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A. The Earliest Peoples in Nubia: The Old Stone Age (Paleolithic)

1. Nubia's Early Hunters

The earliest remains of man have been recovered in South Africa and Kenya, dating back approximately four million years. If environmental conditions in Sudan were as conducive to preserving skeletal remains as they are in these areas, there is no doubt that equally ancient remains would be found there. Until now, the earliest traces of man in Nubia and Sudan have been only the tools he created and used. The earliest tool type used by man was the large rough hand axe with one pointed and another rounded end. The pointed end was used for hammering; the rounded end was held in the closed palm of the hand. Such tools have been found from central Sudan to the Nile Delta and throughout the Sahara, and they are hardly different from those found all over Europe and Asia. Such tools have been identified with the species of early man called homo erectus.

Throughout the last 100,000 years, the Nile Valley and Sahara underwent many dry and wet phases, which over such a span of time would have constantly altered man's habitat. We do not know what the people who used these tools looked like, but they were surely hunters and would have migrated in bands, supplementing their dietwith gathered fruits, nuts and vegetables. This uniform early Paleolithic tool "culture" is known as the Achulean, and it existed from about 500,000 to 50,000 years ago.

2. Nubia's Oldest House?

Some of the most important evidence of early man in Nubia was discovered recently by an expedition of the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, under the direction of Dr. Kryzstof Grzymski, on the east bank of the Nile, about 70 miles (116 km) south of Dongola, Sudan. During the early 1990's, this team discovered several sites containing hundreds of Paleolithic hand axes. At one site, however, the team identified an apparent stone tool workshop, where thousands of sandstone hand axes and flakes lay on the ground around a row of large stones set in a line, suggesting the remains of a shelter. This seems to be the earliest "habitation" site yet discovered in the Nile Valley and may be up to 70,000 years old.

What the Nubian environment was like throughout these distant times, we cannot know with certainty, but it must have changed many times. For many thousands of years it was probably far different than what it is today. Between about 50,000 to 25,000 years ago, the hand axe gradually disappeared and was replaced with numerous distinctive chipped stone industries that varied from region to region, suggesting the presence in Nubia of many different peoples or tribal groups dwelling in close proximity to each other. When we first encounter skeletal remains in Nubia, they are those of modern man: homo sapiens.

3. Nubia's Oldest Battle?

From about 25,000 to 8,000 years ago, the environment gradually evolved to its present state. From this phase several very early settlement sites have been identified at the Second Cataract, near the Egypt-Sudan border. These appear to have been used seasonally by people leading a semi-nomadic existence. The people hunted, fished, and ground wild grain. The first cemeteries also appear, suggesting that people may have been living at least partly sedentary lives. One cemetery site at Jebel Sahaba, near Wadi Halfa, Sudan, contained a number of bodies that had suffered violent deaths and were buried in a mass grave. This suggests that people, even 10,000 years ago, had begun to compete with each other for resources and were willing to kill each other to control them.

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B. From Hunting to Gathering to Self-Subsistence: the New Stone Age (Neolithic): 6000-4000 B.C.

1. Retracing the Ancient Nile and Discovering Nubia's Earliest Towns

By the end of the Old Stone Age, Nubian peoples, like those in the Near East and elsewhere, had begun utilizing sickle-like tools made of wood inset with small razor-sharp stone flakes. The purpose of such tools was for cutting grain, and it is the harvesting of grains and the learning of methods of food production - how to plant crops and how to domesticate animals - that marked the transition from the Old Stone Age (Paleolithic) to the New (Neolithic).

During the 1980's and 90's intensive exploration of the northern Sudan was undertaken by a number of prehistorians. These archaeologists discovered that from about 8000-4000 BC, people learned how to live in large permanent communities, where they produced an increasing proportion of their own food and acquired enough leisure time to create artistic utilitarian objects. Many of these ancient settlements were found in areas that are today absolute deserts. This has not only revealed that the climate was dramatically different in Neolithic times but also that the Nile itself once flowed through entirely different channels than it does today.

Recent surveys of the Bayuda Desert, north of modern Khartoum, Sudan, and the Sahara Desert, west of the Nile at Dongola, Sudan, and the Nubian Desert, east of Kerma, Sudan, have resulted not only in the discovery of major ancient settlement areas but also to a new understanding of the ancient course and tributaries of the Nile.

When a paved road was to be laid across the Bayuda Desert, connecting Omdurman (western Khartoum) with ed-Debba 210 miles (350 km) to the north, a team of the Sudan Archaeological Research Society (SARS) of London, collaborating with the Sudan Antiquities Dept., undertook an archaeological survey of the route. Their work revealed that this Ohio-sized territory, embraced by the Great Bend of the Nile, was once cut by a branch of the White Nile that flowed due north through the dry depression now known as the Wadi Muqaddam. This area, they found, was once well-watered, as revealed by the presence of many fish bones and fresh-water shells, and it supported many prehistoric settlements along its banks. Future excavations here will no doubt lead to important discoveries.

Another major Nile tributary, which has been dry for perhaps three thousand years, once flowed from Chad through the Sahara and intersected the Nile near modern Dongola, Sudan. This ancient river system, called the Wadi Howar, once kept the western desert of Sudan well watered, and from about 8000.to 1000 B.C. it nurtured extensive population groups along its banks. Recent surface surveys in this now lifeless region by Dr. Bergit Keding and a team from the Heinrich Barth Institute of the Univesity of Cologne, Germany, have revealed traces of many complex, previously unknown ancient cultures. Since there is no water or other means of supplying an archaeological expedition here, only very limited excavations have taken place, but future finds here will surely expand dramatically our knowledge of the Nubian Neolithic and the history of cultural evolution in Africa.

Among the most important recent archaeological discoveries in Sudan are those that have been made just south of the Third Cataract by a combined French and Sudanese team, under the direction of Dr. Jacques Reinold, working for the Sudan Antiquities Department. Here, in a 30 mile (50 km) long depression east of the Nile known as the Wadi el-Khowi, just east of Kerma, Sudan, they found evidence of numerous ancient parallel river beds in what is now absolute desert. They discovered that the Nile had once flowed 6 miles (10 km) farther east than it does today. It was clear from a study of this district - a section called Kadruka - that over the millennia the Nile had slowly migrated westward, until about 2000 BC, when it reached the bed it now occupies. A survey of the ancient sites in the Kadruka area has revealed that the most ancient are the farthest east, when the Nile itself was farthest east. As the Nile slowly changed course westward, the old villages were abandoned and new ones were built further west following the new course of the river. The result was that from east to west, the archaeologists could identify increasingly younger settlements and cemetery sites, ranging in date from about 5000 to 3500 BC.

2. The Evidence for Nubia's First Rulers: 6000-3500 BC

Although the settlement sites along the ancient Nile beds of the Wadi el-Khowi, east of Kerma, were all badly damaged by wind and water erosion, the cemeteries often survived because the graves were dug into low mounds. The joint French-Sudanese team has identified over thirty cemeteries, and three or four possess over a thousand burials each. Their major discovery was that a grave's position in the cemterey seemed to indicate the social standing of the owner within the community. The most important individuals, they found, were men, who were buried at the highest point of each cemetery mound. Their graves contained the most important objects - elaborately decorated pottery, fine tools and weapons - especially mace heads - made with with exotic stones, multiple armbands of ivory, grinding stones for eye cosmetics, and strange stone female figurines. Horns of domesticated cattle were sometimes laid on top of the bodies. These "chieftan's graves" were surrounded by lesser graves, predominantly female. Such data reveals that Nubian society, from at least 5000 BC, had become highly stratified.

Another major Neolithic site is Kadero, about 20 km north of Khartoum on the east bank of the Nile, which has been excavated by a team from the Archaeological Museum of Poznan, Poland, headed by Dr. Lech Krzyzaniak. Traces of houses and animal pens were found on a large mound, and trash heaps contained the bones of both wild and domesticated animals (goats and sheep) and fragments of grindstones, stone tools, and pottery vessels. The grindstones suggested knowledge of cereals, but whether the people actually cultivated them remains unclear. The inhabitants apparently supplemented their diet by hunting, fishing, and gathering edible plants. The Kadero cemetery contained several hundred burials, of which one hundred and sixty were excavated - a fraction of the whole. Again, the notable feature of the cemetery was the social stratification of the population. A few people obviously had elite status since they were buried in deep pits with exceptionally fine funeral offerings: ivory jewelry, shells brought from the Red Sea (over 180 miles [300 km] away to the east), amazonite from Chad, fine decorated pottery, and well made stone tools and weapons.

About 90 mi further north, near modern Shendi, Sudan, a large settlement site of the period 4000-3500 BC was found accidentally near the Nile by road builders and excavated by the Sudan Antiquities Dept. It is presently called Kadada. Occupation debris was over a meter thick in some areas, although intact house foundations and cultural deposits were not preserved due to the disturbance of the site. The cemeteries contained several thousand people, of which several hundred graves were excavated and recorded. Individuals were laid in a fetal position at the bottom of a pit 3 to 7 ft (1 and 2 m) in diameter, but there was no particular orientation. The dead had stone or bone tools in the hands, and their heads rested on ox skulls. Other goods were arranged around the body. Again, the tombs were arranged apparently so as to reflect one's social position within the community, and some rich tombs even appear to include secondary burials, which were possibly human sacrifices. Some tombs were surrounded closely by up to a dozen other graves, some nearly on top of the original, suggesting that these were the burial sites of whole families and extended families. No graves of children were found in the cemeteries, but children were found buried in pots in the settlement area, revealing that young children were probably normally buried under the floors of houses.

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C. The Emergence of the State: The A-Group and Pre-Kerma Periods: 3500-2500 B.C.

1. Lower Nubia's Mystery People: The "A-Group"

From about 3500 BC at least two important cultures emerged in Nubia that may suggest the existence of early states controlling major territories and trade routes. The first was centered in Lower Nubia, between the First and Second Cataracts, and the other was centered in Upper Nubia, between the Third and Fourth Cataracts. If there were others, we don't yet know. While these two seem to be related, they also differ in many respects, and yet there can be no doubt that they were in communication with one other, just as they were probably both in contact with Predynastic and Early Dynastic Egypt. Because of finds of central African products in contemporary Egyptian contexts, we can be sure that both of these early Nubian "kingdoms" had a hand in and benefitted from some sort of north-south Nile trade linking central Africa with Egypt.

The early Lower Nubian culture was discovered in 1907 by the famous Egyptologist George A. Reisner during his archaeological survey south of Aswan, which he undertook on behalf of the Egyptian Government just prior to the first raising of the Aswan Dam.

The people of this early Nubian culture used nowriting, and none of the earliest Egyptian inscriptions (which appeared about 3200 B.C.) preserve their original name. (The Egyptian texts call Nubia only by an Egyptian name: "Land of the Bow"). Reisner thus called these people, known only by their grave goods, the "A-Group," since theirs was the earliest culture he had found in Lower Nubia. The name has been used by archaeologists ever since.

A-Group remains are quite distinct from those of contemporary Egypt, so there is good reason to suspect that the people differed from the Egyptians politically, linguistically and culturally, and perhaps ethnically. Their unmistakable objects have been found well distributed throughout Lower Nubia, from the Second Cataract north to Aswan, and a few of their objects have been found at Hierakonpolis, site of the earliest Egyptian capital in Upper Egypt. Although a few small and rather poor looking settlement sites were identified before the region was flooded forever by the Aswan High Dam, the A-Group people are known primarily from their much more prosperous looking cemeteries. Laid in pits beneath small mounds, the dead were arranged flexed, facing west. Obviously they had a strong belief in the afterlife, for the bodies were accompanied by elegant thin-walled painted pottery of their own manufacture, polished stone palettes for grinding eye cosmetics, mica mirrors, as well as a variety of luxury items imported from Egypt.

These included food jars, linen for clothing, copper tools, and small ornaments. Since Lower Nubia, agriculturally, was a poor land, and since at that time it had no recognized natural resources (gold being discovered somewhat later), we must wonder how there came to be so much Egyptian material in these graves. Oddly, very few A-Group products have ever been found in Egypt. It seems most likely that these people purchased their Egyptian goods directly from Egyptian river traders by using as barter raw materials they had obtained from further south in the Sudan. On the other hand, they might also have received their Egyptian goods from Egyptian shippers as tolls in exchange for allowing the Egyptians safe passage to Upper Nubia. In any case, about 3200 B.C. the A-Group people seem to have been middle-men in an ever increasing trade in exotic raw materials flowing between Egypt and the distant south.

