Finds reveal how ancient Egyptian and Nubian cultures blended

Study shows how excavations in Sudan reveal the transformation of Egyptian and Nubian culture.

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA - SANTA BARBARA—In a middle-class tomb just east of the Nile River in what was Upper Nubia, a woman offers a glimpse of how two met civilizations met, mingled and a new pharaonic dynasty arose. Her tomb was Egyptian, but she was buried in the Nubian style—placed in a flexed position on her side and resting on a bed. Around her neck she wore amulets of the Egyptian god Bes, the protector of households.

The Nubian woman is, according to Stuart Tyson Smith, a professor of archaeology and chair of the Department of Anthropology at UC Santa Barbara, a prime example of "cultural entanglement," the process by which colonizing powers and indigenous people influence one another and change over time.

In a paper published in American Anthropologist, Michele Buzon of Purdue University and Smith explore cultural identity and transformation in the ancient village of Tombos in what is now northern Sudan. "Entanglement and the Formation of Ancient Nubian Napatan State" details the findings from Smith and Buzon's excavations of cemeteries in Tombos, which became an important colonial hub after the Egyptians conquered Nubia around 1500 BCE.

"You get this really interesting entangled culture blending different elements in really different ways, but also there seems to be a lot of individual choice involved," Smith explained. "It's not just a matter of the two cultures mash up and then you get this new hybrid thing that's consistent. There seems to be a lot of individual choice—whether or not you want a Nubian bed and/or an Egyptian coffin and/or to be wrapped like a mummy or whether or not you want an Egyptian-style amulet and/or Nubian ivory jewelry."

The Cult of Amun

In the epic rivalry between ancient Egypt and Nubia, one god had enduring appeal

By Daniel Weiss

In its 3,000-year history as a state, ancient Egypt had a complicated, constantly changing set of relations with neighboring powers. With the Libyans to the west and the Babylonians, Hittites, Assyrians, and Persians to the northeast, Egypt by turns waged war, forged treaties, and engaged in mutually beneficial trade. But Egypt’s most important and enduring relationship was, arguably, with its neighbor to the south, Nubia, which occupied a region that is now in Sudan. The two cultures were connected by the Nile River, whose annual flooding made civilization possible in an otherwise harsh desert environment. Through their shared history, Egyptians and Nubians also came to worship the same chief god, Amun, who was closely allied with kingship and played an important role as the two civilizations vied for supremacy.

During its Middle and New Kingdoms, which spanned the second millennium B.C., Egypt pushed its way into Nubia, ultimately conquering and making it a colonial province. The Egyptians were drawn by the land’s rich store of natural resources, including ebony, ivory, animal skins, and, most importantly, gold. As they expanded their control of Nubia, the Egyptians built a number of temples to Amun, the largest of which stood at the foot of a holy mountain called Jebel Barkal. This the Egyptians declared to be the god’s southern home, thereby conceptualizing Egypt and Nubia as a unified whole and justifying their rule of both. After Egypt’s New Kingdom collapsed around 1069 B.C., the kingdom of Kush rose in Nubia, with its court based in Napata, the town adjacent to Jebel Barkal. The Egyptian colonizers may have been gone, but their religious legacy lived on, as the Kushite rulers were by this time fervently devoted to Amun. Just as the Egyptians had used the god to validate their conquest of Nubia, the Kushites now returned the favor. During a period of discord in Egypt, the Kushite king Piye first secured Amun’s northern home, in Karnak, Egypt. Then, claiming to act on the god’s behalf to restore unified control of Nubia and Egypt, he conquered the rest of Egypt and, in 728 B.C., became the first in a line of Kushite pharaohs who ruled Egypt for around 70 years.

Museum Pieces - Model of Nubian Soldiers

Model of Nubian Soldiers

Photocredit: Museums for Intercultural Dialogue

datation: Early Middle Kingdom (11th Dynasty around 2055-1985 BC)
provenance: Asyut
area: Egypt
period: 3000-2000 BC
materials: Wood.

These small figurines of different sizes, wood stuccoed and painted, represent Nubian soldiers as if in a parade. They are fixed on a base composed of five boards joined by three cross boards below. This group was found in a tomb dated to the beginning of the Middle Kingdom in the necropolis of Asyut in Middle Egypt, accompanied by a second group representing a troop of Egyptian soldiers.

These objects are in fact what we call “models”, made to accompany the deceased in his/her trip to the afterlife. They probably belonged to the governor of the nome (province) that they call Nomarch, perhaps Mesehti, who lived during the late 11th Dynasty.

