The ethnic and linguistic issue
In addition to textual and archaeological material, the remains of ancient Nubian human skeletons have contributed to many previous efforts to reconstruct Nubian history. When the first archaeological survey of Nubia was organized, Sir Elliot Smith, the distinguished anatomist then living in Cairo, agreed to undertake the analysis and description of the human skeletons that were being uncovered. He accompanied the first expedition to the field and made measurements and recorded careful observations of the bones in their original position. Those that were well preserved (mainly skulls) were then removed and sent to Cairo for more extensive study. The number of skulls collected in this way never exceeded 15-20% of those exhumed from tombs, as most of the Lower Nubia graves were in a poor state of preservation.
Smith, like Reisner, was forced to leave the survey after the first season, although its methods and work were taken over by Douglas Derry, initially under Smith's supervision, in subsequent campaigns. Their anatomical analyzes were published alongside the purely archaeological findings in both the first bulletins of the Archaeological Survey, and more fully in the 1907-1908 season report. The pattern suggested by Smith and Deary was followed in the Second Archaeological Survey by Ahmed Batrawy in his study of the anatomical remains.
Smith and Deary had no trouble identifying significant racial differences among the human skeletons uncovered in the various Nubian graves. They believed that people (the first group) showed similarity to the pre-dynastic Egyptians, while they saw in the “second group” a much stronger Negro current. This Negro element was believed to remain, albeit in a reduced form, in the third group - a situation that led both Smith and Reisner to assume that northern elements had arrived in Sudan at this time. This racial mixture was observed among the later Nubian population until the times of the "Unknown Group," when a heavy Negro influx occurred again. It was these anatomical differences - apparently evidence of the occurrence of ethnic migrations - that prompted Reisner to identify the types of Nubian cemeteries with distinct population groups, which thus lies behind the overall "multi-phase" interpretation of Nubian history.
The anatomical work of Smith and Deary can be criticized on the basis of a number of reasons. Even with the best intentions and conditions, the approaches available to them at the beginning of the twentieth century were largely primitive and subjective. They placed heavy emphasis on a small number of distinctive features, such as the much-abused vertical guide, many of which were morphological features that could not be proven by measurement. Perhaps more dangerous than the primitiveness of the methodology is the racist tendency contained at the beginning of comparative anatomy. It was, in aspects, pseudoscience, deliberately distinguishing the living forms of man as if they were obvious types of animals or plants. The strategy of this science was to identify fixed differences between intuitively perceived subspecies, ignoring homologies - without regard to the question of whether the "species" themselves were valid as species concepts. This was a cry out of touch with the modern scientific study of population dynamics.
Taking into account the method and assumptions prevailing in 1907, the best comparative anatomists might find in their material confirmation of whatever historical theories they wished to accept. This indisputably happened for Smith, Deary, and Reisner. It must be recognized that the racist view shared by all early students of Nubian history represents a condemnation of the era more than a condemnation of men. Elliot Smith was perhaps the most prominent spokesman among them, asserting in his reports that “the slightest admixture of negro blood shows itself immediately in dulling initiative and “obstructing the subsequent development of the arts of civilization.” However, the same belief was expressed in one way or another in the writings of most of his contemporaries. However, the notions of racial superiority and inferiority were not abandoned until a later generation. Physical anthropology made valuable and important lines in the generation separating the first and second surveys of Nubia. Batrawy's studies of human skeletons from the surveys of Emery and Kirwan had the advantage of a more refined methodology and a far less biased mind than both Smith and Deary. His studies failed in most cases to substantiate their conclusions, particularly on the racial question. Elliot-Smith's influence was, however, so dominant that Batrawy refrained from challenging his predecessor's historical theories even when he disputed their own published empirical findings Its introduction is a kind of hesitant expression of indifference to the theories of his predecessors, which seems quite contradictory in the final paragraphs of his work.
Batrawy became wiser a decade later, having taken a second look not only at his own work, but also at the earlier first archaeological survey. In two articles published in the Journal of the American Anthropological Institute (1946), he clearly refuted the hypothesis of racial pluralism, recognizing that the original Nubian population (that is, without the Egyptian colonizers) had one distinct genetic race from beginning to end. He also admitted that “the failure to differentiate clearly between the achievements of populations and their inherited biological descriptions has caused great confusion in anthropological writings. The literature that deals with the ethnic history of Egypt [and Nubia] provides an extraordinary example of the danger of assessing biological relationships based on cultural evidence.” This warning against making a mistake was lost for a long time, and appeared in a magazine that historians rarely consult, without paying attention to it at all. As a result, the theory of multiple races remains with us in abundance, an example of which we find in the pages of Emery's book Egypt in Nubia. Supported by a web of historical imagination woven around it, the theory remains long after its empirical foundations have been demolished.
