the inhabitants in Zayla and Mogadishu having many camels and slaughter hundreds of them everyday. It tells you that the inhabitants were economically connected to and was an extension of the pastoral herders of the interior. Aside from the grain exports that also tells you they procured these agriculural products from settled Somali farmers in the shabelle valley.

And Mogadishu itself relied on a camel caravan that entered in different directions from the interior, for import/export. And its population largely reflected this, those who controlled and directed that trade had members of them living in the towns permanently.

 

[Zak12]

and trying to desperately force this narrative about

Its the exact argument that one Harari troll on this forum and many others on the internet use when discussing Somali history. Its not even new, colonial era scholars thought the pastoral Somali wasn't responsible for any of the civilizations due to their lifestyle.

or become settled people in towns.

Right, obviously you need settled people for towns but my point is how cultures that were traditionally nomadic were capable of transitioning into these settled lifestyles without necessarily abandoning their nomadic roots. A portion of the population may become settled while the rest will still be nomadic but interact heavily with the settled people. That is what many nomadic cultures did.

 

[Idilinaa]

Its the exact argument that one Harari troll on this forum and many others on the internet use when discussing Somali history.
.

Let me just qoute what i said in another post:

Just calmly explain simply why he is wrong , or just ignore em .

Saying Somalis are primitive as a Harari is actually delusional. If Somalis who controlled the trade camel caravan and commerce of the city to export out of our own coastal ports and was the majority craftsmen inside the town, part of the clergy class and cultivated cash crops like coffee in the vincinity of the Harar are primitive , what does that make Hararis or other Ethiopians?

Petty stuff hardly worth fussing over, there is more i can mention but you catch my drift.

Maybe they look at Somalis through the lens of cultural stereotypes by Christians, that serves to separate the lowlands and from the highlands: and lack that familiarity of us. It seems to be common in christian highland depictions.

Its not even new, colonial era scholars thought the pastoral Somali wasn't responsible for any of the civilizations due to their lifestyle.

The colonial era historians actually believed the opposite , they believed that pastoral nomads came from the middle east and overran to quote their words ''Dumb Agricultural Negroes'' and created Africa's civilizations: That they brought advances etc and Somalis among other groups were an example of this imbued with Caucasian blood from the near east.

It's literally what typified the Hamitic Hypothesis: ''whether this influence was exerted by highly civilized Egyptians or by such wider pastoralists as are represented at the present day by the Beja and Somali''

It's pretty nonsensical looking back at but this is what they believed at the time: And it bled into their interpretations of Horn of African history:

Right, obviously you need settled people for towns but my point is how cultures that were traditionally nomadic were capable of transitioning into these settled lifestyles without necessarily abandoning their nomadic roots. A portion of the population may become settled while the rest will still be nomadic but interact heavily with the settled people. That is what many nomadic cultures did.

They called this a ''A primary pastoral community'' , it's what marks a lot of the similarities and relatedness between Northe East Africans particularly in Egypt and Sudan, that's what early colonial writers saw, it had nothing to do with hamiticism. It had to with them emerging from the same pastoral roots.

Cultural convergence in the Neolithic of the Nile Valley: a prehistoric perspective on Egypt's place in Africa | Antiquity | Cambridge Core

Cultural convergence in the Neolithic of the Nile Valley: a prehistoric perspective on Egypt's place in Africa - Volume 88 Issue 339

www.cambridge.org

The African origins of Egyptian civilisation lie in an important cultural horizon, the ‘primary pastoral community’, which emerged in both the Egyptian and Sudanese parts of the Nile Valley in the fifth millennium BC.

A re-examination of the chronology, assisted by new AMS determinations from Neolithic sites in Middle Egypt, has charted the detailed development of these new kinds of society. The resulting picture challenges recent studies that emphasise climate change and environmental stress as drivers of cultural adaptation in north-east Africa. It also emphasises the crucial role of funerary practices and body decoration.

 

[abdi_]

Very intresting thread, I hope to go over these posts when I have the time.

 

[The alchemist]

Its the exact argument that one Harari troll on this forum and many others on the internet use when discussing Somali history. Its not even new, colonial era scholars thought the pastoral Somali wasn't responsible for any of the civilizations due to their lifestyle.

Right, obviously you need settled people for towns but my point is how cultures that were traditionally nomadic were capable of transitioning into these settled lifestyles without necessarily abandoning their nomadic roots. A portion of the population may become settled while the rest will still be nomadic but interact heavily with the settled people. That is what many nomadic cultures did.

I fully agree with the first part. The second part is not quite correct. Nomadism as people think it is/was was uncommon for herders. Somalis have been agro-pastoralists-traders since the time of the A-Group Culture horizon period. Complexity is merely a characteristic of internal macroeconomic features with contextual changing adaptation rather than a delineated settled-nomadic-agriculturalists divide.