In 1962, at a place called Qustul, about 180 miles (300 km) upriver from Aswan, a University of Chicago team, under the direction of Dr. Keith Seele, discovered a series of plundered, but still unusally rich, tombs containing massive quantities of Egyptian trade goods and luxury items. Since the rising floodwaters were advancing rapidly, the tombs were excavated hastily and the material put in storage. In the early 1980's, when he first examined the material prior to its final publication, Prehistorian Bruce B. Williams theorized that the tombs may have belonged to a dynasty of ten to twelve A-Group kings and that, like Upper and Lower Egypt at about the same time, Lower Nubia may also have developed a strong centralized authority. Two of the objects found in the tombs were sandstone incense burners, made of local stone, carved in intaglio with scenes that seemed to show ancient Egyptian kings, dressed in traditional tall crown (signifying rule over the south) and protected by the falcon god Horus. What made Williams' theory so controversial was that he proposed that the objects did not show early Egyptian kings but rather A-Group kings, and that the objects - and the A-Group kingship - were earlier by at least two centuries than the Egyptian kingship of the same form. He went on to suggest that this hypothetical Nubian kingship became the model for the later Egyptian. The argument was quickly seized by American Afrocentrists as proof that Egyptian-style kingship was not home-grown but was imported from central Africa, and that the report by the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus in the first century BC that Egyptian civilization had derived from Nubia ("Aithiopia") was confirmed.

While Williams' theory was intriguing, it could never be proven or disproven absolutely because shortly after the clearing of the tombs all of Qustul had been flooded forever by the Aswan Dam and could not be reinvestigated. Given the large numbers of imported Egyptian goods in the tombs, one could also never be certain if the incense burners, too, were not simply Egyptian imports rather than Nubian products, as most would have assumed them to be. The fact that they were made of local stone seemed to confirm that they were Nubian, and many other objects and pottery vessels seemed to have a Sudanese origin. Williams' characterization of the tombs as belonging to a time "prior to any known Egyptian kingship" now has to be modified by the recent discovery at Abydos in Egypt of Egyptian royal artifacts that do indeed seem to reach back as far as the Qustul tombs (about 3400 BC).

For unknown reasons, perhaps in dispute with the A-Group rulers over commodity prices or control of trade routes, or in rivalry for empire, the earliest Egyptian pharaohs, as recorded in their brief inscriptions, seem to have been determined to conquer the "Land of the Bow." At least five Egyptian military campaigns into Lower Nubia are recorded between 3100 and 2500 BC. A text of the Fourth Dynasty king Sneferu (ca. 2575-2555 B.C.), for example, reports that the Egyptians carried away from Nubia seven thousand captives and 200,000 head of cattle. These conquests ultimately had the effect of eradicating all traces of the A-Group - at least in the archaaeological record - suggesting either that a large Nubian population went to Egypt, or that it was assimilated, or that it was driven some distance away from the river into the desert grasslands. This allowed the Egyptians to move into the area tentatively and to establish small fortified settlements at strategic points. One of these settlements was located at Buhen, at the approach to the Second Cataract, which was ideally situated as a trading station where Egyptian shippers from Aswan could meet Nubian merchants from the deep south and barter their goods directly with them.

2. Upper Nubia's First Kingdom? The Pre-Kerma Culture

The site of Kerma, about 10 miles (16.5 km) south of the Third Cataract, and about 350 miles (580 km) upstream (south) from Aswan, is known to have been that of the largest city in the Sudan during the period about 2000-1500 BC. Although we do not yet know its ancient name, Kerma was the probable capital of the first Nubian state to call itself Kush, and there is every reason to believe that this phase was the latest of a major town that had already existed here continuously for two or three thousand years. This isolated but highly fertile region of the Nile Valley, between Sai Island and the Fourth Cataract, was uniquely suited for human settlement, independent cultural evolution, and state formation. It was on a wide low-lying plain, which the Nile irrigated with multiple channels, creating many islands. In antiquity greater rainfall stimulated seasonal growth of grasses in the plains and enabled the residents to raise cattle on a grand scale. Whatever king could achieve political power over this district could control all river traffic between Egypt and the lands to the south - traffic from which he could collect tolls, receive gifts, and amass great wealth.

In 1986 the expedition of the University of Geneva, Switzerland, under the direction of Dr. Charles Bonnet, was excavating at the ancient city site of Kerma, which dates to about 2500-1500 BC. Beneath the cemetery of this city, about 1.5 mi (2.7 km) east of the Nile, they found ruins of a second, older town, dating from about 3500-2700 BC. This town is now called the "Pre-Kerma settlement" and its culture the "Pre-Kerma." Mixed with these remains were traces of an even older town, which have yielded carbon dates stretching back to about 4800 BC.

Between 1995 and 1998, 5000 sq. m. of the Pre-Kerma town were cleared, revealing part of a complex plan including the remains of some 50 round houses, which could be identified only by their surviving patterns of post holes. The average house plan was just over 13 ft. (3-3.5 m) in diameter, but several were over 23 ft.(7-7.5 m) in diameter, suggesting that they were used for important community functions or were occupied by important persons. Such houses are very similar to a type of rural African dwelling still used in the Sudan. These are round, with conical roofs, and were made of vertical posts and woven mats, sometimes covered by layers of mud plaster. It was the vertical posts whose holes survived in the ground. Some of the structures, however, were only 3-4 ft. ( 1 - 1.3 m) in diameter, suggesting their likely use as pens for young animals, such as one still sees today in the Sudan.

Two other buildings in the Pre-Kerma town were rectangular in plan. Comparing these with seemingly similar structures in use today by rural Sudanese nomads, we can suggest that they might have been elevated platforms used to store animal fodder. There were also double lines of holes, suggesting where fences had been built as animal corrals. The modern fences of the Sudanese nomads are built in exactly the same way.

Although no imported Egyptian pottery or other material has yet been found in the Pre-Kerma settlement, there seems little doubt that the ivory and other African products found in contemporary Egyptian sites were procured originally from the people of Upper Nubia. Such goods would also have passed through the hands of the A-Group Nubians. Rock drawings of very early ships of this period have been found scratched in the boulders of the Second and Third Cataracts, which would seem to prove that between 3500 and 2900 BC there was at least limited direct river traffic between Egypt and the northern Sudan. So little excavation has been carried out on sites of this period in Sudan that it would be dangerous to assume that the relative simplicity of the Pre-Kerma townsite was an accurate indication of the level of the political and cultural attainments of all of Upper Nubia. If there was a kingship in Lower Nubia during the mid-fourth millennium BC, it would not be far-fetched to assume that there was one of equal importance here as well. On Sai Island, about 100 mi (170 km) downstream from Kerma, another huge early town site has been identified by a French team from the University of Lille, under the direction of Dr. Francis Geus.

At Kerma about 2700 B.C. the Nile channel shifted suddenly to the west, and the Pre-Kerma settlement was abandoned. Closer to the river a new town was built, and it was this city that would ultimately become the capital of Upper Nubia.

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D. Lower Nubia in the late Third Millennium B.C.: the Arrival of the "C-Group" and the Kingdoms of Wawat, Irtjet, and Setju.

Between about 2800 and 2400 BC, the Egyptians were able to occupy Lower Nubia, or certain key parts of it, with some success, but their control eventually deteriorated as new peoples pushed into the region, apparently from the western desert. These were groups of semi-nomadic herdsmen, who were probably organized into large tribal groups or confederacies, ruled by chiefs ("great ones," as the Egyptians called them). Egyptian texts of the period indicate that the pharaohs were forced to pull back north of the First Cataract, leaving Lower Nubia to itself again and direct communication with the far south interrupted. The presence of the newcomers in Lower Nubia is revealed everywhere there by their distinctive cemeteries of low round tombs, and by a unique sort of fine red or black, pottery decorated with incised designs filled with white pigment.

Unfortunately, these people used no writing, and our knowledge of them is derived only from brief Egyptian reports and from their own archaeological remains. Again it was George Reisner who first discovered their distinctive culture and give them the name "C-Group." (Reisner's tentative "B-Group," between his "A-" and "C-Groups" has since been proven to be non-existent). Egyptian inscriptions of the period, however, do provide other names for them

Already by about 2600 BC, the Egyptians had begun referring to the Nubians by the generic name Nehesy. Within this term, however, they recognized several different groups, each of which had its specific tribal or geographical name. By the Sixth Dynasty (ca. 2323-2150 BC), there are repeated Egyptian references to Wawat, Irtjet, and Setju (named from north to south), which seem to identify different C-Group chiefdoms or small kingdoms in Lower Nubia. Another group, called Medja, was a nomadic people dwelling in the eastern desert or ranging about the Second Cataract regions. This ancient name still seems to be preserved by the eastern Sudanese camel herding nomads, who are collectively called the Beja.

Sometime during the Sixth Dynasty, the Egyptians learned to work cooperatively with these peoples, for a rock inscription south of Aswan describes a "summit meeting" that took place nearby between the pharaoh Merenre (ca. 2255-2246 BC) and the "chiefs of Wawat, Irtjet, and Setju." The biography of the Egyptian official Uni, in his tomb at Abydos, reports that at the pharaoh's command he directed building canals around the First Cataract so that he (Uni) could visit certain Lower Nubian quarries by ship in order to cut stone for the king's pyramid. The Nubian rulers are said to have helped by supplying the wood needed to construct the barges. (Since there was no wood in Lower Nubia, they would have had to procure it from sources much farther south). At the same time the Lower Nubian rulers seem also to have profited greatly by sending their fighting men to Egypt for hire. By the end of the Old Kingdom (ca. 2150 BC), the Egyptian armies were mainly composed of Nubian mercenaries, many of whom would ultimately settle in Egypt, marry Egyptian women, and become assimilated into the Egyptian population.

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E. Upper Nubia in the late Third Millennium B.C.: the early Kerma Culture and the Kingdom of Yam.

During the Old Kingdom (ca. 2575-2134 BC), Egyptian texts speak of a land in Upper Nubia called "Yam." Besides troops from "Wawat, Irtjet, and Setju" (Lower Nubia), troops from Yam, too, were hired for service in the Egyptian army. The only source that provides any real information about Yam is a biography of an Egyptian caravan leader named Harkhuf, preserved in his tomb at Aswan. Harkhuf tells us that, on behalf of the pharaohs Merenre and Pepi II (ca. 2255-2152 BC), he led four expeditions to Yam, each of which took eight months. We also learn that Yam had its own ruler, who had a cordial relationship with Pharaoh. On each trip Harkhuf brought important gifts to the Yamite king from the Egyptian king, and in exchange, the Yamite king sent Harkhuf back to Egypt with three hundred donkey loads of merchandise. One of these gifts, on his last trip, was a pygmy "from the land of the horizon dwellers."

On his journeys to Yam from Egypt, Harkhuf followed desert routes to avoid trouble from the rulers of Wawat, Irtjet, and Setju. On his return trip, by necessity having to travelclose to the river, he took back with him a strong escort of Yamite soldiers, who protected him from the same rulers until he was safely back in Egyptian territory.

No one is yet sure where the court of Yam was, but most scholars believe it was at Kerma, which in four or five centuries would become powerful as the (probable) capital of Kush. Recent excavations there by Prof. Charles Bonnet and his team from the University of Geneva, Switzerland, have revealed not only remains of a huge round palace, which date to this period (about 2300-2000 BC), but also a crude stela inscribed in Egyptian hieroglyphs with the names of two Egyptian ship captains who may have visited the town about the same time. Graves of this period from Kerma were found to contain Egyptian trade goods of the Old Kingdom; also found at the site were fragments of stone vessels....

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F. Kerma, Kush and the First Nubian Empire (ca. 2000-1480 BC)

1. Egyptian-Nubian Relations 2200-1550 BC

Between the end of the Old Kingdom and the beginning of the Middle Kingdom (from ca. 2134-2040 BC), political turmoil in Egypt brought an end to trading expeditions like those of Harkhuf. At the same time, major political changes must also have taken place in Upper Nubia. The name "Yam" disappears in Egyptian texts and is replaced by the name "Kush," which the Egyptians regularly modified by an adjective meaning "vile" or "contemptible." The Yamites may have been friendly to Egypt; the Kushites, who replaced them, may have been much more menacing.

