Ancient Nubia: New Ideas, New Discoveries

but this after all is our annual barber Herman lecture but this year it is not precisely a lecture but a full symposium it's entitled ancient Nubia new ideas new discoveries and I know you will not be disappointed the order of our speakers approximately follows the order of the exhibition so first we'll have dr. Stuart Tyson Smith professor of anthropology and director of the Institute for social behavioral and economic research at UC Santa Barbara his uh his talk is entitled Egypt illogical bias intercultural interactions and entanglement next comes dr. Katherine Halle the lila actress and wallace for assistant professor of ancient egyptian art and archeology at the Institute of Fine Arts New York University and the title of her lecture is looking beyond the surface use of Egyptian motifs by Nubian royalty in the Nazi period we'll continue then with dr. Jeremy Pope associate professor of art history at the College of William and Mary in Virginia and he will speak to us today his lectures entitled nubian queen how an ancient African Kingdom became a symbol of feminine power our last speaker dr. Popov wolf joins us from the German archaeological Institute in Berlin and he will speak to us about the surprising extent of the Mara Witek Heartland and its suburbs the title of his lecture is urbanity in each new pia so without further ado I'd like to have our first speaker come up and again [Applause] [Music] [Applause] well thank you very much and thanks very much to Rita and the organizers for pulling the symposium together I hope you enjoy it it's a great lineup so Egyptologists have tended for a long time to view Nubia and still to some extent today I'm sorry to say to view Nubia through the lens of Egypt rather than as a civilization on its own part newbee I became becomes kind of an appendage of Egypt and even good in Nubia is due to Egyptian direct influence and even figures like this gentleman here Bianchi who one of the founding figures of the 25th dynasty who secured control over all of Egypt and started off this vibrant civilization we'll hear more from Katharine about was it's often you know sort of flat out it's just you know the result of Egyptian influence and even not that sophisticated and I'll just give you one quote from John Wilson very you know it's sort of classic Egyptologist writing in the 1950s he reflects this attitude of Nubian inferiority when describing the kushai dynasty and I quote the story of jianchi's conquest of Egypt is an extraordinarily interesting human development particularly in the contrast between this backwater Puritan and the effete and sophisticated Egyptians he goes on to say that and I quote that's Egypt fell into the nominal rule of an Ethiopian from the despise provinces and under the effectual rule of a woman and he's talking about the God's wife of a Menominee artist based in Thebes so managing to be both rather racist and sexist at the same time which Egyptologists have a certain talent for but in fact what I what I'm proposing here is that we shift our viewpoint from Egypt looking at looking kind of down at Nubia and this is partly a projection of Egyptian ideology partly a projection of modern notions of racism also coming from a kind of colonial narrative of African inferiority and instead shift our viewpoint of the other direction and instead of looking at Nubia is produced by Egyptian influence rather look at the dynamic nature of intercultural interaction in particularly this idea of cultural entanglement that I'll explore further using some examples from our recent research at the ancient Egyptian colonial side of tombos and also a kurma site that I'll talk about first and go into right now now while I'm talking about bad Egyptologists I'll introduce George Andrea Riseborough if you've seen the exhibit it was a brilliant archaeologist and if any of you saw Elizabeth miners talk to us recently you'll know how his excavations can be mined for really interesting information about the dynamics of Kushites civilization but his conclusions were in fact horribly racist again he argues that the superior in Egyptian bloodlines of an Egyptian colony at kurma were diluted by intermarriage with a local Nubian women so again managing to be both racist and sexist at the same time and he's taking his cue of course from ancient Egyptian ideology which showed Nubians as inferior as chaotic as the classic enemy of Egypt Egypt props Egyptologists sometimes hold this up as well the Egyptians had a had a negative view of Egypt so when Nubia rather so when P ante came and took over Egypt he must have been viewed as this kind of outsider and that's very much John Wilson's argument but in fact this overlooks the kind of long history of interaction between the two civilizations and the fact that this is ideology this is basically propaganda but also the Middle Eastern peoples were treated in exactly the same way as Nubians no less civilized every bit as chaotic every bit is the stereotypical enemy as were the other our typical enemy Libyans that's kind of surrounded that sort of sea of chaos surrounding an inner Egyptian order so for Reisman are taking this perspective anything good in Nubia had to be the result of Egyptian ization another model see commonly used when looking at Nubia and it for him that meant some kind of assimilation and then once the Egyptian influence faded away then you see Nubia goes into a decline until the next cycle of Egyptian ization or Egyptian influence so for him he argued that kurma must be in Egyptian colony and I'm sorry to say that sometimes crops up in the secondary source is still today because they're looking at older sources where this was really an entrenched idea up until the you know latter half of the 20th century when people started seriously pushing back against it he also saw the New Kingdom Empire is a kind of civilizing influence and again that went into a decline to rise again with the cush I'd Pharaohs who initially he argued were actually Libyans not Nubians I don't think anybody actually believed that though and then but then later on argued for it again another round of Egyptian influence at least these kind of tropes have been repeated over and over again now without the extreme of calling karma an Egyptian colony Egyptologists have still often thought of karma is somehow Egyptian izing and this is a very strange notion and we can see it from Reiser's perspective if he saw here's what you see the view of the cemetery at Karma I'm standing on top of the massive mortuary temple overlooking the last of the great royal tombs and in that tomb of course you will have seen it if you've seen the exhibit in our statues of from Egypt of the ladies anyway at seonhui and her husband and reissner's saw these the statuary and it's you know well it must be an Egyptian colony that was partly because it the Kermit civilization was so obviously complex and grand that it couldn't have been a native African civilization it had to be it had to have come from Egypt and you'll notice that terminology that's not because I don't think that Egypt was not an African civilization in fact I'm firmly convinced it is but it's often treated as if it isn't and one still sees these sort of titles so I think you have to look at Nubia and Egypt as two African civil as in interaction and so there were to be fair some Egyptologists who pointed out things like the these massive to mealy the practice of retainer sacrifice and so on are all practices that are very different from Egypt also all sorts of all different aspects of the material culture burial practice of some examples in just a second are very very different from ancient Egypt so risers idea that it was a colony there was some pushback against it but by and large people had accepted it but instead what we should see is the display of items like these the statuary actually looted from Egypt reflects a kind of projection of esoteric knowledge and power by these kushai rulers so you have this you know this civilization to the north and by bringing in and deploying the statues other parts aspects of material culture they're showing their knowledge of distant lands and power and authority by showing how they can