Nubia

• 1. Introduction

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  Nubia stretches along the Nile between two worlds: at its southern edge, the Blue and White Niles converge near Khartoum; at its northern edge, the river narrows at the First Cataract just south of Aswan. For most of human history, this corridor was not a backwater. It was the spine of civilizations that rose, fell, and outlasted their conquerors. Ancient Nubians pioneered early antibiotics. They built astronomical devices that predate Stonehenge by almost two thousand years. They conquered Egypt and ruled it as pharaohs. Then they were pushed south, and rose again. The questions that follow are not small ones. Where did pharaonic civilization actually begin? How did a kingdom south of the Sahara hold off the Roman Empire on its own terms? And what happened to the Nubian kingdoms when Islam swept north Africa? The answers move between throne rooms, river forts, and buried cemeteries that now lie beneath a lake.

• 2. Before the Pharaohs

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  Affad 23, an archaeological site in the Dongola Reach of northern Sudan, contains what researchers describe as the well-preserved remains of prehistoric camps, including relics of the oldest known open-air hut in the world, with hunting and gathering traces some fifty thousand years old. From the ninth to the sixth millennia before the common era, near what is now Khartoum, Mesolithic communities were already producing sophisticated pottery. By 5000 BC, the people of Nubia had entered the Neolithic Revolution, domesticating sheep, goats, and cattle as the Sahara dried around them.

  Megaliths at Nabta Playa represent some of the earliest known astronomical devices on earth, predating Stonehenge by almost two thousand years. The organizational complexity those megaliths reflect likely shaped the structure of both Neolithic Nubian society and the Old Kingdom of Egypt. American anthropologist Joseph Vogel wrote that the culture of Upper Egypt, which became dynastic Egyptian civilization, could fairly be called a Sudanese transplant. Nubian rock art from the Neolithic period depicts hunters using bows and arrows, a direct precursor to the archery culture that would define Nubian military identity for millennia.

  Around 3500 BC, the Early A-Group culture arose in Lower Nubia. These were sedentary farmers who traded gold with Egypt; their graves contained Egyptian copper tools, faience amulets, seals, stone vessels, and a variety of pots. The wealth of A-Group kings at Qustul, near Abu Simbel, eventually rivaled that of Egyptian rulers. Archaeologist Bruce Williams, studying artifacts excavated by the University of Chicago Oriental Institute between 1960 and 1964, concluded that Nubia and Egypt shared the same official culture and participated together in the most complex dynastic developments of the era.

• 3. The Kingdom of Kerma

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  By 1650 BC, the Classic Kerma culture had produced one of the earliest urban centers in the Nile region and the oldest city in Africa outside of Egypt. Its royal capital at Kerma was surrounded by monumental town walls and large mud-brick structures, including the Eastern and Western Deffufas, each measuring fifty by twenty-five by eighteen meters. George Andrew Reisner excavated the royal city and found pebble-covered tombs reaching ninety meters in diameter, a large circular dwelling, and a palace-like structure unlike anything else in the region.

  Kerma was militaristic, as attested by the archers' burials and bronze daggers and swords found in graves throughout the site. Egyptian Execration texts confirm that Classic Kerma rulers employed a good many Egyptians. The kingdom's power grew to the point that, during Egypt's Second Intermediate Period, Kushite forces came close to ending Egyptian civilization entirely. According to Davies, head of the joint British Museum and Egyptian archaeological team, if the Kerma forces had chosen to stay and occupy Egypt after their devastating attack, they might have permanently eliminated the Egyptians.

  Egypt ultimately turned the tide. By the end of Thutmose I's reign around 1520 BC, all of Lower Nubia had been annexed. Egypt built an administrative center at Napata and expanded as far as the Fourth Cataract. The Turin Papyrus Map, dating to about 1160 BC, records a gold mine in Nubia and is one of the earliest characterized road maps in existence. Yet Nubian resistance never fully died. Military conflict occurred, according to the sources, almost under every Egyptian reign until the twentieth dynasty.

• 4. Nubia Conquers Egypt

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  Piye, the Kushite ruler from the spiritual capital of Napata, personally led the invasion of Egypt and recorded his victory in a lengthy stele filled with hieroglyphics, which scholars call the Stele of Victory. He became the founder of Egypt's 25th Dynasty. Rather than presenting himself as a conqueror, Piye reached back to an older Egyptian identity: he adopted the royal titulary of Tuthmosis III but changed the Horus name to announce that the Kushites had reversed history, replacing "appearing in Thebes" with "appearing in Napata." He also revived pyramid construction, building the oldest known pyramid at the royal burial site of El-Kurru.

  Taharqa, crowned in Memphis in 690 BC, ruled Upper and Lower Egypt from Tanis in the Delta. His reign was marked by a particularly large Nile flood and abundant harvests. He gave large amounts of gold to the temple of Amun at Kawa and built military settlements at Semna, Buhen, and the fortified site of Qasr Ibrim. His army undertook successful campaigns recorded in both the Mut temple at Karnak and inscriptions at Sanam temple. In 701 BC, Taharqa aided King Hezekiah of Judah against a siege by the Assyrian King Sennacherib, an event referenced in both the Hebrew Bible and Assyrian annals.

