Sonderdrucke aus der Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg

ROLF HERZOG

Early Pictorial Representations of Nubians

Originalbeitrag erschienen in: Cahiers d'histoire egyptienne 10 (1967), S. [195] - 199 Extrait : o Cahiers dHistoire Egyptienne », tome X. la, Avenue Baron Empain, H6liopolis — RAU

EARLY PICTORIAL REPRESENTATIONS OF NUBIANS

by

ROLF HERZOG German Archaeological Institute,

In the winter 1737/38, the Danish naval officer Frederik Ludwig Norden (1708-1742) ventured to sail upstream the Nile from Aswan into hitherto rather unknown Nubia. As far as we know he was the first European to penetrate into Nubia by boat. Others before him, like the Frenchmen Poncet and de Brevedent or the German Krump ( 1 ), went along the Darb el-Arbain desert route with a caravan and reached the Nile just north of Dongola. Half a century after Nordens expedition, foreigners started to visit Nubia in increasing numbers especially since the defeat of the Mamluks who had taken refuge in Ibrim and Derr for some years at the beginning of the 19th century. Their former annoyances for travellers had stopped, and personal safety was secured. The itineraries published in European languages reflect the authors intellectual standards and their interests, occasion- ally they are entirely focused upon antiquities, but give a vivid though not complete picture of Nubia, too. The Frenchman Maxime Du Camp (1822-1894), who accom- panied Gustave Flaubert on his Oriental Tour and who later opposed the lart pour lart, took the first photographs of Nubia in 1850 ( 2 ) . The following year the French engineer Felix Tey- nard also made photographs in Egypt and in Nubia ( 3 ) . Regard- ing the long exposure at that time, it was extremely difficult, to

(1) PONCET, CHARLES-JACQUES : « Voyage en Ethiopie », Paris s a. -- Eng- lish translation, London 1709. DE BREVEDENTS letters are published by CRAWFORD, 0 G S.: "The Fung Kingdom of Sennar", Gloucester 1951 KRUMP, THEODOR : "Hoher und fruchtbahrer Palm-Baum", Augsburg 1710 ; cf. HERZOG in "Sudan Notes and Records" vol. 38, Khartoum 1957. (2) DU CAMP, MAXIME . « Egypte, Nubie, et Syrie ». Paris 1852. (3) TEYNARD, FELIX : « Egypte et Nubie », Paris s a. 196 take pictures of the indigenous population, therefore, both these pioneers concentrated upon the ancient sites. In this period of 112 years between the first traveller and the first photographer, reports on Nubia were illustrated, if at all, by sketches, some of which were taken on the spot, others carefully, sometimes even imaginatively executed at home. Only a very limited number of these drawings is of ethnographic value. Showing the Nubians in their own country, in their original costumes and with their primitive agricultural imple- ments and tools, describing all this better than words can do, these pictures remain in spite of their short-comings unsur- passed sources for ethnological or historical studies in the Nile Valley. The following lines may draw the attention to a few selected publications of that kind. Norden was an able cartographer, but his sketches are rude. His view of Derr for instance gives neither details nor a clear general impression ( 4) . Dominique Vivant Denon (1747-1825), komme de lettres and one of Napoleons savants, spent three weeks at Aswan, in 1799. For political and military reasons he could not visit the valley south of Phil, but had to be satisfied with seeing Nubians on Elephantine Island. Plate 51 of the Florence edition, 1808, of his "Voyage dans la Basse et Haute- Egypte" shows boys and girls of the cataract region, one of the females wearing the rahat 1,, , a garment of leather frings round the waist. This was the only costume of Nubian girls until they got married, and it is mentioned in many itineraries of the 19th century. The removal of the rahat and its replace- ment by the woven robe was an essential part in the wedding ceremony. The rahat was common in Nubia and the northern Sudan, among the Bedja tribes at the Red Sea (Bisharin, Abadda, Hadendowa etc.),but not among the Fellahin. The famous Swiss explorer Johann Ludwig Burckhardt (1784-1817) who successfully penetrated far into southern Nubia adorned his excellent "Travels in Nubia" with only very few rough drafts of special objects like daggers or musical instru- ments.