With the reunification of Egypt under the pharoahs of Dynasties 11 and 12 (ca. 2040-1783 BC), the Egyptians aggressively reoccupied Lower Nubia, penetrated to the head of the Second Cataract, and built a series of eleven impregnable fortresses along its desolate reaches. Each fort was defended by a massive mud brick wall system; this was surrounded by dry moats and walls with bastions and loopholes for archers. These structures served a number of purposes. One was to facilitate a massive trading operation with Upper Nubia by assisting and protecting shippers moving up or down the rapids, by providing safe havens and hostels for caravans travelling along the river, and by keeping potentially threatening peoples away. One of the most important purposes, however, must have been to display a strong defensive posture to the rulers of Kush to discourage them from attempting any sort of military moves to the north. These forts were all within signalling distance and were permanently garrisoned and well-supplied. They were given names that revealed their purpose: "Warding off the Bows," "Subduer of the Nubians (Nehesy)," "Curbing the Foreign Lands." At the southern limit of the Second Cataract, at a place called Semna, the Egyptians set up their official southern boundary marker.

About 1750 BC, Egypt again destabilized internally and withdrew from the Nile forts. In the north, a powerful people of Near Eastern origin moved in to occupy the Nile Delta; in Egyptian history they are known as the "Hyksos" (from Egyptian words which meant "Princes of Foreign Lands"), and they established two consecutive dynasties, the 15th and 16th. For a century they considered the Egyptian princes of Thebes their vassals. When the Theban ruler Kamose (ca. 1555-1550 BC) came to the throne of the south, the reigning Hyksos king conspired with the king of Kush to divide up Kamose's kingdom between them. This knowledge stirred the Thebans, first, to drive the Hyksos out of Egypt, which they did in a series of actions during the reign of Kamose's successor Ahmose I (ca. 1550-1525 BC), founder of Dynasty 18. Second, it encouraged them to invade Nubia and to destroy the kingdom of Kush, which had by then siezed all of the Nile Valley northwards to Aswan itself. The plan adopted by the new pharaohs was to invade Kush, annex its territory to Egypt, govern it directly, and sieze control of the Africa trade. This proved to be a much more complex task than expelling the Hyksos, for Kush was not completely subdued until the reign of Thutmose III (ca. 1479-1425 BC).

2. Kerma, the First Nubian City

Only one archaeological site in the Sudan fits all the criteria for having been the capital of the first kingdom of Kush. This is the site called Kerma, after the modern Sudanese village that occupies its site. Its ancient name remains unknown because no inscriptions have yet been found there that preserve it. The Nubians of this period still did not normally use writing, although some people, who did business with the Egyptians, may have learned hieroglyphic writing. Kerma lies just about 10 miles (16.5 km) south of the Third Cataract, on the east bank of the Nile, and about 170 miles (266 km) upstream from the nearest Egyptian fort. The first excavations were conducted by George A. Reisner and his team from Harvard University and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, between 1913 and 1915. Since 1973, excavations have been continued annually by Charles Bonnet and his team from the University of Geneva, Switzerland.

Kerma consisted of a central city, surrounded by a series of defensive walls and moats. This incorporated a palace and a religious sanctuary and about 200 houses. The palace itself evolved from a large round building, about 12 m (40 ft.) in diameter, to a rectangular structure over four times as large. Originally the houses were round, as in the "pre-Kerma" settlement; later, like the palace, they were rectangular, perhaps under Egytian influence. Outside the walls were other heavily populated areas, still poorly known, as well as an area of small temples apparently dedicated to the worship of deceased kings. Along the riverbank were dockyards and warehouses. An enormous cemetery lay about 2 mi (3 km) to the east.

The main feature of the town was a large solid brick platform which in its latest phase stood about 60 ft (18 m), high and measured about 170 x 85 ft (52 x 25.8 m). This building is known as the "Western Deffufa" (after an old Nubian word for a mud brick structure) in order to distinguish it from the "Eastern Deffufa," a similarly sized but lower brick building that rises in the cemetery. It is now known that these buildings were temples. The Western Deffufa was a huge brick platform on top of which there was probably a small shrine or object of worship. The "Eastern Deffufa" was associated with the worship or preparation for burial of the dead kings.

3. The Kerma Cemetery and the Burial Customs of Early Kush

East of Kerma, in what is now the desert, lies its cemetery, which at the end of its existence (about 1480 BC) had grown to be about a mile (1.6 km) long, north to south, and about half a mile (.8 km) wide at its greatest width. It is estimated to contain over 30,000 graves, the oldest located at its northern end and the latest at its southern. The graves take the form of low tumuli covered or ringed with hundreds or thousands of white or black desert pebbles.

The southern border of the cemetery is distinguished by dozens of enormous mounds, four of which are about 300 ft. (90 m) in diameter. These belonged to the most powerful kings of Kerma during the last century of the city's existence. They are clustered around the remains of the large brick building known as the "Eastern Deffufa," thought to have been a funerary chapel connected with the royal tombs. All across the cemetery smaller graves seem to cluster around larger graves, which undoubtedly belonged to those of the highest rank.

The Kerma burial customs are unique, and their features remain quite constant throughout the site's history, suggesting a strong cultural continuity and religious faith. The dead were always interred in round or oval pits, four to five feet (1.5 m) deep, with food offerings and their belongings. The bodies were always flexed, lying on their right sides, their hands in front of their faces, their feet toward the west and their heads toward the east, looking north. This position was unchanging. Initially, the dead were laid on cowhides, but later they were laid on wooden beds, as if sleeping. The body was then covered with a cowhide, and the grave filled in. In later periods the graves normally contain several other skeletons, which can only have been human sacrifices. Many people were also buried with their pet dogs (In Egyptian tomb scenes and in their grave stelae, Nubian soldiers are almost always shown with their dogs, suggesting their fondness for these animals). After filling, the graves were covered with low mounds often decoratively covered with smooth white or black desert pebbles

4. The Royal Burials at Kerma

The three largest royal tombs in the cemetery lie in a row at its southern end. They were mounds approximately 300 ft. (90 m) in diameter and 10 to 13 ft (3 to 4 m) high. Beneath the surface each had a complex internal structure of mud-brick rib walls, built to hold a sand fill and to prevent the sand - and the mound - from blowing away. On this foundation, in the center of the mound, they built a small vaulted chamber. Connected to it was a walled corridor that ran the full diameter of the tomb. The small chamber housed the king's body and his most treasured possessions. It had wooden doors and a vaulted roof; and its plastered walls preserved fragments of wall paintings. Unfortunately, all the kings' chambers had been badly looted in ancient times, but it is known that their bodies were laid on magnificent beds with stone legs and were accompanied by large stone models of ships, which were perhaps believed to carry them on the river of the afterlife.

Previously the dead kings at Kerma had been buried in sand, but the idea of a vaulted roofed burial chamber was new here and seems to have been an Egyptian inspiration. The vault was a novelty in Nubia, but it already had been in use in Egypt for over a thousand years. The corridor in each tomb, which always ran from east to west, contained the bodies of dozens or in one case hundreds sacrificed people- in one case over 300. Some were men, who had obviously comprised the king's personal bodyguard; others were adult women and adolescent girls, all dressed in their finest garments and jewels, and others were children. In each tomb the ruler's entire household of servants and subordinate wives seems to have been buried with him.

After the royal burials were completed and the huge mounds were heaped over them, they were covered with pavements made of millions of white or black pebbles. Up to a thousand cattle were slaughtered, and their skulls were arranged around the southern perimeters of the mounds. Then an enormous white marble monolith, weighing up to ten tons, was set on the top of the mound as a monument. But this did not end the ceremony: over the years to follow, numerous subsidiary tomb pits were sunk in the surface of each great mound. These burials, many quite rich and containing multiple human sacrifices, were obviously those of persons of high rank who had been close to the dead king. Their loyalty to their lord, and their desire to remain forever by his side, obviously dictated their choice to be buried beside him.

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G. The Egyptian Conquest of Nubia and the Viceroyalty of Kush, 1550-1080 B.C.

1. The Egyptian Conquest of Kush

Hostilities between Egypt and Kush were initiated by the Theban pharaoh Kamose (ca. 1555-1550 BC). He had captured a messenger of the Hyksos king (his rival in the Nile Delta) carrying a letter from that ruler inviting the king of Kush to attack Egypt from the south so that he and the Nubian ruler could divide up Kamose's kingdom between them. Under Kamose and his successor Ahmose I (ca. 1550-1525 BC), the Egyptians were able to expell the Hyksos from northern Egypt and to reassert their control over the whole country. Next they siezed Lower Nubia, which had been formerly taken by Kush. Ahmose's son Amenhotep I (ca. 1525-1504 BC) continued the campaign to the south, beyond the Second Cataract, and possibly built the fort at Sai Island, about 70 mi further upriver. Under Thutmose I (ca. 1504-1492 BC), the Egyptians passed beyond the Third Cataract and penetrated the heartland of Kush, while some of his forces cut across the desert to the southeast and approached the Fifth Cataract. Large areas of the Kushite kingdom, however,remained unconquered until the reigns of Thutmose II (ca. 1492-1479 BC) and Hatshepsut, his wife (ca. 1479-1458 BC), who assumed the kingship after his death. Sometime during her reign, or that of her nephew Thutmose III (ca. 1479-1425 BC), it seems that Kerma, the presumed capital, was finally overthrown and burned. This is implied by the carbon dates (about 1480 BC) obtained from the charred planks inset into the mud bricks of the Western Deffufa at Kerma.

The complete conquest of Upper Nubia seems not to have occurred until the later reign of Thutmose III, when the Egyptian frontier was established at the two key points where the trade routes entered the territory of Kush from the far south. These points were at Napata (Gebel Barkal), just below the Fourth Cataract, and at Hagar el-Merwa (Kurgus), just below the Fifth. The Egyptians built a fort at each place.

2. Egyptian Rule of Kush

With the overthrow of the Kushite monarchy, Egypt became the wealthiest and most powerful nation on earth. From the mid-fifteenth to the twelfth centuries BC, Egypt directly ruled Upper and Lower Nubia through an elaborate administration headed by an official chosen from among the pharaoh's closest confidants. He was called the "Royal Son of Kush and Chief of the Southern Foreign Lands" - or, as it is commonly translated today, "the Viceroy of Kush." The Viceroy's administrative control was vast; it extended from the Upper Egyptian town of Nekhen (about 30 mi [50 km] south of Thebes) to the town of Napata, just below the Fourth Cataract, a river distance of about 700 miles [1200 km].

At this time the Egyptians understood the name "Kush" to designate loosely all of Nubia, but they still called Lower Nubia "Wawat." The Egyptian administrative capital of Wawat lay alternately at the towns of Aniba and Faras. That in Kush lay at Amara. Both Kush and Wawat were required to supply annual revenue. Gathering this revenue was the chief duty of the Viceroy, who had to present it to the king in a great spectacle prior to its being consigned to the palace and the temple of the state god Amun at Karnak. Wawat supplied gold, slaves, cattle, and agricultural produce, while Kush supplied gold, slaves, cattle, ivory, live exotic animals and animal products and skins, valuable woods, aromatic resins and gums, precious stones, etc. Each region had its own Egyptian "deputy" responsible to the Viceroy for collecting the tribute. The Viceroy also controlled a provincial army, whose field officer was called the "Commander of the Archers of Kush." Nubian princes were raised at court and were "Egyptianized"; they were then returned to Nubia as district governors of their own people. The number of such administrative districts is suggested by the three "chiefs of Wawat" and six "chiefs of Kush" represented on the walls of the Theban tomb of the Viceroy Amenhotep Huy, dating to the time of Tutankhamun (ca. 1333-1323 BC). Nubia also continued to supply troops to the Egyptian army in the north. Not only are Nubian troops depicted on the walls of Egyptian temples and tombs, but the diplomatic archive found at Tell el-Amarna also reveals that Pharaohs Amenhotep III and Akhenaten regularly stationed Kushite troops in Asia to defend their northern empire.