  The confrontation with Assyria eventually turned against the Kushites. Esarhaddon conquered Northern Egypt and captured Memphis in 671 BC, taking Taharqa's family, including Prince Nes-Anhuret and the royal wives, as prisoners to Assyria. Taharqa's successor, Tantamani, mounted a reconquest and regained control as far north as Memphis, killing Assyria's vassal Necho I, but the Assyrians under Ashurbanipal ultimately pushed the Kushites permanently out of Egypt around 590 BC. The Kushite kingdom survived for another nine hundred years, eventually centering itself at Meroe.

• 5. Meroe and the Kandake

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  Meroe sat on the east bank of the Nile, about six kilometers northeast of the Kabushiya station near Shendi in Sudan, roughly two hundred kilometers northeast of Khartoum. Greek historian Herodotus described it in the fifth century BC as a great city said to be the mother city of the other Ethiopians. The town's importance grew especially from the reign of Arakamani, around 280 BC, when the royal burial ground moved there from Napata. At its peak, Meroe's rulers controlled the Nile Valley over a north-south straight-line distance of more than one thousand kilometers.

  The Meroitic language, attested from 300 BC, developed its own writing system. Writers first adapted Egyptian hieroglyphs, then switched to a cursive alphabetic script of twenty-three signs. The earliest inscription in Meroitic script dates from between 180 and 170 BC, carved on the temple of Queen Shanakdakhete. The language remained largely undeciphered, owing to the scarcity of bilingual texts, and went extinct around 400 AD.

  Kandake, Latinized as Candace, was the Meroitic title for the sister of the king of Kush; through matrilineal succession she would bear the next heir, making her a queen mother and a figure of formidable political power. In 25 BC, the kandake Amanirenas attacked the city of Syene, known today as Aswan, with an army the Roman geographer Strabo counted at thirty thousand men. A fine, over-life-size bronze head of the Emperor Augustus was found buried in Meroe, in front of a temple, after the initial Kushite victories. Emperor Augustus destroyed Napata in retaliation, but Amanirenas was not intimidated; she again engaged Roman forces. The eventual peace, negotiated at Qasr Ibrim, extended the Roman-Egyptian border and guaranteed, according to Welsby, peace for most of the next three hundred years.

• 6. Christian and Islamic Nubia

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  Around 350 AD, the Kingdom of Aksum invaded and the Meroitic kingdom collapsed. Three Christian kingdoms replaced it: Nobatia in the north with its capital at Pachoras, now modern Faras in Egypt; Makuria in the middle, with its capital at Old Dongola; and Alodia in the south, with its capital at Soba. John of Ephesus records that a Miaphysite priest named Julian converted the king and nobles of Nobatia around 545 AD, and that Alodia was converted around 569. The Isis cult at Philae outlasted official Christianization; only in 453 AD did a treaty formally recognize the traditional religious rights of Nubians at Philae.

  By the seventh century, Makuria had become dominant enough to halt the southern expansion of Islam even after the Arabs took Egypt. A treaty called Baqt allowed peaceful coexistence: Nubians paid an annual tribute of slaves and other goods to the Islamic governor at Aswan, and runaway slaves were returned to Nubia. The treaty held for six hundred years. During this period, Nubia's main exports were dates and slaves, with ivory and gold also exchanged for Egyptian ceramics, textiles, and glass.

  The arrangement eventually unraveled. The Egyptian Mamluk ruler invaded in 1272 after an interruption in the annual slave tribute, declaring himself sovereign over half of Nubia. The cathedral of Dongola was converted to a mosque in 1317. Records show a bishop Timothy still at Qasr Ibrim in 1372, but the last Nubian kingdom collapsed around 1504. In the sixteenth century, the region was partitioned: northern Nubia fell to the Ottoman Empire and the south to the Sennar sultanate. That partition, and the rapid Islamization and partial Arabization that followed, reshaped Nubian identity in ways that outlasted every empire that caused them.

• 7. The Science of Nubian Origins

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  Biological anthropologists Shomarka Keita and A.J. Boyce found that crania from southern predynastic Egypt in the formative period between 4000 and 3100 BC were more similar to ancient Nubians, Kushites, Saharans, and modern groups from the Horn of Africa than to dynastic northern Egyptians or ancient or modern southern Europeans. Aleksandra Pudlo's analysis of Nubian paleo-demography from the Upper Paleolithic to the late sixteenth century BC found that Mesolithic inhabitants were robust and tall, with strong alveolar prognathism, while Neolithic Nubians were less robust and shorter. Over eight thousand five hundred years, Pudlo concluded, "Nubians were hardly a homogeneous population."

  In 2003, archaeologist Charles Bonnet led a Swiss team excavating near Kerma and discovered a cache of monumental black granite statues of the 25th Dynasty pharaohs, now displayed at the Kerma Museum. Among them were statues of the dynasty's last two pharaohs, Taharqa and Tanoutamon, described by researchers as masterpieces that rank among the greatest in art history. DNA sequenced in 2022 from the hair of a Kerma period individual dating to about four thousand years before the present revealed close genetic affinity to early pastoralists from the Rift Valley in eastern Africa during the Pastoral Neolithic.

  The Birgid language, once spoken north of Nyala in Darfur, became extinct as late as 1970, a reminder that the linguistic diversity of the region did not end with antiquity. In the early 1970s, many Egyptian and Sudanese Nubians were forcibly relocated when dams constructed at Aswan created Lake Nasser, submerging the very archaeological cemeteries at Qustul that had prompted the debates about Nubian and Egyptian origins in the first place.