Beyond the Nile: Long term Patterns in Nomad-State Interactions across Northeast Africa

Abstract

The history of Northeast Africa is dominated by a "Nile Narrative", a common story that places the urban and riverine cultures of Egypt and Nubia at its centre. While the various iterations of Egyptian and Nubian (Kushite) territorial states shaped the macro-history of the region, this enduring narrative often homogenizes and reduces a much more complex world which consisted of a milieu of nomadic peoples. Indigenous to the vast deserts east and west of the river, these nomads are a vital element in the macro-history of the Nile basin, constantly interacting with their urban neighbours, forming diasporas, conducting trade, and preventing exploitation of their homelands. While these patterns endured for millennia, pronounced episodes of conflict, subjugation, and even state formation abound in the record. This analysis takes a macro-historical view to nomads in Nilotic history, proposing a new model for nomadic polities and Nile states in ancient Northeast Africa.

Full text

37
BEYOND THE NILE:
LONG TERM PATTERNS IN NOMAD-STATE INTERACTIONS
ACROSS NORTHEAST AFRICA
Julien Cooper
1
ABSTRACT
The history of Northeast Africa is dominated by a “Nile Narrative”, a
common story that places the urban and riverine cultures of Egypt and Nubia
at its centre. While the various iterations of Egyptian and Nubian (Kushite)
territorial states shaped the macro-history of the region, this enduring
narrative often homogenizes and reduces a much more complex world which
consisted of a milieu of nomadic peoples. Indigenous to the vast deserts east
and west of the river, these nomads are a vital element in the macro-history
of the Nile basin, constantly interacting with their urban neighbours, forming
diasporas, conducting trade, and preventing exploitation of their homelands.
While these patterns endured for millennia, pronounced episodes of conflict,
subjugation, and even state formation abound in the record. This analysis
takes a macro-historical view to nomads in Nilotic history, proposing a new
model for nomadic polities and Nile states in ancient Northeast Africa.
KEYWORDS
Ancient Egypt; Nubia; Nomadism; States.
1
Julien Cooper holds a PhD in Egyptology from Macquarie University (2016). He is Egyptologist and
Archaeologist at the Research Centre for History and Culture at United International College-Beijing
Normal University and director of a fieldwork mission, the Atbai Survey Project (Sudan). E-mail:
juliencooper@uic.edu.cn

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38
1. Introduction
The fertility brought about by the Egyptian and Sudanese Nile Valley allowed for
one of the densest urban populations in the African continent, creating a myriad of
different dynasties, states, and cities that dominated trade and politics across Northeast
Africa. Despite the Nile-centric axis of this world (and our study of it), almost every
boundary of the Egyptian or Nubian states were bordered by desert and savannah
ecologies, the abode of herders or more properly ‘pastoralist nomads’. From the
Marmarica coastal steppe of the Mediterranean littoral, to the Atbai Hills of the Red Sea,
to the Sahel west of the Upper Nubian Nile in Kordofan, Northeast Africa was dominated
by nomads. In this thinking, sedentary urban groups on the Nile are spatially the exception
rather than the rule, with urban peoples occupying a thin ribbon of agricultural potential
on the banks of the river and select oases. The rest of Northeast Africa was ‘nomad land’.
The history of nomad-state interactions is one of constant transgression of each other’s
realms, with nomadic peoples coming to the Nile for employment and grazing and Nile
peoples journeying through the desert for resource exploitation and trade. This Nile-desert
nexus is one of the longest documented case studies in nomad-urban interactions in world
history.
While it is true to say that the Nile provided the farmland which sustained urban
settlement from the Mediterranean coast to Sudan, the river differed considerably across
its length so as to make nomad-state interactions somewhat different in specific regions
of Egypt and Sudan. The Nile in Egypt provides for an extremely fertile and wide
floodplain, making intensive agriculture and high-density settled urbanism possible. But
in Sudan, whole stretches of the Nile are ill-suited for intensive agriculture such as the
Batn el-Hajar (‘Belly of Stones’) or the rocky Fourth Cataract, with such regions of the
Nile exhibiting a more evenly proportioned mix of agricultural and pastoralist practices
among its population.
2
Indeed, Nubian cultures would always have a slightly higher
pastoralist quotient than their Egyptian neighbours, producing different kinds of
ecological bases for Nubian polities than any iteration of a ‘pharaonic’ state.
3
Furthermore, in the more southerly latitudes, the Nile in Sudan cuts through environments
that receive the northerly reaches of the Africa summer monsoon, creating savannah-like
environments filled with acacia trees and grasses all fed by seasonally flowing wadi
2
For the local geography, see Auenmüller (2019).
3
Emberling (2014); Edwards (1998).

Julien Cooper. Beyond the Nile.
39
systems. Compared to the hyper-arid deserts of the Egyptian desert, the Sudanese deserts
sustain a much higher density of nomadic populations, which in turn eventually give way
to settled ‘agro-pastoralist’ zones outside the Nile in regions like Kassala, Kordofan, and
Darfur. These geographic dynamics provide for a generally higher frequency of nomadic
interactions along the Nubian Nile than in Egypt,
4
although this is partly balanced by the
significant nomadic habitations at Egypt’s extreme north along the Mediterranean littoral
in Libya and the Sinai as well as the Oases of the Western Desert.
Each specific desert ecology surrounding the Nile was generally inhabited by
distinct ethno-linguistic groups, each practicing a mix of cattle, sheep, goat, and later
camel pastoralism. Nomads needed to move frequently across the landscape as a necessity
of their pastoralist lifestyle. Despite their desert origins and homelands, the Nile Valley
had a magnetic pull for many of these nomads. Its demographic and political weight as
well as its diverse economies and markets were irresistible for pastoralist communities.
Almost all nomadic groups in Northeast Africa were periodically represented on the Nile
in diaspora communities and ‘frontier’ settlements, with distinct ebbs and flows in various
historical periods. This kind of historical pattern remains until the present day, with desert
pastoralists continuing their interaction with the Nile in the form of seasonal
transhumance for grazing, community building (diasporas), exploitation, and
acculturation, among some of the ‘modes’ and processes of interaction.
5
Historiographically speaking, the importance of the ‘agricultural centre’ for desert
nomads in such paradigms is often over-stated. The cultural and economic life of nomads,
and the centre of gravity of groups such as the Blemmyes and Libyans, lies squarely in
the desert. So too, their cultural heritage and expression of ‘homeland’ is usually the
desert. Nomadic groups, even when they travel and live outside their homeland, often
exhibit significant ‘nomadic heritage’,
6
keeping ties with their brethren in the desert and
retaining distinct cultural practices and foodways that would mark their legacies as
nomadic. Anthropological literature has identified numerous types, stages, and gradations
between ‘nomad’ and ‘sedentary’ lifestyles so one may speak of ‘agro-pastoralist’ or
‘semi-nomadic’ societies in many sub-regions or even more specific modes of
transhumance like ‘tethered nomadism’.
7
For instance, the Beja of the Atbai Hills are
4
Cf. Welsby (2002: 187-189); Brass (2015).
5
For case studies of arid land nomadism and urban-state interactions, see Murray (1935) and Hobbs (1989).
6
For the archaeology of nomads on the Nile, see Näser (2012) and Gatto (2014). For ‘nomadic identity’,
see Hobbs (1989: 8-11); Szuchman (2009: 3).
7
Szuchman (2009); Wendrich & Barnard (2008).

Mare Nostrum, ano 2022, v. 13, n. 1
40
largely nomadic but to this day, when rainfall is conducive, will settle in one spot for a
part of the year and grow a small crop of millet or sorghum.
8
Scholarship sometimes
emphasizes definitional debates as to whether certain ancient or contemporary societies
are truly ‘nomadic’ after assessing their level of transhumance and integration into
agricultural economies. This approach, while relevant, sometimes relegates the place of
‘nomadic identity’ and self-expression of identity in societies which might no longer
practice seasonal transhumance but nevertheless stress pastoralism as a cultural practice.
Nomads abounded all frontiers of the Egyptian and Kushite (Nubian) states,
Northeast Africa’s two most stable political and territorial institutions (Figure 1).
Likewise, the Aksumite state of highland Ethiopia was also surrounded by nomadic and
agro-pastoralist zones on most of its northern and eastern frontiers, with the southern
frontier constituting a continuation of agriculture fertility of the highlands. The Eastern
Desert of Egypt and Sudan (Atbai) was dominated by groups termed ‘Medjay’,
‘Blemmyes’, and later ‘Beja’ in Egyptian, Graeco-Roman, and Arab documents. So-
called ‘Asiatic’ nomads, mainly Semitic-speakers, inhabited the Sinai borderlands,
stretching between historical Edom, the Mediterranean and Red littorals as well as the
Eastern Delta. To the west of Egypt, along the Mediterranean littoral and Marmarica
plateau stretching to Gebel Akhdar and probably beyond, a group of ‘Libyan’ nomads
dominated the deserts, the so-called Tjemehu and Tjehenu of Egyptian records. All these
populations are generally well-acknowledged in both modern scholarship and ancient
sources, but their histories are always orientated as a facet of their relationship to the
pharaonic state without due recourse to their indigenous economies, modes of production,
or local politics. Each of these regions had its own specific dynamics, natural resources,
and trade relationship with urban centres. This contribution will attempt to elevate the
importance of nomads in the history of the greater Nile Valley by commenting on major
patterns and processes of nomad-state relations and political ascendancies amongst these
desert nomads. Such periods of ‘nomadic ascendency’ are well acknowledged in the
worlds of Central Asia and Iran, as well as China and ‘inner Asia’,
9
but only cursorily
treated in the Nile basin. There are enough case studies of such pastoralist political
formations to posit a similar, but not wholly identical, macro-historical pattern in the case
studies in Northeast Africa. Several distinct historical episodes such as the Libyan
Dynasties of the early First Millennium BCE and the ‘Rise of the Blemmyes’ in late
8
Morton (1989, p. 185). For dry-land agriculture, see Lancelotti et al. (2019).
9
Influential studies are Khazanov (1994: 233-263) and Barfield (2001).