"The Egyptian elites based their power on the control of a surplus deriving from agriculture. In contrast, Lower Nubia had a narrow and discontinuous flood plain, so the A-Group elites lacked large areas of cultivable land. The power base of the A-Group elites was thus animal capital and prestige goods – both local and imported (Wengrow 2006: 173). The latter point deserves some further explanation: Social inequality can emerge in areas that are not very productive agriculturally in situations where other valuable resources can be extracted and exchanged for food (Hayden 2001:250). It seems that the A-Group elites were deriving their wealth and power from controlling the trade with raw materials coming from further south. This may explain the rise of the wealthiest regions close to the Second Cataract and the Wadi Allaqi – portals for trade routes leading to Upper Nubia." - Hafsaas, Henriette, (2009).

We also got other salient features that still prevailed, a lot of people thought Somalis were egalitarian... they were actually heterarchical, namely that "elites" were the majority, which is why you see luxury wares spread across the Somali peninsula in Somali graves that were in the typical cairn cemetery:

"I argue that for the A-Group, this took the form of several local hierarchies, where the interacting elites were equals within a heterarchy (see Brumfiel 1995: 125). A heterarchical organization can be identified archaeologically by a widespread distribution of prestige objects (see Hayden 2001: 249). Nordström’s (2004: 139) study on rank in funerary displays demonstrates that a large proportion of the A-Group people could be categorized as elite, while only a small proportion was poor. 31 I argue that the ethnic group constituting the A-Group was organized into several family groups or clans that were organized as hierarchies with a chief on the top. This would have formed multiple power centres within the A-Group society as a whole, where each elite family interacted as equals in a heterarchy. It is in historical circumstances where the social hierarchies are based on the control of trade that heterarchies are most likely to emerge." - Hafsaas, Henriette, (2009).

Complexity can fluctuate extremely in such structures within centuries and between regions of what some can recognize has a civilizational height to barebone subsistence when drought occurs. The whole point is that there is no ceiling and the form is way more complex than your average centralized formalist state that might only rely on agricultural taxation in terms of economic flow and production. The issue is that researchers have had little knowledge of this type of economy and were frankly centered on the conventional neo-evolutionary conception of how complexity occurs in village systems based on farming towards growing gradual stage-dependent, check-marked linear growth. Well, we break that notion and it has been criticized by newer researchers that find that such perspectives fail to capture any meaningful through that framework when you deal with Somalis or any of the Nubian populations going back to the late Neolithic and Bronze Age, all the way to the Blemmyan historic period; our trajectorial parallels in many ways.

"Defining the complexity of the Nubian A-Group has been a challenging issue. In fact, although recognized as complex, it has never been considered to be as complex as ancient Egypt. In other words: if Predynastic Egypt developed into a state, the Nubian A-Group, at most, could have reached a proto-state level, more likely a chiefdom according to some scholars (Nordström 2001; Gatto 2006; Török 2009). Such an approach, based on an inward-looking tendency of Egyptology as a discipline and a now much challenged neo-evolutionist paradigm, did not consider the distinctive socio-economic organization of the Nubian A-Group. The spatial distribution of A-Group sites, found both along the Nile and in the deserts (Gatto 2006; Lange 2006), the former with evidence of fishing and cultivation, the latter with abundant remains of domesticated animals, points to a society with a certain degree of mobility and an opportunistic and fluid economic pattern that included more than one subsistence activity (Gatto 2006). It is however the social value that herding had within the society, often displayed in ritual settings such as elite burial grounds, that supports its definition as pastoral. The ability of pastoral groups to develop alternative forms of socio-political complexity has been recognized by scholarship from other areas of the world and of Africa, and as a matter of fact it has been recognized also for historic periods in Nubia (Edwards 1998; Emberling 2014), and there is no reason not to recognize it for earlier times. Therefore, the inquiry to address is not whether the A-Group was as complex as ancient Egypt, but how it was complex and how it differed in its complexity." - Emberlling & Williams, The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Nubia, (2020), p. 126-127

Furthermore, to substantiate the possible expanse and variability, you understand that the ancient Nubian cultures could have been viewed as a macro-civilization with internal variability and diversity rather than distinct separate groups that had independent origins:

"With the term Pre-Kerma is indicated a third culture, originally identified in the Kerma region and dated from the end of the 4th millennium to the first half of the 3rd (Honegger, this volume). As such, there seems to have been more than one culture contemporaneously present in the region, when in fact that is not the case. The discrepancy encountered in the archaeological record should be read as an expression of an intracultural variability that, as previously stated, needs to be addressed on a supra-regional level, taking also into consideration the alternative type of socio-economic structuring and power organization that characterized Nubia. In this paper, I retain the term “A-Group” only to define the political entity that arose at the end of the 4th millennium bce." - Emberlling & Williams, The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Nubia, (2020), p. 127

