Jebel Sahaba
| War at Jebel Sahaba | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Part of resource competition in the Nile valley | |||||
| |||||
| Belligerents | |||||
|
Qadan people (probably) | |||||
| Casualties and losses | |||||
| 64 killed | |||||
|
Site notes | |||||
| Discovered | 1964 | ||||
| Archaeologists | Fred Wendorf | ||||
| Condition | 61 skeletons in possession of the British Museum since 2002 3 skeletons missing | ||||
Jebel Sahaba (Arabic: جَبَل ٱلصَّحَابَة, romanized: Jabal Aṣ-Ṣaḥābah, lit. 'Mountain of the Companions'; also Site 117) is a prehistoric cemetery site in the Nile Valley (now submerged in Lake Nasser), near the northern border of Sudan with Egypt in Northeast Africa. It is associated with the Qadan culture. It was discovered in 1964 by a team led by Fred Wendorf.
Since their discovery, the skeletons of Jebel Sahaba have been continuously re-evaluated by anthropologists seeking to determine the circumstances of their death. As of the most recent study (2021), it seems most likely that the war (dating to c. 12th millennium BC) was driven by resource scarcity due to climate change. Tribes of the Qadan culture partook in a series of raids and ambushes against one another with projectile weapons - mostly light arrows, but also much heavier arrows or throwing spears.
The site is often cited as the oldest known evidence of warfare or systemic intergroup violence, although as of 2021 the earliest documented evidence of interpersonal violence appears to be the partial remains of a skeleton in Wadi Kubbaniya from 20 ka (i.e. 19th-18th millennium BC).