Nubia

Related civilizations: Egypt, Greece, Persian Empire.

Also known as: Kush; Napata.

Date: c. 8000-700 b.c.e.

Locale: Nile Valley, south of Egypt to the confluence of the Blue and White Nile Rivers, about 560 miles (900 kilometers) from north to south, west of the Red Sea, east of the Libyan desert

Nubia

The name “Nubia” dates only from the third century c.e. Before that, Nubia was known as the land of Yam, Kush, or Ethiopia. The Old Kingdom (2686-2125 b.c.e.) Egyptians used the name “Wawat” for the river valley between the First and Second Cataracts and “Yam” for the lands beyond, known as “Kush” to the Egyptians from the Middle Kingdom (2055-1650 b.c.e.) onward and also to the Assyrians and the Old Testament, in which the term sometimes included parts of southern Arabia. The Greeks called Nubia “Ethiopia,” the land of the Aethiopes, or burnt faces.

Lower Nubia was Wawat, administered from Aniba in the New Kingdom (1550-1069 b.c.e.). Upper Nubia became virtually everything south of the Second Cataract to the Blue and White Nile Rivers, dominated by an imposing Gebel Barkal, or Holy Mount, below the Fourth Cataract, where Napata grew up and administered from Solub and then Amara West. Lower Nubia had almost no arable land and Upper Nubia not much, but there were rich deposits of iron, good grazing land for cattle, sheep, and goats, and gold in the Nubian desert to the east. The western desert of Upper Nubia in the southern bend of the river is named Bayuda.

Early Nubia

The Lower Nubian Paleolithic period probably drew to a robust and culturally diverse close about 8000 b.c.e., followed by a hesitant and lingering terminal Paleolithic period until about 5000 b.c.e., some five hundred years later than in Upper Egypt. During this period, the Nile cut faster and deeper, and the valley took on something of its present size and climate and continued the gradual, inexorable desiccation of the previous era.

The Badarian culture of Upper Egypt, with its superlative thin red-and-black pottery, reed-matting-lined graves, and rectangular stone palettes, with all its probable links to Mesopotamia and dynastic Egypt, still is not attested with certainty anywhere in Nubia, though some paleoarchaeologists assume a Badarian stage, or phase, in Lower Nubia and beyond. However, since just before World War I, when archaeologist George Andrew Reisner of Harvard University and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts first compared some fifty-eight Nubian cemeteries with those of Sir Flinders Petrie’s predynastic Egypt, there has been no such hesitancy in matching up the subsequent Egyptian and Nubian Amratians (Petrie’s Naqada I) with sites as far south as the Lower Nubian Khor-Bahan, nor with the Gerzeans (Naqada II), with all their advances, including gold and faience (earthenware with opaque colored glazes as decoration). Reisner called his parallels the Nubian Early and Middle Predynastics and their people the A-Group (Ta-Seti), while noting that Lower Nubia began to lag behind Egypt in the later prehistoric period. Archaeologist C. M. Firth, who built on Reisner’s work, assumed that Lower Nubia’s primitive, egalitarian society came to an end only under the impact of Egypt in the late Gerzean or early protodynastic period. In 1927, Firth dated his earliest “chiefly” grave to this period. Similarly, there is no evidence of advanced society in Upper Nubia before the Egyptians brought it there in the New Kingdom (1550-1069 b.c.e.).

Early dynasties

Nubia was a land of raiders and trade from the time of Aha, the first pharaoh of the First Dynasty (c. 3000-2686 b.c.e.). His successor Djer left his name on a battle scene at Wadi Halfa below the Second Cataract. By the end of the Second Dynasty (2890-2686 b.c.e.), Khasekhemwy, the last king of Abydos and the first builder of hard-stone monuments had led an army southward to found colonies and fortify trading posts, including Buhen near Djer’s battle scene.