The Nubians kept those very varied adaptable systems similar to us that all depended upon the envrionmental outlook. An abstract from a sttudy of Christian period Nubians:

"The archaeological site of Ghazali (northern Sudan) provides a rare opportunity to investigate the dynamics of mixed economies and mobility on the fringes on the Nile valley at the time of Christian expansion in Nubia. Thanks to its particular hydrological conditions, Sudan has a long history of diverse groups pursuing different economic activities, with agricultural communities settled along the fertile Nile valley and various mobile pastoralists groups occupying vast areas of the adjacent deserts. Ghazali represents an early medieval Nubian rural site with an extensive funerary zone. Somewhat removed from the Nile valley, Ghazali extends along the western bank of a large wadi, Wadi Abu Dom, running across the Bayuda desert, dated ca. 7th–13th century CE. Multi-isotopic analysis of human tooth enamel from Cemeteries 1, 3, and 4 was used to explore patterns of mobility among these communities. Ten enamel samples were subjected to 87Sr/86Sr analysis, while 24 individuals were studied for their δ18O values. 87Sr/86Sr and δ18O values were very heterogeneous, suggesting that the Ghazali community, as a whole, benefited from a variety of water sources, perhaps including significant contributions from groundwater wells. We suggest that this adds further support for the reconstruction of a mixed practice of agriculture and animal herding in the neighbouring Bayuda desert. These data add to growing evidence for diverse and flexible mixed economies in eastern Africa that provided food security even under the most challenging of conditions."

Continuing....

 

[The alchemist]

....

I mention this because it changes the perspective of people of how wide, complex, and diverse a system can be without it even being recognized as such, as it makes the variational material culture more innovative sides of a broader civilization rather than similar pottery spread but viewed as material culture ethno-associations. Questions have come up if internal variations of material units reflect cultural units by researchers of ancient Nubia:

"This study employs ceramic petrography to establish if the existing typology-based divisions for the so-called Middle Nubian cultures can be related to variations in Nubian ceramic technologies during the mid-second millennium BC (c. 1800–1550 BC). Raw materials, paste recipes, and firing technology are analyzed to identify similarities and differences between the C-Group, Pan-Grave, and Kerma ceramic traditions. Three distinct fabric groups could be identified. Each corresponds, suggestively, to one of the existing cultural units. It is proposed that these variations reflect different approaches to resource acquisition and processing as well as distinct firing processes. Although these technological groups may relate to chronology and subsistence strategies, more evidence is needed before directly linking ceramic technologies to cultural units."

One can find nuances and variability in potter styles, methodologies, materials, and technological systems that make these ceramic materials. Yet, if those are reflective of distinct cultures as they pertain to our understandings of today is not something justified and one can in fact many cases lay foundations, as did in the Oxford literature paragraph I dropped above, that there are stronger cultural horizontal macro forces with distinctions within rahter than unrelated porcesses that come in contact. However, this is much more complicated than one might think.

 

[Abdirazaq]

That is what we go off from in the Laas Geel as well, from what I gathered. From such indirect samples. By the way, the change in the rock art has been analyzed and the camel ones are always consistently younger during when the artyle changed. All of those art style analysts noted that, as I understood it.

But at least with the Laas Geel and related variations artstyle horizon is consistent with the C-Groups type art that is dated into more ancient period. I also think the pottery in one of the sites in the western Galbeed was of the older Nubian sort.
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I've said the same thing before by analyzing the cattle shapes themselves. Even posted it here before.

I’ve always been confused by the distinction of the C-Group peoples from Kerma peoples, I know one is a more sedentary population with different material goods and slightly different culture from the archeological evidence but how truly different are they?

I feel like archaeologists have made extreme differences where there’s none, isn’t it possible that the difference is equal to Somalis who lived in cities vs pastoral Somalis? Why would we make such a huge distinction there as to even speculate these groups (C-group and Kerma) could’ve spoke in different language families let alone the languages within the same sub-family.

 

[Abdirazaq]

I know I'm biased in my opinion but what little I know of history has led me to believe that Somali history and Non-Somali Cushitic history has been co-opted and appropriated by Ethiopianists, Bantu (Bantu descended populations) and Arabs.

The Hamitic hypnosis has also lead to western historians, archaeologists and linguists being extremely averse to attributing cultures and happenings of the past to horn African/ Afro-Asiatic populations within sub-Saharan Africa, instead promoting the black elements where ever they can find it which is clearly a politically charged ideology, all this has lead to Somali history being ripe for taking by other peoples as there’s no strong academic tradition in Somalia or for Somalis/Cushitic peoples (unlike Ethiopianists) making us invisible as a consequence.