The black skinned figures, dressed in a red or white loincloth and wearing a necklace and hair band, are standing in a way which represents the march of the parade: the bare feet, with the left leg forward. The left arm is brought back to a right angle and holds a bow. The other arm is left dangling by the body with the hand holding a set of arrows. The squad consists of four lines of ten soldiers giving a total of forty soldiers.

In Pharaonic Egypt, from the earliest times, there existed a military organization consisting of both Egyptians and other ethnic groups such as Nubians. The Nubian and Medjay auxiliaries appeared in the Middle Kingdom. Some stelae testify that a garrison of Nubian and Medjay archers was established in the late 11th Dynasty at Gebelein in Upper Egypt. In this period, it was primarily the infantry of defeated soldiers who were enlisted in the Egyptian troops.

With the New Kingdom and expansive aims of Egypt the army became professionalized. The pharaoh, supreme commander of armies, was surrounded by important management personnel. Titles connected to the military were numerous; from scribe to chief of troop (so-called General).

The Old and Middle Kingdoms defended their borders and did not venture out much, except to Sinai and Nubia up to the Second Cataract. With the appearance of the horse, a new military unit was created: the chariot, which will have a big influence in conflicts starting from the New Kingdom, especially considering it was a period when ambitions for the Near East intensified. In this period, other ethnic groups from Libya and the Near East will be incorporated into the army. The foreign reinforcements in the army will be continued in future periods as pharaohs will not hesitate to call on foreign mercenaries from the Saite period and onwards: a practice which will become the norm in Antiquity from Hellenistic Greece to Rome.

Source: http://www.unesco.org/culture/museum-for-dialogue/item/en/70/model-of-nubian-soldiers

Searching for Sesostris

A new French exhibition presents what is known about the ancient Egyptian Pharaoh Sesostris III, writes David Tresilian in Paris

Not as famous as his New Kingdom successors Ramses II or Tutankhamun, and not responsible for the kind of grand building projects that immortalised his Old Kingdom predecessors Khufu and Khafre, builders of the largest of the Great Pyramids at Giza, the ancient Egyptian Pharaoh Sesostris III was nevertheless one of the country’s most important rulers, becoming a kind of symbolic embodiment of ancient Egyptian kingship.

However, until recently it has been difficult to disentangle fact from fiction in inherited accounts of the pharaoh’s accomplishments, with modern historians tending to see the list of achievements attributed to Sesostris III by the ancient Greek historian Herodotus, for example, as either invented or a composite of actions taken by many different rulers.

According to Herodotus, writing in the long second book of his Histories dedicated to ancient Egypt, Sesostris, an unusually war-like ruler, sailed down the Arabian Gulf with a fleet of warships, subduing coastal tribes as he did so. Later, he led campaigns in Asia, defeating the Scythians, and even led Egyptian armies into southern Europe, defeating sundry armies in Thrace.

“It is a fact,” Herodotus writes, “that the Colchians are of Egyptian descent,” indicating that Sesostris and his armies reached the far side of the Black Sea. “I noticed this myself before I heard anyone else mention it… and found that the Colchians remembered the Egyptians more distinctly than the Egyptians remembered them.”

Egyptian Carving Defaced by King Tut's Possible Father Discovered

By Owen Jarus, Live Science Contributor   |   July 24, 2014

A newly discovered Egyptian carving, which dates back more than 3,300 years, bears the scars of a religious revolution that upended the ancient civilization.

The panel, carved in Nubian Sandstone, was found recently in a tomb at the site of Sedeinga, in modern-day Sudan. It is about 5.8 feet (1.8 meters) tall by 1.3 feet (0.4 m) wide, and was found in two pieces. 

Originally, it adorned the walls of a temple at Sedeinga that was dedicated to Queen Tiye (also spelled Tiyi), who died around 1340 B.C. Several centuries after Tiye's death — and after her temple had fallen into ruin — this panel was reused in a tomb as a bench that held a coffin above the floor.

Credit: Photo by V. Francigny © Sedeinga Mission

Scars of a revolution

Archaeologists found that the god depicted in the carving, Amun, had his face and hieroglyphs hacked out from the panel. The order to deface the carving came from Akhenaten (reign 1353-1336 B.C.), a pharaoh who tried to focus Egyptian religion around the worship of the "Aten," the sun disk. In his fervor, Akhenaten had the name and images of Amun, a key Egyptian god, obliterated throughout all Egypt-controlled territory. This included the ancient land of Nubia, a territory that is now partly in Sudan.

"All the major inscriptions with the name of Amun in Egypt were erased during his reign," archaeology team member Vincent Francigny, a research associate at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, told Live Science in an interview.

