History and Archaeology in Nubia

Egyptian texts

The name Kush and other Egyptian names for Nubia appear in a large number of hieroglyphic and hieratic texts, but in many of them they are only passing references. Throughout the entire 3,000 years of Nubian-Pharaonic relations there are hardly half a hundred texts dealing entirely or even primarily with Nubian affairs [For detailed information on the hieroglyphic texts that were exposed to Nubia. They were all intended, of course, to celebrate the victories and spoils of Egypt or the Egyptians more than to convey any objective description of the southern land. Their main value was directed to recreating political and economic history. As for other aspects of Nubian life, we have to read between the lines - a practice that is always suspicious, and becomes even more suspicious when the lines themselves stray from clarity.

The oldest known historical record associated with Nubia dates back to the dawn of history itself. It is a figurative representation found on a rocky outcrop near the Second Cataract, often commemorating a military success achieved by the First Dynasty pharaoh Dajr (or Zar) over a local enemy. Other inscriptions were found in Egypt giving brief mentions of military campaigns to Nubia during the era of the Second and Third Dynasties, and from a short later period there are inscriptions of explorers and quarry workers in various places in the Nubian deserts. From the Sixth Dynasty come two biographical texts containing accounts of both commercial and military operations that took place in Sudan. Both texts are more detailed than anything before them, and provide the first insight into cultural conditions in the southern lands.

There is almost no written record of Egyptian-Nubian relations during the First Intermediate Period (7th to 10th Dynasties). The Eleventh Dynasty apparently waged intermittent warfare in the south, laying the foundation for the conquest and occupation of Lower Nubia by the early pharaohs of the Twelfth Dynasty. Descriptions of their campaigns and declarations of Egyptian sovereignty are the baptismal documents of the Nubian Order during the Middle Kingdom. After the Thirteenth Dynasty, the record becomes silent again for a significant period of time, until the story of conquest and exploitation is repeated word for word under the New Kingdom.

New Kingdom texts (Eighteenth to Twentieth Dynasties) represent a dismal record of military operations against an apparently defenseless population. No fewer than eight kings claim to have conquered or reopened parts of Nubia, although the archaeological record indicates more or less continuous Egyptian occupation. Some of these expeditions could only be forays into slavery, disguised as fetters under the pretext of restoring civil order. The latest textual records of Egyptian rule in Nubia prove the receipt of tribute during the reign of Ramesses IX. After his reign, there was silence again for centuries, until the Nubians themselves took up the story.

Additional information about the early Nubians can be gleaned from the evidence of drawings on the walls of Egyptian temples and tombs. They often show captives and servants from the southern lands, who are easily identifiable by their features, in the case of the drawings, and by the color of their skin. From these drawings we learn something about people's appearance and clothing, and the roles they could have occupied in the Egyptian social system.

Nubian hieroglyphic texts

The Nubians, or at least the Nubian kings, finally seized the opportunity to write down their own vision of history after their conquest of Egypt in the eighth century BC. The Nubians, as rulers of the northern land, inherited the elaborate propaganda apparatus that had always been under the command of the Pharaohs, and they did not hesitate to use it. Although their royal proclamations and annals do not differ in style or content from those of previous or subsequent pharaohs, they at least display, for the first time in history, a pro-Nubian point of view. After all, it was written by Egyptian scribes in Egyptian language and symbols, and it must have been directed in large part to an Egyptian audience. Many of them were not “Nubian” documents at all, but rather chronicles of Nubian rulers who would become rulers of Egypt. It does not tell us more about life in the homeland of the Nubians than what pure Egyptian texts dating from other times do.

From the point of view of political history, on the other hand, the texts of the Nabataean period (the era of Nubian rule in Egypt and the following centuries) represent at least the same importance as the annals of previous eras. Prominent among them are the paintings of Piya, who conquered Egypt, and Taharqa, who lost it. From the two centuries that followed Taharqa there are three other royal inscriptions of considerable length, all of which recall events of military operations inside Sudan. Although the Nabatean kings retained the proverbial Pharaonic title of “Lord of the Two Lands” (i.e., Upper and Lower Egypt), there is no evidence that they made any practical effort to impose it after the time of Taharqa. The Nestasen stela, now dated to around 336 BC, is the last text of a historically consistent Nubian origin. Later inscriptions only provide us with names of rulers, and they cannot be arranged in a clear sequence.