 

[Abdirazaq]

Anyone who thinks nomads are incapable of building civilization are ignorant of history at best and intentionally dishonest at worst. Various nomadic cultures from the Arabs, to Turkics, to the ancient Scythians all had complex and developed societies with advanced trade networks and numerous towns and urban centers linking those networks together. Ibn Battuta flat out also describes a huge city like Mogadishu as being nomadic in character.

Even within Africa, nomadic cultures like the Tuaregs and Fula people had plenty of towns and kingdoms which dare I say, were more advanced than the farmer based societies of most of Sub-Sahara Africa. And of course, I'm sure many of you know how sedentary medieval Ethiopia was almost entirely devoid of any proper urbanism with its kings preferring nomadic encampments as their capitals.

Bro, how can you leave out the mongols? They had the largest empire in history before the modern era and were based on a nomadic culture.

Also I’m pretty sure ancient Nubia was also a predominately nomadic culture too.

 

[Abdirazaq]

Its the exact argument that one Harari troll on this forum and many others on the internet use when discussing Somali history. Its not even new, colonial era scholars thought the pastoral Somali wasn't responsible for any of the civilizations due to their lifestyle.

Right, obviously you need settled people for towns but my point is how cultures that were traditionally nomadic were capable of transitioning into these settled lifestyles without necessarily abandoning their nomadic roots.

Thee might be a point to be made that a civilization cannot purely depend on nomadic supply in order to sustain itself but this completely ignores the complexity of trade between different regions (which will have an excess supply of crops and the like), and how some portion of a population within a civilization will be agro-pastoralists themselves, not to mention the other ways of food supply like fishing etc.

The cultures of these civilizations will still be dominated by nomadic influence though, as this was the basis of the civilization and what sprung it forth rather than the more common story of agriculture giving rise to excess supply leading to settled people etc.

Edit: ignore this post, @The alchemist said it much more in depth than me.

 

[Shimbiris]

Wonderful thread. I'll give it a solid read and reply and find the time soon to also do a final set of posts for my Dhow thread and my Futuh thread as well. I'm excited about the former in particular because once it's done it'll be very indisputable that Somalis were a seafaring people, especially in the last 300 years. Great thread as always, walaal. I'm gonna stay in sharp contact with you and some others once I begin reviving Anthromadness soon, insha'Allah.

 

[Zak12]

once I begin reviving Anthromadness

Wait, you are the author Anthromadness, Awale?!

 

[Step a side]

Wait, you are the author Anthromadness, Awale?!

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[Zak12]

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I first learned about Somali genetics through his blogs lol. Mad respect

 

[The alchemist]

I’ve always been confused by the distinction of the C-Group peoples from Kerma peoples, I know one is a more sedentary population with different material goods and slightly different culture from the archeological evidence but how truly different are they?

I feel like archaeologists have made extreme differences where there’s none, isn’t it possible that the difference is equal to Somalis who lived in cities vs pastoral Somalis? Why would we make such a huge distinction there as to even speculate these groups (C-group and Kerma) could’ve spoke in different language families let alone the languages within the same sub-family.

This is another topic really but I will provide a rough answer.

I don't think there were any wide genetic differences between the early Kermans, C-Group Nubians, and the later Pan Grave - these people descended from the same Nubians -- all Cushitic speakers, and I would even say they were Eastern Cushitic speakers (later Kermans language-shifted with probably genetic influence from Saharans). Their pottery was a variation of each other. Their burials also showed various affinities (they had different trajectories that influenced each other several times over). With regards to subsistence, they were agro-pastoralists who originated and orientated with a heavy travel mix, never did they fixate completely (they did retain pastoral ideology even when farming was emphasized) other than to adapt and mix economies according to their needs. One cannot interpret this as an ethnic difference. Kermans lived in a region that was greener so they did farming more while pan Grave and C-Group stayed in more arid areas to the north and northeast. However, as the Kadruka cemetery showed the pre-Kerma, the groups there were mixed economy as things generally went:

"The picture is still incomplete, and relies on a limited number of discoveries, but points to the occupation of the land by an agro-pastoralist population that fills a local void preceding the Kerma civilization (Fig. 8.1)." Emberlling & Williams, The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Nubia, (2020), p. 145

That quote refers to a cemetery of what led to the Kerma, so pre-Kerma.