3. Egyptian and Nubian Cultural and Religious Assimilation

To the Egyptians of earlier periods, Nubia had been an alien land - a place where no Egyptian would wish to live and die. All Egyptians, of course, wished to die and be buried in Egypt. In order to encourage Egyptians to settle in Nubia, it was essential for them to believe that Nubia had always been a part of Egypt. Immediately after the conquest, therefore, the pharaohs commenced building major temples throughout Nubia to the Egyptian gods. Two kings, Amenhotep III and Ramses II even built temples to their own divine aspects at Soleb and Abu Simbel respectively. Egyptian religious traditions concerning Nubia were also revised to emphasize episodes that had to do with Nubia. Rapidly Egyptian temple towns were founded; Egyptians became settlers and took Nubian spouses, and many Nubians of the upper classes adopted Egyptian customs and Egyptian language and writing.

Although little is known of the Nubian gods or religious beliefs prior to the coming of the Egyptians, evidence from Kerma reveals that the Kushites had a well-developed religion and that, like the Egyptians, they probably worshipped the sun. Like the Egyptians, they probably identified the sun as an ancestor or father of their living king, who was also deified like the pharaoh. There is also reason to believe that Egyptian and Kushite cults may have begun to merge even under the Kerma kings, who were evidently strong admirers of the Egyptians and employed many Egyptians at their court. Just as the Greeks of later times identified the Egyptian gods as merely alternate aspects of their own gods, the Kushites and Egyptians may also have come to share the belief that their key gods were merely forms of each other.

4. The Nubian Amun Cult and the Legend of the Nubian Origin of Egyptian Kingship

After their conquest of Kush, the Egyptians established the cult of their supreme god Amun throughout Nubia. This cult, originally of Thebes, had grown dramatically in power and influence as the Theban royal families had extended theirs. Originally simply a local god, he soon became conceptualized as "king of the gods." He was believed to be the god of creation, of fertility, of the Nile flood, of the sun, and of kingship, and he was believed to be the pharaoh's own father, making the king himself divine. Although his true nature was mysterious and "hidden" (which is the meaning of his name), Amun in art was normally represented as a man with blue skin and golden garments and a tall, two-feathered golden crown. In Nubia, however, he increasingly appeared in a new form: as a man with a ram's head, crowned with a sun disk. Scholars now believe that this Nubian form of Amun was derived from a native Nubian god of the pre-conquest era.

Although Karnak was Amun's chief sanctuary in Egypt, the Egyptians established new centers for his worship in Nubia. The most important was at Napata, about 102 miles (170 km) southeast of Kerma by desert road. The Amun temple complex there was built at the foot of a small, isolated, flat-topped sandstone butte, which the Egyptians called "The Pure Mountain." Today this rock is called in Arabic Gebel ("Mount") Barkal. The god was believed to dwell inside it.

Gebel Barkal rises about 320 ft (102 m), above the desert plain and confronts the Nile, about 1.5 mi (2.5 km) distant, with a sheer cliff. The mountain's most distinctive feature is a 243 ft (74 m) pinnacle on the south angle of its cliff. Recent researches there by Timothy Kendall and a team from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston have revealed that this colossal monolith was conceived by the ancients as a natxural statue of a rearing cobra ("uraeus"), the symbol of kingship which was affixed to the king's crown. When the mountain was seen from the east in silhouette, it looked like a giant king's head wearing a uraeus diadem, which gave rise to a tradition that this was the place where Amun first brought kingship to earth. The Egyptian pharaohs thus made this remote mountain in Nubia one of the holiest places of their empire, built here a coronation center, and came here to receive their crowns from the god.

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H. Kushite Resurgence: The Nubian Conquest of Egypt: 1080-650 BC.

1. The Nubian Dark Age: ca. 1100-800 BC

Egyptian control over Nubia lapsed after the death of Ramses II (ca. 1224 BC) as Egypt itself again destabilized. In the early eleventh century BC Egypt split into two semi-independent domains: Lower Egypt, which was governed by the pharaoh, and Upper Egypt, which was governed in the name of Amun by his high priest at Thebes. By early Dynasty 21 (ca. 1080-945 BC), most of Lower Nubia seems to have become a no-man's land, while Upper Nubia became independent under unknown rulers.

From the meager data available, it would appear that those who ultimately gained control in Upper Nubia were people who had been little influenced by Egyptian culture. The old Egyptian centers show poor continuity of occupation, and their temples became derelict.

Not until the tenth century BC are African products again listed among gifts dedicated to Amun of Karnak by an Egyptian king. The donor, Sheshonq I (ca. 945-924 BC), and his successor Osorkon I (ca. 924-889 BC) of Dynasty 22 are also said in the Old Testament to have employed Kushite mercenaries and officers in their campaigns against Judah. Assyrian texts of the later ninth century BC also describe African products sent by the pharaohs to the Assyrian kings. Such evidence suggests that the Egyptians during this period had re-established trade relations with the far south, but they never reveal with whom they were dealing. One can only assume that from the tenth century on one or more dominant independent chiefdoms had emerged in Nubia - again, as in the case of Kerma centuries before, beginning a process of material, cultural, and political enrichment through commerce with Egypt. Until now, however, no archaeological remains have yet been found in Nubia that shed light on this obscure period.

2. The Neo-Kushite Dynasty of Napata and Its Claims to Egyptian Kingship

The archaeological record of Kush resumesagain with the discoveries made in 1918 by George A. Reisner and his team from Harvard University and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, at the site of el-Kurru, about 10 mi (16 km) downstream from Gebel Barkal. Here Reisner found the remains of an ancient walled town, which he could not excavate, and a sequence of ruinous royal tombs, in which the tomb form and the burial customs rapidly changed from traditional Nubian type to Egyptian. The earliest tombs were rough stone circular structures, reminiscent of C-Group graves, in which the dead had been laid in pits lying on beds. The owners of these tombs left no inscriptions, so their names are unknown. The tombs had been badly plundered, but a wealth of gold jewelry was found in the debris. Rapidly the round tombs became square in shape and evolved into small steep-sided pyramids; the narrow burial pits became spacious, roofed chambers; and the dead were suddenly mummified and laid in coffins. The last tombs of the sequence had belonged to the great Nubian kings who conquered Egypt in the late eighth century BC and were counted in history as Egypt's Dynasty 25.

The origin of this family is mysterious; their Nubian roots are obvious, not only from the comments of many ancient writers, who described them as "burnt-faced," but especially by the tombs of their ancestors, the earliest of which seemed to date to the period 900-850 BC. Why this family abandoned their native Nubian customs and suddenly embraced the Egyptian remains unclear, but the process was sure and swift. It seems to have occurred over perhaps not more than three generations. The possibility that these kings were missionized by expatriate Egyptian priests from Karnak and taught to worship Amun of Gebel Barkal is a strong possibility. About the time the early tombs at el-Kurru were being built, there was a bitter civil war in Upper Egypt as a result of the attempt by the Egyptian king Takelot II to force the Amun priesthood at Thebes to accept his son as high priest. Many of the rebellious Amun priests may well have fled to the new court of Kush in southern Nubia to escape a certain death sentence, and once there, sought to restore the old Amun sanctuary at Gebel Barkal. By encouraging the Kushite rulers to work on behalf of Amun, the priests would have assured them of the god's support. Indeed it was from this moment on that the political fortunes of the family soared. It was also at this moment when the kings began to present themselves in the Egyptian style, to use Egyptian royal titles, burial customs, and to write their first inscriptions in the Egyptian language and script.

The first of the kings known by name is Alara (ca. 785-760 BC), who seems likely to have been the sixth ruler buried at el-Kurru. Alara was accorded special status by his illustrious descendants as the inaugurator of a new age, and it was probably Alara who first united all of Upper Nubia into a single state. It was also he who was said to have "put his trust in Amun" and to have begun restoring the god's temples in mud-brick at the old Egyptian sanctuaries at Gebel Barkal and Kawa (just south of Kerma). He was followed by Kashta (ca. 760-747 BC), who reconquered all of Lower Nubia and boldly assumed the title of "King of Upper and Lower Egypt" - which meant that he ranked himself as Pharaoh and an equal with the contemporary co-reigning kings of Dynasty 22 and 23 in Egypt. Probably, though, he never actually set foot in Egypt.

Kashta's death brought to the throne one of the most remarkable characters in the history of the Nile Valley. This was a king known variously as Piankhy or Piye (ca. 743-712 BC) (The exact reading of his name remains controversial). The name apparently meant "The Living One." Just as the Egyptian pharaohs of Dynasty 18 had recognized Gebel Barkal as an ancient source of Egyptian kingship and had themselves crowned there to affirm their rule, the new kings of Kush rediscovered this tradition and now used it to prove their right to rule Egypt. Since the first to recognize the religious significance of Gebel Barkal had been the Pharoah Thutmose III (ca. 1479-1425 BC), Piankhy sought to emulate him and presented himself as that great king's heir and reincarnation.

3. The Nubian Conquest of Egypt and Dynasty 25

Shortly after his rule began in Nubia about 743 BC, the Napatan king Piankhy (or Piye) achieved control over Upper (southern) Egypt by having his sister Amenirdis appointed to the ancient position of "Divine Wife of the God" at Thebes. In other words, she was symbolically "married" to Amun of Karnak and served as his virtual high priestess, living goddess, and mortal queen. All Upper Egyptian matters thus fell under the control of her office and ultimately to the Kushite king in Napata.

Kushite control of Upper Egypt was not long tolerated by the ruling families of Lower (northern) Egypt, who were then divided into several autonomous kingdoms. By Piankhy's 20th year they had formed an aggressive military alliance, led by a chief named Tefnakht of the Delta city of Sais. Piankhy's famous Victory Stela, now in the Egyptian Museum, Cairo, which is dated to his year 21 and was set up at Gebel Barkal, describes his campaign northward into Egypt to put an end to the "rebellion" and details his ultimate conquest of all of the country except certain parts of the Nile Delta. The stela is especially interesting in revealing some unusual royal Nubian personality traits: the king ever sought to avoid bloodshed; he forgave his enemies; and he made special devotions to the gods of the northern towns fallen to his arms. Despite his stunning victory, Piankhy had no interest in direct rule over northern Egypt; he was content merely to control Thebes and the western desert oases. He thus withdrew again to Napata to proclaim his triumphs and to rebuild the old Egyptian temples.

Upon the death of Piankhy about 712 BC, he was buried beside his ancestors, beneath a modest pyramid at el-Kurru with a subterranean chamber accessed by staircase. It was a tomb type that would remain in use, in one form or another, by his successors in Kush for the next ten centuries. Besides tombs for his major and minor wives, he also provided tombs for four of his horses, which were buried standing up and facing east. Burying horses - sometimes up to eight at a time in separate tombs side by side - was a custom continued by each of Piankhy's successors at el-Kurru.

After Piankhy's death, his northern Egyptian "vassals" again erupted into rebellion, and his successor, a brother named Shabaqo, reinvaded to maintain control. It is Shabaqo rather than Piankhy whom the Greek historians remembered as the founder of the 25th Dynasty, doubtless because he was the first of his line to take up permanent residence in Egypt.

At this point, the kings moved to Memphis; they became fully Egyptianized and cosmopolitanized; and, as far as we know, they returned to Nubia only for burial. If they have traditionally been portrayed by historians as "foreigners" in Egypt, they surely did not see themselves as such, despite their different ethnic, cultural and linguistic origin. In their minds Egypt and Kush were northern and southern halves of an ancient original domain of Amun. These two lands, they believed, had been united in mythological times; subsequently they grew apart, to be united again in historical times only by the greatest pharaohs. As "sons" of Amun, the Napatan monarchs saw themselves as heirs of those pharaohs, who thus became their "ancestors." Shabaqo (ca. 712-698 BC) and his successors Shebitqo (ca. 698-690 BC) and Taharqa (690-664 BC) believed they were the god's representatives - from his southern sphere - chosen to unite and protect his ancient empire and to restorema'at - "truth, order, and propriety" in the Egyptian sense - throughout the land.

In their search for religious and cultural purity, the Kushite kings in Egypt developed a keen interest in all ancient Egyptian ideals, rituals and traditions, especially those that had fallen into disuse, and they tried to revive them, even reinvent them. They attempted to archaize the written - if not the spoken - language. They encouraged the state artisans to draw their inspiration from the masterworks of the Old and Middle Kingdoms. They also revived the pyramid as proper royal tomb type. They undertook extensive renovations and renewals of ancient temples the entire length and breadth of their empire, and they poured their energies into making over Egypt's decadent present into the image of her glorious past.

