The missive stands out for more than the unusual cargo it orders. It shows that ancient Nubia, spread along the Nile for 900 miles in what is now Sudan and southern Egypt, stood at the crossroads of the Bronze Age world, with trading and diplomatic relationships from Africa (experts believe that Pygmies lived then, as now, far south of Nubia) to the Mediterranean. Yet Nubia is seldom mentioned in the same breath with such powers as Egypt or Greece. It’s seldom mentioned at all. Scholars routinely translate the Egyptian words heka and wer as “king” when they apply to Egypt but as “chief” when referring to Nubians. Nubia’s grand funeral mounds, replete with internal chambers and corridors, are rarely elevated to the status of the Pyramids. Whether this reflects bias or just ignorance, scholars are rethinking the conventional views of Nubia. The revisionism, spurred by the Afrocentrism movement among classics scholars, coincides with a new exhibit, “Ancient Nubia: Egypt’s Rival in Africa,” which opened last week at the University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. (After a year it will travel to seven sites, including Newark, N.J.; Coral Gables, Fla.; Baltimore, and Minneapolis.) Says curator David O’Connor, “Scholars have thought of Nubia as a tribal group for much of its history, weakly organized and easily dominated. Now there is a shift in that thinking.”
In the Bronze Age, after 3000 B.C., chiefdoms as well as states appeared in Nubia, and for two millenniums produced such striking works as intricately incised ceramics and burnished red-clay vessels. Society was stratified, with royals and traders, bureaucrats and laborers. Beginning in 1000 B.C., Nubia became centralized, ruled first from the city of Napata and then from Meroe (map). Some of the richest archeological finds come from the royal palace and cemetery at Karanog, including heavy gold necklaces and statues of princes in their royal robes. Egypt occupied parts of Nubia periodically, around 2000 B.C. and again around 550 B.C. Nubia returned the favor by conquering Egypt, establishing the 25th Dynasty (ruled in Egypt by Nubian princesses) and installing pharaohs on the throne from 747 to 656 B.C. By the end of the sixth century, Nubia had split into three Christianized kingdoms.
Among the debates swept up in Afrocentrism is how the wellspring of Western civilizations (read: classical Greece) was influenced by Egypt, and was Egypt a “true” African (read: black) civilization. Scholars both African and Western, led by the late Cheikh Anta Diop of Senegal and by Martin Bernal of Cornell University, have marshaled convincing linguistic, historic and archeological evidence that Egypt did help shape classic civilizations and that Egypt was at least partly African. The new focus on Nubia suggests that Africa was a central player. Nubia was African and not an African-Mediterranean hybrid. Nor was it a mere appendage of Egypt, inferior in achievement and power, as scholars thought (or assumed). “There had been a tendency to view Nubia as a derivative of Egypt,” says Egyptologist Emily Teeter of the University of Chicago. Moreover, “we are finding trade and cultural connections between southern Nubia and Rome,” evidenced by Roman-style statues and a head of Emperor Augustus found in Meroe, says Teeter. “[The Romans] seem to have skipped right over Egypt. It’s evidence of a powerful, more centralized state than was previously thought.”
The 300 artifacts on display at Penn include many from settlements “and give insights into lifestyles that are different from those we get from funerary objects,” says curator O’Connor. They reveal not only the social stratification of Nubian society but also its complexity. Many of the artifacts were unearthed 30 years ago in the Aswan desert, before the hydroelectric dam flooded it. But as with all relics, the thing that makes them more than dusty pots and dirt-encrusted bottles is the scholarship that illuminates them. The jewelry, ceramics, statues of princes in their robes of state, glass vessels, elaborately incised earthenware and sumptuous funerary objects speak of a civilization whose achievements rivaled the glory of Egypt. It was usually a trading partner, often an influence. Some experts now believe, for instance, that the concept of divine kingship originated in Nubia and influenced the political development of Egypt and the West.
The Aswan High Dam led to the flooding of much of the archeologically lush area of ancient Nubia, so unearthing more impressive artifacts may be difficult. A greater obstacle is that scholars cannot decode the Meroitic language. It doesn’t seem to belong to any known language family, developed sometime after 1000 B.C. and lasting until at least A.D. 400. Although they can understand some funeral inscriptions, the language and alphabet as a whole remain untranslated. “To understand the evolution of civilizations in Africa, we have to find out a lot more about Nubia,” says O’Connor. By the evidence of his exhibit, what remains to be found should be eloquent testimony to civilization on a continent that had always been denied it.