On the one hand, it is fortunate that the Nabatean kings chose the Egyptian language and symbols to write their royal annals, as this means that we can read them without difficulty. On the other hand, we are deprived of any key to the original Nubian language, and thus to the ethnic identity and kinship ties of the population. In later times, a purely original written language (Meroitic) actually developed, but to this day it remains incomprehensible to modern researchers. It does not appear to be closely related to the Nubian language nor to any of the current languages. It was employed in a few memorial inscriptions, but was used most often for short votive texts and possibly for commercial texts.

Greek and Roman writers

There were many Greek adventurers and settlers in Egypt long before Alexander. As mercenaries in the Egyptian army, some of them accompanied Pharaoh Psamtik II on his campaign into Nubia in the sixth century BC. The inscriptions that they left in the Temple of Abu Simbel, and in one or two other places, represent the first evidence of the entry of any European into Nubia.

Herodotus's visit in the fifth century BC represented a turning point in the recording of Nubian history and Egyptian history alike. The “Father of History” never personally traveled beyond Aswan, but he collected from travelers and merchants an accurate (for him) and surprising geographical description of the lands farther up the Nile. To this day, our knowledge of the Kingdom of Meroe depends in part on the evidence of Herodotus, even though he never saw it. His work is the oldest surviving account of the history and geography of Nubia that claims comprehensiveness or objectivity, although it may be preceded by the lost account of Hecateus.

It is not surprising, given the scarcity of source material, that most of the presentations about Nubia are stronger in terms of geography and ethnology than in terms of history. Many of its authors copied extensively from Herodotus, while a few added additional detail of importance and value. Among the latter were Strabo (whose geographical description of Nubia was largely copied from the lost work of Eratosphenes), Dideros of Sicily, and Pliny. In addition to their descriptions of the land and people, these writers represent our primary sources for the relations between the Ptolemies and the Nubians and between the Romans and the Nubians. At the beginning of the end of the Classical period, three writers presented a symptomatic picture of the state of chaos that prevailed in Nubia following the dissolution of the Meroe state. The ambiguous and sometimes contradictory narratives provided by Priscus, Olympiodorus, and Procopius represent valuable sources for political history, and they have contributed more than their share to the fog surrounding the issue of the Nubian “unknown group.” Didor of SicilyBelinus

One document stands alone among the "classical" records of Nubia. This is a document declaring a victory achieved by the Nubian king Silku in the sixth century, a declaration inscribed in a primitive, ungrammatical Greek language on the stones of the Kalabsha Temple. Despite its limited size and imprecise language, it represents the last historical text deliberately created for Nubian authority until modern times.

Ecclesiastical dates

Two early church historians, John of Ephesus and John of Baclarum, and two later historians, Eutyches and Michael the Syrian, wrote about the conversion of Nubia to Christianity in the sixth century. Their accounts differ on a number of important points, revealing bias towards one or another of the competing Orthodox sects at the time. Like the late classical texts, their writings sparked controversy that continues to haunt us. The light shed by these writings is largely limited to the first century of Nubian Christianity, because after the Arab conquest of Egypt, the outside world turned a blind eye to Nile Christianity until the end of the Middle Ages.

Arab historians and geographers

The greatest among Arab historians, ancient and modern, was Abd al-Rahman Ibn Khaldun (late seventeenth century). However, his account was not the best among the medieval sources on the history or geography of Nubia. Such a preference goes back to his contemporary, the geographer Al-Maqrizi. Al-Maqrizi's work, Al-Khattat, is not only an authentic and important source, but it also preserves a long essay by an original visitor, Ibn Salim Al-Aswany, whose account of tenth-century Nubia has been otherwise lost. Other works by Al-Masudi and Al-Omari combine history and geography, and provide a chronological arrangement of the facts of Nubian relations with the Islamic Caliphate, and later with the dissenting dynasties in Egypt. A pure geographical work, The Churches and Monasteries of Egypt and Some Neighboring Countries, attributed to Abu Salih “the Armenian”. Author of Al-Maqrizi "Plans"

Darkness descended on Nubia, as far as Arab sources are concerned, with the Ottoman conquest of 1520. However, it seems likely that the written sources of the late medieval period are far from exhausted. Ottoman documents, Portuguese exploration annals, Venetian annals, trade shows, and periodicals of anonymous travelers may shed more light on a period that remains to date one of the darkest periods in Nubian history.

Material archaeological sources

Early modern travelers

In the same year that Nubia disappeared behind the “Ottoman curtain,” the neighboring land of Ethiopia was introduced to European consciousness during the first of many Portuguese missions. At this time, the dim light in Nubia comes more from the south than from the north. The narrative of the Jesuit fathers says little about the events on the Nile, but it is almost all we have of their century.