It has always seemed fascinating to us that, for all their Egyptianization, the Kushites made no attempt to conceal their Nubian ethnicity in art or to hide or alter their Nubian names. Quite the contrary, they were proud of their origins, as if their Nubian ancestry imparted to them a special legitimacy. Equally un-Egyptian in appearance was the king's costume. Their preferred crown was a kind of tight-fitting head-cap ("cap crown") to which were affixed two uraei (cobra diadems) rather than the usual single uraeus worn by Egyptian kings. Often, this was accompanied by a distinctive cord necklace, which wound once about the neck and left the ends to fall forward over the shoulders. Ram-head pendants, representing the face of the god Amun of Gebel Barkal, were fastened to it at the throat and from each end. Identical pendants were sometimes worn as earrings.

All of these details now can be explained through the discoveries recently made at Gebel Barkal by Timothy Kendall and his team from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. We know that the Egyptian kings seven centuries earlier had identified Gebel Barkal as an important source of their kingship. The Kushites now also identified it as the source of their kingship and, indeed, as the only true source of Egyptian kingship.The reason, as we now know, was that the Gebel Barkal appeared to them in silhouette like a great crown emerging from the ground, with a uraeus on its forehead. The Egyptians and Kushites thus identified Napata as the birthplace of Egyptian kingship and the place where the great god had first brought the crown to earth. The Egyptian kings had seen the crown in the rock and had developed a new type of tight fitting skull cap crown probably to emulate it. The Kushites then modelled their own crown even more closely on the form of Gebel Barkal, probably so that they could present themselves to the world of their day as the possessors of the original kingship, which no other dynasty of their time possessed. This is probably the reason why they were so interested in recreating in Egypt a renaissance of her most ancient traditions. The Nubian ethnicity of the Kushites gave them a great propaganda advantage over any other claimant to the Egyptian throne, for it allowed them to present themselves as authentic children of the great god of the Nubian mountain, where, according to legend, all the other gods had been born as well.

The greatest of the Kushite pharaohs was Taharqa, who ruled twenty-six years. A son of Piankhy by a minor wife, he came to Egypt as a youth. After a distinguished career in the army, he succeeded to the throne of Shebitqo in 690 BC at the age of about 32. In his first decade, he won significant military victories over eastern and western desert peoples, controlled the western oases and established an Egyptian sphere of influence over the Phoenician port cities and Philistia.

He was also the most prolific and original builder of his age. His misfortunes came in the latter half of his reign. His two predecessors had provoked the Assyrian kings (ruling what is now northern Iraq) by conspiring with the petty rulers of Palestine, Phoenicia, and Judah to block their military advance to the east. The effort had been futile. By 674 BC the Assyrians had reached the Mediterranean, had brought all of Taharqa's Near Eastern allies into submission, and now focused their wrath on Egypt itself. They attempted invasions almost annually and finally forced Taharqa in 669 to withdraw ignominiously to Napata, after losing his army, his capital Memphis, his treasure, his chief wife and sons to the enemy. Within five years he was dead, buried in a colossal (but now much ruined) pyramid at Nuri, which is visible from the summit of Gebel Barkal and about 6 mi (10 km) distant on the opposite bank.

Taharqa's nephew and successor Tanutaman (ca. 664-653 BC), a son of Shabaqo, was able to re-enact successfully the achievement of his father and uncle by reconquering Egypt one more time in 663 B.C. However, the Assyrians returned the following year with a vengeance and expelled him and his dynasty from Egypt for the last time. The ensuing Assyrian sack of Thebes was a disaster from which the Egyptian Amun cult never fully recovered. The subsequent seizure of Upper Egypt by the kings of Sais in the Delta - who had collaborated with the Assyrians against the Kushites - must have been perplexing events for the Nubian priests and galling events for the Nubian kings, whose formerly vast kingdom was now restricted to the northern Sudan.

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I. The Napatan State: Nubia as an Egyptian-style Kingdom: 661-300 BC.

1. The Napatan Period

After the expulsion of the Kushite court from Egypt by the invading Assyrian armies, the royal family regrouped in Nubia and consolidated its hold over all their lands south of Aswan. Although their armies were too weakened to attempt another assault on the north, the kings merely ignored their new Egyptian rivals of Dynasty 26 and continued to use all the proper Egyptian royal titles and to maintain steadfastly that they were the true kings of Egypt. By the late seventh century, the continued pretensions of the Kushites to the Egyptian throne must have become intolerable to the new Egyptian kings. Thus in 593 BC, with an army composed largely of Greek and Carian mercenaries, the pharaoh Psammeticus II invaded Kush. His troops met and destroyed a Kushite army south of the Third Cataract, while another force seems to have struck out across the Nubian Desert and launched a surprise attack on Napata, sacking and burning the city and destroying the palace and temples. The Kushite king Aspelta (ca. 600-580 BC), a grandson or great-grandson of Taharqa, apparently fled to Mero‘ for safety. After his reign, however, our historical records become very scarce and our knowledge of historical events in Kush becomes very imperfect.

The 300-year period in Nubia following Kushite rule over Egypt has traditionally been known as the "Napatan Period," since it used to be thought that during this period the capital of Kush lay at Napata. It is now generally assumed that Napata was never more than the chief religious center of the kingdom, and that the political capital, after Dynasty 25, was always Mero‘, about 170 miles (280 km) to the southeast. Throughout the Napatan period all the royal burials took place in the Napata district - at Nuri, about 6 miles (10 km) northeast of Gebel Barkal on the opposite side of the river. The following period, the "Meroitic", is thought to begin when the first royal tombs were constructed at Mero‘, some time after 300 BC. These names, "Napatan" and "Meroitic", designate only cultural phases of the later kingdom of Kush and should not be thought to refer to separate or successive kingdoms.

Although the royal inscriptions of the Napatan period are not many, and although little or nothing is known of most of the kings, the surviving texts do reveal that the rulers traveled to Gebel Barkal for their coronations and to consult the oracle there on matters of state and the conduct of war.

The kings also undertook periodic journeys to all the other sanctuaries in the kingdom for the celebration of important rituals and festivals. Through their generals, the kings waged wars against the nomad tribes of the desert and the peoples of the south. Much of the time, they dwelt in god-like seclusion at Mero‘, and upon their deaths, they were buried in huge pyramid tombs at Nuri.

The Napatan Period was an era when Kushite culture rather slavishly imitated Egyptian models in art, architecture, and burial practices, and when royal inscriptions were written exclusively in the Egyptian language with Egyptian hieroglyphic writing. These aspects of culture, in fact, may have been controlled by the powerful priesthood of Amun, who may have seen any departure from "Egyptian" culture as a violation of religious law. The Meroitic Period, which began about the mid-third century BC, was significantly different and is thought to have begun when the kings abandoned Napata as their burial site and began to construct their pyramids at Meroe. At the same time, the use of Egyptian language and writing sharply declines and formal inscriptions began to be written in the native language, called Meroitic, which was expressed in a newly devised native alphabetic script. Similarly there was also a sudden shift away from Egyptian artistic standards, and Kushite culture began to assume a very original appearance.

The radical change in the mid-third century BC was almost certainly brought about by events recorded by the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, who wrote that until that time it was the custom of the most powerful priests to send a message to the reigning king, claiming it was from the god; the message ordered him to take his own life. Diodorus states that the custom of divinely-ordained royal suicide was abolished by a king named Ergamenes, who upon receipt of the letter, simply marched to the temple, put the priests to the sword and ordered matters according to his will. The custom of putting a king to death when he began to grow old and infirm is a well-known one in many traditional African societies, since people believed that the king's health and vigor were important to guarantee the health and vigor of the state. Many scholars doubt the truth of Diodorus' account, but it hardly seems coincidence that the first royal pyramid at Meroe belonged to a king named Arkamani ("Ergamenes").

2. The Royal Pyramids at Nuri

The most important surviving monuments of the Napatan Period are the royal pyramids at Nuri. The cemetery was founded by Taharqa, and it was used by nineteen of his successsors and fifty-four queens.

Only five of the rulers after Taharqa are known by any lengthy historical documents; the rest remain shadowy figures known only by the names found on their tombs. The pyramids were erected on a pair of parallel ridges about 1 mi (1.5 km) from the Nile, about 6 mi (10 km) northeast of Gebel Barkal on the opposite bank. Probably because Taharqa was recognized as greatest member of the dynasty, his successors allowed his pyramid to remain more than twice the size of any of their pyramids. It was 171 ft. (52 m) on a side, had a 69 degree angle, and stood originally about 260 ft. (79 m) high. Generally the other kings' pyramids were half that size at the base. Their angles varied, and they stood between 65 and 130 ft (20-39.5 m) high. The queens' pyramids averaged about 30 ft.(9 m) on a side, although near the end of the period the pyramids of the primary queens reached 56 ft (17 m), attesting to the increasing political importance of these ladies. Small chapels were built on the eastern sides of the pyramids (facing away from the river toward sunrise); and within these chapels offerings of food and drink were made to the deceased owners.

The tombs were cut in the bedrock beneath the pyramids, which were constructed of solid masonry. The kings' tombs regularly consisted of three interconnecting chambers; the queens tombs, only two. When well finished, these rooms were completely painted and carved with Egyptian texts from the "Book of the Dead." Each was entered by a long flight of stairs cut in a descending trench in the rock ledge, far out in front of the chapel entrance. After the burial, the stairway was filled in and camouflaged from the ground.

This, however, did not deter tomb robbers. The tombs were all thoroughly plundered in antiquity, but much remained in them that revealed what the burials had been like. All but two of the tombs were excavated in 1917-18 by George A. Reisner and his Harvard University-Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, expedition, and many of the finds are presently on permanent exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts and in the Sudan National Museum, Khartoum.

Typically, Napatan royalty were mummified according to Egyptian fashion; their bodies were wrapped holding gold crooks and flails; green stone heart scarabs and gold pectorals were placed over their chests. Their fingers and toes were capped with gold, and their faces were covered with gold masks (although the only existing examples were found in queens' tombs, where the masks were only of gilded silver).

The vital organs (heart, lungs, stomach, and intestines) were removed from the body and placed in large canopic jars. The royal mummies were encased within carved wooden anthropoid coffins covered with gold foil and inlaid with colored stones set in designs of falcons or vultures with wings seeming to envelop the body. The coffin eyes were inlaid with gilded bronze, calcite, and obsidian. The coffins were then placed within larger anthropoid coffins, covered with gold leaf. In two cases the kings' outer coffins were placed within huge fully decorated granite sarcophagi. Shawabti figures of stone or faience, numbering between several hundred to over a thousand, would be arranged standing around the walls of the burial chambers.

Evidence suggests that the kings were also buried with chests of valuable jewelry, perfume and unguent vessels, and other personal possessions. A large number of storage jars containing food and drink for the afterlife was also interred.

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J. The Meroitic State: Nubia as a Hellenistic African State. 300 BC 350 AD

1. The Meroitic Period

The Napatan Phase of the Nubian culture ended when the royal cemetery was transferred from Napata (Nuri) to Mero‘ in the mid- third century BC. This inaugurated the phase called the "Meroitic Period," in which the culture seemed to free itself from the strict bonds of Egyptian norms and developed many original traits as well as accepting many ideals from the Greco-Roman world of the Mediterranean. The terms "Napatan" and "Meroitic" refer to cultural phases of the same kingdom.

The change of culture in Kush almost certainly had to do with an event recorded by the Greek historican Diodorus in the first century BC. He stated that before the reign of a Kushite king named Ergamenes, who lived at the time of Ptolemy II of Egypt (285-246 BC), it had been the custom for the high priests, probably at Napata, to send a message to the king, supposedly from the great god Amun himself. This message told him that the time of his rule on earth was finished and that he must die. Traditionally, according to Diodorus, the kings had dutifully obeyed the divine orders and had taken their own lives. Ergamenes, however, "who had received instruction in Greek philosophy, was the first to disdain this command. With the determination worthy of a king he came with an armed force to the forbidden place where the golden temple of the Aithiopians was situated and slaughtered all the priests, abolished this tradition, and instituted practices at his own discretion." Interestingly, it was about this time that the first royal tomb was built at Mero‘, which belonged to a king named Arkamani (= "Ergamanes"). Soon thereafter, Kushite art and architecture began to develop individualistic styles. The royal family appeared much more central African in their images and in their standards of beauty. The royal costumes and crowns were unique. A lion god named Apedemak, unknown in the Egyptian pantheon, became pre-eminent in the southern part of the kingdom. And Egyptian language and writing were largely abandoned and replaced by the native Nubian language (called "Meroitic"), which was for the first time written down in newly devised hieroglyphic and cursive alphabets of 23 letters.