control the other and this is of course is the same thing that motivated Egyptians to depict Indians in the ways they did and so forth now since the work of Schrauben a at karma we know that karma was the center of a vibrant civilization a true urban center one of the earliest in Africa and in fact that karma was not just dominated by Egypt but in fact was Egypt's rival in Northeast Africa we can see a huge urban center and so on now when we look at architecture like the great great urban to phupho what you see here it represents this kind of idea of entanglement so this can involve the adoption of different of exotic practices or foreign practices but up more often the adaptation of those practices imagery and so on material culture but also in differences in rejection and typically it's a it's a blending of these different elements and it's a process of mutual influence rather than simply assimilation driven from Egypt into Nubia as again Egyptologists have often argued and you can see this at Karma the mud-brick architectural technology of building a massive structure like this was clearly borrowed from Egypt but the monument itself is a uniquely Nubian thing in a similar way within the urban center we see round structures and that round structure was originally made of a kind of post whole traditional architecture in Nubia but then later in Warren in my brick but we also see a you know elements of rectilinear architecture and so on that would have been borrowed directly from Egypt we also see things like Ram imagery surrounding religion that they actually have influenced Egyptian Ram imagery connected especially with the cult of the god of moon so it does go both ways similarly in the here's a massive mortuary temple that I show you from standing on top looking at the the big tomb and here we see Egyptian imagery like this winged uraeus deployed and here's a good example of adaptation so again the technology and even the symbolism here is Egyptian but in fact it's integrated into a fundamentally Nubian institution and within a nubian cultural framework we also have examples of rejection so all the beautiful karma pottery that you can see on display here this is a beautiful bowl that we found in a new excavation and the premise Emma Terry just to the south of our colonial side Nubian ceramic traditions not only are you know are not influenced by Egyptian ones they deliberately in spite of the fact they were in interaction with Egyptians they knew about Egyptian pottery techniques like the wheel all this pottery is handmade they retain those traditions in spite of that contact and even after the Empire is you'll see in a minute they continued making these traditional style Potteries with this kind of black top decoration and we also see hybrids in you know blended out pottery with blended like this wonderful bowl here which may be on display yeah which is on display in the exhibit and you can see here Aegean motif so kind of running not motif but also blend it in with some Egyptian motifs with some Levant EIN influences as well so it shows a nubian civilisations we're not a kind of unsophisticated backwater but in fact we're very much engaged with the larger world of East you know North East Africa as well as the Mediterranean now in terms of the impacts of Egyptian influence during the krama era on on the kind of local populations we've begun excavation at a place called Abu Fatima which is about 10 kilometres north of crema so within the kurma inter LAN but a relatively modest society the people who were supporting the grand tradition and here we see basically no real Egyptian influence so we have flex burials the pottery is almost all nubian there is one little Egyptian pot up in the upper left hand side as an import could have been as much for the contents of the pot as the pot itself but the nubian pottery traditions definitely dominate features like ostrich feather fans animal burials we've had a couple of burials of dogs as well as sheep and as ceremonial as a ceremonial component of burial we see these things at Karma as well and again the significance of sheep to Nubian civilization is something that perhaps represents that kind of do you know 2-way entanglement another thing that we see again an example of rejection is cloth we have some cloth but not a lot instead the real emphasis is on leather work and it's amazing stuff so we're finding an entirely preserved leather skirts on bodies I mean they're they're very delicate and kind of broken up but we can reconstruct the whole thing and we can you can see examples of this incredible incredibly detailed stitching and especially the piece and the upper right with its perforations incredibly small amazingly detailed then there's a little cam in there too and that's you know that's five centimeters so the piece is like this big it's incredible and this little bit of woven kind of Rovin strand amazing so we see nubian crafts predominating at kurma the notion of a karma egyptian ization is really can't be sustained at all what the influence we see tends to be very strongly adaptive than often rejecting Egyptian things so rather than an Egyptian material culture being as Barry Kemp said you know kind of overwhelming the sort of folksy Nubian culture with its fancy mass-produced objects and in a kind of parallel to modern globalism in fact we see nubian traditions are very durable now the criminal civilization lasted for around a thousand years but came to an end with the Egyptian conquest in about 1500 BC which four empires both in the Levant and throughout an extensive area in Nubia and I'll I'll mention a cycle Oskar very briefly but my main examples will come from tombos and that cemetery of abu fatima that i just showed you is just to the right to the south of tombos again just a little bit north of kurma and the fact that tom bus was located at the third cataract of the nile kind of on a boundary where we see heavy Egyptian influence with these colonial communities founded throughout the region but south of kurma we don't really south of the third cataract rather we don't really see a lot of evidence for full-on colonisation it seems that this was a an important kind of internal boundary within the Egyptian Empire so again an interesting look is to look at intercultural interaction in this process of entanglement it also seems to be in this symbolic boundary so we have a series of steely as I said the fortress itself was established around 1450 BC and we just recently established that it's probably represents a place called tar oy that's mentioned in an Egyptian text from about the time of a minute of the third around 1350 BC so our main work though and what I'll focus on for examples here is within the cemetery so the cemetery has two parts one is a more kind of Egyptian part if you will with pyramid Tunes and Egyptian style super structures but still a bit of entanglement going on but then very interestingly before the end of the New Kingdom with what Egyptologists call the ramesside period starting around 1200 BC we see a nubian cemetery with Nubian style tumulus mounds on top of grays although again with an increasing pace of entanglement and increasing you know sophistication of entanglement over time now within the Egyptian part of the cemetery we know and I don't have time to really go into it here but we know from isotopic analyses as well as craniofacial measurements that what we have is a population of Egyptian colonists who then intermarried with or you know I can't really 100% say it's sure say that we're married but interbred to use not to find a term with with the colonists and we end up having a mixed population and so we have both biological and cultural entanglements the Egyptian come on has brought the full suite of Egyptian practices with them so for example we have evidence for mummification and not just ordinary mummification but with a set of canopic jars that we recently found this one dedicated to a priest named happy coincidentally this this particular jar is also dedicated to our invokes the protection of the son of Horus whose name is also happy but a different happy so a lot of happiness going on with this guy but yeah actually the the sad sad shriveled remains and the