Here is another saying that the material burial culture had a common origin reflecting what later became differentiated broad peoplehood reflected in the funerary ideology:

"Moreover, cattle were sacrificed in great numbers during the funerals, from several dozen to even several thousands. Such a change did not occur suddenly, as can be observed in the cemeteries of the Pan-Grave and C-Group cultures of Lower Nubia and the Kerma culture of Upper Nubia (Chaix 2000; Hafsaas 2006; Bangsgaard 2010, 2013, 2014a; see also chapters by Liszka and de Souza and by Hafsaas, this volume). The common practices and similarities in material culture of these groups belonging to the Middle Nubian Horizon are generally explained by a shared cultural foundation and origin (Gratien 1986; Bangsgaard 2014b). Undoubtedly, these partially contemporary cultures fall within a deeply rooted tradition of animal deposits in Nubia, as they pursued the practice of animal inhumation in pits including sheep and cut body-parts of the animal inside the grave shaft. However, they moved the ritual use of animals to a new dimension with ostentatious deposits of cattle skulls in the open air."

It is very complicated to be honest, because the concept of ethnic group is not universal:

"It seems relevant to analyze animal remains discovered in archaeology in this way, while keeping in mind that ethnology always prompts to interpretative caution, especially when it reveals the complexity of funerary rituals, the multiplicity of practices and their motivations, and the diversity of representations of the hereafter."

Those people might have seen each other as the same people but had distinctive practices and ideologies very different from how we view populations today. Similar to how pre-historic Arabians had a broad conception of the Arabian population. So clans/tribes are not akin to ethnic groups but neither was the broad Arab conception either. More like race (although that is really a term defined very differently here than how people usually think of it). That is just an example, since those people likely were cognizant of who they were and how they related but had unique ideas of the broader.

There are also different layers to this. Both Kerma and C-Group might be Kushite; Pan-Grave arrived later and is probably a variation of those, like an offshoot.

I generally have this view as posted in the previous drop:

"With the term Pre-Kerma is indicated a third culture, originally identified in the Kerma region and dated from the end of the 4th millennium to the first half of the 3rd (Honegger, this volume). As such, there seems to have been more than one culture contemporaneously present in the region, when in fact that is not the case. The discrepancy encountered in the archaeological record should be read as an expression of an intracultural variability that, as previously stated, needs to be addressed on a supra-regional level, taking also into consideration the alternative type of socio-economic structuring and power organization that characterized Nubia. In this paper, I retain the term “A-Group” only to define the political entity that arose at the end of the 4th millennium bce." - Emberlling & Williams, The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Nubia, (2020), p. 127

In the previous stages, pre-Kerma and A-Group had similar pottery. We're not talking about different people but the same people expressing variations:

"As regards the typology of the pottery, the differences between the Pre-Kerma and A-Group are rather subtle and it is difficult to interpret their significance. Overall, they represent a single cultural horizon, but it could be that the differences observed reflect the existence of several (tribal) groups, similar to those described at a later date during the expeditions of Harkhuf (about 2287–2270 bce; Török 2009:69–70)." - Emberlling & Williams, The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Nubia, (2020), p.147

"It is possible that the few sites in Lower Nubia represent persistence of the A-Group in the region, and that the two entities, A-Group and Pre-Kerma, represent at that point in time a single cultural entity (Gatto 2011a). We can conceive that the commercial routes, as well as the population movements from the south towards the north, in the wake of the growing influence of Egypt starting in 3000 bce, led to a level of cultural harmonization between Upper and Lower Nubia. However, we need a greater volume of data for this period to be able to be more precise about the situation." Emberlling & Williams, The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Nubia, (2020), p. 148

Well, it is not just homogenizing as if there was cultural diffusion, which it was. The point was that these people descended from the same late Neolithic Cushitic pastoralists people in the first place.

One cannot rely on Egyptians to be precise. But one thing is important to note, Egypt emphasized that Kush had allied with these other groups to attack them, likely reflecting a supra-regional conception of affinity and some of those existed as a broad economic and cultural variational cluster instead of hard ethnic lines of today people:

This was from an inscription in Elkab during the 17th dynasty by the Sobeknakht governor:

"Kush came ... he had stirred up the tribes of Wawat, the [islands ?] of Khenthennefer, the land of Punt and the Medjaw"

From this, we even have evidence that they would even band together on military strikes, essentially superimposing on the related affinities they had on a political and military projection.

You had C-Group Nubians buried in Kerman cultural contexts, according to archeology:

"The origins of this group, which occupied Lower Nubia from 2500 bce, continues to be unknown, and its presence in the Kerma cultural context could be indicative of contacts and a certain freedom of circulation between the two groups." - Emberlling & Williams, The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Nubia, (2020), p. 149

Safe to say, these hard lines of ethnology are not warranted.

By the way, it is not totally unknown as the source claims. C-Group Nubians, though a later re-introduction to Lower Nubia, was probably A-Group moving south and mixing with Kermans, then moving toward Lower Nubia again. The affinity they had with the A-Group was evident, though they had distinct changes.