Mero‘ seems to have been a flourishing town at least as early as the eighth century BC. It was situated at the junction of several main river and caravan routes, connecting central Africa, via the Blue and White Niles, with Egypt, and the Upper Nile region with western Sudan, the Red Sea and the Ethiopian highlands. Since it lay within the rainbelt, its land was seasonally more productive than the region of Napata, and it was thus a more pleasant place to live. By the third century BC it was only one of several large towns that had arisen in the same region. Bounded to the west by the Nile, the north by the River Atbara and to the south by the Blue Nile, this area, now known as the Butana Steppe, was the heartland of the later Kushite kingdom and came to be known in classical literature as "the Island of Mero‘."

Our historical knowledge of Meroitic history is scant. When the kings ceased writing in Egyptian and began writing in their own Meroitic language, we suddenly cease being able to read their offical inscriptions. Meroitic, unfortunately, has not yet been deciphered; the key has never yet been found. All our knowledge of Meroitic history is thus based on the few surviving Greek and Roman reports, and on data recovered archaeologically.

The Meroitic rulers were contemporaries with the Ptolemies of Egypt and the Caesars. In the third century BC, they maintained friendly relations with the Ptolemies, since the kings of the two neighboring Nile kingdoms collaborated in renovating the temples of Lower Nubia, which were sacred to both Kush and Egypt.Agents of the Ptolemies also traveled up the Nile as explorers and emissaries, some perhaps traveling to Mero‘ to haggle with the Kushite ruler over the price of war-elephants, which they sought to purchase for the armies of Egypt. The Roman historian Pliny preserves the names of several Greeks who actually resided at Mero‘. One, named Simonides, was said to have lived there five years and to have written a book about his adventures. There was obviously a brisk trade between Mero‘ and Egypt and even beyond, since numerous Greek and Roman objects have been found at Mero‘: for example, a wine jar stamped with a mark indicating it had come from a region of Algeria or a Greek vase made in Athens. By the first century AD some of the Meroitic gods even began appearing in the guise of the Olympian deities; some temples were actually built using Greek measurement and incorporated Hellenistic features and ornament. Obviously Mero‘ was in communication with the rest of the Greco-Roman world and incorporated many of its most popular or "modern" features.

2. The City of Mero‘

Scanty, but certainly accurate accounts of the capital Mero‘ have come down to us in the works of the Roman writers Pliny and Strabo, both of whom had at their disposal the reports of the team of explorers sent to Mero‘ by Nero about 60 AD to seek the source of the Nile. Pliny stated that Mero‘ was in an area where the grass became greener, where scrub forest first began to appear and where elephants and rhinoceros could be seen in small numbers. The buildings in the town, at that time, he said, "were few in number," but there were temples to "Jupiter Hammon" (Amun), besides "smaller shrines erected in his honor throughout all the country." Strabo also noted that the palace at Mero‘ had a garden full of fruit trees, and that the houses of the common folk were constructed of bricks or "interwoven pieces of split palm wood." (They were, in other words, probably little different from the houses of the Sudanese in the same region today).

Today Mero‘ is the largest archaeological site in the Sudan. Lying about _ mi (1 km) from the river, the city ruins alone cover about a square mile in area. Today they lie in a forest of stunted acacia trees. Most prominent among the ruins is the huge stone-walled enclosure containing the tumbled remains of the palace and government buildings, several small temples (one with painted frescoes), and a so-called "Roman bath". Immediately behind it sprawls another walled compound enclosing the Amun Temple, a near copy of the one at Gebel Barkal. The remains of several other major sanctuaries lie nearby among the trees. Between these and the palace compound there are the extensive unexcavated mounds of the settlement, and on the east end of the city, on the edge of the desert, there are great slag heaps which have suggested that Mero‘ was an important iron working center.

Farther east is the great ruined temple complex known popularly (but incorrectly) as the "Sun Temple," with the cemeteries beyond (see below). While cattle raising and the farming of millet and barley seem to have been the major occupations of the people at large, the city prospered by its river and overland trade. According to Strabo this trade probably involved the procurement and trans-shipment of salt, copper, iron, gold, various kinds of precious stones, valuable woods and animal products such as ivory and the skins of lion and leopard. Oddly enough, unlike the principalities within the Greco-Roman sphere, Mero‘ never made use of coinage and instead did all business in barter.

3. The Pyramids of Mero‘

Behind Mero‘ to the east lie its huge cemeteries. Those nearest the town were reserved for the common people. Those about 1 _ mi (2.5 km) further east bear the small masonry pyramids of the nobles and lesser members of the royal family. Finally, about 3 mi (5 km) away, lining the tops of two ridges, are the towering pyramids of the rulers.

The royal tombs at Meroe were excavated between 1920 and 1924 by George A. Reisner and his Boston team. From the 1960's to the present, the pyramids have been carefully studied, and many reconstructed, by the German scholar-architect Dr. Friedrich W. Hinkel, working together with the Sudan Antiquities Dept.

Many of the tombs at Mero‘ contained multiple human skeletons, again reminding us of the Kerma burials in which people were sacrificed to accompany the dead. Obviously by Meroitic times, the Egyptian custom of burying shawabtis as servants in the tombs was abandoned, and important people reverted to the old custom of burying their real servants with them. Writing in the first century BC, the Greek historian Diodorus remarked of the Meroites that it was "customary for the comrades of the kings even to die with them of their own accord and that such a death is an honorable one and proof of true friendship." He added also that "it was for that reason that a conspiracy against the king is not easily raised among the Aithiopians, all his friends being concerned both for his safety and for their own." Excavations have revealed that it was not only the kings who took others with them in death. Many tombs of lesser importance contained small groups of subsidiary skeletons, and it was clear that many wealthy persons were buried with servants. In the royal burials, animals too were slaughtered and usually placed at the bottoms of the deep stairways leading to the sealed entrances of the burial chamber. In some cases the remains of yoked horses, oxen, camels and dogs, and even the bodies of their keepers have been found.

4. Some Important Meroitic Archaeological Sites

If Mero‘ was the major city of the kingdom, it was not the only one. The Butana Steppe (east of the Nile north of Khartoum) is dotted with other Meroitic townsites, some up to sixty miles (100 km) east of the Nile. Other settlements have been identified further south along the Blue and White Niles, and many important Meroitic settlements arose in Lower Nubia, some barely a hundred miles south of Aswan. Apart from the capital, the most monumental sites are three, which lie between 40 and 50 mi (66 and 82 km) south of Mero‘. At Wad Ban Naga, on the east bank of the Nile, there are the ruins of an enormous palace, together with two temples and a town. The palace was occupied by the great Meroitic queen Amanishakheto, a contemporary of the Roman emperor Augustus. Her spectacular tomb treasure, found in 1833 by an Italian adventurer named Ferlini, is now divided between the Berlin and Munich Museums.

Wad Ban Naga was apparently a river port leading to two important inland centers, now called Naga and Musawwarat es-Sufra, which were built on the plain beneath a ridge of low mountains some 12 to 18 mi (20 to 30 km) inland. Naga was clear1y an important religious center, for it possesses the ruins of at least seven stone temples, a town, and a cemetery, all datable to the first century AD. On-going excavations here by Dr. Dietrich Wildung and his team from the Egyptian Museum in Berlin have revealed that the town was also surrounded by numerous manor houses with plantations.

Musawwarat es-Sufra, 10 mi to the north, was also an important cult center, but it remains as enigmatic as it is awesome to behold. The most spectacular site in the Butana, Musawwarat contains the sprawling ruin known as the "Great Enclosure," a strange labyrinth of stone temples and courtyards surrounded by walls and connected by corridors and ramps. Tremendous stone walls partition the complex into no less than twenty separate compounds. Excavations there by an expedition of Humboldt University of Berlin under the direction of Dr. Steffen Wenig have recently shown that some of these courtyards contained gardens of trees, all brought, together with their soil, from the banks of the Nile and watered by an elaborate undergroound pipe system. The function of the complex was clearly religious, but the lack of carved reliefs on the interior walls of the buildings makes their purpose difficult to determine. Adding to the mystery is the fact that the walls are covered by hundreds of drawings and graffiti of ancient visitors.

While the sites of Naga and Musawwarat now lie in virtual desert, careful management of somewhat greater rainfall in ancient times made the area much more fertile than it is today. Huge artificial lakes, called hafirs, were constructed at each site to collect the annual rainwater and hold it until needed. The largest hafir at Musawwarat is 800 ft. (243 m) across and 20 ft. (3 to 4 m) high. Stone statues of guardian lions and frogs ringed many of these artificial lakes, perhaps intended magically to protect their contents.

The major god of the region of Mero‘ was a divinity of local origin, called Apedemak. He was perhaps a lion form of Amun and was often identified with the moon. He normally took the form of a powerful lion-headed man, dressed in armor and often appeared in the reliefs of his temples standing or seated on a throne or on an elephant, grasping prisoners and weapons of war, or holding elephants and lions on leashes.

Magnificent temples in Apedemak's honor were built at every major site in the Butana, the finest surviving examples being those at Naga and Musawwarat. The Apedemak Temple at Naga is adorned with reliefs depicting the imposing figures of its builders, King Natakamani and Queen Amanitore doing homage to the lion god. This royal pair, who lived at about the time of Christ, seem to have presided over a Meroitic Golden Age, as the remains of numerous buildings bear their names. In the decorative scheme of this temple the figure of the queen appears just as prominently as that of her husband, providing a clear indication of the unusual status accorded women in the Meroitic monarchy.

5. Mero‘ and Rome

In 24 BC, soon after Rome had wrested Egypt from Anthony and Cleopatra, the Kushites invaded Lower Nubia, attacked and plundered Aswan, and seized the statues of the emperor Augustus to test the new northern power. This is the only incident in which Mero‘ appears directly on the stage of Roman history. Following this challenge to Augustus' authority, the Roman general Petronius was immediately dispatched to Nubia. He met and defeated a Meroitic army and drove on to Napata, which he is said to have captured and destroyed, enslaving its inhabitants. The Meroites and Romans ultimately made a peace treaty, however, which endured for three centuries. The Romans claimed a victory, but so apparently did the Meroites. A victory stela, now in the British Museum, was set up in the capital by Amanirenas, the ruling queen of the time, and although it is inscribed in Meroitic, the name of Rome can clearly be read. In one of the temples in the city, a bronze head of Augustus was found buried beneath the entrance steps so that all who entered would step on this foreign ruler, who was only dimly known to Kush. Figures of Roman soldiers pierced with swords or arrows also adorned numerous magical objects and appeared in painted frescoes.

6. The Queens of Mero‘

Judging by the many large pyramids of queens and the remains of buildings bearing their names exclusively, Mero‘ after the third century BC seems to have been ruled by many queens in their own right, although they were probably mothers of future kings too young to rule. Classical writers were so impressed with the presence of queens at Meroe that they often assumed that Mero‘ was ruled exclusively by women, whom they thought always bore the name "Candace." This name, the origin of our modern female name, was in fact a Meroitic queenly title. As was explained by the Christian theologian Oecumenius in the 6th century (probably quoting one of the early Greek travelers to Mero‘ of the second century BC), "Candace is what the Aithiopians call every mother of a king, since they do not refer to the fatherÉ (Her son) is traditionally regarded as a son of the sun god." In Meroitic texts the title "Candace" appears as "Kedeke."

In the Roman account of the war with Kush in 24 BC, it was noted that the Kushites were led by a queen who was "a very masculine sort of woman and blind in one eye." This strange description is given substance by the even stranger portrayals of these ladies that appear in reliefs in their tomb chapels and temples. The successive queens Amanirenas, Amanishakheto and Amanitore, for example, all of whom are nearly contemporary with Petronius' campaign, are depicted as massive, powerful figures, enormously fat, covered with jewels and ornament and elaborate fringed and tasseled robes.