person's internal organs were actually still in this so we do know that they were practicing full of iteration we have also found things like with shop tea figurines and heart scarabs and the most freakish thing I have to say that we've ever found in tombos is this it's a human skull fragment of a human skull with writing on it and initially I thought okay this is weird something strange is going on here but and here you can see from infrared a little more detail but I think what's happened is a papyrus has transferred the ink from a papaya is transferred onto the skull after the tomb was looted and so this is probably a copy of the Book of the Dead although I still haven't had a chance to verify that otherwise it we see typical Egyptian burial practice you notice the this is the bottom part of a woman and her legs are pinned together and that would indicate wrapping consistent with mummification but most of the time the flesh wrappings coffins even aren't very well preserved because wood is not very well preserved this is a common problem in Nubia more generally but here we found things like cosmetic equipment very common I love this little dish which if you look at the left-hand side of it you'll see there's a little beak and a little head and it's got a little tail so it's a little ducky dish thank you and earrings other kinds of jewelry that scarab interesting enough actually dates from the Middle Kingdom and it could have been looted from a tomb in the northern part of Nubia where there was a colonization episode or even from from cush itself where we find these Middle Kingdom scarabs but I really think it's most likely an heirloom so again if these were Colin it's coming from Egypt they were bringing treasured items with them that might eventually make the way into tombs and the pottery is predominantly Egyptian this is the cutest pop we found to continue our duct theme little incense burner dating from the ramesside period the later part of the cemetery and was actually found at the bottom of the shaft of the tomb right in the entrance I love that kind of thing you can imagine the people you know in the funeral and they're burning incense to help the deceased go through the afterlife and other things so we see a layout of a tomb here so burial practice head towards the west facing towards eastern horizon to benefit from the rejuvenating powers of the Sun who's reborn every morning at dawn and pottery scarabs amulets other things but you notice right in the middle of the shaft there is a flex burial so in the traditional Nubian style and that's why we found about 10 flexed burials of all of women so there's a gender dynamic to this sort of entanglement this definitely represents an example of this kind of cultural entanglement and here you see another one of these burials a woman in a Flex position that's very reminiscent of burials at kurma itself and she was found in association with the amulets actually it's a single amulet the two sides of it on the left with the God Khepri the REA born on the horizon and then the God never to him below and then another burial was found with these two wonderful little amulets of the God Bess and Bess becomes an extremely popular deity in Nubia taken up by the Nubians with great enthusiasm we also see nubian pottery showing up again in spite of the fact that Egyptologist have often posited that nubian traditions disappeared under the the under these layers of Egyptian colonialism and its idea assimilation in fact we find new B and pottery a cooking pot on the left a nice Bowl not quite as nice as the you know the height of Nubian civilization but nevertheless and we also see Nubian cooking vessels at sites like ah scoot and I don't have time to go into it the fortress it was built in the Middle Kingdom still occupied in the New Kingdom and you can see the the brown or orange e Brown aligns are all Egyptian pottery you can see most of the ceramic assemblage is heavily dominated by Egyptian pots serving vessels like cups and jars but the cooking vessels are dominated by Nubian cooking vessels so we see a kind of Nubian take over in the household related to cuisine now just as the Carmel civilization came to the to an end the Egyptian Empire also came to an end with a rebellion of Jen the Vice last Viceroy a push named pan Hesse who split the colony away and then ushered in what Egyptologists referred to was a dark age but I think that's only because there aren't a lot of texts which I guess is sort of the definition of an art a dark page that doesn't mean that not anything was going on and we have this this inscription of Queen kata mala suggests some kind of successor stage and that's what you know the newer archeology looking at this transition are finding lots and lots of continuities and not this notion of a kind of return to barbarism that eventually ushered in individuals this is the pharaoh nubian pharaoh taharka through a second wave of egyptian ization we don't really need to posit that Egyptian influence but rather we can see this as at least in part due to continuing these continuing cultural entanglements so here's Reiser again and of course he argued that in fact these Nubian dynasts were you know it sort of returned to barbarism and then and then you were actually Libyan Kings to start with and so on but this idea of the the Nubian colony sort of splintered apart into these small chiefdoms as usually the term used which again it's kind of hue to colonial or a language about africa after an egyptian withdrawal in fact there was no egyptian withdrawal the colony split away and we see this at places like MROs tombos and various other sites we see continuity across that divide and it's and what we see following this is a lot of entanglement and adaptation and I will go into this Katherine's going to be talking more about the royal side of things but this is how a kushai King represented himself as opposed to the sort of illustrations even from National Geographic that show Nubians let me just go back one second that shown you it's very much in the trope of the enemy that opposes Egypt from the new king rather than on their own terms that you see here so a Tumbo so I'd like to just look at how this plays out at a more at a more secondary level with a broader population at tombos so we see the continuing construction of pyramids this pyramid here over builds the ruin of New Kingdom tombs so I think it may date to the third and immediate period to be very exciting but we're going back this season and hopefully we'll be able to pin down the date a little bit better but it's definitely very very late maybe 2015 St like this pyramid here and it's important to remember that monumental forms and symbolism like pyramids at some point during their life in Nubia and there were dozens and dozens of pyramids built in Nubia before the 25th dynasty they become internalized they become not an Egyptian thing but really a nubian kind of Monument and so instead of looking to Egyptian pyramids as the inspiration for nubian pyramids I think you need to look at these local monuments the monuments of the Egyptian and eventually entangled many of these people were of Nubian ancestry who were important bureaucrats within the colonial apparatus and the point that this Claudia there's no reason to think that this colonial Opera apparatus simply disappeared and in Thom Bose we have a lot of hints of practices that we see later on in the 25th dynasty that represent these kind of complex adaptations and entanglements so we have this amazing horse burial beautifully done kind of echoing the horse barrows our priests aging the horse burials at El Carew with a bit of iron with very early piece of iron from about 900 BC and then even a little bit of jewelry that makes you think of the the elaborate tap and that we find at the in the burials at kuru and the pace of entanglement just increases so amongst the two muley we see Nubian practices like the tubular structures themselves beds bed burials and in black top pottery and then but still Egyptian amulets and scarabs and things the Scarab is quite interesting because it looks as if it doesn't have any good parallels so it looks as if it might have been a local product it's not gonna do that