 

[Midas]

This is another topic really but I will provide a rough answer.

I don't think there were any wide genetic differences between the early Kermans, C-Group Nubians, and the later Pan Grave - these people descended from the same Nubians -- all Cushitic speakers, and I would even say they were Eastern Cushitic speakers (later Kermans language-shifted with probably genetic influence from Saharans). Their pottery was a variation of each other. Their burials also showed various affinities (they had different trajectories that influenced each other several times over). With regards to subsistence, they were agro-pastoralists who originated and orientated with a heavy travel mix, never did they fixate completely (they did retain pastoral ideology even when farming was emphasized) other than to adapt and mix economies according to their needs. One cannot interpret this as an ethnic difference. Kermans lived in a region that was greener so they did farming more while pan Grave and C-Group stayed in more arid areas to the north and northeast. However, as the Kadruka cemetery showed the pre-Kerma, the groups there were mixed economy as things generally went:

"The picture is still incomplete, and relies on a limited number of discoveries, but points to the occupation of the land by an agro-pastoralist population that fills a local void preceding the Kerma civilization (Fig. 8.1)." Emberlling & Williams, The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Nubia, (2020), p. 145

That quote refers to a cemetery of what led to the Kerma, so pre-Kerma.

Here is another saying that the material burial culture had a common origin reflecting what later became differentiated broad peoplehood reflected in the funerary ideology:

"Moreover, cattle were sacrificed in great numbers during the funerals, from several dozen to even several thousands. Such a change did not occur suddenly, as can be observed in the cemeteries of the Pan-Grave and C-Group cultures of Lower Nubia and the Kerma culture of Upper Nubia (Chaix 2000; Hafsaas 2006; Bangsgaard 2010, 2013, 2014a; see also chapters by Liszka and de Souza and by Hafsaas, this volume). The common practices and similarities in material culture of these groups belonging to the Middle Nubian Horizon are generally explained by a shared cultural foundation and origin (Gratien 1986; Bangsgaard 2014b). Undoubtedly, these partially contemporary cultures fall within a deeply rooted tradition of animal deposits in Nubia, as they pursued the practice of animal inhumation in pits including sheep and cut body-parts of the animal inside the grave shaft. However, they moved the ritual use of animals to a new dimension with ostentatious deposits of cattle skulls in the open air."

It is very complicated to be honest, because the concept of ethnic group is not universal:

"It seems relevant to analyze animal remains discovered in archaeology in this way, while keeping in mind that ethnology always prompts to interpretative caution, especially when it reveals the complexity of funerary rituals, the multiplicity of practices and their motivations, and the diversity of representations of the hereafter."

Those people might have seen each other as the same people but had distinctive practices and ideologies very different from how we view populations today. Similar to how pre-historic Arabians had a broad conception of the Arabian population. So clans/tribes are not akin to ethnic groups but neither was the broad Arab conception either. More like race (although that is really a term defined very differently here than how people usually think of it). That is just an example, since those people likely were cognizant of who they were and how they related but had unique ideas of the broader.

There are also different layers to this. Both Kerma and C-Group might be Kushite; Pan-Grave arrived later and is probably a variation of those, like an offshoot.

I generally have this view as posted in the previous drop:

"With the term Pre-Kerma is indicated a third culture, originally identified in the Kerma region and dated from the end of the 4th millennium to the first half of the 3rd (Honegger, this volume). As such, there seems to have been more than one culture contemporaneously present in the region, when in fact that is not the case. The discrepancy encountered in the archaeological record should be read as an expression of an intracultural variability that, as previously stated, needs to be addressed on a supra-regional level, taking also into consideration the alternative type of socio-economic structuring and power organization that characterized Nubia. In this paper, I retain the term “A-Group” only to define the political entity that arose at the end of the 4th millennium bce." - Emberlling & Williams, The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Nubia, (2020), p. 127

In the previous stages, pre-Kerma and A-Group had similar pottery. We're not talking about different people but the same people expressing variations:

"As regards the typology of the pottery, the differences between the Pre-Kerma and A-Group are rather subtle and it is difficult to interpret their significance. Overall, they represent a single cultural horizon, but it could be that the differences observed reflect the existence of several (tribal) groups, similar to those described at a later date during the expeditions of Harkhuf (about 2287–2270 bce; Török 2009:69–70)." - Emberlling & Williams, The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Nubia, (2020), p.147

"It is possible that the few sites in Lower Nubia represent persistence of the A-Group in the region, and that the two entities, A-Group and Pre-Kerma, represent at that point in time a single cultural entity (Gatto 2011a). We can conceive that the commercial routes, as well as the population movements from the south towards the north, in the wake of the growing influence of Egypt starting in 3000 bce, led to a level of cultural harmonization between Upper and Lower Nubia. However, we need a greater volume of data for this period to be able to be more precise about the situation." Emberlling & Williams, The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Nubia, (2020), p. 148

Well, it is not just homogenizing as if there was cultural diffusion, which it was. The point was that these people descended from the same late Neolithic Cushitic pastoralists people in the first place.