Julien Cooper. Beyond the Nile.
41
antiquity illustrate the impact of nomadic populations on one of the world’s most ancient
agricultural centres.
Figure 1. Broad zones of nomadism outside the Nile Valley.
The zones do not accord to single nomadic groups but rather broad ecological zones, often
overlapping with ethno-linguistic groups and some material horizons.
Beyond these ‘foreign nomads’ living in the deserts far away from the Nile, a
significant community of pastoralist nomads seems to be ever-present in the Nile Valley
itself, sometimes called in scholarship ‘peripatetic nomads’.
10
These nomads could
sometimes be foreign ethnic groups residing on the Nile, but in some cases there is no
reason to believe that all such nomads were ‘foreign’. Egyptian texts had a specific phrase
‘ones who are upon the sand’ or ‘travelers of the sand’ (r.y-, nm-) for such nomadic
people. One of the earliest extant papyri dossiers in Egyptian history, a kind of village
roster called the ‘Gebelein papyri’ (c. 2550 BCE), mention a few such ‘ones who are upon
the sand’ amongst a village dominated by farmers, fishermen, and craftsmen. All the
10
Näser (2012).

Mare Nostrum, ano 2022, v. 13, n. 1
42
‘ones who are upon the sand’ have Egyptian names such as Nefret.
11
If this roster from
Gebelein is indicative of a standard Egyptian village, it would seem that some small part
of Egyptian village life always contained such pastoralist nomads, perhaps they were
herdsmen who itinerantly roamed the near deserts for pasture, also engaging in hunting
or other activities.
2. Desert Nomadism
The deserts and savannah of ancient Northeast Africa had a particular type of
nomadism inherited from the ruminants adopted since the neolithic – well suited to its
semi-arid ecological context. The desert ecologies only allowed for a select few different
ruminants, primarily, goat, sheep, and cattle, and even here they must be managed
effectively and in low enough densities as to not stress local vegetation and water
resources. After the termination of the Neolithic Wet Phase in Northeast Africa, the cattle
largely vanished from nearby deserts where there was no permanent surface water.
12
As
witnessed in rock art and through other cultural outputs such as cattle bucrania in burials,
cattle were given disproportional cultural and symbolic importance vis-à-vis their small
ratio in herds compared to sheep and goats. This is generally explained through a social-
ritual importance attached to cattle in many Northeast African societies, something which
is still observable in the Nilotic populations and Cushitic groups in the greater Horn of
Africa.
13
The horse is not found frequently on the archaeological record, although is said
to have made a large impact on Kushite states where the pasture of savannah ecologies
(rather than riverine floodplains) were comparatively more common and thus conducive
to the rearing of large populations of horses.
14
The date of the arrival and corresponding
domestication of the camel into such nomadic societies is one of the most debated issues
in Northeast African archaeology.
15
At the latest, by the turn of the common era the camel
seems to have been embedded in pastoralist communities of the greater Nile basin,
11
Posener-Krieger (2004: Tav. 1 (A17, B6); Tav. 2 (44-45), Tav. 13 (78), Tav. 38 (35)). See also Moreno
Garcia (2014, p. 46)
12
Jesse et al. (2004); Bobrowski et al. (2013).
13
See di Lernia (2013); Chaix (2001). Note also that one might distinguish pastoralist herds kept alongside
permanent bodies of water (the Nile, lakes, swamps etc) where the ratio of cattle is appreciably higher like
at Kerma (Chaix & Dubosson 2012, p. 189) from arid rangelands where the quotient of cattle in the herd is
much smaller (cf. Morton 1989, p. 114).
14
Trigger (1965, p. 131); Heidorn (1997).
15
Esser & Esser (1982); Bechhaus-Gerst (1991b, p. 44); Manzo (2004); Cooper (2020a); Cuvigny (2020).

Julien Cooper. Beyond the Nile.
43
excepting highlands and humid ecologies to which it is wholly unsuited biologically.
16
The arrival of this ruminant might go some way to explaining the prominence of nomadic
peoples in Nile history of late antiquity, a feature witnessed for both the Blemmyes and
the Noba as well as the Saracens of the Sinai borderlands.
This broad type of arid land nomadism extended well beyond the Nile basin to the
Horn of Africa and as far south as Tanzania, the southernmost extension of Afroasiatic
peoples. Such nomadism was also practiced to the west across Sahelian latitudes of North
Africa, the ecological interface between the hyper-arid Sahara and the savannah climes
further south. Within this huge ‘nomadic sphere’, Northeast African nomadism differed
appreciably. Transhumant or seasonal migrations are highly specific and engineered
according to the needs of ruminants and local weather conditions as well as interactions
with agricultural peoples. The type of livestock kept by a nomadic group could dictate
specific movements, as could the unreliable aberrations in rainfall. Generally speaking,
movements according to ‘summer’ and ‘winter’ pastures are recognized in most
ethnographic research, but even this categorization is somewhat simplistic. Mobile
shelters ‘tents’ were constructed with differing materials such as wood, matting, and
skins, all of which could be transported on beasts of burden like the donkey or camel.
17
While all such societies had a certain reliance on the sustenance of their herds and their
meat and milk, the proportion of fishing, hunting, mixed-agriculture, or trade in cereals
also differed markedly. For those pastoralists in proximity to the Nile, a significant part
of their transhumance was geared to finding pasture on the Nile riverbanks – an activity
that also promoted trade with urban regimes, integration with local communities, and
employment within these urban societies.
3. 
Despite the obvious inadequacies of the term ‘Asiatic’ in Egyptological literature,
there remains no overarching term for the nomadic pastoralists who inhabited the Sinai
borderlands and adjacent regions of the Gulf of Suez, the alternative use of ‘Canaanites’
or ‘Semites’ hardly rectify these issues. The inhabitants of the Sinai had been interacting
with Egypt since the predynastic. Early phases of contact apparently comprised of some
violent confrontations between the Egyptian state and these nomads in the Sinai ‘mineral
16
Wilson (1984, p. 17).
17
For different mobile structures (tents), see Prussin (1995).

Mare Nostrum, ano 2022, v. 13, n. 1
44
zone’.
18
This dynamic is one of the earliest examples of a continual pattern in nomad-
state relations in Northeast Africa, with the Egyptian state’s desire for desert resources
and exploitation of nomadic lands fueling violent confrontation.
19
It seems likely that
these nomadic inhabitants of the Sinai and Egypt’s northeastern periphery, belonging to
the material horizon of the Canaanite ‘Early Bronze Age’ (c. 3300-2000 BC), were
Semitic speaking groups who traversed between wells and pasture in the peninsula,
20
periodically coming into the Nile Valley, especially the Eastern Delta. Viewed in the
longue durée, these movements of pastoralists into the Eastern Delta would foreshadow
the much more pronounced historical episode of Canaanite influence under the Hyksos
in the Second Intermediate Period.
Egyptian sources speak of a slew of groups in the Sinai and southern Levant such
as the aforementioned ‘sand-dwellers’ (r.yw-), the Aamu, the Iuntiu and later Shasu
(New Kingdom) and Saracens and Arabs (Graeco-Roman period).
21
However, it is not at
all clear if in every instance (except maybe with ‘sand-dwellers’) one can discern whether
these ‘Asiatics’ specifically designated pastoralists of the Sinai and southern Palestine
(Edom, Moab, Midian) or additionally settled groups from further north in Palestine and
Syria. Likewise, it is unclear whether one should at all attempt to segment and
differentiate urban and nomadic populations in the southern Levant which probably
practiced an adaptive mixture of pastoralism and seasonal agriculture. While violent
episodes between Egyptians and Asiatic nomads abound in the texts, for the most part
there was a symbiotic relationship between Asiatics and the Egyptian state. An Asiatic
diaspora of sorts formed throughout the Middle Kingdom and all successive periods, and
Egyptians regularly employed Asiatics on expeditionary ventures.
22
For Egyptians, the
‘Asiatic’ ethnicity was intimately connected with their cultural practice of transhumance.
The Egyptian labels made specific reference to their transhumant and herding nature. The
word for ‘Asiatic’, m.w, while originating in a foreign semitic tongue and borrowed into
Egyptian language, had by the Demotic stage of the language become the word for
‘shepherd’. Likewise the word Shasu () meant ‘one who roams’, also having a later
meaning ‘shepherd’.
23
Egyptians seem to have sharply distinguished nomadic peoples
18
Tallet & Laisney (2012).
19
For New Kingdom nomad-state resource problems, see Schulman (1982); Zibelius-Chen (1994).
20
See the discussion in Cooper (2020b, pp. 93-98).
21
For the complex ethnic terminology on this borderland, see Desanges (1989); Cooper (2020b, pp. 93-
95).
22
Mourad (2015); Winnicki (2009, pp. 145-173).
23
Redford (1986, p. 131); Cooper (2020b, p. 76); Westendorf (1965, p. 5).

Julien Cooper. Beyond the Nile.
45
from their own agricultural ways. One Middle Kingdom literary text, The Instructions of
Merikare, emphasizes the nomadic life of these Asiatics:
24
The vile Asiatic is miserable because of the place wherein he is,
Shortage of water, lack of trees,
And the paths thereof difficult because of the mountains.
He has never settled in one place,
But plagued by want, he wanders the deserts on foot.
While the text’s subject is specific to ‘Asiatics’, such deterministic notions of
geography and otherness could be reproduced for any foreign and nomadic groups whose
lifestyle was alien to Egyptians. One Egyptian text even implies the most basic food in
the world was that possessed by the nomads of the land of Ibhet (= Eastern Desert).
25
In
these cases, Egyptians compounded the ‘othering’ of nomads by linking their nomadic
lifestyle of movement to a life of wretchedness, a charge laid against all foreigners who
lived differently to Egyptians. As Egypt was a riverine land of plenty providing for the
norms of agricultural existence, the desert was a land of destitution breeding want and
misery.
4. 
Much further south, in the vast deserts west of the Nubian Nile towards Kordofan
and Darfur, there was a pastoralist group known as the ‘Noba’. The history of the early
Noba is known from various Graeco-Roman authors and Meroitic inscriptions and what
scant information we have of the early ‘Noba’ suggests that the group had a pastoralist
and nomadic element. Strabo, the first historian to mention them (3rd Century BCE),
describes them living west of the Nubian Nile.
26
Whatever the case, they frequently came
into violent contact with Kushites and were one of their emblematic enemies, akin to the
‘nine-bows’ of Egypt (Figure 2). With the fall of the Kushite state, this group had become
the new elite of the Middle Nile Valley and eventually formed a new series of kingdoms,
transforming Kushite Nubia into the Christian kingdoms of Nobatia, Makuria, and Alwa.
24
Translation following Fischer-Elfert (2005, p. 332).
25
For translation and analysis, see Sauneron (1959).
26
FHN II, no. 109.

