It happened 10 thousand years ago or a little earlier... A small detachment of hunters who came from the Sahara, then still a flourishing plain, approached the edge of the plateau, behind which a new, unknown country opened up. Antelope hunters, familiar only with small rivers of their native steppes that dry up in summer, have never seen such a miracle! A wide, full-flowing river majestically carried muddy waters past them; where and where - no one knew. Without breaking the silence, people looked at the river for a long time, seized with sacred awe and the desire to fall on their knees before the mighty ruler of these places. The hunters did not even dare to go down to the very water, near which venomous snakes swarmed. The banks of the river were swampy for hundreds of meters and overgrown with thick reeds. Hippos and crocodiles rested on the shallows. The hunters left, but they, and later their descendants, had to return to the tempting and frightening shores.
Game in the drying steppes of the Sahara became less and less, skirmishes between hunting tribes became more and more fierce and bloody. Defeated, pushed back from the familiar steppe, the tribes settled on the banks of the big river, unfamiliar to them. The population of the Nile Valley gradually developed from small groups that “leaked” here, among which were people with different skin colors - olive-yellow, brownish or completely dark. The first settlements discovered by archaeologists on the banks of the Nile date back to a rather late time - VI-IV millennium BC. They were located on high sections of the river valley, far from the water - people were afraid of floods. They still did not know how to properly cultivate the fertile soil of the "lower fields", although they already knew the simplest methods of caring for cultivated plants.