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, two intrepid travelers, the Frenchman Poncet and the German Crump, traveled up the Nile from Cairo, the first as far as Ethiopia and the second as far as Sennar. By the end of the century James Bruce ascended the same route. All of these people hastened through what they considered inhospitable terrain on the Upper Nile, and left us urgent outlines of views along the way. It was the great scholars-travelers who walked in the awakening of the occupation of Fatah Muhammad Ali who introduced the connotations of the modern era into Nubian history. Prominent among them were Burckhardt, Waddington and Hanbury, Caillaux, Linnane de Bellefond, and, a generation later, Hoskins and Lepsius. Their massive displays, richly illustrated with illustrations, were the starting point for an ongoing history of Nubia that extends to our present times.

Archaeological sources

The handful of archaeological excavations conducted in Nubia before 1907 were either clearing operations designed to uncover hieroglyphic inscriptions, architectural structures, or plainly just treasure hunting. In practice, archeology became consistent in plan and procedure with George Reisner and the first archaeological survey of Nubia, which became necessary thanks to the expansion of the original Aswan reservoir (which had been built in 1898-1902 and which had first expanded in 1908-1910). At that time, the challenge of archaeological salvage (i.e. systematic, systematic and impartial excavation of all sites in danger of destruction) was unprecedented. Reisner found himself having to develop his approach as he worked. Some of its procedures, such as the use of standardized forms for data recording, have since found universal acceptance.

First archaeological survey

The first field archaeological survey lasted for four seasons, from 1907 to 1911. Ninety-five miles of the Nile Valley between the waterfall and Wadi Al-Seboua were explored. Reisner supervised the survey in the first season, and then Firth took over supervision for the next three seasons. According to the survey, 151 cemeteries and more than 8,000 individual graves were excavated. Only half a dozen sites other than cemeteries have been studied, and only one of them has been studied with any degree of scrutiny. These results, and more specifically the works of the first season, represented the data base upon which Reisner and his successors built their reconstruction of Nubian history.

Two characteristics of the first archaeological survey stand out: first, it was devoted to funerary remains to the exclusion of any other archaeological evidence, and second, the incorrect focus on the early stages of Nubian history. Both features were somewhat intentional. Reisner and Firth did not doubt that the written evidence would provide the basic picture of subsequent historical stages, and their choice of the sites to be studied adopted the principle that focuses on stages that are less known. Moreover, until 1907 it was accepted that the first rule of all archaeology - including salvage work - was the detection of movable objects. The excavation and recording of living sites was mostly an incidental and secondary process (there was, however, an architectural and epigraphic survey of Nubian temples conducted at the same time). Firth once or twice expressed his regret that the pressure of time did not permit his field teams to examine some of the ruined cities they observed along the Firth route, but he never seriously considered the question that a detailed study of these ruined cities might deserve priority over the incessant excavation of graves and cemeteries whose topology had by then become known. This same range of priorities has been adopted by later archaeologists and has influenced our treatment of Nubian history to this day. As a result, it often seems to us that we know more about how the Early Nubians died than we do about how they lived. The treatment of Christian antiquities provides an interesting side light to the work of the early archaeological survey. In the first weeks of the preliminary campaign, Reisner's team excavated all 1,600 and twenty-five tombs in a Christian cemetery near the waterfall—a much larger number of tombs than were subsequently excavated in a cemetery of any Reisner period. The tombs were of course devoid of any offerings, as placing objects in the grave was not characteristic of Christian funerary practice. After this disappointing experience, the survey never opened any significant number of Christian graves again, and in recent seasons the presence of these graves has not been recorded on a regular basis. Christian cemeteries, along with Islamic cemeteries, belong to a period that is too poor and recent to be of interest. Precisely because the archeology of Christian Nubia was not a “science of funerary archaeology,” neither the first nor the second surveys contributed anything of value to our understanding of the phase of these nine hundred years of Nubian history.

The clear achievement of the first archaeological survey was undoubtedly the discovery and identification of the first, second, third and previously unknown cultural groups, and the arrangement of these cultures, like the historically known Nubian cultures, in a regular succession. In a way, this was accomplished from the beginning. Remains of all four stages (and indeed of almost every period of Nubian history) were found in Cemetery No. 7 at the waterfall, the excavation of which was completed in the first ten weeks of the initial campaign. Therefore, this cemetery can be described as representing the basis for the final data on which the modern histories of Nubia are based.