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K. From Unity to Fragmentation: The Post-Meroitic Period. 300-600 AD

1. The End of Mero‘

By the late third century AD, the Meroitic state was over a thousand years old. It had outlived the ancient empires and had even survived long enough to grow old with Rome. While remaining the last bastion of ancient Egyptian traditions and religion, it would pass from view during the next century in a series of events that are poorly understood. Certainly, in its later stages, the official art, the architecture, and the outward trappings of the state took on the appearance of decadence and impoverishment. One reason for Mero‘'s decline may have been her loss of control of the profitable trade routes to the Red Sea as a result of the increase in power and prestige of Axum, a newly emerging state in what is now central Ethiopia. Another may have been the depletion of Mero‘'s natural resources and the degradation of her environment by overgrazing and deforestation. Another may have been Mero‘'s growing vulnerability to attacks by desert nomads, who had by now learned to breed and ride the camel, which allowed them to launch sudden attacks from the deserts and to retreat back into the desert just as quickly. In any event, by the mid-fourth century, the ancient state of Kush seems to flicker out. The last royal pyramid was built; monumental art and architecture disappeared from the landscape; and literacy ceased.

2. The Rise of Axum and the "Noba"

The only text possibly shedding light on the end of Mero‘ is an inscription, written in the Ge'ez language for the newly Christianized King Ezana of Axum. It seems to describe an Axumite invasion of the old heartland of the "Kasu" (i.e. Kush) about the mid- or late fourth century AD. At that time, according to the text, this land was occupied by a people called the "Noba," who lived in "grass houses and brick towns." The text makes no mention of a sitting Kushite king who was heir to a venerable tradition.

From about 350 to 540 AD, the political history of Nubia is obscure. While archaeological material is abundant, historical sources are few and confusing. The territory of the old Meroitic empire seems to have fragmented into a number of small separate principalities whose centers can only be guessed at by the presence, here and there, of important cemeteries of large mound graves. The objects and wealth contained within many of them reveal that their owners carried on some of the royal Meroitic traditions as well as the worship of the Egyptian and Meroitic gods. Whether the rulers buried in these tombs were merely local figureheads and owed allegiance to other more powerful kings, or whether they themselves controlled territories of great extent, cannot be determined. Not a single grave of this type yet excavated has contained a ruler's name, and only the rarest tomb contains a scrap ofwriting. The tomb type and some of the funerary customs they reflect, however, suggest a return to certain ancient Nubian customs reminiscent of those of the Kerma culture, two thousand years earlier.

3. The Mounds of El-Hobagi, Tangasi, and Zuma

In the Meroitic heartland, between the Fifth and Sixth Cataracts, the old city of Mero‘ ceased to be used as a capital and royal cemetery. Many large mound tombs of the later fourth century AD, however, have recently been identified and excavated by the French Unit attached to the Sudan Antiquities Service, under the direction of Patrice Lenoble. These tombs, located at a site called el-Hobagi, about 40 miles upriver from Mero‘ and on the opposite (west) bank, were part of a cluster of large earth tumuli, in which the largest was about 130 ft. (40 m) in diam.and about 12 to 16 ft. (4 to 5 m) high and was surrounded by rough walls. Although the exterior appearance of the tombs had little in common with the traditional Kushite royal pyramids, the internal burial customs and funeral offerings were heavily influenced by the Meroitic and include, too, a number of purely Meroitic and late Roman imported objects, confirming the 4th century date. The deceased, presumed by the excavator in each case to be a king, was buried in a pit lying on a bed surrounded by huge numbers of food and beer jars and a variety of weapons: large spears, pole axes, swords, and multiple quivers containing hundreds of arrows. Apart from Roman imported bronze and glass vessels, and even medallions with portraits of Roman emperors of the period, they also contained bronze vessels with Merotic motifs, one even bearing a Meroitic hieroglyphic inscription containing the Meroitic word for "king" - qore. Accompanying the deceased were also sacrificed pet dogs, horses, camels, donkeys, and oxen. The excavator has argued that such tombs show the continuity of the Meroitic state rather than its fragmentation, but one may argue equally well that these are tombs of post-Meroitic rulers utilizing some of the trappings of Meroitic royalty in order simply to look royal in the Meroitic tradition.

Further northwest, 150 mi (250 km) across the Bayuda Desert, other "power centers" may have existed along the Nile from the Fourth Cataract to Dongola. Here there are numerous districts where more large tumuli can be seen, but few of the tombs have been excavated. Two of the largest groups, at Tangasi and Zuma (in the vicinity of ancient Napata), have suggested the centers of possible other kingdoms on opposite sides of the Nile that became independent from Mero‘. This political/cultural context is known as the "Tangasi Culture." Despite the presence of very large burial mounds here, excavators Peter Shinnie at Tangasi and George A. Reisner at Zuma discovered, with great labor to themselves, that the burials were of the poorest sort, leading one to speculate whether the owners were indeed "royal" at all. It is unclear whether such graves suggest regionally powerful dynasties or merely locally important chiefs.

4. The Blemmyes, Nobadae, and the Royal Tombs at Ballana and Qustul

From the fourth to the sixth centuries AD, both Upper and Lower Nubia were increasingly harried by desert nomads, who had mastered the art of warfare utilizing the fast camel. From Roman texts we hear of two such groups: the Blemmyes and the Nobadae. These were peoples who suddenly came to wield considerable power in Lower Nubia when the centralized authority of Meroe collapsed. The Blemmyes, who destabilized northern Lower Nubia, eventually caused the Romans to pull back their frontier to Aswan in 297 AD. In southern Lower Nubia, the Nobadae seized power in this prosperous, formerly Meroitic area.

Identified with the Nobadae is the culture known variously as the "X-Group" (coined by Reisner in 1907) or, more recently, the "Ballana Culture." This phase overlies the Meroitic remains of Lower Nubia but precedes the Christian. Here, monumental architecture dies out; there is no further building in dressed stone; the use of writing disappears; and, in general, culture declines. Nevertheless Roman trade goods dramatically increase; iron tools and weapons become common, as do carved woodwork and brightly colored cotton textiles. Judging by their tomb material, the kings of the Nobadae retained the Meroitic concept of "divine monarchy" as well as certain Meroitic royal insignia. They continued to worship the old Egyptian gods, as did the Blemmyes, and fought the Christianized Romans whenever they threatened to close down the Temple of Isis at Philae.

The most extraordinary monuments of the Post-Meroitic "Ballana Culture" are its royal tombs, which were discovered between 1931 and 1934 by W.B. Emery and L. Kirwan of the Second Archaeological Survey of (Egyptian) Nubia. Although now flooded and lost to the Aswan High Dam, the tombs lay on opposite banks of the Nile at Ballana and Qustul, near Abu Simbel; 180 were excavated of which about 40 were thought to have belonged to kings or members of the royal families. These certainly were the largest and richest archaeological finds ever made in Nubia. The tombs were large mounds - so large they were taken at first to be natural features. The largest was about 250 ft. (76 m) in diameter and about 40 ft. (12 m) high. Initially the tombs were built by clearing the ground and sinking a large pit in the hard alluvium. Here a series of connecting brick chambers were built with vaulted roofs. When the king died, one room was heaped with food and drink offerings in storage jars; another was filled with his tools and weapons; another room was reserved for a queen and her servants, who were all sacrificed, perhaps by poisoning. The king was laid in a chamber nearest the entrance, placed on a canopied bier, surrounded with precious vessels for his immediate use and other luxury items, and dressed in his royal regalia, including, on his head, a bejeweled silver crown.

At his feet were a sacrificed servant and an ox. After the tomb was sealed up, the passageway leading to the entrance was filled with slaughtered animals: fully caparisoned horses, camels, donkeys, and dogs with their collars and leashes, including their grooms and possibly soldiers. The larger tombs contained up to seventeen human sacrifices. Many of the objects were imports from Byzantine Egypt; some contained Christian motifs; other preserved Egyptian and Hellenistic iconography. The spectacular silver crowns of these Nubian lords were all adorned with Meroitic and Egyptian royal and divine insignia.

The only Nobadian king actually known by name is a King Silko, who in the 6th century AD claimed in a Greek inscription incised on the walls of Kalabsha temple to have conquered the Blemmyes. He is depicted on horseback like a Roman general with scaled corselet; but a winged Victory crowns him with a crown of just the sort found in the Ballana tombs.

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L. The Nubian Christian Kingdoms: 600-1500 AD

1. The Christianization of Nubia

In the fourth century AD, the Ethiopian kingdom of Axum declared itself Christian, and soon the Christian Byzantine court at Constantinople concluded a military and trade alliance with it. In AD 524, the Byzantines pledged to supply Axum with mercenary troops drawn from the Nubian tribes of the Blemmyes and Nobadae to assist it in its invasion of Yemen. At this point it seemed desirable to the Byzantine emperor, as a matter of border security, to convert the Blemmyes and Nobadae to Christianity. This occurred about 540, and the temple of Isis at Philae was finally closed by the emperor Justinian without apparent incident. The Christianization of Lower Nubia, however, was probably not entirely peaceful. In 1986, the Egypt Exploration Society under the direction of Boyce Driscell discovered the ruins of the last Post-Meroitic (i.e. "pagan") temple at Qasr Ibrim, which had been desecrated and destroyed in a single violent episode in the sixth century AD. Here were smashed Egyptian statues, overthrown altars, fragments of magnificent textiles from the sanctuary, all viciously torn to shreds, and painted wooden panels, reminiscent of Christian icons but portraying Egyptian deities or symbolic animals, which had been scattered wildly about. It seemed to be the decisive and vivid end of Egyptian and Meroitic antiquity and the ancient religion.

In the sixth century AD two competing Christian doctrines upset the Eastern church, and supporters of each doctrine attempted to secure a foothold in Nubia, which became an arena for the religious, ideological and political struggle occurring elsewhere in the Eastern world. One, called the Monophysite ("One Body") doctrine, held that Jesus had but one nature that was both human and divine. This doctrine was supported by the native clergies of Egypt, Armenia, and Syria. The other, called the Dyophysite ("Two-Body") doctrine, held that Jesus had separate human and divine natures. This concept was held sacred by the clergy of Byzantium. In AD 451, the Monophysite doctrine was offically declared a heresy by Byzantium, but in Egypt it remainedstrong primarily because it gave the Egyptian church a means of asserting its ideological and political independence from the Byzantine church and government.

2. The Nubian Christian Kingdoms

Nubia in the sixth century AD was divided into three kingdoms: a northern, called Nobatia, which extended roughly from the First Cataract south to the Third; a central, called Makuria, which extended from the Third Cataract south to the Sixth; and a southern called Alwa, which extended from the Sixth Cataract southward up the Blue Nile to the no-man's land between it and the Abyssinian (Ethiopian) kingdom of Axum. Competing Monophysite and Dyophysite missionaries to Nobatia resulted in its conversion to Monophysitism in 543 and its becoming allied to the Egyptian Coptic church. Since the Nubian kingdoms were all mutually mistrustful of each other, Makuria embraced the Dyophysite doctrine and became allied with Byzantium in 570. Alwa, in 580, then became Monopysite in opposition to Makuria on its north and Axum in the south, both of which were Dyophysite. By the mid-seventh century, however, as Egypt fell first to the invading armies of the Persians (616-629) and then to the Arabs (639-641), Makuria absorbed Nobatia and became Monopysite - as an extension of the Egyptian Coptic Church, which retained independence under the early Egyptian Arab rulers because it opposed Byzantium.

Although the Coptic Christian Church in Egypt was allowed to exist under Islam, it became marginalized. With the advent of secure Islamic control over the eastern Mediterranean and Red Sea, both Alwa and Axum soon also became Monophysite, now recognizing the authority of the Egyptian Coptic patriarch, because they, too, were cut off from the protection of Byzantium. Local political and religious rivalries were now subordinated to the greater threat, which was Islam.

The Arab armies that subdued Egypt also attempted to conquer Nubia in 642 and again in 652. In the first confrontation, the Arabs were repulsed decisively by Nubian archers, which, after three millennia, were still devastatingly effective. In the second confrontation, the Arabs, who were now armed with coats of mail, were more successful, and this led both sides to make a treaty. This "pact" (known, in fact, as the "Baqt," from the Greek pakton) declared that the Arab authorities in Egypt would make no further attacks on Nubia if the Nubians provided an annual tribute of 360 slaves and allowed a mosque to be built in the center of their capital at Old Dongola. The contract was signed, and it remained in effect for six centuries.