Mare Nostrum, ano 2022, v. 13, n. 1
46
This transformation of Nubia in older scholarship is considered as a migration, but
archaeological narratives of ‘Post-Meroitic’ Nubia have emphasized population
continuity,
27
earmarking a strong possibility that ‘Noba’ communities had always been a
(growing) part of the milieu of the Nubian Nile. The language of the elite shifted from
Meroitic to Old Nubian, signaling some cultural and linguistic changes throughout the
Nile. If the desert origin of Strabo’s Noba is true, then they once practiced pastoralism or
agro-pastoralism by virtue of living in arid homelands of the Bayuda desert and further
west towards Kordofan. Indeed, the ‘Noba’ transition on the Nile is in some areas marked
by increasing archaeological signs of pastoralism compared to previous periods.
28
This
suggests a complex set of dynamics and relationships between subsistence foodways,
political arrangements, and ethnicity in the new order of the Nubian Nile.
Figure 2. A copper figurine of a ‘Noba’ enemy produced by Kushites. The Meroitic text on the
figurine identifies the person as a ‘Noba King’ (=EA 65222).
© The Trustees of the British Museum.
The Noba evidently raided and wrested control parts of the Sudanese Nile from old
regimes. For ancient chroniclers, the ‘Noba’ phenomenon involved a reconfiguration and
migratory period across the Middle Nile, although the narrative is hardly clear and
archaeological analyses stress continuity with the previous ‘Meroitic’ period rather than
27
Edwards (2018); Obłuski (2010, pp. 163-167).
28
Adams (1965, pp. 168-169); Obłuski (2010, pp. 78-80).

Julien Cooper. Beyond the Nile.
47
disruption.
29
Aksumite texts speak of Noba approaching the Atbara river on the eastern
side of the Nubian Nile, raids which spurred the Aksumite empire into defensive action.
30
It is wholly uncertain whether these ‘Noba’ of Aksumite texts were the same groups as
the ‘Noba’ of Meroitic and Greek texts, and indeed there is some indication that ‘Noba’
in Post-Meroitic Nubia may have been a catch-all term for a slew of different peoples
who became newly prominent in the embers of the vanishing Meroitic empire.
31
5. Libyan Pastoralists
The ‘Libyans’, like the ‘Asiatics’, are a quasi-Egyptological invented entity, and
are a rather difficult group to define and encapsulate. This word itself came from the
moniker Libu (Lbw) recorded by the Egyptians in the Ramesside period (c. 1290-1050
BCE).
32
Modern scholars, conflating this with the modern connotations of the word
‘Libya’, have now used this term to refer to any peoples broadly west of the Nile, usually
including the regions of the Mediterranean littoral of the Marmarica as far as Gebel
Akhdar. This sometimes also includes the areas around the oases of Siwa and Kufra, the
Qattara depression and beyond. The exact nature of the continuity between these ‘later’
Libyans of the New Kingdom to the Libyans of the earlier Third and Second Millenniums
BCE, labelled Tjehenu and Tjehemu in Egyptian records, is uncertain.
33
From the
perspective of Egyptologists, most ‘Libyan’ interactions occurred on the Mediterranean
littoral, which after all is a relatively fertile zone with plentiful grasslands and even
possibility of limited agricultural in the wadi-systems emptying into the sea (Figure 3).
34
By the New Kingdom at least, Libyans had also settled in the oases, perhaps using a
network of desert paths connecting the Mediterranean coast with the distant oases of
Kufra and Siwa and finally the ‘Egyptian’ oases of Bahariyya, Kharga, Farafra, and
Dakhla.
35
On the Mediterranean coast, Ramesside kings constructed an ambitious chain
of forts, linking the eastern Delta with the distant desert in a venture that was likely aimed
at controlling maritime and terrestrial trade. This was a deliberate imperialistic policy that
29
Edwards (2018).
30
Hatke (2013, pp. 107-109, 114-122).
31
Bechhaus-Gerst (1991a) stresses the multi-ethnic nature of the Noba.
32
Wainwright (1962, p. 93, n. 8).
33
Cf. Manassa (2003, pp. 82-85).
34
Rieger et al. (2012); Snape (2003, pp. 94-96). See also Bates (1914).
35
Roe (2008, pp. 498-504); Manassa (2003, pp. 99-113).

Mare Nostrum, ano 2022, v. 13, n. 1
48
seems to be without precedent in earlier periods,
36
making it certain that Egyptian kings
were responding to a ‘Libyan problem’. While interactions with Libyans are well-known
from a variety of sources in the preceding millennia,
37
there is nothing compared to the
regularity and familiarity of Egypto-Libyan contacts that occurs in the Ramesside period.
How deep into historical ‘Libya’ this contact zone emerged is unknown; surely the
Libyans of Egyptian texts accord to those groups of the Mediterranean littoral as well as
Siwa Oasis, and perhaps even further afield in Gebel Akhdar (Cyrenaica).
38
Figure 3. The Marmarica littoral, the abode of the ‘Libyans’.
Picture of Wadi Hamara, courtesy of Linda Hulin.
The Libyan political impact on the Nile seems to have taken a rather different
trajectory than other nomadic peoples. Ecological changes such as failing rainfall or
pressures on the carrying capacity of the Mediterranean littoral have been posited as
causes for Libyan encroachment on the Eastern Delta. At the same time, there is a reason
to suggest that what happened in the Libyan wars of the Ramesside period was a more
violent and pronounced version of the slow and recurrent population movements that the
Delta had been experiencing for over a millennium. Such causes coincided with an
36
Morris (2005, pp. 621-629).
37
Cooney (2011).
38
See Ritner (2009, p. 43).

Julien Cooper. Beyond the Nile.
49
element of political opportunism and the economic downturns of the late Ramesside state.
Egyptian texts make clear that these ‘Libyan’ groups of the Ramesside period comprised
a constellation of tribes who sometimes acted in concert.
39
This included the Libu,
Meshwesh, Has, Isbet (var. Seped), Mahas, Pit, Shaman, and Qeheq. Two tribes stood
above the rest in this confederation, the Meshwesh and Libu, groups who would
eventually seize control of key parts of the Delta, become mercenaries, and themselves
emerge as a new elite in the Delta.
6. The Medjay and the Blemmyes
As with other nomadic groups on Egypt’s periphery, the peoples of the Eastern
Desert appear in Egyptian texts since the Early Dynastic. By the Old Kingdom the term
‘Medja’ (toponym) is found in Egyptian texts, a word which slowly crystallizes in
Egyptian literate circles to an ethnonym ‘Medjay’.
40
Archaeologically speaking, the
Medjay are a significant problem. There is no material horizon that can be equivocally
connected with these Medjay, even if there have been attempts to link the Pan-Grave and
Gebel Mokram cultures with the nomadic inhabitants of the Eastern Desert.
41
Whatever
the case, some difficulties of the archaeological ‘materiality of nomadism’ seem to be
relevant here for our archaeological search for the ‘Medjay’. Medjay mercenaries are
present in the Old Kingdom military and expeditionary apparatus, while in the Middle
Kingdom there are plentiful records of Medjay living on the Nile and in the desert.
42
Some
Medjay had formed a diaspora on the Nile while other groups remained in the desert but
nevertheless had interactions with their Nile neighbours. By the Middle Kingdom (c.
2000-1650 BCE), Egyptian scribes were aware of the names of some tribal rulers and
territorial zones across the Medjay desert, and by the New Kingdom (c. 1550-1050 BCE),
successive Egyptian officials attempted to quell local groups across the Eastern Desert
who interrupted Egypt’s all important gold supplies. Some of these Eastern Desert groups
also cooperated with Egyptian expeditions, fighting off rival tribes for Egyptians,
43
so
there can be no simple universal notion of enemy and ally in nomad-state relations, rather
a complex patchwork of local allegiances and rivalries. These dynamics between the
39
Bates (1914, pp. 46-72). Ritner (2009, p. 47) calls them a ‘coalition’.
40
Cooper (2020b, pp. 158-170); Liszka (2011).
41
Manzo (2017b); de Souza (2019, pp. 7-30).
42
Liszka (2011); Cooper (2021).
43
Helck (1967); Cooper (2022).

Mare Nostrum, ano 2022, v. 13, n. 1
50
Egyptians and Eastern Desert nomads also extended to the Kushite state in the First
Millennium BCE, who likewise were tested by Eastern Desert groups such as the Rhrhs
and a new group who they termed ‘Belahiu’ (Brhw), a label that is no doubt an early form
of the word ‘Blemmyes’.
By the Graeco-Roman period, these Eastern Desert ‘Blemmyes’ had become
increasingly prominent both in the textual sources and archeological record, with new
pastoralist settlements and cemeteries cropping up in the desert from Coptos to Kassala.
Greek, Coptic, Arabic, and Ge‘ez (Ethiopic) documents speak of Blemmyean raids on
urban states, and also an extensive diaspora living within these states. They even mention
episodes of Blemmyean territorial control of the Nile River. In the first half of the 5th
Century CE the Blemmyes had seized the northern part of Lower Nubia from the
declining Kushites and a retreating Roman administration. They made the temple of
Kalabsha a kind of ‘Nile’ headquarters, patronizing the cult to the local god Mandulis,
and extracting wealth from their new ‘Nile province’. One of the kings of this newly
ascendent Blemmyean polity, Phonen, warred against the rival Noba, a war which
ultimately ended Blemmyean control of the Lower Nubian Nile c. 450 CE. Taking cues
from their Nile neighbours, the Blemmyes conducted an administrative apparatus in the
manner of urban states, creating written decrees and laws in Greek and Coptic, while also
enacting taxation of agricultural holdings.
44
These efforts do not seem to have ‘converted’
the Blemmyes to an urbane existence, however. Blemmyean rulers had significant
authority over their realm and seemed to have travelled their desert and Nile domains,
touring Lower Nubia while maintaining a life in the interior desert. They never lost their
desert heritage. Even when they were living on the Nile, one of the primary concerns of
King Phonen seems to have been his herd.
7. Desert Herds on the Nile
There are records for all these pastoralist groups bringing their families and herds
to the Nile Valley. At times, this may have been an emergency measure to avoid drought
or conflict in the desert, but in several cases there is reason to believe that pasturing on
the Nile Valley would have been a regular part of their seasonal movements. Moreno-
Garcia has advanced a thesis for the western Delta as an important node for Libyan
44
FHN III, nos 331-343.