Batrawi's final view of Nubian racial history received further support from the comparative studies of the human skeletons excavated at Jebel Muya carried out by Mujere, who, using a complex set of statistical compilations, calculated degrees of relationship between some twenty African population groups, including "pure" Negroes as well as Nubians, Ethiopians, and Egyptians. In their structure the seven Nubian groups (that is, all those originally studied by Smith and Derry, and more recently by Batrawi) stand out as a distinct group with close genetic homogeneity, widely separated from all but two of the remaining thirteen groups with which the comparison was made. Like Batrawi, Mukhiri and his companions concluded that the Nubian groups represent a single species with little genetic variation. More recently, study of molar characteristics (later recognized as highly sensitive genetic indicators) failed to reveal any significant differences between the Anonymous and the Meroe and Christian populations.
The most recent published work is an analysis of skulls from different historical periods that were uncovered by the joint Scandinavian expedition to Sudanese Nubia in the period 1961-1964. From that study, Vägen Nielsen concluded that there was very weak confirmation of many of the previous theories put forward by Elliott Smith and Derry, that is, he saw the presence of slight but consistent differences in the population in each successive stage of Nubian history. His diagnosis of these differences in racial terms is a far cry from that of Smith and Deary: “With regard to the question of the Negro influence in Nubia in general, it must be determined from these tests that the inhabitants of the third group were diagnosed with very slight, or non-existent, Negroid features. The Pharaonic series was without Negroid features. "The group cannot in any way be described as 'Negro'."
It is clear that “negro” represents in the mind of Vagen Nielsen a kind of “pure” form, which was never found in Nubia in the historical period. The author is careful in attributing slight genetic differences to mass migrations or population replacements. He tends to see these differences as the product of progressive development and the gradual infusion of new blood (sometimes from the south, sometimes from the north) into the Nubian population. Another study conducted recently also indicates that there may have been great diversity among the Nubian population in certain periods of history as well as from one stage to another.
These generations of anatomical studies seem to have left us where we started: while we are aware of the fact that Nubia had an African or partly African population that differed from that of Egypt, and while also knowing that this does not make us any wiser about the political, social, and cultural history of the country, we can at present do nothing better than highlight Batrawi’s warning to “distinguish clearly between the achievements of the population and its inherited biological characteristics.” We must also note that the absence of anatomical evidence does not completely rule out the possibility of migrations in Nubian history, nor does the apparent genealogical homogeneity now include linguistic or cultural homogeneity. The legitimate conclusion is that in order to know something about language and society, we must look at the evidence of language and society, not the evidence of biology.
Language is the primary source of self-identity for most human beings. Among primitive peoples there is a close association between dialect groups and kinship networks; in more complex societies, national states are often similarly identified by language. Thus, our endeavors to discover the origins and social kinship ties of early peoples always begin with an attempt to uncover the language they spoke.
Direct evidence of language is certainly missing for the entirety of prehistory. The invention of writing is what provides us with the first key to modern language. In ancient civilizations, the relationship between the written language and the spoken language was not necessarily close. For many centuries, writing systems were limited in number, sufficient for large numbers of people. Those who did not develop writing for themselves borrowed the written language of their neighbors. This phenomenon is particularly evident in Nubia, where the Nubians used at least six written languages at different times in their history. Of the five languages whose letters we can decipher—hieroglyphics, Greek, Coptic, ancient Nubian, and Arabic—only one approximates an original spoken language. It is believed that a sixth language whose vocabulary has not yet been deciphered, the Meroe language, was original because it lacked a relationship with any known language, but this of course remains an assumption.
We will never know which languages the Nubians spoke during the pre-writing tribal period. However, the distinct cultural homogeneity of the first and third groups, coupled with the low population density, suggests the possibility that a single language was used in all parts of the region in which these cultural remains were uncovered. Dynastic civilization, however, extended the borders of Nubia far beyond it, and certainly brought into the region diverse linguistic groups. Starting from New Kingdom times onwards we have to imagine at least a variety of dialects, if not entirely independent languages, along different parts of the Nile.
The linguistic situation in modern Nubia is likely to be identical to what it was like in the past. Those who speak the three local dialects, as well as the non-Nubian settlers, use a common written language, which is equally foreign to them all. Two important lessons can be learned here. First, the use of a single written language throughout the region does not necessarily involve a single spoken language. Second, the written language may not be the mother tongue of any of the groups using it.
