Chapter Eight

chapter eight

LOCATING THE CULTURES OF LOWER NUBIA IN THE LATE NEOLITHIC, EARLY AND MIDDLE BRONZE AGE: SOME PRELIMINARY CONCLUSIONS

1. Against Models

Any theory is better than none [?]1 Ancient Nubia was discovered by Egyptologists and continued to be considered a special annex to Ancient Egypt well into the 1960s when the traditional image of a cyclically “Egyptianized” Nubia begun to crumble as a result of the discoveries made during the UNESCO Nubian Salvage Campaign.2 Between 1959 and 1969 more than forty archaeological expeditions worked between the First and Second Nile Cataracts. In Egyptian Nubia excavations were conducted at about thirty sites, settlements as well as cemeteries. Albeit in a less con- centrated manner,3 an organised survey was undertaken for the ﬁrst time in Sudanese Lower Nubia too. As a result of the international undertaking, over 1,000 sites were discovered and excavations were car- ried out in c. one third of them.4 The new evidence demanded rad- ical changes not only in the traditional discourse on the connections between Lower Nubia, Upper Nubia and Egypt but also in the traditional methods and strategies which derived from the methods and

1 Freely after J.J. Janssen, review of Kemp 1989, JEA 78 (1992) 313–317 and Warbur- ton 2001 244.—The question mark is of course mine. 2 For the Campaign see, with further literature, Adams 1977 81ff.; T. Säve-Söder- bergh: Temples and Towns of Ancient Nubia. London 1987; W.Y. Adams: The Nubian Archaeological Campaigns of 1959–1969: Myths and Realities, Success and Failures. in: Bonnet (ed.) 1992 3–27; A.J. Mills: The Archaeological Survey from Gemai to Dal, ibid. 29–31; T. Säve-Söderbergh: The International Nubia Campaign: Two Perspectives, ibid. 33–42; F. Wendorf: The Campaign for Nubian Prehistory, ibid. 43–54. 3 For the limitations of the Salvage Campaign in the Sudan, see J. Vercoutter: The Unesco “Campaign of Nubia” in the Sudan. Success or Failure? DE 33 (1995) 133–140. 4 For preliminary reports on the Survey, see Kush 9 (1961) 17–43; 10 (1962) 10–75; 11 (1963) 10–46; 12 (1964) 216–250; 13 (1965) 145–176; 14 (1966) 1–15; for a list of the excavated sites, see Adams 1977 85f. 120 chapter eight strategies of Egyptology. The scholars participating in the UNESCO Rescue Campaign or entering the Nubian scene in the course of the 1960s and 1970s arrived from widely different backgrounds such as cultural anthropology, archaeology, art history, Egyptology, ethnogra- phy, European medieval studies, classical archaeology, Byzantine studies, African studies etc. The papers of their first international confer- ences did not leave any doubt that Nubian Studies, the new discipline emerging as a result of their efforts, cannot be considered as an annex to Egyptology. The viewpoint of the leading personalities of the Cam- paign and the authors of the first post-Campaign synthesises was deter- mined first of all by American cultural anthropology5 and the theory of New Archaeology6 which also explains their rejection of any deliberate Egyptocentrism in historical interpretation. In order to better appreci- ate the extent of these changes, let us go back some decades and see the traditional image of Nubia as it was reflected in a synthesis published by one of the pioneers of Nubian prehistory. Anthony Arkell wrote thus in 1955: the egyptianized kingdom [of Kush was] running gradually downhill to a miserable and inglorious end. There were interludes of prosperity when contact with the outside world was free and friendly, and new inspiration and energy (the effect of new ideas from outside) were infused into the kingdom.7 The emphasis on contact with the outside world was doubtless meant as an encouragement for the recently liberated Republic of Sudan, yet, in spite of his empathy towards the contemporary Sudanese, Arkell’s vision of a total dependence on ideas borrowed from outside derived from George Andrew Reisner’s views. Reisner8 not only created the methodology for survey and rescue archaeology, brought a new standard to the study of stratification,9 and

5 Adams 1977 8ff., 665ff. 6 On the relationship between Trigger 1965 and L. Binford’s work (esp. Archaeol- ogy as Anthropology. American Antiquity 28 [1962] 217–225; Archaeological Systematics and the Study of Cultural Process. ibid. 31 [1965] 203–210), see Trigger 1984 passim and esp. 370, 379. 7 Arkell 1955 138. 8 WWW 351f. 9 Richard Lepsius was the first Egyptologist to make stratified section drawings at his excavation of the “Labyrinth” in the Fayoum in the middle of the 19th century, cf. LD I 47; LD Text II 11f. A systematic stratigraphic analysis of archaeological sites was introduced by the 1860s at Pompeji and was generally practiced from the 1870s at classical sites in the Mediterranean (cf. Trigger 1989 196ff.). Petrie regarded strati-