The carving was originally created for the temple of Queen Tiye — Akhenaten's mother — who may have been alive when the defacement occurred. Even so, Francigny stressed that the desecration of the carving wasn't targeted against Akhenaten's own mom.

Knowing Nubia

Ancient African Kingdoms on the Nile: Nubia; Edited by Marjorie Fisher, Peter Lacovara, Salima Ikram and Sue D’Auria; ‫Cairo‬: AUC PRESS, 2012. Reviewed by Gamal Nkrumah

For a long time, the very notion of Nubia, the “Land of Gold” as the ancient Egyptians called it, was an eccentric Egyptologist’s pipe dream. Nubiology as a separate academic discipline, independent of Egyptology was unknown. The very notion of Nubiology was frowned upon. Nubia was an Egyptian appendage at best.

New hypotheses, though, attest to Nubian civilizations being the origin of ancient Egypt. In other words, the ancient Nubians were the progenitors, and their cattle-based culture, the precursor of the Egyptian civilization. 

The designation Nubiology was coined by the Polish archeologist and Egyptologist Kazimierz Michalowski who is also acknowledged and internationally acclaimed as the founder of Nubian studies as an academic discipline in its own right.

On a visit to Meroe last year I was astounded by the beauty of the ancient Nubian pyramids. Most are much smaller in size than their Egyptian counterparts, and especially when compared to the Giza pyramids. Yet, two facets of ancient Nubian pyramids stood out. First, was the fact that there were far more pyramid in Sudan than in Egypt. There are 300 pyramids in Sudan, while there are only 100 pyramids in Egypt. Second, and even more startling is that there are almost as many pyramids constructed specifically for ancient Nubian queens, or rather queen-mothers, as for kings.

It is reasonable to presume that the status of royal women in ancient Nubia was far more significant than in ancient Egypt. The royal consorts were not particularly powerful in ancient Nubia. The Queen-Mother, being the king’s biological mother, his maternal aunt or sister often assumed that role. Moreover, many royal women ruled as queens in their own right and were socially accepted as such.

The Meaning Behind a Nubian Ruler’s Offering to a Falcon God

Taharqa offering to Hemen. The Louvre, Paris.

This image is part of a weekly series that The Root is presenting in conjunction with the Image of the Black in Western Art Archive at Harvard University’s W.E.B. Du Bois Research Institute, part of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research.

For many, the grandeur of ancient Egypt is evoked by its great monuments of architecture and colossal sculptures. Works of more modest dimensions, however, are far more numerous and quite arguably more revealing of the complex culture that produced them.

Such is certainly the case with the small-scale, delicately crafted work shown here. On a silver base, the figure of Taharqa—ruler of the 25th Dynasty of Egypt—kneels before the giant figure of the falcon god Hemen.

This stunning work is both aesthetically and technically unique. The most straightforward part of its manufacture is the solid-bronze figure of Taharqa, cast and then incised with linear detail. The image of Hemen, on the other hand, is carved from stone and covered with sheets of thin gold. The figures rest on a wooden base covered with a silver revetment.

Dressed only in the pleated linen kilt worn by Egyptian royalty, Taharqa offers the god two small jars of wine. He wears the double-uraeus headdress representing rule over his native Nubia as well as the whole land of Egypt to the north. An inscription on the back of his belt identifies him by name and extols his divine status: “The perfect god. Taharqa alive for eternity.”

Miniature Pyramids of Sudan

Archaeologists excavating on the banks of the Nile have uncovered a necropolis where hundreds of small pyramids once stood

By ERIC A. POWELL

Nearly two thousand years after the Egyptian pharaoh Khufu marshaled armies of workers to build his 480-foot-tall Great Pyramid of Giza, the armies of Nubia (a region that is now in Sudan) invaded and occupied Egypt. It was 730 B.C. and, by then, the Egyptian pharaohs had long since abandoned the practice of erecting massive tombs. It was expensive to do so, and it had nearly bankrupted them. But the pyramids clearly fascinated the Nubian kings. They ruled Egypt during the 25th Dynasty, until they were ejected in 656 B.C., but Egypt’s influence on their own cultural practices was long-lasting. As ongoing archaeological work shows, the inhabitants of Nubia, particularly those in the kingdom of Meroe, found a way to imitate Egypt’s monuments. At the Meroitic royal cemetery, 80 radically downsized pyramids were constructed over the tombs of kings and queens. And now, new excavations at Sedeinga, a necropolis of the same era but 450 miles from Meroe, tell us that the practice of building diminutive pyramids trickled down from royals to the wealthy elite much more extensively than previously believed. Sedeinga contains a dense field of small pyramids, one just 30 inches across. “It is a crazy site,” says Vincent Francigny, a research associate at the American Museum of Natural History and codirector of the excavations at Sedeinga. “I’ve never seen a cemetery like this, with so many small monuments packed so closely together.”