no it's not okay so I'll just go through these slides very quickly because I'm running out of time I apologize so one of these burials again burials showed this combination of things so we have a mummified burial and the remains of a coffin on top of the bed but with black top pottery so we see these complex sets of entanglement entanglements but again unlike that notion that the Nubians were a sort of a backwater Empire you see iron weaponry but juxtaposed with lithic tip weaponry and we see these from the royal tombs as well as other places imagery like this bowl with cattle on it that's very reminiscent of the bull from right here but fits into what what's been referred to as the International style of the Iron Age so you can see these kind of bull imagery and an elaborately decorated wooden box with images and I'll help you out here of a cow licking a calf and in front of that a Benin bird a stork so in this kind of a swampy motif it's kind of a papyrus swamp here's an ivory from Nimrod that shows you exactly the same motif so it's about about rebirth and and with a heavy a sort of overlay of cow symbolism another example of the God never to them again both the cows on either side quite unique but also tying in to the International style so here from Assyria from exactly the same timeframe images of knepper tomb but in this case flanked by deities and then finally inside of the box we found this amazing set of vessels this one made of fans this one is absolutely unique and I think must be a local product because it doesn't really find any close parallels but this one is a sort of PA stood resistance this beautiful little best vessel again that God best being very influential and this little frog lid quite remarkable and again we see this is tapping into a kind of international style both in the the Levant in the in the Levant with these examples including and monumental form but it's all best was and for other dwarf deities like potatoes were something the tide maybe itself together whoops could go back just very briefly there we go so we can see these kind of amulet spread around in both royal and non royal contacts up and down Nubia and there's that little beautiful potatoes that was found very much like the ones from the royal cemetery and just to finish so Nubia far from being a backwater it was actually a full participant and I think actually generating objects in this style mewtwo themselves a fully cosmopolitan civilization representing these different kinds of in cultural entanglement but coming up with new objects new material culture new theologies playing off of the Egyptian ideas so the Frog amulet this little frog lid there's actually a parallel all the way across the Mediterranean in Sardinia the bowls with with cattle imagery surround the Mediterranean found quite widespread another little object I didn't talk about that a little scarab with the cryptographic inscription that was common throughout the Mediterranean world but in fact is a very innovative variant and very sophisticated very autonomous so Nubians brought a new level of sophistication to their intertwining and adaptation of Egyptian material culture coming out of the colonial encounter but also the long history of interaction and then here a few acknowledgments for all our supporters and my co directors especially Michele Busan and Sarah Schrader thank you very much [Applause] okay good afternoon everybody thank you for having me I've been asked to speak to you today about the nafferton period and the fascinating use of Egyptian motifs by the Nubian kings first of all a quick introduction for those not familiar with the period in the first millennium BC after millennia of enduring repeated military incursions and colonial occupation by the Egyptians the Nubians we might say got their revenge in approximately 720 BC King Bianchi led an invading force that swept through Egypt this is the Stila in which he recounts his heroic exploits unfortunately as you can see at the top he's been rather chipped out so I actually have exactly the same picture Stuart just showed you it is a rather more lively representation of events now PNG and his descendants often called in Egyptology the 25th dynasty ruled over Egypt for the next century their successes even after being forced out of Egypt by pressures from the Assyrians maintained the cultural coherency of the dynasty who are known as the Mathison kings after the City of Napa their political and religious center located near the fourth cataract of the Nile in Afton period is traditionally considered to last until approximately 300 BC when the capsule of the Nubian kings moved south from nepeta to Mara today I will be talking about objects and buildings from the early and middle Nafferton period approximately 750 to 580 BC when contact between Egypt and Nubia was at its height so Nubia was finally militarily on top and yet rather than taking the opportunity to introduce Egypt to the wonders of fine pottery to mule eye and burial beds all traditional features associated with Nubian culture the Nafferton period is known instead for its Egyptian Asst this is long proved a problem for Egyptologists who have been so confused by the NAFTA Kings profuse Egyptian explosion that they can't quite seem to take it seriously scholars have long been looking for the differences between the Nafferton made or Naprosyn owned material and the Egyptian originals on which they were based to see whether the Nubians made any mistakes in their copying or indeed whether it's possible to see Nubian ethnic identity being asserted in the changes that Nubians have made to Egyptian motifs that is a kind of Nubian nurse coming through the problem is that on a surface level the nafferton Kings really haven't adapted the Egyptian models at all on the surface of a spelter that you see here this house here in the museum for example the religious texts that were being used on the sarcophagus were exactly the same as Egyptians even priests at the time chose for their coffins and in fact the versions of religious texts on the sarcophagi contain exactly the same spelling mistakes as the Egyptian versions suggesting very strongly that they derived from a single source we can see the same phenomenon on this shabti at the Knux in King stinkman ISKCON unlike his predecessors shap T's this one has a back pillar as you can see right here a feature that wasn't introduced into Egyptian shap T's until around 650 BC senkaimon ISKCON coming to power in about 640 then is really following the latest trends in Egyptian shap T design straight from the workshops of Thebes so if the naft in Kings borrowed these Egyptian motifs so literally what does this mean for our understanding of the Nubians Egyptian borrowing must we acknowledge that scholarly interpretations of the early 20th century were correct and that Nubians were unimaginative and awed by the great civilization of the Egyptians well no in fact I would argue that it would be a gross mistake to do so that would cause us to miss understand the relationship between Nubia and Egypt at this time the problem is perhaps unsurprisingly given how beautiful much of the material is that we have been blinded by the visual and concentrated only on what these things look like but people's culture is contained not just in their things but also in their actions if you'll permit me a modern parallel if any one of you were to open my kitchen cupboards at home you would find exactly the same ceramic vessels as in the average Americans that is thick-walled handled drinking vessels with a capacity of about 12 ounces otherwise known as mugs now one might think solely from their appearance that my assimilation to American society is therefore complete but a study of how I use the vessels would reveal that the liquid inside is tea not coffee that I pour milk into that team and that on special occasions I even dunk biscuits not cookies into the liquid inside now such actions can also have strong emotional bonds that are difficult to reconstruct from the appearance of the objects a Brits answer to any emotional crisis is after all a nice cup of tea so it's these ephemeral actions and even thoughts around the objects that we will have to find in order to properly