Initial survey reports were published in the form of small "bulletins" that appeared in great haste during and after each season. Groups I, II, and III (only as grave forms) were defined in early publications, and the full frequency of phases (now specifically identified with population groups) was formally suggested in the opening pages of the third publication issued in 1909. A year later Reisner devoted the first report of the Nubia Archaeological Survey (1907-1908) to defining and discussing each phase of Nubian culture. Firth repeated and renewed the discussion in each of the three subsequent reports, but the starting foundations established by Reisner remained unchanged.

It must be added that neither bulletins nor reports are by any means comprehensive accounts of the work of the first archaeological survey. Some sites were never described in what was printed, and in many cases we still do not know what volume was completed and what was not. In the first decade of the twentieth century, the recognition of documentation and publishing as two vital parts of the archaeologist's tasks was just beginning.

Parallel to, but independent of, the archaeological survey, studies were conducted on the architecture of Pharaonic and Ptolemaic-Roman temples and their inscriptions in the threatened area. This work was undertaken by Blackman, Vautier, and Roeder, and published in a series of volumes under the collective title The Sunken Temples of Nubia.

Other pioneering missions

Five other expeditions entered the Nubian field within a year or two of the first archaeological survey. Expeditions from the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Oxford, and the Vienna Academy of Sciences worked in Lower Nubia to the south of the area threatened by the low-lying reservoir. Farther south, the Meroe expedition began to uncover the royal city bearing that name, and Welkam excavations uncovered prehistoric remains on the island between the Blue and White Nile. With the exception of the Vienna expedition, all these excavations supported the work of the archaeological survey in two important aspects. First, it paid more attention to architectural remains, both domestic and monumental, than the survey did. Secondly, they were all concerned to a significant extent with the remains of the Meroe period, which were not represented in the far north of Nubia and therefore do not appear in the work of Reisner and Firth. The Oxford and Pennsylvania missions made the first significant contribution to the study of Christian Nubian antiquities, again on the basis of architectural rather than funerary remains. During the same years, the architect Somers Clarke was surveying the Christian remains between Khartoum and Cairo, and his book Ancient Christian Antiquities in the Nile Valley represents the pioneering work in this field.

In 1913, Reisner returned to Nubia after an absence of several years, this time as director of the Harvard-Boston Expedition, a joint mission between Harvard University and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts that had obtained a license to excavate almost a virtual monopoly on important archaeological remains in northern Sudan. During the following eighteen years, studies were conducted on almost all monumental sites dating back to the dynastic periods of Nubian history (Pharaonic, Nabataean, and Meroe). The mission's work falls under three main headings:

1. Excavation of the Great Egyptian Commercial Center and the Nubian Royal Cemetery at Kerma. This task was completed between the years 1913-1916 and was published in the Harvard African Studies series. Our knowledge of Kerma culture is consistent with these reports.

2. Excavation of many massive castles in the Second Cataract area, originally built during the Middle Kingdom and expanded during the New Kingdom. He conducted this work intermittently over several years under different directors. The results appeared only very recently in the two volumes entitled Dunham's Castles of the Second Waterfall.

3. Excavations in the Napatan and Meroe royal cemeteries, and certain accompanying temples next to Karima and in Meroe.

These works undoubtedly embodied Reisner's avant-garde work in Sudan. Through this work, Reisner reconstructed the succession of the Nabatean and Meroe royal families, a structure that still serves as the basic framework for the chronological sequence for discussing this stage of Nubian history. Again, the main concrete results were not published until long after Reisner's death in a series of volumes bearing wonderful illustrations and illustrations. Dunham prepared these volumes, which received the collective title: The Royal Cemeteries of Kush.

Excavations in Sudan were only a secondary part of the work of the Harvard-Boston expedition from the beginning of its organization in 1905 until Reisner's death nearly forty years later. The mission's interest was first and foremost occupied by excavations in the Old Kingdom cemetery at Giza, in the shadow of the Great Pyramids. Business in Sudan at the same time was conducted as well as possible. Most often, work in Nubia was completed late in the season, after finishing work in Egypt. The excavations in Nubia were by far the largest body of consistent archaeological work ever undertaken in Upper Nubia, and their results will always form the backbone of studies into the history of Napata-Meroe.

C.M.Firth, The Archaeological Survey of Nubia. Report for 1908/09. Cairo.

G.A.Reisner, The Archaeological Survey of Nubia. Report for 1907-1908, vol.I. Archaeological Report. Cairo.

D.Dunham, Second Cataract Forts, vol.2. Uronarti, Shalfak. Mirgissa. Boston.

Second archaeological survey

Classical Writers│New Publications in Sudanese Studies│Bibliography│Sudanese Antiquities Exhibition│New Kush│Home Page