From the late seventh to the fifteenth century, Nubia had two Christian kingdoms, each with its own ruler. Old Dongola, the capital of Makuria, is now the largest Christian archaeological site in the Sudan (currently being excavated by a Polish team from the National Museum, Warsaw, under the direction of Dr, W, Godlewski). The capital of Alwa was Soba, a smaller site on the north bank of the Blue Nile, about 15 miles upstream from modern Khartoum. There were thirteen episcopal sees or provinces, each with its own bishop and each with its own cathedral, and every settlement had at least one church. The cathedrals were among the greatest architectural and artistic achievements of the age, as revealed by the well preserved cathedral found at Faras during the 1960's by Polish archaeologists. These cathedrals, built with assistance from Byzantine architects and artists, were, after the eighth century, entirely decorated on the interior with spectacular, brilliantly painted frescoes of scenes and figures from the Old and New Testaments. Although Faras cathedral was flooded by the Aswan Dam, its frescoes fortunately could be saved and now grace both the Sudan National Museum in Khartoum and the Warsaw Museum in Poland

There were also monasteries for the training of monks. A particularly picturesque ruined medieval monastery can still be seen at Ghazali (ÔGazelle'), located in an isolated desert area about 12 miles from the Nile opposite ancient Napata (Gebel Barkal). The ruined church, outbuildings, and cemetery of monks' graves lie on the edge of a wadi ("dry streambed") near several lovely stands of palms.

The adoption of Christianity by the Nubians allowed them to replace the secretive ancient Egyptian cults, to which they had so long been attached, with a new religion that was easy to grasp and which welcomed the common man. Unlike the old religion, which excluded the people from the temple sanctuaries and the presence of the gods, Christianity provided the people with holy places built within their settlements and into which they were invited and given direct personal access to the Divinity. The new faith also provided simple concepts for living and promised social equality after death.

Although the rule of the Nubian Christian kings was considered to have divine sanction, the rulers themselves were no longer considered divine; they were mere servants of God, required to follow the same rules as all men. The only divine king was Jesus himself, and only he could be celebrated in art, architecture, and literature. The medieval Nubian kings, thus, are known only from texts. The royal tomb, as a symbol of authority, ceased to exist, and tombs of Christian Nubian kings are not known. Similarly, the graves of private citizens are small and plain, and no one - from king to commoner - was any longer buried with personal possessions and offerings. Only bishops seem to have received special burials; they were placed in vaulted chambers; they were dressed in their robes wearing their rings, and sometimes, as in most ancient times, were buried lying on their beds. The interior walls of the vaults were whitewashed on their interiors and inscribed with New Testament texts.

The Christian era in Nubia marked a return to literacy, although literacy in the Middle Ages was primarily a possession of church personnel. Despite the allegiance of the Nubian church to the Egyptian church, the church language was primarily Greek as opposed to Coptic. By the later Middle Ages, the Nubians used their own language but wrote it in Greek letters.

Eventually the authority of the Nubian kings declined. Increasing power was assumed by local chiefs, who began to put more effort into building castles than churches. Churches became increasingly smaller, while castles, as in Europe of the same period, became the most common monuments of the age - as well as symbols of Nubia's growing instability. By 1400, Nubia had become a "maze of warring principalities" and now lay vulnerable to immigrants bearing Islam.

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M. Nubia and Islam: 1400-the present

1. The Islamization of Nubia

The Christian kingdoms of Makuria and Alwa gradually destabilized and fragmented into fiefdoms of independent warlords. Bands of bedouin Arabs, forced out of Egypt by its rulers, simultaneously pushed southward along the Red Sea hills and up the Nile and quickened the process of political decay. The influx of large numbers of Muslim nomads into Nubia undermined what little influence the Christian church still retained, and the divided Christian territories gradually fell into the hands of Muslim chiefs, either by violence or through their intermarriage with the ruling Nubian families.

Traditionally in Nubian society a man left all his property not to his own sons but to his sister's eldest son. This explains why, in ancient times, the Nubian throne so often passed to a king's nephew. As the Arabs increasingly intermarried with the Nubian women, all property in time passed into the hands of the Arabs, who left all their property to their own sons. Because the Arabs became dominant both socially and politically, their children began to identify exclusively with their Arab ancestors while ignoring or suppressing knowledge of their pre-Islamic Nubian ancestors.

The breakdown of centralized authority in the Nubian Nile Valley and surrounding deserts led to banditry and lawlessness, which resulted in a cessation of foreign trade and Nubia's increased isolation from the outside world. In the north, despite their conversion to Islam, Nubians were able to retain their language and some aspects of their former culture. In the south, the Nubians were Arabized to such an extent that they lost their native language to Arabic. Since native identity lacked prestige among the Arabs, the Islamized Nubians now assumed real or fraudulent genealogies that linked them to Arabia and the Prophet Mohammed. Eventually the Nubians came to be divided into numerous small Arab chiefdoms, encompassing one or several villages, and each was ruled by a mek ("king").

2. The Kingdom of Sennar

In the early sixteenth century a supreme Islamic kingship emerged at Sennar, about 180 miles south of modern Khartoum. This state, known as the Kingdom of the Funj, had a ruling dynasty actually of Nilotic or central African origin. The kings, in other words, had very black skin and were not Nubians. By some means, however, the Funj had come to embrace Islam and traced their descent from the Prophet Mohammed. Known as the "Black Sultans," they managed to extend their control over the northern Arab-Nubian tribes settled in Upper Nubia and eventually claimed tribute from all the meks along the Nile as far as the Third Cataract. North of there, the Ottoman Sultan in Turkey claimed the rest of Nubia as part of his own new territory, along with Egypt, which he conquered in 1517. He also seized control of the Red Sea ports of Suakin and Massawa.

Although the early Funj rulers were not well versed Muslims, they did seek to become enlightened, and thus opened their kingdom up to foreign religious teachers. Thus many early Muslim missionaries came to the Sudan from Arabia and spread knowledge of the sufi sects of mystical Islam. Unlike the learned Islamic scholars trained in Cairo, Damascus or Baghdad, the sufis who came to the Sudan were bearers of a folk religion that believed in salvation through spiritual ecstasy rather than through scriptures. Each sufi movement had its own prescribed route to salvation and enlightenment, usually through some rigid ritual abstentions and practices. While the people worshipped conventionally, certain male members of the society trained to study religion and joined one or another sufi order. These men then became disciples of a recognized sheikh or holy man. When the latter died, the disciples dispersed to found new schools and to disseminate further the teachings of the master.

The Islamic period in the Sudan has not left many ancient remains. All the early mosques were built of perishable materials, like the houses themselves, and do not survive in any presentable state. Nor were these buildings decorated; there was no sculpture, no stone carving, no representational art. A few inscribed tombstones have been preserved from the early centuries of Islam, but not much else. Like the Christians, the Muslims were buried in simple graves, in which the dead were laid on their sides looking toward Mecca. The only people to merit burial in an impressive tomb were the saints and holy men who spread the faith across the countryside. Their tombs are the most impressive Islamic remains in the Sudan. They are great mud-brick, often whitewashed domes, called gubbas. Although many are in dilapidated condition, they survive because of the veneration in which their owners were and are still held.

Doubtless the most magnificent objects created in the Sudan during this period were the costumes, armor, and weapons of the elite. Of this material, however, only very little still survives. It is a curious fact that with the introduction of Islam, the use of the bow and arrow - the weapon so identified with early Nubians - died out, probably because such weapons had not been used by the armies of the Prophet and for that reason were considered impure.

3. The Egyptian Conquest of Nubia and "the Sudan", 1821-1883

By the turn of the nineteenth century, the Funj kingdom was in collapse. Egypt's new ruler, an independent Turkish viceroy of Albanian descent named Muhammad Ali, turned his eyes to the south, seeking to seize control of the slave trade, which had become a major business in the Sudan during the Islamic era. Discovering that the Sudanese tribes had very few firearms, he invaded with a small, heavily armed force and quickly conquered the Sudan and annexed it to Egypt. He founded the city of Khartoum at the confluence of the Blue and White Niles as the seat of Egyptian governmental control in the Sudan. This period of Egyptian ("Turkish") rule in Sudan is known as the Turkiya. It was a period of intense slave raiding and exploitation of the Sudan's natural and animal resources; it was also a period in which European explorers and businessmen poured into the Sudan on an unprecedented scale. The headwaters of the Nile were discovered and explored, as were many of the remoter parts of the Sudan, but the Muslim peoples deeply resented the brutal treatment by the alien government, its oppressive taxes, and the presence of European Christian administrators, whom the Egyptians began using after 1870.

4. The Revolt of the Mahdi and the "Mahdiyya": 1883-1898

In 1881 an obscure Muslim holy man named Mohammed Ahmed declared himself the long-expected Messiah of Islam, the "Mahdi," and united the country under a message of expelling the hated Egyptians and uniting the people under the earliest and purest form of Islam. One hears again in this movement echoes of the "pious Aithiopians" of ancient times. The early victories of the Mahdi's followers against the Egyptian armies sent against him were considered miracles, and quickly all the Muslim Sudanese tribes rallied to his side. The Nubian tribes, which straddled Egypt and Sudan, were divided in their loyalties; some fought with the Mahdi; others rejected him as a false prophet. Since Egypt had just been taken over by British authorities, the Mahdi's revolt became a British problem, yet Britain was unable to prevent the Mahdi from conquering all of the country and its capital Khartoum, despite the dispatch of British troops. The determined defense of Khartoum against the Mahdi's forces by the British General Charles G. Gordon is one of the great tales of Colonialist Africa. The city ultimately fell after a ten month siege; Gordon was killed; the British were outraged but helpless to do anything; and the Sudan, for the next thirteen years, became an independent Islamic state.

Until 1898, the Sudan successfully fought off the forces of colonialism; the period was called the Mahdiyya ("The Period of the Mahdi"). In 1896, however, Britain launched a slow invasion of the Sudan by building a railroad up the Nile and transporting troops, sophisticated weaponry and disassembled gunboats over the cataracts. On Sept. 2, 1898, just north of the Mahdist capital of Omdurman, the 50,000 man army of the Mahdi's successor, the Khalifa Abdullahi, carrying medieval weapons and primitive guns, attacked the British line. Over 11,000 men were mowed down by howitzers and machine guns. Resistance collapsed; the Khalifa fled and was later killed, and Britain took control of the Sudan.

5. The "Anglo-Egyptian Sudan" (1898-1956) and the Sudanese Republic (1956-present)

After 1898 the Sudan remained officially a part of Egypt, but unofficially it was an independent British protectorate until 1956, when it was granted full independence. Although the Sudanese people aspired to democratic rule, and have periodically experienced it, the country almost from its beginning has been siezed by a succession of military dictatorships backed by rival Islamic political parties. Almost continuously from that time to the present, the country has been plagued by a series of devastating civil wars waged by the Islamic government against the non-Islamic southern Sudanese peoples, who have been fighting for their religious freedom and representation in the government.

6. The Birth of the Science of Nubiology.

In 1958, Gamel Abdel Nasser, president of Egypt, decided to build a high dam at Aswan. The Egyptians wanted it to control the flooding of the Nile and to generate electrical power for themselves. Unfortunately the lake created by the dam would completely flood Lower Nubia and destroy all of the ancient Nubian sites in Egypt. The waters would also inundate about 70 mi (110 km) of the Sudan. Because of the building of the dam, a huge international emergency effort was organized to rescue Nubia's archaeological treasures and heritage before they were lost forever. Thus, between 1959 and 1967, over 40 international teams worked together to explore 300 miles of the Nile Valley. They discovered thousands of ancient sites and objects, which are now in museums the world over. Three complete Nubian temples were removed altogether and may now be seen in New York (Metropolitan Museum of Art), in Leiden, Holland (Museum van der Oudheden), and in Barcelona, Spain. Many others were taken down and restored on higher ground. This great effort made Lower Nubia, archaeologically, one of the best known regions of the world and created the discipline of "Nubiology." After the flooding of Lower Nubia and with the passage of time, many of the Nubiologists in the 1970's began to look south to continue their researches, and they began the exploration of the northern Sudan, which continues today (2001). Currently there are about sixteen foreign archaeological expeditions working in Sudan, as well as many Sudanese teams.

© 1994-2001 Education Development Center, Inc. All Rights Reserved.