Julien Cooper. Beyond the Nile.
51
pastoralists since the Old Kingdom.
45
Egyptian frontier missives reported that Edomite
nomads were bringing their herds to the eastern Delta in the Ramesside period.
46
The data
is even more explicit with Medjay and Blemmyean nomads of the Eastern Desert. These
nomads are encountered in numerous Egyptian settlements throughout the 12th and 13th
Dynasties, with a particularly large concentration in the Lower Nubian borderlands. This
is ascertainable not only from documentary records like the missives from Egyptian
fortresses (The Semna Dispatches) and the records of the Theban palace (papyrus Boulaq
18),
47
but also verifiable archaeologically from the many Pan-Grave sites in Lower Nubia
and Upper Egypt, if these do indeed represent ‘Eastern Desert nomads’. While we only
have access to the cemeteries of the Pan-Grave people rather than any settlements, these
cemeteries convey a rich faunal assemblage suggestive of their nomadic nature and
heritage. The precise ratio of animal remains (goat, sheep, cattle) occurring in Pan-Grave
cemeteries is largely consistent with a standard pastoralist herd in Northeast Africa, and
thus the burial assemblage likely represents the reality of the living nomadic herd.
48
The reasons for pastoralists taking their herd to the Nile are manifold and not
necessarily motivated by the singular purpose of grazing on riverbanks. As the herding
subsistence pattern is the major foodway for pastoralists, it stands to reason that herds
may have been taken with the travelling family units on trading ventures, raids, or even
alongside Egyptian expeditions. Napatan chronicles and narratives mention the capture
of herds and families in violent episodes with nomads on the Nubian Nile.
49
The Egyptian
and Kushite states may have been able to easily profit through the influx of such seasonal
movements by facilitating trading nodes specialized in livestock trade. This seems to be
the backdrop to relatively well-known Egyptian sources such as papyrus Anastasi VI
which describe nomads from Edom seeking pasture in the Eastern Delta, the ‘Aamu’
traders depicted in the tomb of Beni Hassan, or the ‘foreign’ herders in the tomb of
Ukhhotep.
50
Such trade would have also brought coveted desert wealth such as gold,
aromatics, oils, leather but most of all the live animals themselves. For example, ‘Libyan
cattle’ are mentioned in a number of Egyptian documents.
51
Cities like Gebelein seem to
have acted as an important hub for Eastern Desert nomads both in the Pharaonic period
45
Moreno Garcia (2015).
46
Gardiner (1937, p. 76).
47
Scharff (1922); Smither (1945).
48
Bangsgaard (2013).
49
Török (2009, pp. 368-372); FHN I, no. 34.
50
Gardiner (1937, p. 76); Kamrin (2013); Fischer (1959, pp. 249-251).
51
Ritner (2009, pp. 43-44).

Mare Nostrum, ano 2022, v. 13, n. 1
52
and late antiquity.
52
The major towns of the western Delta seemed likewise to have
developed as ‘pastoralist-Nile’ nodes in respect to Libyan nomads and cattle trade.
53
Some episodes of ‘nomads on the Nile’ might have been part of seasonal cycles,
but we should also reckon with periodic episodes of pronounced climatic change and
ecological stress that brought nomads in larger numbers to the river. This has been
proposed by a number of authorities in relation to the Pan-Grave and Medjay on the Nile,
with special reference being paid to a missive from the fortress of Mirgissa who reported
that the Medjay said that ‘the desert is dying of hunger’.
54
Even short episodes of drought,
which are comparatively common for instance in the modern Atbai desert, might force
nomads to retreat to safer water resources for a time. For example, the 1980s Atbai
drought wiped out approximately 75-90 percent of herds, taking years for the Beja to
restock to a pre-drought size.
55
The impact of these events on local politics and
movements cannot be underestimated. One of the notable consequences of drought, even
in recent history, is the movement of pastoralists to agricultural settlements with a shift
in employment to diverse roles in urban communities. In ancient societies with little food
contingency or assistance from aid-agencies, such events must have been catastrophic for
the pastoralist community.
Such episodes of grazing, herding, and trading may have acted as ‘stepping stones’
towards the emergence of diaspora communities in the Nile Valley. Activities for which
desert communities had natural dependencies and skills such as hunting, tracking, and
mineral exploitation facilitated their integration into Egyptian bureaucracies and
expeditionary activities. Nomadic diaspora communities are documented in almost all
periods both on the archaeological and textual record, but it has proven difficult to
correlate and marry these two categories of material and textual evidence together to
produce a holistic narrative of nomadic habitations. The archaeological horizon of the
‘Pan-Grave culture’ for example has the appearance of one such diaspora group,
stretching from Middle Egypt to Lower Nubia, but the data for Pan-Grave occupations
on the Nile hardly allows for a simple equation with the Eastern Desert Medjay.
56
The
situation of the nomadic ‘Trogodytes’ of the Graeco-Roman period is similarly murky
52
There is evidence of ‘Medjay cattle’ from the Eastern Desert at Gebelein, see Vernus (1986: 141-143).
There is some evidence for nomads at Gebelein in the First Intermediate Period (Fischer 1961) and more
explicit evidence in late antiquity (Darnell & Manassa, 2020).
53
Moreno Garcia (2015).
54
Kraemer & Liszka (2016); Liszka & Kraemer (2016); Smither (1945, p. 9).
55
Hjort-af-Ornäs & Dahl (1991, p. 160).
56
Liszka & de Souza (2021).

Julien Cooper. Beyond the Nile.
53
from an archaeological perspective.
57
With the Blemmyes of the late Roman period our
narrative is slightly better developed, with both ‘Blemmyean’ satellite settlements known
throughout the near and interior desert as well as plentiful remains of locally produced
ceramic type ‘Eastern Desert Ware’, both of which can be more or less correlated with
the plentiful historical and epigraphic records for Blemmyean occupations.
58
8. Raiding Cultures
Raiding is not an activity specific to nomadic pastoralists but both historians and
anthropologists stress it as a comparatively common feature amongst pastoralist societies,
a pattern that continues in some parts of the world to the present day. There are a number
of possible reasons for the prevalence of this activity among nomadic pastoralists. The
mobile nature of pastoralist communities allows for ease of movement across the
landscape, with plentiful beasts-of-burden including camels and horses assisting in this
activity. Then there is the economic motive for raiding, either to seize livestock for their
own herds or supplement their economy away from livestock subsistence, with some even
supposing a nomadic dependency on the products of urban economies. Furthermore,
raiding could be considered a method of asymmetric warfare which does not give the
disadvantages of open pitched battle against a numerically superior foe. Probably more
importantly, however, is the lack of economic contingency in nomadic economies
particularly those inhabiting arid environments. The anthropologist Anatoly Khazanov
championed a view of raiding as a pattern shared between sedentary and nearby nomadic
peoples, an activity that was balanced on the other hand by trading, with both strategies
having the same goal of resource acquisition and redistribution. Accordingly, Khazanov
stresses a recurrent pattern that arises from integration in sedentary worlds:
59
Nomads are in a position in which they are able to acquire the agricultural products
and handicraft goods they need (and also livestock) by force, or by threatening
such, while giving little or nothing in exchange. Thus wherever nomads have the
corresponding opportunities, their raids and pillaging become a permanent fixture.
For many nomads they were an important supplementary means of livelihood.
57
Burstein (2008); Cuvigny (2014).
58
Cooper (2020a); Lassányi (2012).
59
Khazanov (1994, pp. 221-222).

Mare Nostrum, ano 2022, v. 13, n. 1
54
With no cereal agriculture, obvious food surpluses, or storage apparatuses, nomadic
economies, once integrated with those of agricultural centres, would have become
somewhat reliant on trade. Historical documents in Egypt and Nubia indicate that raiding
was directed at different targets: 1) settlements and their food supplies, including
livestock or 2) temples, churches, and places of worship, probably directed at their stored
resources, goods, and attached workshops.
60
In the former, the raid would seem to be a
method of supplanting the nomads’ food economy, while in the latter, raiding seems
deliberately to seek out precious goods for redistribution and prestige in their own
economy. Raiding was not just directed at foreign groups, and there is evidence that
raiding on other nomadic groups of the same ethno-linguistic continuum were relatively
common. Agatharchides, a Greek historian (2nd Century BCE), remarks that the
Trogodytes of the Red Sea coast fight each other for pasture, while such a phenomenon
of ‘livestock raiding’ exists till the present day in certain parts of East Africa and the
Horn.
61
For the macro-history of the Nile basin, the allure of urban riches would always
mean that nomads could turn to the Nile for a shortfall – trading, raiding, or employment
were all equally valid strategies for economic diversification. Other methods of
acquisition, often enacted alongside raiding, included extraction of tribute or direct
taxation.
In the Nile Valley, Pharaonic state dogma communicated an ideological aversion to
the nomadic and unsettled way of life. Boundary stele warn against transgression by
nomadic groups onto Egyptian political territory and nomadism is specifically chastised
in various genres of Egyptian literature.
62
The Egyptian state did actively try to keep out
some groups from grazing in the Nile Valley through fortified frontiers and denying
access to wells,
63
a policy which would have certainly led to conflict with nomadic
groups, especially in times of drought or internal conflict where access to the valley was
necessary for their survival. Beyond the motive of ‘opportunity’, current anthropological
theories have attempted to model the causes and patterns of raiding as originating from
the ecological bases of arid land pastoralists. This raiding arises from constantly
60
For raiding amongst the Blemmyes, see Cooper (2020a). For the chronology of Libyan raids, see Bates
(1914, pp. 210-241).
61
Khazanov (1994, p. 183). For Agatharchides, see Burstein (1989, p. 114).
62
Fischer-Elfert (2005).
63
See Snape (2013, p. 448) for the Libyan frontier. Fischer-Elfert (2015, p. 330) cites similar policies on
Nubian frontiers.