A walk among Sudan’s Nubian pyramids

Does Sudan have more pyramids than Egypt? In this series, we explore the splendours of the ancient Kingdom of Kush and the legacy it left behind in the land of the Black Pharaohs

by Mohammed Elrazzaz, Monday 21 Jan 2013

The Island of Meroe

Following the Nile as it flows north, some 200 kilometres from Khartoum, one comes close to the last capital of the Kushite Kingdom, one of ancient Africa’s most prominent cultures. The site, known as the Island of Meroe, is no island at all, but rather an expanse of land that stretches between the Nile and the Atbara River. One of two UNESCO World Heritage Sites in Sudan, the archaeological sites of Meroe includes Meroe itself, Naga and Musawwarat es-Sufra.

Visitors to these isolated sites will find pyramids, temples, relics of residential buildings and irrigation infrastructure dating from as far back in time as the eighth century BC.

The Kingdom of Kush, which was heavily influenced by Ancient Egyptian culture, built its own pyramids, over two hundred of them. Whether at Meroe, El-Kurru or Nuri, the unique architecture of these pyramids is self-evident.

Unlike their Egyptian counterparts, the Nubian pyramids are much smaller in size (a base no broader than eight metres), very steep (an angle of seventy degrees) and rather elongated (no higher than thirty metres). Before delving into more details, we start with the first site.

An Egyptian Renaissance: The Kushite 25th Dynasty

An Egyptian Renaissance: The Kushite 25th Dynasty

by Dr. Lisa Swart

Far from being a cultural and geographic backwater, the Kushite 25th Dynasty created one of the largest empires along the Nile in ancient and medieval times. A dynasty of charismatic Kushite kings assumed Egyptian titles and postures for over a century. Their sovereignty over Egypt was acknowledged by the Egyptians, all while retaining their own unique identities. The Kushites not only united a previously fragmented Egypt, which had slid into political and economic decline, but reinvigorated Egyptian material culture with a blend of their own distinctive characteristics with Egyptian prototypes.

Introduction

Extending south, along the Nile River from the First Cataract to the Shubaluqa Gorge (Sixth Cataract), is the land of Nubia. Today, this region is mostly located within the borders of modern Sudan, with a small portion crossing into southern Egypt. Known as Kush by the Egyptians, Assyrians, Hebrews and Persians; and Ethiopia by the Greeks, Romans and 19th and early 20th century writers, it is one of only two African civilizations so far to have produced significant archaeological or written records from before 1000 CE (Depuydt, 1996: 531), However, even with rich Kushite archaeological remains along the course of the Nile Valley, compared with other great civilizations of the ancient world, relatively little is known about Nubia. Previously considered a geographical backwater, Nubia has been traditionally viewed with the flawed perception by scholars from within the shadow of the monolithic Egyptian empire. This opinion has its roots in the preconceptions of early African societies prevalent in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Confounding matters further, unlike Egypt, there is not an excess of textual artifacts, and of those found, many have been written in the undeciphered Meroitic language.

As ancient as its neighbour in the north, the history of Nubia is deeply interwoven with that of Egypt, a long-time rival, trading partner, colonial master, and subsequent colony. From obscure origins, the Kushite kings conquered and establised their domination over Egypt as the Twenty-fifth Dynasty during the mid-eighth century BCE. They ruled Egypt for over a century, until they were ousted by the Assyrians in the 650s BCE.

The 25th Dynasty

by Timothy Kendall

The Nubian Conquest of Egypt: 1080-650 BC

Egyptian control over Nubia lapsed after the death of Ramesses II (ca. 1224 BC), just as the pharaoh's control over Egypt itself began to wane. In the early eleventh century BC Egypt split into two semi-autonomous domains: Lower Egypt was governed by the pharaoh, and the much larger tract of Upper Egypt was governed in the name of the god Amun by his high priest at Thebes. Nubia's last imperial viceroy, Panehesy ("The Nubian") became a renegade by waging war against the Theban high priests who were themselves military commanders seeking to extend their authority southward. By early Dynasty 21, most of Lower Nubia had become a no-man's land. Upper Nubia (the northern Sudan) became independent under authorities unknown.

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 centers of the New Kingdom show poor continuity of occupation, and their temples became derelict.

Not until Dynasty 22 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) are also said in the Bible to have employed Kushite mercenaries and officers in their campaigns against Judah. Assyrian texts of the later ninth century further note that the pharaohs were sending African products 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 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.