The Palermo stone describes 7,000 captives and 200,000 cattle that Pharaoh Snefru won from the Nubians at the beginning of the Fourth Dynasty (2613-2494 b.c.e.). He may also have begun copper smelting near Wadi Halfa, which may have continued through the Fifth Dynasty (2494-2345 b.c.e.). His son Khufu (also known as Cheops) extracted diorite from a stone quarry northwest of Toshka. The Sixth Dynasty (2345-2181 b.c.e.) may have seen the first Nubian mercenaries in the Egyptian army. In the Nineteenth Dynasty, Ramses II was still using these mercenaries all over the empire. The Sixth Dynasty may also have seen the first Egyptian trading post above the Third Cataract, at Kerma, and the Weni narrative (third millennium b.c.e.; English translation in Rank and Title in the Old Kingdom, 1960) of the Sixth Dynasty alludes to at least five different tribes of Nubians.

In the time of Pepy II and throughout the First Intermediate period (2160-2055 b.c.e.), a new population, probably not black, known as the C-Group, seem to have taken possession of Wawat and perhaps even some of Upper Egypt. By the end of the period, there was probably a powerful chieftain, or king. The Egyptians began to call the south Kush and derived virtually all their gold from there.

Middle Kingdom and Intermediate period

The Middle Kingdom (2055-1650 b.c.e.) probably began with significant help from Nubian mercenaries. Toward the end of the Eleventh Dynasty (2055-1985 b.c.e.), Montuhotep I used them and so did the vizier of Montuhotep III. The first king of the Twelfth Dynasty (1986-1773 b.c.e.), Amenemhet I, who built on the southern connections of his Elephantine mother, subjugated Lower Nubia and founded the fortress of Semna beyond the Second Cataract, one of a series of great southern fortresses in which to station his Nubian troops. There were at least thirteen forts and depots between Syene and Semna alone, standing guard between the rich Upper Nubian trade and the dangerous Upper Nubian raiders. His son Sesostris I may have fortified the garrison of Buhen at Wadi Halfa. Conquest, fortification, commerce, and the Egyptianization of Nubia grew apace, reaching a zenith, perhaps, in the annexation of Lower Nubia by Sesostris III, who came to be worshiped as a god by the Nubians. He boasts of a southern frontier at the Second Cataract rather than the First and probably appointed a third vizier for the far south.

At the end of the Middle Kingdom or early in the Second Intermediate period (1650-1550 b.c.e.), while the Hyksos kings descended on the north, native kings captured, or recaptured, Kerma at the Third Cataract, where Amenemhet I had built and Amenemhet III had refurbished a great brick garrison and residence. There they indulged themselves with luxury Egyptian imports while creating native ceramics and other industrial endeavors and burying themselves in un-Egyptian barbaric splendor, sometimes with numerous human sacrifices of their own retainers, dominating not only their own country but also some of Upper Egypt, to judge from Kamose of Egypt’s complaints at Thebes, until the consolidation of the New Kingdom (1550-1069 b.c.e.).

New Kingdom

In the Seventeenth Dynasty (c. 1580-1550 b.c.e.), Kamose used the Medjay Nubians, identical, perhaps, with the archaeologists’ Pan-Grave people, against the Hyksos Asiatics. He may well have brought the south to book with a viceroy of Nubia before descending on the Hyksos, but he refers to a newly but firmly ensconced “chieftain of Kush,” perhaps from Kerma, with ties to the Asiatics, who implored their Kushite correspondent to march northward against Kamose. Kamose’s successor Ahmose I, founder of the Eighteenth Dynasty (1550-1295 b.c.e.) and the New Kingdom, crushed the last of the Nubians in Upper Egypt and marched against those in the south. His son and successor Amenhotep I reconquered Lower Nubia and colonized it. He may even have captured its king and appointed the first known “king’s son of Kush,” a title roughly analogous to the prince of Wales, though it did not necessarily signify royal birth or even the vice-regency of Nubia.