Julien Cooper. Beyond the Nile.
55
fluctuating desert ecologies that are in ‘disequilibrium’ or experience localized climate
variability and exceptional droughts, affecting one pastoralist tribe more than another and
thus necessitating redistributive mechanisms to balance economies across tribal units.
64
Such modelling is probably beyond empirical tests with respect to the ancient evidence,
but nevertheless this theory remains a powerful heuristic for explaining the ubiquity of
raids amongst pastoralist peoples. Whatever the cause of raiding, it seems that this
practice became institutionalized and politicized in some para-Nilotic cultures, with
raiding benefitting local elites and thus contributing to new political formations in
nomadic tribes and confederations.
Such political and ecological factors meant that low-scale conflict between nomadic
groups and agricultural communities were comparatively frequent and even inevitable.
Viewed in such a way, raiding might be considered as part of the same goal-oriented
behaviour as trading, both producing the same outcome of resource acquisition and
wealth. Raids from Atbai nomads are described in several texts of the New Kingdom,
where they robbed cereals from Lower Nubian towns.
65
In late antiquity, Blemmyean
raids originating in the same desert are well-known in the historical record from the 3rd
Century and continue largely unabated into the early Arab period c. 9th Century CE,
proliferating on the whole stretch of the Nile Valley from Upper Egypt well into the
Kushite heartland (Figure 4).
66
A vivid archaeological example of this are the gold objects
of Nubian manufacture found in a Blemmyean tomb of the Eastern Desert, objects which
most likely belong to a much earlier Kushite royal burial.
67
The situation of raiding on
the Libyan frontier of Egypt is less clear owing to the presentation of ‘Libyan wars’ in
Egyptian sources. Some scholars situate the Ramesside Libyan wars as part of a larger
restructuring and migratory episode involving pastoralists along the Mediterranean
littoral, involving the movement of whole families and herds.
68
Associated raids and
immigration events were also directed towards the oases and Thebes. Asiatic nomads
were known to infringe on the Eastern Delta since the earliest phases of the Egyptian
state, originating in the Eastern Desert of Lower Egypt or the Sinai and find a later
64
McCabe (2004); Marshall et al. (2011, pp. 45-49).
65
Schulman (1982).
66
Cooper (2020a). For documents of individual raids, see Updegraff (1978, pp. 46-162) and Power (2012,
pp. 140-162).
67
Sadr et al. (1995, pp. 215-220).
68
Snape (2003); Snape (2013, pp. 447-448); Ritner (2009); Hulin (2020).

Mare Nostrum, ano 2022, v. 13, n. 1
56
corollary in the activities of ‘Saracens’ of late antiquity who marauded monastic
settlements.
69
Figure 4. Rock art in the Atbai Desert (Wadi Hodein) depicting a camel raiding party from late
antiquity or the medieval period, after Červíček (1978), Abb. 327.
Each of these raiding affairs involved different goals and entailed different
historical trajectories. Blemmyean raids seem to have been small affairs, pilfering
resources from small settlements and monasteries, taking captives and livestock. In
certain parts of the valley particularly well-travelled by the Blemmyes such as Lower
Nubia and Gebelein, these episodes of raiding (and grazing) eventually manifested in
migrations and the formation of local administrations and annexations of Nile territory to
the Blemmyean polity.
70
The Libyan wars of the Ramesside period eventuated in a large
demographic input of Libyans to the Delta region – a several century long process that
would lead ultimately to the formation of a community of Libyans who would seize power
in the Third Intermediate Period (c. 1050-664 BCE).
9. Forming Nomadic States
While state-formation is one of the most well-studied and debated processes in
ancient world studies,
71
there is little consensus and even methodological apparatus on
how and why nomadic regimes may form overt political institutions and ‘confederate’ or
69
Cooper (2020a).
70
As manifested in the papyrological and epigraphic documents, see FHN III, nos 300-301, 310-313, 331-
343.
71
See most recently Graeber & Wengrow (2021, pp. 359-413), who problematize the concept of the ‘ancient
state’ and state formation more generally, preferring instead to analyse ancient societies in terms of how
they exercised domination.

Julien Cooper. Beyond the Nile.
57
‘unify’. Significantly, scholarship using both historical and anthropological approaches
has stressed that nomadism is no barrier to the formation of highly centralized and
successful political configurations, ‘kingdoms’, ‘states’, ‘empires’ etc.
72
Viewed in the
evolutionary model of statehood, which supposes stadial levels of supposed increasing
complexity and hierarchical organization (aka the so-called ‘chiefdom model’), desert
nomadic societies seem unlikely contenders for forming large political and territorial
states vis-à-vis agricultural regimes.
73
However, even cursory examples of strong
territorial-based nomadic polities in the proximal Near East tell us this cannot be the case.
The Ghassanids, Nabataeans, and Palmyrenes of the Arabian desert ecologies formed
political institutions and territorial agglomerations in what was a vastly arid and nomadic
space spliced by oases. Further afield, the process of state formation amongst peoples of
the Central Asian Steppe is well-studied, with a significant scholarship focusing on the
case studies of Turko-Mongol state formation across nomadic and agricultural zones.
Such formations and processes where pastoralists seize power over sedentary regions and
form new ruling dynasties are seldomly recognized in the scholarship as occurring in the
African continent. One case might be the emergence of Sayfawa dynasty of Kanem
around Lake Chad.
74
This pattern of nomadic ‘state-building’ has also be identified in
several transitions relating to Berber or Tuareg ascendency over sedentary groups in the
Maghreb, or even the ancient Numidian (c. 200-40 BCE) and Laguatan confederations
(c. 6th Century CE) in Libya.
75
In general, however, there remains a degree of ambiguity
and fuzziness on the status and emergence of the ‘nomadic polities’ across Africa
generally and the ‘Nile corridor’ especially.
The evolutionist view of political formation and so-called ‘archaic states’ and
chiefdoms has been criticized as being much too simplistic to explain the many diverse
case studies of the emergence of ancient polities. Beyond this view, there is a growing
recognition in the scholarship that there existed such a thing as a ‘nomadic state’,
76
political formations whose population was by in large nomadic but nevertheless could
form complex political and territorial institutions. Some scholars have seen these
72
Khazanov (1994); Emberling (2014, pp. 147-150); Honeychurch (2014); Hämäläinen (2013).
73
Yoffee (2005). For the issues of this model as applied to African societies, see McIntosh (1999). As
applied to nomads, see also the model of ‘chiefly confederacy’ in Levy (2009, pp. 157-158).
74
Muiu (2009, p. 39); Khazanov (1994, pp. 277-290). Khazanov also identifies possible examples in East
Africa (290-295) but finds difficulties with applying this model, borne out of Central Asian exemplars, to
African cultures.
75
See Mattingly (1983). These examples of ‘nomadic polities’ are complicated by the fact that these regions
were always host to a mix of nomadic pastoralists and sedentary agriculturists.
76
Honeychurch (2014).

Mare Nostrum, ano 2022, v. 13, n. 1
58
formations as cases of ‘secondary state formation’, that is these polities form only in
proximity to pre-existent urban states and often borrow symbols and systems of
governance from such nearby states, as exhibited in the case of the Mongol relationship
with China. Another related view of nomadic states is that they are largely predatory or
parasitic ‘shadow empires’,
77
polities reliant on raiding and exploitation of agricultural
states for maintenance of their own institutions and wealth. Accordingly, these nomadic
polities were capable of forming unity only after a ‘primary state’ has emerged in a nearby
fertile agricultural zone.
Scholarly attitudes to the presence or absence of ‘nomadic polities’ is mainly
shaped by our primary evidence and investigative methodologies. Political formations,
being abstract entities, are difficult to perceive in the textual and archaeological record
outside the exemplars in Central Asia. In pre-literate societies, there will be no explicit
record of a political institution unless nearby states have noted it in their foreign
neighbours, and even here it is not always clear (as in Egyptian texts) if such records are
identifying and describing a political or territorial bound entity or something much vaguer
like a broad externally created amorphous ‘ethnicity’. When Egyptians use the word
Tjehenu ‘Libyan’ or Aamu ‘Asiatic’ in texts there is certainly no reason for us to
reconstruct a Libyan or Asiatic nomadic polity in each of these cases. In archaeological
terms, certain features such as administrative seals, monumental architecture, or even
urban architecture itself are sometimes taken to be evidence of territorial polities or
‘centralization’, but it would indeed be a simplistic model of sociocultural organization
for these things to be preconditions of political organization among pastoralists.
78
In many cases, scholars have counterintuitively shaped their search for nomadic
polities by trying to detect the paraphernalia that is quintessentially associated with urban
states. A nomadic polity is unlikely to engage in monumental architecture, and certainly
does not produce the same sort of features of economic storage and redistribution as urban
polities.
79
A perceived absence of political formation amongst nomads is sometimes
grasped in terms of an almost geographic deterministic arguments, where agricultural
intensification or surplus is seen as a precondition for ‘complexity’ and statehood.
77
Barfield (2001).
78
See the discussion in Ben-Yosef (2019).
79
This is also true of the theoretical models, see Honeychurch (2014, p. 281): “These models tend to
discount the possibility of indigenous forms of statehood among nomads because of the way in which
complexity and states are typically imagined”. Likewise McIntosh (1999, p. 22): “archaeological theory is
at present ill-equipped to evaluate such instances because our current conceptual toolkit for investigating
complexity has been fashioned with only a subset of complex sites and societies in mind”.

Julien Cooper. Beyond the Nile.
59
Nomadic political establishments, often based on assemblies, consensus politics, and
tribal confederacies of kinship rather than bureaucratic institutions will axiomatically
manifest themselves in completely different ways both on the archaeological and textual
record.
80
Furthermore, theoretical approaches from African ethnography and archaeology
stress models of ‘horizontal’ complexity rather than vertical hierarchy, where institutions
cut across society like cult associations or groups of specialist craftsmen,
81
creating an
altogether different view of the ancient polity from the expectation of the centralized
‘kingdom’. Anthropological theorists analysing nomadic political organizations have
stressed the flexible and adaptive nature of nomadic political structures,
82
allowing them
to quickly reshape and transform in response to new historical, economic, or climatic
circumstances. This makes the detection of ‘nomadic power’ even more elusive wherein
there is no stable mental image of an ever-changing nomadic polity.
Such differing forms of organization must manifest very differently, possibly
invisibly, on the archaeological record. Where an Egyptian temple might mark a ‘vestige’
of a state enterprise, no such obvious markers are to be expected in nomadic societies.
One way nomadic institutions might express themselves in a very nomadic idiom is using
symbols of lineage and kinship as markers of identity. For example, pastoralist branding
marks for tribal and herd identification (wasm in the Middle East, tamgha in Central Asia)
could sometimes manifest as emblematic symbols of nomadic regimes or their dynasty
and ruler.
83
Such ‘clan’ or ‘tribal’ marks are documented in the ancient rock art record of
the Nile basin, the Sahel, the Horn, and East Africa, but as yet there is limited scope for
linking such identifier marks with political institutions in the Nile basin.
84
Nevertheless,
such ‘pastoralist’ manifestations of identity demonstrate that our search for nomadic
formations must be geared to different kinds of material and symbolic manifestations.
Likewise, large group cemeteries and sacral sites across the desert probably served as
focal points to bond disparate mobile groups together and create common identities.
85
The mobility of pastoralist groups means that our search for political identities is different
from that of urban cultures, not that pastoralist groups did not possess political identities.
80
For the place of ‘kinship’ in such political formations, see Sneath (2007).
81
McIntosh (1999).
82
Salzman (1978); Togan (1998).
83
Landais (2001). These marks are often used for the symbol of the ruling nomadic elite or empire in
Central Asia.
84
Russell (2013). For a putative example of the Blemmyes using a ‘royal wasm’, see Cooper (2020a, pp.
11-14).
85
For examples of collective burial sites in the Eastern Desert such as Khor Nubt, see Krzywinksi (2012,
pp. 144-146). I thank the anonymous reviewer for this comment.