understand the Egyptian motifs in apt and visual culture but then we are leaving behind the comforting solidity of the objects that remain and there are the objects themselves and we're literally chasing ghosts that is the people that moved around the objects now like most ghosts it helps to see them if you can look out at the corner of your eye and so today I will not be looking directly at the objects at their iconography and their forms but our patterns in how they appear they're archaeological context that is where they were left and where they were found and how they were made I will take a series of three themes today to illustrates the hidden non Egyptian estat the Egyptian motif naps and visual culture those of practice production and preeminence by the way I want to emphasize that by doing so we do not find some pure Nubian Asst either the nap returns governed that and their territory is one land with the presence in the 25th dynasty that stretched all the way in the South here from Nubia all the way up to Memphis and the Mediterranean Sea I will be talking about sites today that range from the fourth cataract of the Nile deep in Nubia and all the way that is sorry at the fourth cataract the Royal cemetery of Murray and the Temple of our moon at sanam all the way to Egyptian Thebes right here and therefore the material culture we're going to look at is a reflection of deeply entwined traditions from a vast swath of the Nile Valley in which the naphtha tons are reacting to their culture and circumstances and producing something new it is not possible and has never been to uncover some pure idea of Nubian culture from the material at this period it looks and in some cases is Egyptian but since Nubians used it it was at the same time Nubian and the Egyptian motifs that was so popular in the Knapton period came to define Nubian culture for future generations of Nubians to the royal cemetery of nura provides the starting point for our first theme that of practice murray is a vast pyramid field containing the tombs of kings and royal women founded by king - jaco of the 25th dynasty but mostly in use during the middle and late Nafferton periods despite the fact that most of the kings buried here were no longer in territorial control of Egypt we see perhaps the greatest proportion of Egyptian motifs of any inhabitant site here is just a selection of objects found in the burial assemblages shap t's foundation deposits and Egyptian hieroglyphic writing things made of files and other precious stones and metals that likely came from Egypt we've already seen how trendy some of these things were in an Egyptian sense in appearance then these objects are basically entirely Egypt but they were found in Nubia in use by Nubians an investigation a practice that is how the Nubians use these things reveals that the uses around the objects were significantly different to how they would have been used by an Egyptian in Egypt that is the object was adapted to make it meaningful in its new cultural context men at amulets a1 illuminating example where we're able to reconstruct how the Nubians would have interacted with an Egyptian style object while in Egypt these were either used as counterweights to balance out large necklaces or as votive offerings to the goddess Hathor archaeological context demonstrates that they had a far more particular use in Nubia rising there's careful documentation of his excavations that Nury allows us to see that in many tombs at Nuri these amulets were found on the staircase down to the burial chamber with one or two late carefully on every step one can imagine this reformed part of the funerary ritual as the priests left the tomb placing the amulets behind him before the staircase was filled in and that they therefore had a protective rather than a votive function even though they kept the bit visual feature of the stringing loop from their Egyptian function as necklaces sharpies offer a second example of the practices surrounding Egyptian material culture in naps and puri of Nubia firstly the fine spot of the figurine helps us to inform us as to the practices surrounding the shabti reissner's excavation notebooks and photographs show that when shaft keys were found in situ in the middle Nafferton tombs at nuri they were arranged standing around the walls of the burial chamber and this extract from risings diaries and every little cross represents where shap tees were standing so they were literally lining most of the tomb this is in contrast to Egyptian practices where shout T's at this time were often arranged neatly in boxes or just in piles on the floor of the tomb secondly the number of the shaft T's also separates the Nubian shaft ezzat nuri from egyptian examples the nubian kings especially are known for their quite frankly excessive number of shanties with sanctimony skin owning over 1200 both of these examples suggest that sharp tees were used with slightly different practices in Nubia than in Egypt one can imagine for example that the time-consuming task of arranging the figurines standing up around the walls might have formed part of the Nubian funerary summit ceremony these different practices also may have corresponding to differing beliefs about the function of shaft ease as guards for the body perhaps rather than servants for the afterlife in other words while the form of the shaft ease may have traveled more or less wholesale from Egypt to Nubia through reconstructing the behaviors of those who use the objects we can see that the use and meaning of the Egyptian object underwent significant changes in its new environment our second theme looks back in time not to the object in use but to before it was even made by looking at the processes that went into manufacture of Egyptian style objects the differing environment and priorities of the nafs and Kings become clear for this theme we'll go to the site of my ongoing excavations at the temple of King King Takako at sanam in the region of NAFTA King Takako was the master builder of the Knapton Kings building extensively throughout his territories in Egypt and Nubia as part of his construction program he built a network of temples dedicated to our moon throughout his nubian territory though the temple at sanam was explored over a hundred years ago by the famed oxford philologist francis llewellyn griffith he was interested unsurprisingly for the time in the interior of the temple where he hoped to find texts and monument or statuary since as you can see the temple built of soft nubian sandstone has been quite badly damaged and he was generally rather disappointed with the results and spent only a single season now one of the discoveries which he made but never investigated further were traces of production at the temple what he was unable to realize at the time since neither nuri nor the other royal since cemetery al crew had yet been excavated or published was that the shakti molds that he found were being used to manufacture figurines for the royal tombs so here you can see various different shakti molds that griffith found and here's an imprint that he took from one of them and then you can actually match some of the figurines to from nuri very closely to particular two particular molds for the shap t's now only royal family members in the Knapton period were permitted to own shap tees and shap tees are never found in the tombs of non royal individuals therefore what griffith dismissed as uninteresting in fact links the r moon temple with the burials of the nafferton royal family in a way that is not familiar to us from Egyptian monuments one of our priorities with the field work then has been to identify and investigate the production areas which must have been in use at the temple this is demonstrated that while the final appearance of the objects was Egyptian the processes that went into making them reveal the local cultural influences that determined their manufacture and the differing functions that they would have fulfilled in a nubian cultural environment now we were able thankfully to identify an area of extensive production debris in our first season in 2018 to the rear of the temple you should be able to see the hypostyle Hall right here and here is the production