The emerging society, the emerging élite

What social and economic developments might we expect to find by the annually silted shores of a giant lake in the middle of a desertifying part of Africa? Certainly, we might expect agriculture to arrive by sea. We know that around 6000 BCE, the Barbary coast had maritime contacts with, and trade routes extending beyond, Sicily. We also know that the hunter-gatherers of the Maghreb had some seafaring exploits around 5000 BCE. It seems reasonable enough to assume that if a fertile valley stretched all the way from Timbuktu to the Shot Djerid, stopping along the way for a lake at El-Djouff and an inland delta in the Tidikelt basin, the Egyptian winning combination of barley, wheat, flax, and papyrus would either be duplicated with locally available vegetation or introduced seeds sometime during the fifth millennium, if only because the people would be desperate for a subsistence that was more reliable than the dwindling numbers of wildlife to hunt and wild plants to gather.

(Perhaps the tribes at the lake would have taken to more fishing, but that would only leave them as viable as the impoverished Gedrosian coastal fishermen Alexander the Great encountered when his army marched back to Persepolis after his Indian campaign. Not the stuff of empires.)

At the same time, from around 5000 BCE, we might expect the arrival of Afro-Asiatic language communities, introducing pastoralism (goats, sheep, and cows). In the rock art of this time, hunting and ritual are replaced with herds, milk, and manliness. Prudity is a rather modern concept: these communities were unapologetically proud of herms and painted bodies and "fertility dances" and sheaths that enhanced the appearance of their "equipment". (Egypt's predynastic period has yielded giant statues with giant holes for the insertion of equally giant poles.) They would also be likely to introduce the idea(l) of gender division, although like all Berbers, they might well have chosen matriarchy rather than patriarchy - initially that is.

This paints the picture of two competing economic revolutions arriving at roughly the same time, which may well have engendered a plethora of interactions with the original hunter-gatherers in the place. These initial hunter-gatherers would have been related to the Beaker culture. Wherever the Beaker culture went (and it went as far north as the Netherlands, maybe even Scotland), it left giant megalith tombes.

The picture that emerges is one of farming disseminated from the coastal region of Tunesia (later known for historic Carthage), pastoralism plodding in from the east, and bumping together in the territory of a megalith tombe culture desperate for more subsistence than hunting and gathering and fishing. The most mobile of these three cultures are the hunters-gatherers and the pastoralists. And of these two, the pastoralists would have both the greater numbers and the higher organisational level. But only when pastoralists manage to complement the even greater numbers of farming communities would they be in a position to emerge as the local élite. That complement could come from first trading with the farming community, then facilitating its trade with the outside world (pastoralists are on the move anyway), and finally from gradually increasing the price for access to that trade route when the Bronze Age takes off.

So when predynastic societies start to emerge along the shores of the Djouff lake (the core of what is to become Djuph) we might expect them to be:

* agriculturally organised (ditches made by communal labour, artificial basins dug for extra silt retention)

* culturally dominated by the descendents of the pastoralists (body painting, fertility obsession), but both the cattle herding and the culture associated with it would be increasingly reserved for the élite. Pastoralists that have chosen not to complement agricultural communities would be literally and figuratively marginalised. They would wither away at the ever more arid edges of the vegetated world, and become raiding nomads.

* emerging as religiously very diverse: multiple supreme gods, various pantheons, conflicting stories of how the world began. Any élite aspiring to dominate beyond the local level would have to reconcile these different beliefs.

* superstitious. The economic and social risings and fallings, the shattered religious homogeneity, combined with the ever more arid circumstances, the increasingly hostile nomads, and the crippling, venomous and lethal manifestations of nature (from scorpions and hippos to floods and droughts to diseases and old age) would leave the by now sedentary population in a quest for magic, religion, and anything else that could help to control the overwhelming mix of these forces.

* built on a tradition of giant structures. The landscape is littered with the megalith tombs of ancestors who’s rituals are being forgotten. But the communal tradition of building something large is still there. These people are ripe for an élite populist who promises to keep everything under control, if only they will build something larger than any of their ancestors have ever established. If he or she can convince the local élite that strength is in numbers – and don’t they want to be in that number? – then that populist is the emerging supra-local lord/ lady.

By the end of the fourth millennium BCE, Djuph has developed pre-dynastic nobilities. They cocoon themselves in degrees of ritual and material exclusivity, they oligopolise trade, and as such, they compete with one another. It is a matter of time before two or three supra-local rulers emerge. These will come with visions for a unified belief system and the combined efforts of ever more communities.

And once they have emerged, Djuph will be one audacious individual away from the establishment of a monarchy. A priestly monarchy, in all probability.