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Forgotten Fortress Returning to Uronarti

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Forgotten Fortress Returning to Uronarti Forgotten Fortress Returning to Uronarti Laurel Bestock Uronarti fortress seen from the north. Kite aerial photograph by Kathryn Howley and Laurel Bestock. ronarti, located in northern Sudan, is the site of one the physical relationships between modern nation-states is at all of a series of fortresses built by the Egyptian kings times problematic when applied to ancient Egypt, and in cer- of the Twelfth Dynasty to control the gold-bearing tain periods the territorial control of Egypt certainly extended well beyond its notional boundaries. The Middle Kingdom (ca. Uterritory of Lower Nubia. Long thought to be inaccessible to 2055–1650 b.c.e.) was the first great period of expansion; dur- further archaeological research due to the flooding behind the ing this period the kings of Egypt’s Twelfth Dynasty established Aswan High Dam, two of the forts have recently been found to control over Lower Nubia (now in southern Egypt and northern be remaining above water. The rediscovery of these forgotten Sudan) and maintained that control with a series of monumen- fortresses and the beginning of a new project at Uronarti allow tal fortifications (fig. 1). Most of these were built along the Nile us to pose questions about not only the state-imposed stamp of itself, although we increasingly recognize that control over the desert was an integrated part of this system. colonialism in this place but also the more complex long-term The fortress-based domination of Lower Nubia in the Middle engagements and lifestyles that grew up around it. The Uronarti Kingdom had interwoven military, economic, and ideologi- Regional Archaeological Project is investigating some aspects cal components, and was a major undertaking of the complex of lived experience in this outpost.1 bureaucratic state of the time. From a military perspective, the growing wealth and complexity of the Kerma culture to the south seems likely to have posed a threat. Economically, the region of Egyptian Colonialism in Nubia in the Lower Nubia was and still is an important location for gold min- Middle Kingdom ing, and Kerma may have represented an attractive trading part- ner despite also being a potential threat. That the region of the The ancient Egyptian state had its southern boundary at the fortresses was the part of the Nile most difficult to navigate pre- first Nile cataract, a point of both geographic and ideological sumably added both to its military importance and to interest in significance. Nonetheless, the idea of a strict border as defines controlling economic activity along it. Ideologically, the size and 154 NEAR EASTERN ARCHAEOLOGY 80.3 (2017) Semna Region Shalfak Uronarti Elephantine El-Hudi western desert Eastern wall desert forts Semna Kumma 0 5km Semna South Ikkur Kuban W a d i Areika A Aniba l l a q i Faras Serra East N Buhen Kor Mirgissa Askut see inset above 0 50 100km Figure 1. Map showing the locations of the Middle Kingdom fortresses in Nubia. ordered construction of the fortresses served as visible celebration of the strong arm of the Egyptian king that sent the “vile” Nubians scurry- ing before it. While this mixture of imperatives was likely central to the foundation of the forts, the daily lives and cultural interactions of those who occupied this land over the many generations of Egyptian control were surely also caught up in more quotidian questions of how to live in this often forbidding landscape. The bureaucratic Middle Kingdom state planned the original fortresses, but that was the beginning, not the end, of the story. Returning to Uronarti allows us to explore this longer and more nuanced picture. Previous Research Both texts and archaeology have been central to our understand- ing of Egyptian colonialism in Lower Nubia in the Middle Kingdom. Texts range from bombastic royal statements erected on stelae that contrast the might of the king with the perfidy of the Nubians (Eyre Figure 2. Aerial photograph of Uronarti prior to the construction of the Aswan High Dam. 1990), to letters sent about desert surveillance between the forts and Courtesy of David Edwards. back to Egypt (Kraemer and Liszka 2016), to thousands of seal impres- sions—discarded trash that document for us administrative activities that took place at the storehouses and other institutions within the for- The “barbican” gate that led into the complex covers an tresses (Smith 1995: 000). astonishing 30 m × 47 m. The inner fortification, which Archaeologically, the fortresses themselves have played the star- has walls averaging 5 meter-thick regularly supported by ring role (see esp. Vogel 2004, with references). Truly massive monu- fortified bastions, was a precise rectangle measuring 138 ments, their proportions and structures bring to mind crusader castles m × 150 m. Access to the river—important as a source of or Roman forts despite their construction in mud brick. Buhen, of- water and as the artery vital both