One cannot rely on Egyptians to be precise. But one thing is important to note, Egypt emphasized that Kush had allied with these other groups to attack them, likely reflecting a supra-regional conception of affinity and some of those existed as a broad economic and cultural variational cluster instead of hard ethnic lines of today people:
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This was from an inscription in Elkab during the 17th dynasty by the Sobeknakht governor:

"Kush came ... he had stirred up the tribes of Wawat, the [islands ?] of Khenthennefer, the land of Punt and the Medjaw"

From this, we even have evidence that they would even band together on military strikes, essentially superimposing on the related affinities they had on a political and military projection.

You had C-Group Nubians buried in Kerman cultural contexts, according to archeology:

"The origins of this group, which occupied Lower Nubia from 2500 bce, continues to be unknown, and its presence in the Kerma cultural context could be indicative of contacts and a certain freedom of circulation between the two groups." - Emberlling & Williams, The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Nubia, (2020), p. 149

Safe to say, these hard lines of ethnology are not warranted.

By the way, it is not totally unknown as the source claims. C-Group Nubians, though a later re-introduction to Lower Nubia, was probably A-Group moving south and mixing with Kermans, then moving toward Lower Nubia again. The affinity they had with the A-Group was evident, though they had distinct changes

I don't want to speculate too much. But I can't help but notice the simialrties between this phenomenon and the one mentioned by this author on how the patriarchs of certain early swahili towns who descended from pastoralists maintained and used these shared ancestry connections to trade with the nomads and ask for help in times of war. It's wild to think that these guys might be recognizing some shared culutral and ancestral similarly between them even after millenia of separation. I think pastoral ideaology is the perfect term for this.

 

[The alchemist]

Bro, how can you leave out the mongols? They had the largest empire in history before the modern era and were based on a nomadic culture.

Also I’m pretty sure ancient Nubia was also a predominately nomadic culture too.

Ancient Nubia was agro-pastoral, nomadic is really not the right description for us or most pastoralists. They had a pastoralist culture. Pastoralism is for the most part rarely nomadic in the true sense and that term creates many problems because it is a reductive and limiting description.

"Pastoralism naturally maintained both its economic and ideological importance, but it does not necessarily imply that the entire community was mobile and involved in transhumance activities. In the image of actual pastoral communities from northeast Africa, it is possible that only a segment of the population accompanied the herd animals in search of fresh pastures and lived a part of the year in campsites"

All the Nubian cultures were agro-pastoral-trade oriented in complex variations and thus you could have Kerma that essentially saw itself as pastoral first and foremost in ideology, engaging in a mixed economy and also supporting not second-stage, but regional super-power status of that time.

Nomads in the true sense are not transhumant pastoralists or agro-pastoral complex peoples. Neither us nor the Nubians were nomadic in its irregular meaning and I have read a study that fleshed out that the nomadic part usually is atypical.

"Archaeologists and historians have frequently confated pastoralism with nomadism and kin-based tribal societies (see Khazanov 1984; Meadow 1992). Further, archaeologists frequently use “pastoralists” narrowly to refer to communities that rely on herd animals for the majority of their subsistence and practice little or no agriculture, or to mobile populations seen as distinctive and separate from settled farmer neighbors (Chang 2015; Dyson-Hudson and DysonHudson 1980). These usages are problematic since pastoralism can take many forms and be afected by many variables that often fuctuate within and between generations (Salzman 2004)."

This is one description of how that can look in one context:

"More recently, Bernbeck (2013) has pushed against widespread assumptions about Halaf mobility. Instead of representing a dimorphic, nomad-herder versus sed‑ entary-farmer dichotomy, he instead sees Halaf communities as representing “modu‑ lar, multi-sited communities” (Bernbeck 2013, p. 51) engaged in mixed agropastoral practices. In this view, the shifting stratigraphy of many Halaf sites represents an intermediate scale of mobility, comparable to swidden farming, in which modular residential units (e.g., households) moved in multiyear cycles."

By the way, the height of the Mesopotamian civilization occurred when Semitic pastoralists came and settled and became elites among the pre-existing city-states. Early Egyptian kings and very typical and characteristic ideology came from pastoralists Nubian in origin, but that topic is for another day because it sort of gets very interesting.

