Harkhuf (early -2200s) was an Egyptian explorer. His autobiography, one of the oldest in Egypt, is cut into the rock across the Nile River from what is now the city of Aswan (and just north of Elephantine Island). Worn away by the winds of 4,000 years, it is still readable. It runs about 50 lines of hieroglyphs, equal to two to three pages of printed English. It goes from about the year -2287 to -2276, when he made his journeys to:
The Land of Yam: No one is sure where this is. But it is probably somewhere in what is now northern Sudan, either somewhere along the Nile or possibly to the west in Darfur. It took him some seven months and 300 donkeys to make the trip. That comes to about a thousand miles (1600 km) according to one estimate. Harkhuf gives his route – but it is full of place names no longer known.
What he brought back:
“With 300 donkeys loaded with incense, ebony, heknu oil, shesat [an aromatic product], panther skins, elephant tusks, throw-sticks, and all sorts of wonderful products did I travel.”
Nubia: He also brought back reports of what was going on in Nubia, the country just south of Egypt (called Ethiopia by the Greeks, Romans and the King James Bible). He travelled through Nubia on the way back. Egypt had long kept Nubia on edge as a matter of foreign policy, but now it was becoming united and hostile, so much so that in a later expedition Harkhuf needed an armed guard to cross Nubia.
The Road of Forty Days, aka Darb el-Arba’in in Arabic, may have been part of his route: 3,000 years later, in medieval times, it was a trade route from Darfur bringing just the sort of products Harkhuf brought back from Yam. On one of his expeditions he said he took the Oasis Road, the road west the Kharga Oasis, where the Road of Forty Days begins. If so, then Yam is Darfur.
Nilo-Saharans were the people who then lived in Darfur and along the Nile south of Nubia. They still live along the grasslands south of the Sahara, as far as the Great Bend of the Niger River where Timbuktu is.
Pygmies: On his last journey, in about -2276, Harkhuf brought back a “dwarf”, widely believed to be a Pygmy.
Pepy II, then eight, was excited. Harkhuf quotes from his letter:
“Come north to the Residence straight-away! Cast [everything else] aside, bring with you this dwarf who is in your charge, whom you brought from the land of the Horizon-dwellers. May he live, prosper and be healthy, so that he may dance for the god and gladden and delight the king of Upper and Lower Egypt Neferkare [Pepy II], may he live for ever!
When he goes down in your charge into the boat, station reliable people around him on the deck lest he fall into the water! When he sleeps at night, ensure that reliable people sleep around him in his quarters. Make inspection ten times per night!
My majesty wants to see this dwarf more than the tribue of Sinai or of Punt [Somalia?].”
– Abagond, +2023.
See also:
- century readings
- Africa: the last 13,000 years
- Nubia
- Sudan
- Timbuktu
- Africans as zoo animals
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Abagond 
Exploitation of Pygmies by other Africans has been going on for thousands of years, but you don’t even care about them. You functionally treat them as subhuman. You don’t do any stories on them or the genocide, mass rapes and cannibalism, or the invasion of their lands by Bantu invaders they face in Africa. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/extermination-of-the-pygmies-552332.html. You are much more concerned with the few hundred thousand black slaves sent to the US, whose ancestors have multiplied many many times over and who collectively have become the most successful blacks on the planet, rather than the hundreds of thousands Pygmies who have been subject to subhuman treatment, and in many cases wiped out or hunted to near extinction, in Africa.
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