Mare Nostrum, ano 2022, v. 13, n. 1
60
Without an obvious primary source base to explicate the ‘nomadic polity’, the
question remains as to what is the status of ‘nomadic polities’ in the Nile basin? In a
number of the cases illustrated above (Libyans, Noba, Blemmyes) it seems likely that
these peoples formed something of a ‘nomadic polity’ if we accept some basic definitions
of such an entity as having some notion of territorial control, agreed-upon leadership and
membership, and evidence of some coordination in decision making. In all these cases,
one must reckon with largely independent political units or ‘tribes’ loosely bound in such
confederations, with episodes of greater or lesser unity. The obvious pattern here is that
we chiefly notice these nomadic polities insofar as they are mentioned in Egyptian or
Kushite texts. For example, the Libyans of the Ramesside period are epistemologically
present only as a result of being listed in Ramesside war texts – no one doubts their
existence certainly, but we are a long way from being able to define or characterize a
Libyan nomadic polity from the archaeological record.
The case study of polities in the Eastern Desert is illustrative. The pastoralist
Medjay, for example, had established tribal-territorial institutions as far back as 1800
BCE, named Webat-Sepet and Ausheq. In this period, the Atbai desert was ruled by three
leading families, some of whom journeyed to the Theban palace and maintained
diplomatic relationships with the Egyptian court.
86
There is little to nothing on the
archaeological record to posit their existence but it would be crass to ignore the data from
the Execration Texts and Middle Kingdom Annales which unproblematically mention
‘polities’ of some kind in the interior desert.
87
Much later in Eastern Desert history in late
antiquity, inscriptions at Kalabsha and a corpus of texts at Gebelein bear witness to the
emergence of an institution of pre-eminent Blemmyean kings, ruling over a wide territory
and subgroup of tribal elders (phylarchs). A number of structural causes and triggers for
the emergence of this Blemmyean polity can be posited: the development of camel
nomadism, the slow integration (c. 300BCE) of the nomads in Ptolemaic and Roman trade
networks, and the subsequent downfall of these networks in the Third Century CE crisis
coupled with the slow demise of the Meroitic state. The archaeological record in the desert
also demands that we also consult internal factors for the emergence of this ‘Blemmyean
state’. All throughout the desert, the nomads constructed a different type of settlement or
86
Cooper (2020b, pp. 121-122, 142-147). Morkot (1999: 182) opines that the existence of these groups as
evidence for ‘recognized leaders’ in Nubian states.
87
Cooper (2021).

Julien Cooper. Beyond the Nile.
61
seasonal camp in the 3rd -7th Centuries CE.
88
A Blemmyean ceramic type, ‘Eastern Desert
Ware’, likewise emerges in a similar period and is found all across their desert space,
from Myos Hormos, Berenike, Mons Smaragdus, the Sudanese Deserts, Aksum and even
a site on the Arabian coast, witnessing the integration of desert peoples in long-distance
networks.
89
This Blemmyean ‘polity’ controlled several regions in the Nile Valley, but
never transformed into an expansionist empire. According to Murray’s macro-historical
assessment, it was only the integration of Egypt into the wider Roman Empire that
prevented this ‘nomadic invasion’:
Had these new invaders had only the native Egyptians to conquer, they might have
repeated the success of the Hyksos, but the Romans restricted their inroads to the
district south of Thebes and eventually drove the Blemmyes back beyond the First
Cataract.
Despite being ejected from their Nile ‘provinces’ by the 7th Century CE, the
Blemmyes (‘Beja’ in Arabic documents), continued raiding the Nile Valley well into the
Medieval period and remained fiercely independent for much of history.
90
Even down to
the 19th Century, the foreign Turkish control of this region was barely felt beyond the Red
Sea coast.
10. -
Nomads could form political agglomerations in the desert and, if historical
conditions favoured, could seize parts of the Nile Valley from urban regimes. The most
famous example of this are the Libyan dynasties of Egypt’s ‘Third Intermediate Period’
or eponymous ‘Libyan period’. Some have also speculated that the Hyksos dynasties of
the Delta (15th Dynasty) also involved a nomadic element from the southern Levant and
Sinai, although debate continues as to the exact origin and nature of the Hyksos
interlude.
91
The Blemmyes of the Eastern Desert would also create ‘urban provinces’ of
88
Lassányi (2012, pp. 287-290).
89
Barnard (2008); Manzo (2014). For sherds of this ware on the Arabian coast, see Zarins & Zahrani (1984,
p. 81, pl. 77).
90
Dahl & Hjort-af-Ornäs (2006).
91
Egyptian written traditions, at least, remembered the Hyksos as nomadic peoples, see Redford (1970).
For these considerations from the archaeological record, see Bietak (2010).

Mare Nostrum, ano 2022, v. 13, n. 1
62
their kingdom, periodically seizing Lower Nubia and small stretches of the Nile in Upper
Egypt around Moalla and Gebelein (Figure 5). The case of the Noba is more difficult to
grasp due to their uncertain status as nomads and relationship to pastoralism, but they
would emerge as a new ruling elite in late antique Nubia, supplanting the prior Kushite
rulers headquartered in Meroe.
Figure 5. Nomads on the edge of the Nile Valley, a low-density ‘Blemmyean’ settlement of
stone huts along a narrow wadi in the near desert near Moalla and Gebelein
(M10-11/S1 – ‘Debabiya’).
Image courtesy of the Moalla Survey Project, Yale University (Colleen Manassa Darnell, John Darnell, &
Alberto Urcia).

Julien Cooper. Beyond the Nile.
63
These examples of ‘nomadic kingdoms’ on the Nile are frequent enough to justify
it as a geopolitical pattern which has better known examples elsewhere in the world in
what some historians call ‘Post-Nomadic’ Empires.
92
Leaving aside the difficulties with
the term ‘empire’, various nomadic confederations of Central Asia engaged in a pattern
of invasion and dynastic replacement of nearby urban states, especially in fertile
agricultural ‘centres’. Examples are numerous and include the Mongol Yuan Dynasty of
China, the Il-Khans of Persia, and the Mughals of north India (to name a few). All these
cases involved not only a kind of limited migration and seizure of political power by
peoples of nomadic heritage, but also the engendering of a new dynastic elite engaged in
‘state-building’ and traditional administrative apparatuses.
93
The main variable, as many
scholars have noted, is the degree to which the nomadic overlords acculturate to their new
political centre of gravity or rather preserve their nomadic heritage. This is overlaid by
other developments as to whether parts of the nomadic population engage in new
economic and subsistence strategies, sometimes exchanging their nomadic pastoralism
for settled agriculture or some sort of mixture of these activities. The social dynamics of
these new ‘Post-Nomadic’ states are complex and involve constantly shifting negotiations
and identities between the new elite ruling (and often militaristic) class, the old
indigenous elite, and the sedentary subjects. For example, the case of the Manchu Qing
Dynasty provides a vivid example of an active policy of preserving Manchu identity and
heritage at the expense of the assimilation to Chinese (Han) norms.
94
Other nomadic
dynasties seem to quickly acculturate to the cultural and ideological norms of their
demographically numerous urban subjects, possibly driven by a policy of expedience
when confronted with a vastly different economic and demographic setting. ‘Nomadic
rulers’ in such episodes adopt the titles and accoutrements of their former rulers, Shah
(Iran), Huángdì (China), and in the case of Libyan Egypt, the full fivefold titulary of a
traditional Egyptian king.
The parallels with the rise of ‘nomadic’ Libyan power in urban Egypt are tempting
but not altogether fitting. The ‘new regimes’ of the Libyan Dynasties (Dyn. 22-24), apart
from dynastic heritage, quickly resembles something very un-Libyan in most details left
to historians. Although in truth, most our details of what is ‘Libyan’ in a cultural sense
92
Wink (2011).
93
The literature on Central Asian nomadic dynasties is vast, see the edited volume of Paul (2013). Seminal
studies include Khazanov (1994, pp. 233-263) and Sneath (2007).
94
See the extensive study of Elliot (2001).

Mare Nostrum, ano 2022, v. 13, n. 1
64
derives largely from Egyptian ‘outside’ sources which are rather broad and stereotyped
ethnographic brushstrokes. Feather-wearing, cattle keeping, and manifesting different
norms of kinship and genealogy, Libyans may well have kept many of their indigenous
cultural conditions intact. Such traditions were, however, not important to communicate
in elite display in an Egyptian world. Despite the comparisons of ‘nomadic replacement’
of an urban centre, the Libyan example does not seem to recreate the images of an
invading Central Asian horde in China or Iran. Firstly, the Libyan elite did not rapidly
invade Egypt and replace a dynasty in a single or even protracted campaign of conquest,
but rather fought a long series of drawn-out wars and skirmishes over multiple
generations, slowly settling in the Delta and other regions, and then eventually rising to
the spectre of political power in an atmosphere of decaying political unity in Lower Egypt.
Little in the way of pastoralist rhetoric or heritage is communicated by the Libyan
overlords in their newfound dynasties. All the paraphernalia of Pharaonic elite display
seems to have been adopted comprehensively (Figure 6), after all the Libyans had spent
part of their prior history in the Egyptian agricultural world of the Delta.
95
Figure 6. ‘Post-Nomadic’ rulers? The Libyan Pharaohs of Sheshonq I and Osorkon II,
after Lepsius, Denkmäler aus Ägypten und Äthiopien, III, 300.
There is furthermore, unlike say for example the Mongol experience under Genghis
Khan, any certain evidence for the Libyan dynasty remaining rulers over their nomadic
95
For detailed discussions of Libyan acculturation, see Hulin (2020) and Leahy (1985).