for shipping and for mili- ten regarded as the type site for the whole system, illustrates this well. tary transport—was protected. The layout of buildings in With two rings of defensive walls, each abutted on the outside by a dry the inner fortress was exceptionally regular. ditch and protected by a plethora of arrow loops, it covered an area While Buhen may serve as a type site for the more of approximately 450 m × 150 m (Emery, Smith, and Millard 1979). northern of the fortresses, which were built earlier in NEAR EASTERN ARCHAEOLOGY 80.3 (2017) 155 Figure 3. Kite photo of the northern part of Uronarti island looking north. the Twelfth Dynasty and which commanded an area where the rocky spur on an island in the Nile is the reason it is available for ground was flat enough to permit such expansive construc- study today. tions as well as some agriculture, the more southerly forts have a The original archaeological excavation of the forts took place somewhat different character. Situated in areas of rocky rapids, in two great waves during the twentieth century. The first -oc they cover less area and have single defensive walls that are not curred in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Uronarti itself was in- defined by right angles (Vogel 2004). However, they still have vestigated in this wave; it was dug in three short seasons from massively thick defenses and—despite their irregular outlines— 1928–1930 under the personal supervision of Noel Wheeler, rigidly orthogonal interior buildings. Uronarti is one of these who worked under the larger direction of George Reisner’s Bos- southern fortresses of irregular type, built in the later Twelfth ton Museum of Fine Arts/Harvard University project in Nubia Dynasty by the king Senwosret III, and its location high atop a (Dunham 1967). Wheeler concentrated largely on the fortress 156 NEAR EASTERN ARCHAEOLOGY 80.3 (2017) itself, which he almost entirely cleared down to bedrock. Con- is defined by a raised ridge of granite running approximately ditions were rough—it is still an isolated and difficult place to north–south, visible as four hills of varying heights. The lower- excavate—and Wheeler himself withdrew before the publication lying regions that are seasonally dry are now covered with silt, of his excavations, leaving that task to others. which in some years is farmed (fig. 3). A subsequent second wave of survey and excavation in Lower Archaeological remains are known from several parts of the Nubia was undertaken by a range of international missions in island. The northern and highest of the hills houses the for- the 1960s ahead of the waters that rose behind the Aswan High tress, basically triangular in plan, with a long spur wall reaching Dam to form the lake known in Egypt as Lake Nasser. This enor- north (fig. 4). The walls of the fortress are over 3 meters thick mous man-made body of water stretches across the Egyptian– and have regularly spaced massive bastions. Inside the fortress Sudanese border and is more or less precisely contiguous with are barracks, granaries, and administrative buildings. A stone- the 350 km stretch of the Nile fortified by the Egyptian Middle paved street runs down the middle of the fortress (fig. 5); other Kingdom kings; the lake retreats into a river again in the area of streets run inside the fortification walls and across the fort south Semna, now a quiet landscape but once a rushing cataract that of the administrative complex at the northern tip. The main gate squeezed the Nile and was the southern point of direct Middle to the fortress is on the south, adjacent to a partly protected set Kingdom control. Interpretive studies of the Middle Kingdom of outer buildings. Water stairs, now gone, once led down from occupation continued after the rising of the waters (see for in- the northern end of the fortress. The topography, which is ex- stance Smith 1995; Vogel 2004), but it was not expected that new tremely steep, made this a superbly defensible spot. Much of the data from the fortresses themselves would become available. original dumping from the fortress took place on the southern We can claim now to be in a growing third wave of investiga- slope. Some of this dump is still visible today, some has been lost tion of Egyptian control of Lower Nubia. Uronarti and Shalfak to inundation, and some is overlain by the dumps of the early were rediscovered in 2004 by Derek Welsby (Welsby 2004), and twentieth-century excavations. the Uronarti Regional Archaeological Project first took the field Additional scant remains were found by the first excavators of in 2012. Additional research has very recently resumed at Shalfak Uronarti on the remaining hilltops: no more than dry-stone ob- (Claudia Naeser, personal communication), and investigation of servation posts on the middle hills, but rather more substantial desert fortifications and mining sites as well as new analyses of (though sadly unrecorded) brick remains on the southernmost texts are providing additional context for understanding the re- hill.
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