Thutmose I tightened his grip on Nubia in the late sixteenth century b.c.e., especially on the Second, Third, and Fourth Cataracts, and draped a Nubian chieftain’s body round the prow of his ship on the way home from one of his expeditions. Napata may well have begun as one of his outposts. The great warrior Thutmose III, who usually gets the credit for Napata about 1450 b.c.e., bettered the exploits of his predecessors in the south, where he not only commemorated some four hundred place names and built or improved at least six temples, but also redecorated that of Sesostris III at Semna in honour of the Nubian god Dedwen, perhaps for the Medjay Nubians he had campaigned with in Palestine.

Napata and Meroe

Napata’s lowly beginnings are mysterious, but its future was assured, first as a crossroads of desert trade routes and an outpost of Egyptian control on the Nile to the Fifth Cataract during the New Kingdom, culminating, perhaps, in Ramses II’s great Nineteenth Dynasty (1295-1186 b.c.e.) temples and statuary at Derr and Abu Simbel. Afterward, it became an increasingly native administrative capital of Egyptianized Kush and later a great religious center for the worship and priesthood of Amun-Re. Early in the fifteenth century b.c.e., blacks appear on the monuments of Thutmose III. By the end of that century, in the time of Amenhotep II, Napata was already important enough for the king to hang one of seven conquered princes on its walls as the southernmost frontier-city of Egypt. In the mid-fourteenth century b.c.e., Napata probably was not Akhenaton’s Nubian City of the Sun, Gem-Aten, which was somewhere near the Third Cataract, but at the end of that century, Tutankhamen still marked it as the boundary of Huy, his Lower Nubian viceroy at Aniba. In the middle of the thirteenth century b.c.e., the great pharaoh Ramses II built the southernmost of his five great Nubian mortuary temples there.

Napata’s Egyptianized, Amun-Re-oriented, hybrid culture may well have developed more or less untrammeled after the collapse of the New Kingdom because of its religion and relative isolation. Ultimately Theban Amun-priest refugees seem to have shaped the virile religious and cultural conviction driving the kings of the Twenty-fifth or Ethiopian Dynasty (747-656 b.c.e.). By the middle of the eighth century b.c.e., King Kashta and his son the great warrior Piye were using Napata as their capital. They also seem to have made Meroe (a promising village of crops and cattle and iron deposits in the fork of the Nile and Atbara between the Fifth and Sixth Cataracts) into a second, southern city of Kush. Piye first conquered much of degenerate Egypt from Napata and then retired there, leaving his younger brother Shabaka to reconquer the whole and make himself pharaoh of Egypt in Thebes, perhaps in the year 711 b.c.e. By the time of the accession of Taharqa in 689 b.c.e., the Ethiopian dynasty’s days were numbered, for all its anti-Assyrian intrigues with the Phoenicians and Israelites.

Esarhaddon drove Taharqa from Memphis, which he retook after the Assyrian died in 669 b.c.e., only to be driven out anew by Ashurbanipal in his first campaign. After Ashurbanipal went back to Nineveh, Tanutamun, the last king of the Twenty-fifth Dynasty, succeeded Taharqa and reoccupied Memphis, only to give way up the Nile before Ashurbanipal’s second descent. Tanutamun abandoned Memphis, then Thebes, then Egypt. Like Piye before him, he retired to Napata, and the Ethiopians had to content themselves with Upper Nubia and develop the more defensible Meroe to the southeast as a refuge. They governed first from Napata until its destruction by the nationalist Egyptian king Psamtik II with his Greek and Carian mercenaries about 590 b.c.e., then from their new capital of Meroe, perhaps in the reign of their king Aspelta, even if Napata retained a great religious and economic significance.

Bibliography

Adams, William L. Nubia: Corridor to Africa. London: Penguin, 1978.

Burstein, Stanley M., ed. Ancient African Civilizations: Kush and Axum. Princeton, N.J.: Markus Wiener, 1998.

Gardiner, Sir Alan. Egypt of the Pharaohs. London: Oxford University Press, 1961.

Harris, J. R., ed. The Legacy of Egypt. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1971.

Taylor, John. Egypt and Nubia. London: The British Museum Press, 1991.