Julien Cooper. Beyond the Nile.
65
heartland, that is ruling both Libya and Egypt together. This may be because the specific
Libyan tribes and confederation that had emerged as pharaohs had already largely
acculturated to an urban agricultural life for centuries in the Delta, distancing themselves
from those ‘desert Libyans’ on the eve of their expansion in the Ramesside period. The
issue here is that our record of the Libyan dynasty is largely confined to funerary
archaeology and standards of Egyptian epigraphic practice, categories of evidence that
are markedly ‘Egyptian’ in acculturating potential. Were we able to step into a Libyan
residence and observe their food preparation, cultural festivities, or oral traditions, we
may have a very different view of Libyan practices in the Nile world. It would be
simplistic to view Libyans as wholesale assimilating to the Egyptian culture either. While
they styled themselves as pharaohs, they still honoured their heritage as ‘chiefs of the Ma’
and were bestowed with names in the Libyan tongue. The distinction here is important;
Libyan Pharaohs kept titles directed at their Libyan social status (‘chief of the Ma’) while
also taking on the dynastic norms of fivefold Pharaonic names.
A commonly held rhetoric in the literature of nomadic states is that they are largely
secondary phenomena, emerging in response and reaction to nearby agricultural regimes.
Much of the theoretical literature on these issues is dominated by the historical situations
of China, Iran, and Central Asia. These case studies have given rise to Barfield’s
aforementioned ‘shadow-empires’.
96
This view, while promoting a key ‘external’
influencer, cannot sit as a mono-causal approach to state formation.
97
Internal factors such
as changing subsistence patterns and ecologies in the nomadic heartlands must also have
a part to play. The political ambitions and repositioning of distinct kinship groups and
lead-tribes as well as internal exchange within the nomadic sphere might have just as
much a role in the path to a nomadic state and the shaping of a ‘confederacy’. Likewise,
there is reason to suppose that nomadic pastoralists always contained or exhibited forms
of ‘political complexity’ involving confederating tendencies and complex kinship and
political relations, even if most scholars would seldom afford words like ‘polity’,
‘confederation’, or ‘state’ to these formations unless they are capable of invading or
maintaining diplomatic relations with foreign states. An illustrative case is the Eastern
Desert formations of Webat-Sepet and Ausheq known from Egyptian sources in the early
96
Barfield (2001).
97
Cf. di Cosmo (2012, pp. 173-174): “For these theoretical schemes to be useful, the idea that inner Asian
states developed “in relation to” sedentary states needs to be substantiated with historical evidence that
illustrates how that relationship came into being”.

Mare Nostrum, ano 2022, v. 13, n. 1
66
Second Millennium BCE. These groups engaged in trade ventures with Egypt including
the export of gold, and their leaders and retinues are also documented journeying to the
Theban palace of the Middle Kingdom. The mere existence of these nomadic entities is
significant as these formations exist thousands of years before any scholar would afford
the pastoralists of the Eastern Desert any such political labels like ‘chiefdoms’ or ‘polity’.
Comparing nomad-state relations in the Nile basin and inner Asia is a helpful
exercise and heuristic but not one that can be used uncritically or transplanted without
exception. The specifics of nomad-state relations differs markedly from example to
example. Even across the Nile basin, it would be spurious to compare the Libyan
ascendency and ensuing ‘Libyan dynasties’ with that of the Blemmyes seizure of Lower
Nubia in late antiquity. In one case a nomadic group became sedentary elites and then
pharaohs, in another case a large desert nation of nomads exercised political control over
discrete parts of the Nile Valley, while remaining inseparably bound to their desert
territory. Both regimes clearly engaged in conflict with Nile-bound states, but the
dynamics of their ‘emergence’ or ‘rise’ seem to have little commonalities except for their
being tribal confederacies in marginal ecological situations on the periphery of the Nile.
There is, as some scholars have pointed out, a contradiction in ‘nomadic states’ here,
dependent on whether one views these states as still containing a nomadic populace, or
whether the ‘nomadic’ element is rather a small elite group that originated in a pastoralist
nomadic setting.
98
Implicit in this approach is the existence, for example, of two different
Libyan ‘nomadic states’, a tribal confederacy that attacked Egypt in the Ramesside period
and had a desert homeland, and a later state which was largely centered around a ruling
Libyan Dynasty in the Delta.
99
The common element that must be emphasized is that
nomadic peoples and political configurations have a greater place in the geopolitics of the
Nile Valley than is commonly espoused, forming confederacies that threatened, invaded,
and administered parts of the Nile Valley.
11. The Archaeology of Para-Nilotic Nomadism
One of the major reasons why nomadic societies and ‘nomadic polities’ remain
elusive to us is the comparatively poor archaeological wealth associated with transhumant
98
Bruun (2006, p. 233); Khazanov (1994, p. 228).
99
O’Connor (1990) championed the view of a Libyan ‘nomadic state’ in the late New Kingdom, a level
of organisation which is rejected in Ritner (2009, p. 44).

Julien Cooper. Beyond the Nile.
67
living. Nomadic society, being largely on the move, is typified by transient sites; hearths,
tent bases, faunal remains and other trappings of food production, as well as clusters of
surface artefacts such as lithics and pottery in addition to the record of rock art and
petroglyphs. Bradley’s case study of the ancient nomadism in the Butana Desert proposed
a hierarchy of types of nomadic sites oriented to the degree of transience and presence of
permanent architecture. This included ‘sedentary sites’, ‘rainy season campsites’, and
‘nomadic burial sites’.
100
Sadr’s analysis of nomadism in the southern Atbai categorized
site types according to density of surface remains, ‘high’, ‘medium’ and ‘low’, noting that
low-density sites might reflect seasonal camps and medium density sites correspond to
reoccupied camps.
101
This material record of nomadism depends largely on the frequency
of movement and intensity of human activity at the site, in turn dictated by seasonal
differences of ecologies. Compounding these problems, even when surveys take place in
these desert zones, they usually focus on the prominent archaeological remains attributed
to urban foreigners such as fortresses, mines, harbours, and even desert temples. This
means that in most desert zones outside the Nile, the record of nomads is ‘patchy’, but is
notably improving. Such aims have increasingly been the subject of dedicated projects
with a view to analysing the habitation of desert regions and filling in the ‘blanks’ in our
habitation map of Northeast Africa.
Surveys have now taken place in most nomadic ‘peripheries’ of the Nile Valley
albeit in varying levels of intensity. Amongst the most illuminating results are the various
projects focused on the Sudanese Western Desert, where a huge number of sites belonging
to cattle pastoralists have been identified in what is now hyper-arid desert.
102
The
importance of this work has been both to reconstruct nomadic habitations and link this
with discrete environmental changes. This work has thus been instrumental for
understanding the end of the Neolithic Wet Phase, a process of climatic change which
would irreversibly change the nomads’ home forever. Nomadic habitations retreated
spatially over the course of the neolithic and terminal historic (c. 2000-1500 BCE) to
other marginal ecologies, the Nile River, or indeed other ecological refuges such as the
Nuba Mountains. In the southwestern periphery of Nubia in the region of Kordofan, sites
at Gebel Zankor and Wadi el-Malik have been subject to a number of surveys and
100
Bradley (1992, pp. 198-199). For these problems more generally, see Cribb (1991, pp. 65-83).
101
Sadr (1991, pp. 20-22).
102
For a summary of results, see the volume of Bubenzer et al. (2007) and Riemer & Kindermann (2019).
This worsening ecology and ensuing migrations have a significant bearing on the spread of Nilo-Saharan
languages, for which see Dimmendaal (2007).

Mare Nostrum, ano 2022, v. 13, n. 1
68
excavations, revealing habitations from the neolithic to the First Millennium CE.
103
Moving north, around the oases of the Western Desert, the local cattle-raising Bashendi
and Sheikh Muftah cultures have undergone extensive archaeological documentation, a
cultural horizon that seems to disappear with growing Egyptian control and settlement of
Kharga and Dakhla (c. 2000 BCE).
104
Many surveys and projects have documented the
nearby Libyan deserts of the Marmarica and Gebel Akhdar, with extensive signs of
pastoralist habitation around well sites and even signs of low-intensity agriculture along
rain-fed wadis nearing the coast.
105
Local harbour sites and fortresses acted as nodes of
interaction between pastoralists and urban states who attempted to control and facilitate
trade along the littoral.
Moving to the east of the Nile, continued surveys in the Southern Atbai around
Kassala have been able to explicate complex relations between communities that variably
exhibited by pastoralist and agricultural tendencies.
106
From the fieldwork conducted thus
far, these communities exhibited ebbs and flows in subsistence patterns with greater and
lesser emphases on pastoralism in distinct periods. For instance, the cultural horizon of
the ‘Gebel Mokram’, based mainly on surface surveys between the Gash and Atbara
rivers, is considered to be a material manifestation of pastoralists. Known primarily
through a set ceramic tradition, the ‘Gebel Mokram’ culture built large circular huts fixed
with posts and practiced a mixed agro-pastoralist culture comprising of millet, sorghum,
fishing and herding of goats and cattle. The relatively well-watered savannah of the
Butana or the ‘isle of Meroe’ is famous as the site of Meroitic temple towns like Naqa
and Musawwarat es-Sufra. Dryland agriculture was possible in this region and artificial
reservoirs (hafir) created a haven for herds, making this region a dynamic nexus between
nomadic and sedentary subsistence patterns. While most studies in this region are oriented
to sites exhibiting monumental architecture, a number of surveys have demonstrated the
high-density of pastoralist occupations.
107
The royal Kushite constructions in this desert,
particular the hafirs, are often emphasized as deliberate strategies on the part of the state
to serve and control nomads in their transhumance, giving the Kushite state a rather
different political ecology than that of Egypt with its intensive and dense agricultural
settlement. Across the Nile, several projects relating to the Bayuda desert have
103
Best summarized in Chlebowski & Drzewiecki (2019).
104
See the volume of Riemer (2011).
105
Hulin (2012); Rieger et al. (2012); Vetter et al. (2013); White & White (1996).
106
Manzo (2017a) summarizes decades of results, surveys, and excavations in the region.
107
Bradley (1992).