The bottom line is, that the dimorphic intuition people have about this is why we have this massive misunderstanding and quite frankly the pejoratives and reductive associations people make. For example, this was an abstract on the history of pastoralism in the Near East debunking a lot of the unfounded stereotypes:

"In this paper, we present a history of pastoralism in the ancient Near East from the Neolithic through the Bronze Age. We describe the accretional development of pas‑ toral technologies over eight millennia, including the productive breeding of domes‑ tic sheep, goats, and cattle in the early Neolithic and the subsequent domestication of animals used primarily for labor—donkeys, horses, and fnally camels—as well as the frst appearance of husbandry strategies such as penning, foddering, pastur‑ ing, young male culling, and dairy production. Despite frequent references in the literature to prehistoric pastoral nomads, pastoralism in Southwest Asia was strongly associated with sedentary communities that practiced intensive plant cultivation and was largely local in nature. There is very little evidence in prehistoric and early his‑ toric Southwest Asia to support the notion of a “dimorphic society” characterized by separate and specialized agriculturists and mobile pastoralists. Although mobile herders were present in the steppe regions of Syria by the early second millennium BC, mobile pastoralism was the exception rather than the rule at that time; its “iden‑ tifcation” in the archaeological record frequently derives from the application of anachronistic ethnographic analogy. We conclude that pastoralism was a diverse, fexible, and dynamic adaptation in the ancient Near East and call for a reinvigorated and empirically based archaeology of pastoralism in Southwest Asia."

And we have to dispel such notions otherwise we will always have these quite ridiculous titles:

"TOWNS IN A SEA OF NOMADS: TERRITORY AND TRADE IN MEDIEVAL SOMALILAND"

"Nomads Trading With Empires."

"The common ground: islam, nomads and ruban dwellers..."

The word nomad has consequential connotations. The authors of those titles often tried to form an ethnic diversity as an interpretation from the already wrong assumptions of this highly nomad dimorphic pigenholding of uncharacteristic and unfounded proportions. The Somalis were clearly "nomads" to the authors, and nomads were, in fact, baseline and could not muster anything more than meat and perhaps middle-men roles, and thus the settled people were either foreigners or foreign-influenced Somalis that divorced themselves from the "nomads," socio-culturally perhaps more strongly associated with foreigners than the nomad "periphery."

I have read a lot of such literature by archeologists that write this:

"It is also unclear who were, ethnically speaking, the inhabitants of these permanent sites, as the Somali cited in Arab texts are considered nomadic groups and differentiated from the inhabitants of the Barr Saʿd al-Dīn Sultanate, even if in some cases they shared the same territory"

Mind you, these are in Somaliland... You see, the incompetence and frankly lazy stereotyping that perhaps stems from racial bias have characterized our historical interpretation to the degree that it disassociates Somalis from Somali history itself because of this damned nomadic term and its idiotic assumptions.

So, I would suggest to all of you guys to stop using the term "nomads" or "nomadic" unless you precisely qualify what you mean and emphasize that nomadism was actually never really a thing we practiced in its irregular and constant mobile nature disassociative condition. We were agro-pastoralists, mobile pastoralists, where pastoralism has wide complexities (read the literature) that changed throughout history, and trade and centralization and various forms of cluster nucleouses we consider settled areas was always a feature of this in the macro-scale as an internal process, i.e., this nomad, settler divide was actually unfounded. You had the same tribes that simultaneously lived in settled areas, did seasonal transhumance, traded, did seafaring, farmed and interacted with every part of this complex economic chain and they were not only Somalis but often the same tribes. At the same time, there were several tribes and all of those overlapped in these formations. Sometimes you might have a centralized conception coming out of this, although that is not what causes complexity as the system was always this complex, and you have several nodes of heterarchical centralizations that make up a whole, and fragmentations are not isolated parts but merely aspect of the nature of the whole. This can muster something that draws upon several cultural, traditional homogenizing superimposed qualities across these wide regions and power accumulating for ideology without the paradigm of gradual centralized state development. In a very unique way, that mess is a whole system that can easily be considered a macro-central horizon that has its function complexified in more parts where the philosophy of institutions is very different from how a village of farmers grows into a state simply through inequality.

 

[The alchemist]

I don't want to speculate too much. But I can't help but notice the simialrties between this phenomenon and the one mentioned by this author on how the patriarchs of certain early swahili towns who descended from pastoralists maintained and used these shared ancestry connections to trade with the nomads and ask for help in times of war. It's wild to think that these guys might be recognizing some shared culutral and ancestral similarly between them even after millenia of separation. I think pastoral ideaology is the perfect term for this.

I have no idea about that topic, to be honest.

But pastoralist ideology was a real thing in many different ways since the time of Nubia, in origin Egypt (in part) in quite surprising ways.