area where we found it literally directly outside the walls of the temple now over the past two seasons of work we have made several surprising discoveries most prized one sorry I couldn't help myself was our very own perfectly preserved shaft a mold into which the faience paste would have been pressed to create the fine facial details that you can see here the object type certainly has its roots in Egypt but here the shaft tees are clearly being made far south of Egypt in the heartland of the Knutson kings however the process of making fire on a tie of self glazing ceramic requires lime normally in Egypt we assumed that this came from limestone or from sand that was formed from limestone but in Nubia there is no limestone only sandstone so they needed to get their line from somewhere else one of the surprising finds we made in the production areas were quite frankly ridiculous qualities of tiny denial mollusk shells and I apologize now to my excavators they had a horrible time retrieving all of these along with large quantities of grinding stones and also faience beads and various wasters from the faience production process these kind of lumpy amorphous things you can see here now it's quite possible that the shells were being ground up to be used as an additive for faience production and that therefore despite the Egyptian appearance of the objects the process of making was marked as nubian and quite literally embodied in the laborious collection and subsequent grinding of shells that wasn't done in Egypt the location of these production areas is a further clue to Nubian practices that underlay Egyptian objects they are right outside the walls of the temple none of the surviving faience workshops from Egypt are located in a similar position where actually they're generally found in domestic contexts not religious ones the production of Egyptian style finance objects that Salim therefore is quite literally physically overshadowed by the Egyptian style temple why the production areas were sited here in a place not perhaps immediately obvious is suitable for the dirty hot work of Finance production can perhaps be understood by considering what role the Egyptian objects we see being made here had in Nubian society the craftsmen were clearly using nubian processes to create objects including shaft tees that only royal Nubians were allowed to possess so the craftsmen are making things that while they're not terribly money really valuable they were not actually allowed to use themselves and they're doing so while in the constant presence of monumental images of the king and a building whose access was probably heavily restricted possibly even to the craftsmen themselves the Egyptian objects that the Nafferton royal family used in their tombs were a way of demonstrating the Kings exclusive access to such objects and although they were eventually sealed away in the tomb both the production practices directly outside the our moon temple and the practices of use highly involved processes in which the priests were arranging the Egyptian objects in the tomb as part of the funeral ritual would have ensured that these Egyptian objects acted on a nubian audience in the desired way so the final theme preeminence demonstrates that practice doesn't have to be on the level of individual objects but can encompass whole systems of behavior now to look at this will move north to Egypt where the naps and Kings had to come up with creative ways to rule over such a large territory and ensure that the rule was accepted by the Egyptians while the King played a vital role here of course he also made use of royal women who were placed in priestly office in Thebes to wield immense power these women are known as the gods wives of our moon this title was an Egyptian office that had existed for centuries and therefore the nubian women were able to place themselves into a pre-existing Egyptian religious structure but in order to leverage the position for the political and religious requirements of Knapton Egypt they certainly didn't behave in ways that fitted with the Egyptian history of the office in doing so however they were not reproducing Nubian patterns of behavior for naps and royal women rather the exceptional circumstances of nafferton control over Egypt meant that the gods wives produced something entirely remarkable for both Egypt and Nubia and achieved a preeminence which only becomes fully visible through comparison of their visual culture with other examples from both Egypt and Nubia the first object I want to use to illustrate this principle is the Sphinx of chef and wife at the second holding before her a nemcek vessel in fact two very similar statues of her were found that were almost certainly erected in karnak temple in Thebes with one being found submerged in the sacred lake while the other one now in cairo was one of the nearly 800 statues found in the karnak Keshet in front of the temple's 7th pylon now the use of sphinx iconography by a woman was rare in ancient Egypt with only about 30 female sphinxes surviving those of Shep and web that are the only ones from the late period so she was certainly not taking any inspiration from her close contemporaries the reason so if you exist is because the Sphinx was generally a form that only Kings portrayed themselves as but if we look not only at the Sphinx form but what she is carrying the iconography of the statue becomes yet more striking there are no other examples known of female Sphinx is holding them set vessels and indeed only nine examples of royal mail Sphinx is doing so before this time all of them date from the New Kingdom some of these New Kingdom Sphinx is however were also found in the Karnak Keshet raising the intriguing possibility that Shep and whether saw these statues in karnak temple and was responding directly to them even more striking these earlier statues belong to ramses ii mightiest of all the pharaohs whose degree of building activity over his long reign was almost unparalleled Shep and whether then not only took the step of portraying herself a female priestess in a form that was normally reserved for male kings she also did so in a way that referenced a statue of the greatest king of them all one famed for the number of children he had produced as well as his extensive building activity with both Ramses and chef and what that statue likely on viewing karnak temple the message would have been clear on a purely iconographic level it would be hard to get more Egyptians than a f---ing ramses ii but here sharon weather is not concerned with egyptian asst but with advertising her unprecedented kingly power and influence in a most pointed and public why such statues are not the only way in which the gods wives of our moon and particularly chef and wet assumed kingly motifs and religious roles during the naphthene period in a way that while using Egyptian motifs betrays a distinct change in cultural and religious practice to what had come before all the gods wives built temples even at Karnak an activity that had been previously restricted to Kings while Shepherd went that the second even celebrated her own said festival the rituals of kingly renewal but I'd like to now point out another aspect of the gods wives of our Moon's use of kingly prerogative that echoes not Egyptian kingship but Nubian the gods wives are known for their tomb chapels in front of the great Theban temple of medinet habu where they were laid to rest beneath stone chapels that were labelled it elaborately decorated these burials fit within third Intermediate Period Egyptian traditions of burial chapels within temple enclosures rather than the pyramid burials of their family members in the royal burial grounds at new in Nubia their burial assemblage also points to a difference between the gods wives of our Moon and other nafferton royal women who were buried in Nubia and in such a way that the unprecedented kingly prerogative of the gods wife is emphasized again looking at chef and whether and she had large numbers of shabby figurines of multiple types being supplied with both stone examples and smaller violence ones now the use of multiple types of sham teas in a single tomb and particularly the use of stone shaft 'is not faience ones