Julien Cooper. Beyond the Nile.
69
demonstrated the extensive pastoralist use of this desert, a region which also has
significant traces of urban regimes who travelled along its wadis to shorten navigation
through the bends of the Nubian Nile.
108
The significant interplay between pastoralists
and the Kushite states in the Bayuda has some commonalities with the Butana, and
likewise has been termed a ‘hinterland’ of the Kushite state. A mix of agro-pastoralism
likely existed in the Gezira south of the Nile confluences at Khartoum. This region is
well-known through the extensive excavations from Henry Wellcome at the base of Jebel
Moya. New work has brought more rigor to the chronology of the site, which experienced
a nadir of nomadic burials in the late first Millennium BCE until about 500 CE.
109
The archaeology of the Eastern Desert of Sudan and Upper Egypt (the Atbai) is
little understood until late antiquity, when distinct ‘nomad-settlements’ crop-up at many
sites in Egypt and Sudan. These sites are typified by a base of rectilinear or circular stones,
with most sites situated near a water-source.
110
Surface remains at these sites, sometimes
call ‘enigmatic settlements’, exhibit local ceramic traditions of the indigenous nomads as
well as wares originating from the Roman and Arab worlds. The settlements are of such
a different shape and size to earlier and later domestic architecture in the Eastern Desert
as to suggest a change in lifestyle and transhumance, perhaps one that engaged in a
slightly more sedentary or seasonally encamped pattern of movement. In some cases, the
proximity of these settlements to gold-sources suggests that the nomads may have been
directly engaged in gold-processing,
111
while other settlements sit alongside major trade
routes connecting Red Sea harbours with the Egyptian Nile, the so-called ‘Berenike
road’.
112
In roughly the same period, a new burial tradition emerges in the Eastern Desert,
typified by a circular and flat-topped tumulus superstructure, locally called Akerataheil
in the Beja language or ‘disc-shaped tumuli’ by archaeologists. These graves scatter the
Eastern Desert from Kassala as far north as Upper Egypt. While the overwhelming
majority of these tombs and cemeteries are located squarely in the desert, significant
clusters occur in the Nile Valley at Kalabsha, Wadi Qitna, and further north at Moalla, all
known abodes of the Blemmyes on the Nile. These cemeteries sometimes comprise
isolated tombs or small clusters, yet where there is good pasture in the interior desert at
108
See the edited volume in Lohwasser et al. (2018) and the summary in Karberg & Lohwasser (2019).
109
Brass (2016); Gregory et al. (2022). New fieldwork has also been conducted along the Dinder watershed
in the Ethiopian borderlands, see González-Ruibal (2021).
110
Sidebotham et al. (2002); Lassányi (2012).
111
Manzo (2020, pp. 77-78); Cooper (2021, pp. 125-126).
112
Lassányi (2012); Luft (2010).

Mare Nostrum, ano 2022, v. 13, n. 1
70
sites like Khor Nubt, Bir al-Ajjami, and Gebel Qoqay tombs aggregate in their hundreds
or even thousands (Figure 7).
113
Judging from a diplomatic text in the Arab period, it
seems as if Nubt functioned as the ‘royal’ settlement and burial ground of the Eastern
Desert nomads.
114
Figure 7. Nomadic burials, Akerataheil tombs on the wadi and hillsides near Bir al-
Ajjami. Tombs extend to the horizon in every direction from this cluster.
© Google Earth.
A significant vestige of nomadic peoples are burials, which are especially important
and rich sources for nomads where the trappings of settlement are otherwise absent or
elusive. Perhaps one of the most well documented ‘nomad burial’ traditions are those
labelled as the ‘Pan-Grave culture’ (c. 1800-1550 BCE), a distinct burial tradition and
type occurring in the Egyptian and Nubian Nile. This culture has unquestionable
connections to other contemporary Nubian material cultures such as Kerma and the C-
Group, and is sometimes defined as pastoral Nubian culture’s manifestation to the
riverine world (Figure 8).
115
‘Pan-graves’ are relatively shallow and small burials with
little or no superstructure. Burial goods reveal connections with Egypt, particularly the
presence of Egyptian manufactured objects. Decorated cattle bucrania echo a burial
113
Krzywinksi (2012, pp. 144-146); Krzywinski et al. (2020); Manzo et al. (2011).
114
Hagen (2009, p. 116).
115
de Souza (2019).

Julien Cooper. Beyond the Nile.
71
tradition also well-known from Kerma in Upper Nubia, and also comprise one of the
diagnostic classes of evidence for the Pan-Grave peoples ‘pastoralist’ heritage.
Figure 8. The burial accoutrements of pastoralists, a decorated cow skull (bucranium) of the
‘Pan Grave’ culture, likely from the site of Khozam (03.1957).
© Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
The Eastern Desert further north at the latitudes of Lower Egypt are much more
sporadically surveyed in terms of nomadic habitations. The presence of pastoralists in this
region is mentioned in textual traditions but thus far archaeological investigation is
oriented to mine-sites or monastic settlements.
116
Nomadic habitations are fairly well
documented in the Sinai borderlands, especially neolithic and Early Bronze Age
occupations, a cultural complex which extended into the southern Levant.
117
The status
of this region as a borderland between Canaan and Egypt has made the Sinai subject to
many projects, surveys, and excavations, but again the majority of these investigations
are aimed at fortresses, settlements, and conspicuous archaeological sites like mines,
monasteries, and rock art tableaux. This brief summary of archaeological knowledge and
surveying is meant as an outline only but is generally indicative of the epistemology of
ancient nomadic pastoralism in the para-Nilotic zone.
116
For surveys oriented to explicating nomad habitations, see Bomann & Young (1994); Tristant (2012).
117
Summarized in Finkelstein (1995).

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72
12. Some concluding thoughts
The basis of this paper is to assess commonalities in nomad-state relations in the
Nile basin and Northeast Africa, a theme which is much better developed in the
historiographical traditions of other parts of the world, especially ‘inner Asia’. This
absence of historical models is all the more surprising in a Nile world so easily and
emphatically divided into an ‘urban’ river and a ‘nomadic’ desert. What strikes the
historian of this region is the constant struggle for urban suzerainty over this desert world.
Most iterations of Egyptian and Kushite states attempted to wrest control of desert
resources, or at least funnel them into their own exchange networks, all the while being
prevented from doing so by the designs of desert indigenes. Flipping the perspective,
nomads attempted to profit from their wealth in livestock, while attempting to manipulate
foreigner’s interest in their minerals and trade networks to their benefit. Likewise, all the
nomads living beyond the Nile had a ‘second life’ on the Nile, in the form of employment,
a diasporic community, or more transiently in the form of seasonal grazing and trading
sojourns. Such processes created a constant flow of nomads to and from the Nile, a feature
which was evidently symbiotic to both peoples in terms of subsistence, labour, and trade.
Such divides between nomads on one hand and sedentary Egyptians and Kushites on the
other was also more pronounced than just subsistence and kinship patterns, and in the
majority of cases involved differences in language. The nomads of the Atbai, Libya, and
Sinai all spoke different languages to their neighbours on the Nile, a demographic
situation that has endured until fairly recent history.
It is true that in many cases that the demographic weight and concentration of desert
nomads did not allow for the formation of a concerted ‘nomadic polity’, but in some
cases, especially in the Nubian deserts and Mediterranean littoral, the ecological carrying
capacity provided for a population density that could challenge Nile regimes. The triggers
for forming nomadic polities in the Nile basin remain largely elusive, a situation that will
likely remain until intensive archaeological work is conducted in nomadic heartlands in
the desert. Models and hypotheses for emerging ‘nomadic polities’ must be multivalent
and take into account both external pressures from Nile regimes as well as structural
developments in the desert and local economies. Moreover, simple historical
transformations like the introduction and domestication of the horse and camel seem to
completely change the trajectory of nomadic peoples. Both Bruce Trigger and George
Murray hypothesized that the arrival of these ruminants played a large part in upsetting

Julien Cooper. Beyond the Nile.
73
the status quo of power in the Nile world in favour of pastoralists.
118
The models of
nomadic formations in the Nile basin do not replicate in speed, violence, or in general
pattern, the typical model of nomadic invasion and state building in Central Asia. Rather
what is witnessed in the Nile basin is a long equilibrium and symbiosis between Nile and
para-Nilotic peoples punctuated by contracted episodes ‘nomadic rises’. These highpoints
of nomadic power usually coincided with indications of unifying processes amongst tribal
kinship groups, centralizing key decision making. Even when the nomads remained in the
desert and did not attempt to exercise any hegemony over the Nile, there is reason to
suggest that they routinely exhibited their own sophisticated political alliances and
kinship agreements. This created an ill-defined patchwork of nomadic political entities
beyond the Nile.
Received: 05/16/2022
Approved: 09/12/2022
118
Murray (1935, p. 20); Trigger (1965, p. 131). In both cases, it seems there were centuries-long delay
from the initial introduction of a ruminant to the nomadic group until the ruminant made a large impact to
their foodways, economy, and military.

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74
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Mare Nostrum, ano 2022, v. 13, n. 1
86
ALÉM DO NILO:
PADRÕES DE LONGA DURAÇÃO NAS INTERAÇÕES DOS ESTADOS-NÔMADES
ATRAVÉS DO NORDESTE DA ÁFRICA
RESUMO
A história do Nordeste da África é dominada pela “Narrativa do Nilo”, uma
história comum que coloca as culturas urbanas e ribeirinhas do Egito e da
Núbia sem seu centro. Enquanto as várias interações dos Estados territoriais
egípcio e núbio (kushita) moldaram a macro-história da região, essa narrativa
duradoura frequentemente hegemoniza e reduz um mundo muito mais
complexo, que consistia em um ambiente de povos nômades. Nativos dos
vastos desertos a Leste e Oeste do rio, esses nômades são um elemento vital
na macro-história da bacia do Nilo, interagindo constantemente com seus
vizinhos urbanos, formando diásporas, conduzindo trocas e impedindo a
exploração de suas terras natais. Ainda que esses padrões tenham perdurado
por milênios, episódios pronunciados de conflito, subjugação e até formação
de Estado abundam nos registros. Esta análise toma uma visão macro-
histórica para os nômades na história nilótica, propondo um novo modelo para
as organizações políticas nômades e os Estados do Nilo no Nordeste da
África.
PALAVRAS-CHAVE
Antigo Egito; Núbia; Nomadismo; Estados.