The relationship of modern Nubian to the early languages of the region has always caused difficulty. The lack of apparent resemblance to the undeciphered Meroe language, combined with the evidence of dynastic differences as indicated by Elliott Smith, led to the emergence of a widespread hypothesis that the language of today came to Nubia with the Negro invaders from the people of the “Unknown Group” who replaced or contained their Meroe ancestors. The anatomy of this theory shows its falsity. Moreover, we have no way of knowing the language in which the Meroe residents of Lower Nubia spoke. We may suggest that the written language they circulated from time to time was the language of a ruling tribe far to the south (i.e. at Meroe) and very different from their daily speech. If linguistic evidence is a help in removing the cover from the social history of Nubia, then we must not only solve the mysteries of the Meroe language, but in addition we must reveal its speakers. At the present time, linguistic evidence does not make us more sophisticated, historically, than racial evidence does.
Winston Churchill, with his usual insight, spoke of how “the archaeologist's shovel corrects and enlarges the historian's study.” The phrase seems appropriate for Nubia when we compare the picture of history that Wallis Budge presented in 1907 with what Reisner, with his archaeological discoveries, was able to present to the same extent two years later. However, there is a difference between “correcting” and “expanding” the historian’s study, and we embody this in turn in the case of Nubia. Nubia historians, from Budge to Emery, relied on archeology primarily to expand their historical outlook, not to correct it. Because they had been trained for the most part as linguists and historians, they assigned archaeological evidence a secondary role rather than the complementary role it deserved. Descriptions of the first group, the third group, and other unrecorded stages of Nubian history are necessarily based on archaeological finds. At the same time, many descriptions of the Pharaonic, Meroean, and Christian phases rarely acknowledge the existence of an archaeological record. It is the refraining from referring to archaeology, except in the case of the complete inability of the textual record, which makes many studies of Nubian history, which gives many Nubian studies not only a narrative character of events, but also a disjointed one. In one moment it seems that we are studying a political and social history, and in the next moment we are studying a cultural history, while we oscillate back and forth between the textual record and the synthetic one.
This difference is somewhat rooted in the evidence. Not only do archeology and recorded history give us views on very different aspects of life, they also offer us different measures of identity and relationships. Monuments can only provide us with tangible and indelible cultural products, and what we can read from them about the customs and beliefs held by their creators. Within this limited range we can apply criteria of identity and kinship that are of our own devising – based primarily on our ability to recognize distinct patterns. Thus we attribute great importance, as measures of identity, to types of pottery and funerary practices, without regard to whether they had any perceived importance to the people who created them. To the extent that we can reconstruct history, by comparing the remains of one period with the remains of another, we are of course reconstructing the development of culture alone, not the development of man.
With the advent of written texts, we begin to view history through the eyes of its participants, or at least its observers. The perspective of culture in its essence may not be more broad than the perspective that archaeology offers us; The truth is always narrower. Many fields of culture, specifically the material and technical fields, remained unrecorded and therefore “prehistoric” long after the invention of writing. Early history writers were interested in broad generalities, but they were interested in specific people and specific events. Equally, when they spoke of “peoples” rather than “people,” they spoke in ethnic, not cultural, terms. The societies that mattered to them were societies of language, law, and social tradition, not societies of material culture and trade such as we are obligated to treat in archaeology. To the extent that recorded texts go beyond simply recording events, they provide us with a social and ethnic history, while archeology gives us a cultural history.
Archeology and textual history can and should complement each other. Together they can provide a more complete picture of life at any time in history than either source could alone. However, they cannot be used interchangeably, as was usual in Nubia, to produce a coherent and continuous story of either social or cultural development. Sooner or later one has to choose whether to let the textual or archaeological record bear the main burden of the story, and whether to write a social or cultural history.
Wallace Page would have had no such experience in 1907. Lacking a cultural record as revealed to us through archaeology, his Egyptian Sudan was necessarily a social and ethnic history, albeit a very incomplete one. Despite this, very little additional textual material has come to light since his time, other than that relating to the Christian period, such that we are hardly better prepared to write social history today. Moreover, it seems unlikely that many of the voids will ever be filled. The continued circulation of Reisner's orthographic descriptions of cultural groups A, B, C and X is eloquent testimony to the fact that we lack solid ethnic and social information for many periods in Nubian history. His theories of ethnic discontinuity may remain so for all time; archeology alone will neither prove nor disprove them.
Although we are still unable to call many Nubian peoples by their proper names, we have achieved continuous progress in studying their cultural development through archaeology. The undisputed story of Nubian studies in the twentieth century is the story of the three great dams, and the planned archaeological salvage projects that sprang from them. Through these, we not only possess our only evidence indicating the undocumented stages of Nubian history, but also a mass of comparative and mostly unrecorded detail regarding the cultures of the historically known stages. In other words, we still have texts for selected periods in Nubian history, but we now possess traces of almost all periods. What we can do now, therefore, is to elevate archeology to its rightful place, letting it tell a continuing story of cultural development from prehistoric times to the present.
Kush or Nubia: the naming problem