occurs only in kingly tombs in Nubia not the tombs of royal women a similar pattern can be seen when comparing Schieffelin with its monumental granite offering table with those of her family in Nubia such large well carved stone versions were much more common in Kings tombs and importantly there is only one other granite example known that belongs to a queen the rest were all kings canopic jars were also mostly restricted to kings and queens of the very highest status and perhaps most tellingly chef and weds tomb was furnished with inscribed foundation deposits while all of the mapperton Kings buried at Nuri had such deposits only one queen who had the extra special distinction of being both Kings wife and Kings mother was able to match chef and weapon in possession of inscribed foundation tablets such as this one in the range quality and materials of the tomb contents of the gods wives then the assemblages resemble more closely those of the Knapton Kings than they do even the queenly tombs in Nubia and show how nubian norms as much as Egyptian who are disrupted by the particular cultural circumstances of the Knapton period so as I have I demonstrated the use of Egyptian motifs in the Nafferton period is not a case of the Nubian seeking to straightforwardly adopt Egyptian culture it is also not the case that by stripping away the Egyptian motifs are in the visual culture of this time period we're left with a pure unadulterated Nubian culture by which we can somehow understand the true nature of rulers such as Jaco rather by looking somewhat askance at these very Egyptian looking things with archaeological methodologies we start to uncover a rich tapestry of practices which animated the objects as they were used practices of ritual of production and of preeminence these practices demonstrate the way that nafferton period kings and priestesses adopted Egyptian style objects into a vibrant cultural milieu of activity that stretched at times from the sixth cataract of the Nile to the Mediterranean Sea such conscious and learned manipulation of Egyptian visual culture no doubt had different effects on its audience depending on whether they were in sanim or Memphis but the subsuming of Egyptian motifs into Nubian cultural practice became an integral part of Natha tinfoil culture even after they no longer had control over Egypt in which ideas such as Nubian and Egyptian can no longer be separated from each other the objects and buildings that I've shared with you today demonstrate the strikingly mixed nature of visual culture in the nafs in period Nile Valley entangled multi-dimensional and completely enchanting [Applause] across the modern history of global popular culture the phrase nubian queen has appeared in the lyrics of hundreds of songs the examples that you see on this slide were sung by artists from New Jersey to Paris and from Cape Verde to Compton around the world the nubian queen has become an example of ancient history gone viral it has been repeated like a mantra and then merchandised as a product but why why is it that when popular culture invokes the idea of queenship the adjective Nubian is so frequently attached and conversely why is it that when popular culture invokes ancient Nubia the image of a queen repeatedly comes to mind for those outside of the very specialized academic field of new biology it might seem logical to assume that ancient Nubia is associated with Queens simply because ancient Nubia was usually ruled by a woman but this assumption would be mistaken more than 70 rulers of ancient Nubia are known to historians by name and more than 90% of them were men if ancient Nubia was not usually ruled by a woman then why has it become so pervasively linked to the idea of queenship in modern global popular culture one possible answer might be that the few women who did rule Nubia alone are commemorated today precisely because they were exceptional unique deviations from the patriarchy that otherwise defined the rest of the ancient world however this explanation must be confronted with the example of ancient Egypt as Egyptologist Carriacou Dee reminds us in her 18 book Egyptian Queens repeatedly did exert supreme political power over one of the most influential states of the ancient world Kunie even goes so far as to assert of antiquity that Egypt was the only state that consistently allowed female ruled Cooney's assertion threatens to turn our entire inquiry on its head if as Kuni proposes ancient Egypt was the only state that consistently allowed female ruled then why is it instead ancient Nubia that has become pervasively linked to the idea of queenship in modern global popular culture is that linkage actually an error a modern misunderstanding of ancient history to find out we need to go back to the early modern era throughout my lecture today I will repeatedly mark this timeline across the bottom of the screen in order to help everyone follow the sequence centuries before any archaeologists ever put a trowel to the ground in the Nubian region of Sudan modern awareness of ancient Nubia was heavily dependent upon translations of the Bible and one verse in the Bible loomed particularly large this verse in Psalm 68 Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God there are a few things that I want to highlight about this verse first the land of Nubia is called here in the King James translation by its Greek name Ethiopia this terminology often confuses modern audiences but it's easily explained the Greek term Ethiopia meant literally land of dark faces so it was a physical description of the inhabitants of many countries known to the Greeks but the Ethiopia best known to the Greeks was not the modern country the bears that name today on the Horn of Africa but rather the land of Nubia located immediately to the south of Egypt second notice the gender attributed to Ethiopia in this verse Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God it would be tempting to dismiss this feminine possessive pronoun as nothing more than some jacobi and poetic flourish on the part of the King James translators after all archaic forms of the English language often treat place-names as inherently feminine with phrases like britain and her colonies but let's look more closely at the ancient source on which this English translation was based the Bible as first composed in Hebrew the Hebrew Bible refers to Nubia as cush and the grammatical gender of that proper noun appears to have confused the Hebrew scribe translated literally the verse reads cush she stretches forth his hands unto God did the ancient Hebrew scribe understand the place name cush as grammatically feminine or as grammatically masculine to describe make a mistake here and if so which pronoun is the mistaken one to answer this question scholars employ a logical principle of textual criticism that is known by its latin name lectio difficuly or this principle holds that the more unusual phrase is more likely the original one because scribes copying a manuscript would more often replace odd phrases with familiar ones rather than replacing familiar phrases with odd ones since masculine pronouns are much more common than feminine ones in the Hebrew Bible Translators have consistently concluded that the feminine pronoun was the original one and thus that was regarded as somehow feminine by the original author of Psalm 68 the King James translation reflects this understanding of the passage so we have already some indication that the early modern linkage between ancient Nubia and feminine power apparently was consistent with at least one ancient source however it would take centuries before modern audiences would realize just how accurate this depiction of ancient nubian society really was in the meantime this biblical verse about ancient Nubia was catapulted to exceptional prominence the popularity of Psalm 68 in the early modern era derives partly from its translation in the future tense as a prophecy in the Hebrew Bible the passage seems to have predicted that at some future moment ancient Nubia would render either gifts or worship to the God of the Hebrews modern Christians however reinterpreted this verse about ancient Nubia has a prophecy about modern Ethiopians that is dark-skinned