Asia is home to some of the oldest and most culturally significant rivers in the world—the Yangtze, the Ganges, Tigris and Euphrates, the Jordan—but its real vasculature has always been its roads. From the Southern Dispersal of anatomically modern humans out of Africa and across the Arabian Peninsula, following the southern coast which encloses the Gulf of Persia from the north, down into the subcontinent along the western seaboard made up of the Konkan, Kanara, and Malabar Coast, and on to Southeast Asia and Oceania to the Silk Roads to the overland trail of the beatnik generation, Asia has seemingly always been latticed by footpaths, lanes for horseback riders, caravan expressways, the grooves of chariot wheels, and the prints of parading war elephants. It was not always so in Africa, where climate change in the millennia preceding Egypt’s settlement beginning around 5500 BCE made much of it nearly impossible to traverse other than in small bands moving from oasis to oasis or else up and down the fecundating life-blood of the Nile, whose river valley its early inhabitants called the Black Land for the fertility of its soil in opposition to the Red Land of the encircling sands. In the river-fed land of Lower Egypt (in what we think of as the north, where the Nile river delta spills into the Mediterranean Sea at the bookends of 100 miles of coastline) and Upper Egypt (what we think of as its south, closer to ancient Nubia and modern Sudan), travel was only safe in the Black Land, where gods and pharaoh preserved order (maat) and kept out the chaos (isfet) that dwelled in the ancient desert and the unworshiped sea (Egypt alone among ancient peoples bordering it lacking a native deity of the Mediterranean waters). When the Egyptians did venture out, as they did into Canaan from the 16th to the 12th centuries BCE, on the eve of Bronze Age Collapse and the first emergence of the Proto-Israelites in the Canaanite highlands, it could be taken as an extension of cosmic order into the chaotic wilderness. Yet that order merely oversaw, and could not stop, the itineracy that had dominated the Levantine coast of Syria-Palestine since time immemorial, as the coastal highway connecting Africa to Asia Minor and Mesopotamia, where at the southern mouth of the Euphrates, near the ancient boundaries of the Persian Gulf which then encompassed what is now Kuwait, the city of Uruk hailed the dawn of Sumerian culture in the fourth millennium BCE. And yet the cascading emergence of city-states and their empires in Mesopotamia, the mythically cyclical dynasties of Egypt, and the small urban kingdoms of what was in the third and second millennia BCE the expanse of Canaan could not deny the wayfaring cultures which were and in some cases still are far older civilizations than their settled counterparts. Akkadian texts describe the Amorites as fearsome nomads whose eventual states once stretched from the northern end of Canaan to the northern end of the Fertile Crescent; after them, the Ahlamu, ancestors of the Aramean culture, appear as the new nomadic threat in the epistolary corpora of contemporary Ancient Near Eastern monarchs. The Habiru or Apiru also register in the second millennium BCE under the same perspective: landless, and therefore unallied, wanderers, mercenaries, migrant workers, and slaves, possible troublemakers for the landed states of cities like Ur or Ugarit, variously interchangeable with some of the nomadic tribes inhabiting the northwest Arabian steppe and the south of Canaan, like the Midianites and the Shasu, who also appear in biblical literature, and have social, religious, and perhaps ethnic ties to its human protagonists.
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