Question

Why is Egypt called ”the seedbed of African cultures"?

Answer 1

The idea that Egypt is a seed-bed for African cultures is largely a 20th Century notion and can be dismissed as an intellectual conceit of the discredited Afrocentrism theories.

Explanation:

Egypt, by geography, is in Africa. By culture, so far as we can tell from 5,200 years of history (and a closely examined prehistory) it has usually been a culture unto itself, or else been a part of a Mediterranean or Middle Eastern culture.

Over the last 5,000 years, the cultures and civilizations of Asia, south-Asia, the Middle, East, the Mediterranean and Europe slowly knit trade links. We can tell from the spread of domesticated plant and animal species, trade-goods, new technologies, and even ideas that linkages slowly formed from Canton to Lisbon, from Moscow to Cairo. Sub-Saharan Africa was partly isolated by these by distance, climate, disease, and geography.

The agents of transmission depended on travel overland by horse and camel, and by sea. The Sahara Desert was a major obstacle, although the emergence of kingdoms in Mali, the Sudan and Ethiopia made it clear trade was just possible... Below that, the Tsetse fly killed horses and camels. Sub-Saharan Africa is short on natural harbours and navigable rivers. Explorers who sailed to the mouths of the Congo or Limpopo for example, found unattractive and lethal swamps, and could only sail upriver for a few kilometres before encountering rapids.

Egypt did have contact with what is now the Sudan (and there are more pyramids in the Sudan -- built in emulation of Egypt -- than there are in Giza). Going beyond the Sudan was nigh-impossible and there is little evidence than anyone really tried.

As Jared Diamond points out in "Guns, Germs and Steel", Africa was also short of animals and plants that could be domesticated to feed a civilization. While Africans in the Sub-Sahara had gourds and goats by around 1,000 BC, the civilization-supporting crops like wheat, rice, corn, potatoes or millet didn't grow there. Sorghum was possible, but it isn't reliable enough. Ironically, it seems to have been the slave trade (Zanzibar was founded as a slaving city for the Arabs in 700 AD) that seems to have changed that. The same holds true on the Atlantic Side after 1600.