(4) NORDEN, FREDERIC LOUIS . « Voyage dEgypte et de Nubie », Copenhagen 1755, vol 2, plate 159. 197

Francois Chretien Gau (1790-1853), an architect born in Cologne, late naturalized French, went up the Nile to the second cataract in 1818/19 and made many drawings. He was mainly interested in the ancient monuments, but his views of Derr (vignette 10 and plate 50) are more instructive than that of Norden, showing particularly the residence of the kashef, the local authority es ). Also vignette 4, a scene at the river at Kalabsha, gives details of the houses and the garments. The same value his vignette 9, representing a mausoleum (qubba) of a local Muslim saint and two shadufs at the bank of the Nile near es-Sebua. The Italian adventurer and excavator Giovanni Battista Belzoni (1778-1823) travelled through Nubia about the same time. As previously his efforts in Giza and Thebes, so also here they were concentrated upon antiquities. Nevertheless, one of his drawings, a coloured general view on ( 6 ), provides us with some ethnographic details. On the East bank of the Nile we recognise two male Nubians shovelling the cultivated soil ; a saqiya, moved by a bull, in irrigating the fields. In the foreground left side is a group of women and girls, among them one dressed with the rahat mentioned above. The astronomer Edward Joshua Cooper (1798-1863) visited Egypt in 1820-21 mainly to study the zodiacs of Dendera and Esna. In Naples he had hired an Italian artist, S. Bossi, to accompany him up to the Second Cataract. Cooper published only a selection of Bossis drawings, cut on stone by British lithographers, with brief explanations under the title "Views in Egypt and Nubia, executed in lithography .. taken in the Winter of 1820-21", London 1824-27. Among these pictures we find "Costume of the women in the island of Elephantine", another representation of the rahat, as well as "A group of Nubians", four males sketched near Derr, half-naked and with their hair dressed in the Bisharin style. "Nubian family crossing the Nile" is of high ethnographic value ; two men, a woman with a child are on the middle of the river on a raft, which Cooper describes as "a bundle of sugar-canes bound together in two or three

(5) GAU, FRANCOIS CHRETIEN u Antiquites de la Nubie », Stuttgart/Paris 1822 (6) BE.ZONI, GIOVANNI: Plates illustrative of the "Researches and Operations in Egypt and Nubia", London 1820, plate 42 198 places by the long and pliant leaf of the palm-tree. The man, seated in front, guides this miserable apology for a boat, while he who swims behind impels it forward". Two other drawings, one showing Ababda females near Djebel Silsile and the other Nubian woman near Qena are without special significance. But it remains remarkable, that already at that time, Nubians lived in Upper Egypt far North from Aswan. In 1821, the Prussian, General Heinrich von Minutoli (1772- 1846), was less successful in his researches in Nubia, than in those which he had just finished in the oasis of Siwa. Because of disturbances on the ev6 of the Egyptian conquest of the Egyptian conquest of the Sudan, he could not proceed further south than Elephantine Island. A member of his crew, Girolamo Segato, sketched three Nubians there : a wife with a small baby, she wearing a loose wrap, a red necklace probably of corals, and metal rings around the ankles (khulkhal) ; an unmarried girl with the rahat and a small red necklace ( 7 ) ; a warrior, armed with a lance longer than his own height and a round shield with a buckle in the centre. The hair of all three is plaited ( S ) . In 1829, Mohammed Ali employed Achille Constant Theo- dore Emile Prisse dAvenne (1807-1879), a young Frenchman who had a diplöme dingenieur-architecte and who remained a permanent resident in Egypt till 1844. He saw Nubia on duty ; in 1837 for instance he was in Abu Simbel. His versatility rang- ed from topography and egyptology to studies in Islamic art and the social anthropology of the Beduins. In this field of research he had chosen the Ababda tribe as his special subject. Prisse dAvennes "Oriental Album" of 1848, a collection of 30 coloured lithographs 26 X 35 cm. and of 35 engravings on wood in a much smaller size, gives really an excellent general impression of "the characters, costumes, and modes of life in the Valley of the Nile" as the sub-title suggests. Three plates show Nubians : no. 25 two girls of the Kenuzi Nubians, one with the rahat ; no. 26 a male Nubian together with a f ellahin ; and no. 27 two

(7) On the rahat in general cf HERZOG, ROLF : "Der Rahat, eine fast ver- schwundene Mädchentracht" im "Ostsudan. Baessler-Archiv" N F. vol. 4, Berlin 1956 (8) MINUTOLI, HEINRICH von : "Reise zum Tempel des Jupiter Ammon", Berlin, 1824, plate 25, figures 1-3. 199 girls, who neither in appearance nor in their clothes are typical for any race, listen to a Nubian boy playing the lyra, called kisirki in Nubian language. The beautiful Kenuzi girl with the rahat should serve as an example for illustrations demonstrat- ing Nubians long before photography warranted their authenti- city.

A Nubian girl with the rahat. From. "The Oriental Album" by Emile Prisse dAvenne,