Artistic expression in any given age always develops from works, styles, and themes produced in earlier eras. The further back into history we go, the more difficult it may be to ascertain the source of a given culture and the art it produces. The wonders of Egypt have long fascinated archaeologists, historians, and art experts. This art did not develop out of whole cloth but instead had antecedents which can be discerned elsewhere on the continent of Africa, specifically the rock art of Africa which can be seen as a precursor of the Egyptian civilization that would develop to the north.
The connections between the different cultures of Africa can be seen now as extending back to the beginning of humankind, for recent research seems to indicate that human beings first emerged on the African continent. Cultural development in the area can be traced back to the paleolithic, and Africans began to use well-fashioned stone implements in the neolithic era. The domestication of animals and the cultivation of plants has been traced to Egypt about 5000 B.C. and may have been brought there from the Levant and Mesopotamia through trade contacts. within some 1500 years, the lower Nile region was developed into a region of farming communities, with a growing urban civilization culminating in the emergence of dynastic Egypt and a sophisticated culture in the Nubian areas of the Upper Nile Valley:
It cannot be established with certainty whether agriculture and the raising of domestic animals came to West Africa by diffusion from Egypt or whether. . . it resulted from indigenous development. It seems, however, that the culture of the Sahara in prehistoric times preceded that of Egypt by many millennia (Gillon 24).
The earliest settlers in the Nile Valley reached the area some time around 4000 B.C., emerging from the neolithic culture of the Tasian villages of Upper Egypt and those of Merimdeh on the western edge of the Delta and on t...