The New Kingdom of Kemet was in decline by 1200 BC, but its political and cultural influence still extended far to the south: Wawat and Kush were provinces of the empire, and trading expeditions made regular trips to the land of Iam on the upper White Nile. And the people of Iam had their own trading partners: through them, Kemet’s indirect commercial links reached the Bantu who were just beginning to migrate into the Lake Victoria region and others who lived in the upper Chari basin.
The first Nok-made goods reached the Kemetic capital of Waset even before 1200; among other things, a terra-cotta sculpture of a seated figure in royal regalia was found in the tomb of the middle 13th-century Kemetic nobleman Meryre. No doubt they passed through many hands on the way: there was much wild country between the Niger Valley and the upper Nile, and it was seemingly unthinkable for one merchant to make the entire trip. There are fragmentary references in Kemetic records to a kingdom of black men far to the southwest, on the banks of a river that flooded annually much as the Nile did; this indicates that the pharaohs had at least heard of the Nok Empire, although they knew little of its ways.
That would change in 1167, when a caravan of Nok merchants did the unthinkable, making the difficult journey east from the upper Chari and Aouk through hill country to the Nile, and thence through Iam to the borders of Kemet. In 1166, they arrived in Waset with the ceremony of a royal procession, bringing exotic goods and gifts from their king Omele. The record of their stay in Waset is the first known written account of the Nok, and provides our main cross-check to the chronology in the
Tale of Kings. But more importantly to the merchants’ contemporaries, the Nok “discovery” of Kemet, and their return with domestic donkeys, exotic goods and stories of an empire even older and richer than theirs, led to an enduring fascination.
The Nok – or at least the bureaucrat-griots and merchants – came to view the luxury trade that grew up during the later 12th century as not only a source of profit but a source of learning. They had heard travelers’ tales of Kemet, as the nobles of Kemet had about them, but having gone there and seen it for themselves was more inspirational than any number of Palm Road legends. By about 1120, Kemetic influence showed in medicine, engineering, and most of all, writing.
Nok writing would derive from, but not mirror, Kemetic writing, both because the Nok language had several sounds that were not used in Kemet and because the writing materials were different. Papyrus didn’t grow anywhere in the Nok domains; instead, writing was done on walls, hides or clay. Palace and tomb inscriptions were the most prestigious, but clay was the most common, being widely used for merchant accounts. The formal alphabet – the Nok did adopt the Kemetic custom of having several forms of writing with varying degrees of formality – was closest to the writing of Kemet, while the merchant alphabet, adapted to be written with a stylus on clay, soon bore only a passing resemblance.
Be that as it may, this was the end of Nok prehistory and the beginning of the historic era: the time when the
Tale of Kings and the ancient legends were codified. It was all the more significant because it came soon after a major civil war between Omele’s successor and a coalition of powerful kingmakers. This war – the last significant event of prehistory – resulted in victory for the kingmakers, who had married into many high-ranking military families, and in a rebel general being crowned king. But the victory was not all the kingmaker families had hoped for: the power of the throne was temporarily eclipsed, but the vacuum was filled not by them but by the military. The kingmakers bitterly resented this state of affairs, and did everything they could to undermine the soldier-king’s legitimacy.
The new regime seized on writing much as the previous ones had seized on bureaucrat-griots or monumental works of art: as a means of proclaiming its right to rule. Not only chronicles but myths were reinterpreted to glorify the king and to portray the ancestral Nok as soldiers and conquerors much like him. At the same time, a remarkable dissident thread grew up, which harked back to an ideal time when men were free and monarchs answered to the kingmakers and village assemblies; this, it is believed, is the source of many of the tales of the Age of Kings. The bureaucrat-griots, who formed the core of the emerging scribe class, could be found on both sides. In many ways, the late twelfth and early eleventh centuries BC were an extended rhetorical duel between the soldier-kings and the old nobles, which produced some of the finest works of Nok literature and poetry.
At the same time, unseen, the other end of the Palm Road also felt the effects of trade, ironically augmented by the fact that Kemet was not nearly as fascinated with the Nok Empire as the other way around. The nobles of Kemet might value the palm oil, salt, steelwork, drugs and exotic art that traveled the Palm Road, but they had a middle-kingdom view of themselves and their tradition of centuries was to look inward. They had little interest in going to a land they viewed as wild and barbaric, and they didn’t believe they had much to learn from it.
Perhaps the Kemetic nobles should have paid more attention, because Kush and Iam grew stronger through the riches that commerce brought, and Nok steelworking techniques – superior to anything the Nile Valley had at the time – made them better able to resist Kemetic encroachment. Sometime after 1150, Kush broke away from Kemetic rule, and Wawat would follow by the end of the century as Kemet itself slipped into the civil wars that would mark the beginning of the Third Intermediate Period. Iam, for its part, coalesced into a collection of market towns and tribal kingdoms, not yet states or even city-states, but at a higher level of organization than had existed before and with a rising divide between newly-rich chieftains and their people.
And at the opposite end of the Nok sphere, yet another kingdom was coming into being, this one on the upper Niger beyond even the Salt Road. The peoples of the rich floodplain were too far away to come under Nok rule or even to be knitted into their commercial empire, but they traded enough with the Nok colonies in the middle Niger to learn the art of ironworking and the concept of statehood. Their own king list places the first ruler at about 1120 to 1105 BC, and all evidence indicates that this is an accurate birthdate for the culture that would one day put the Nok into eclipse.