peoples of the modern world the ancient name Ethiopia land of dark faces seemed to map so easily onto modern concepts of race thus the first book ever written about people of African descent in the Americas had this verse emblazoned in Latin on its cover as a prophecy that enslaved Africans in Cartagena Colombia would one day accept Christianity for enslaved people's themselves the verse eventually became a source of Hope in the litany of examples that I'm about to rattle off for you notice the changing content of the prophecy and the consistent retention of the feminine pronoun in 1774 Bostonian poetess Philip Phyllis Wheatley interpreted Psalm 68 as a statement about the religious Redemption of African descended peoples worldwide writing I hope that which the divine royal psalmist says by inspiration is now on the point of being accomplished namely Ethiopia shall soon stretch forth her hands on to God just two decades later Bostonian prince hall founder of the Prince Hall Mason's wrote of the Haitian Revolution thus doth Ethiopia began to stretch forth her hand from a sink of slavery to freedom and equality and as a Mansa patient later approached in North America author Francis Harper published a poem entitled Ethiopia in which African Americans as a collective were embodied in the figure of a long-suffering woman named Ethiopia the poem concludes with the words then Ethiopia stretch o stretch by bleeding hands abroad thy cry of agony shall reach and find redress from God these and many other uses of Psalm 68 cemented Nubia biblical Ethiopia as a symbol aspiration across the early modern world and their consistent use of the pronoun her in reference to Nubia simultaneously reinforced the belief that this country was somehow uniquely feminine it is perhaps worth reminding ourselves at this point that all of these modern sentiments were invoking an ancient passage and one that in its original ancient context was specifically about Nubia this fact is easy to forget because early modern audiences between the 1620s in the 1850s had access to very little information about the ancient state upon which that biblical verse had been based harpers Ethiopia stretches out her hands abroad but the poem focuses more on the pronoun her than on the adverb abroad more on the femininity of Ethiopia than on its geographical location evidence about ancient Nubia would however soon be forthcoming during the same years when Harper was composing her poem the Prussian Egyptologist Richard lepsius was conducting one of the first epigraphic surveys of ancient Nubia the relief scenes that he copied featured numerous ancient nubian women sometimes occupying pride of place in the scene either in front of men and closest to the God or executing the traditional duties of the supreme ruler such as smiting the country's enemies this representation of women would have been unusual in ancient Egypt but lepsy is founded repeatedly in Nubia many of these scenes dated from the 1st century AD and lepsius was quick to connect them to a passage in the New Testament book of Acts referring to conduct queen of the Ethiopians but the prominent representation of nubian women was not confined to the 1st century AD other examples discovered by Egyptologists during the mid 19th century revealed a similar pattern and many of these dated to much earlier periods of Nubian history the scene that you see here derives from the early 6th century BC and the figure shown at far right is a nubian queen whose direct speech to the gods is inscribed in hieroglyphs immediately in front of her in the inscription below this scene the king of Nubia justifies his right to rule by listing off seven generations of his female ancestors perhaps most intriguing was the fact that similar depictions of women increased in Egypt during precisely the era when the Nubians annexed Egypt in the eighth and seventh centuries BC it's 25th dynasty notice the woman here who stands in front of her husband in a manner seldom attested upon Egyptian monuments the woman in question is actually Egyptian but she appears here as a subject of the new nubian dynasty so the gender conventions employed were presumably those favored by the Nubians the hieroglyphic inscription below the scene then explains that the nubian royal women accompanied the army during its annexation of Egypt and that it was these nubian women who first received the obeisance there of the conquered folks the evidence for feminine power in ancient Nubia discovered in the middle of the nineteenth century gradually became known to the world outside of Egyptology the American poet Walt Whitman was among those especially interested in the Walt Whitman archive I found this note by Whitman in which he inquires to a colleague about those discoveries made in Ethiopia by the Egyptologist Richard lepsius Whitman's inquiry then gave rise to a poem entitled Ethiopia saluting the colors in which a newly freed african-american woman named Ethiopia salutes the Union soldiers as they withdraw from the Confederacy after the American Civil War the poem repeated repeatedly describes this woman as ancient a double entendre that positions her as both an elderly American who has lived her entire life enslaved and simultaneously as an inheritor of a mysterious African history that fascinated Whitman in his decision to Center the poem around a woman Walt Whitman may very well have been influenced by the long-standing tradition of representing Ethiopia as feminine but literary scholars have also noted an additional motivation during the Reconstruction era America was embroiled in debates about whether to extend voting rights to african-american men Whitman effectively sidestepped this controversy by focusing his poem instead upon an african-american woman Whitman had reinforced the popular linkage between Nubia and femininity but one of his principal reasons for doing so had absolutely nothing to do with ancient history at all a very similar dynamic manifested just a few years later across the Atlantic during the early 1870s Giuseppe Verdi's Egypt Dominic Opera Aida present a premiered in Cairo and then across Europe the scenario for the Opera had been drafted by a French Egyptologist Auguste Mejia and Mariette included authentic details called from ancient inscriptions recently discovered in Nubia most significantly of course the title character of the Opera was a nubian princess even so Verdi's purpose was not to faithfully portray an ancient history but instead to disguise a modern political commentary about the Italian Risorgimento ancient Egypt would represent the Habsburg imperialism of 19th century Austria an agent Nubia would represent the victim Verdi's Italy to this end when the nubian princess Aida came to center stage the music would turn to chromatic harmonies and woodwind orchestration designed to evoke sympathy for Nubia as an allegory for Italy as one of the most popular operas ever performed countless times across the past century from Verdi to Elton John Aida remains one of the most influential forces linking Nubia to femininity in modern popular culture for many people in the modern world that the Aida character is Nubia perhaps the only Nubia than they ever know but the linkage thereby cemented with between Nubia and a stereotyped femininity not yet between Nubia and feminine power from phillis wheatley to giuseppe verdi ethiopia stretching forth her hands was still viewed as a suppliant figure pleading to power rather than wielding power herself this characterization would begin to change during the first half of the 20th century in 1913 progressive staged an event known as the Americas making exposition in which represent representatives of various ethnic groups would each produce an exhibit highlighting their groups aspirations and contributions to American nationalism for the african-american component of the show the organizers recruited a famous sociologist an ardent supporter of women's suffrage none other than Harvard man WB Dubois Dubois chose to represent African Americans in a way that was both historically deep and socially inclusive he produced a theatrical performance entitled the star of Ethiopia in which the leading actors were all women portraying figures from ancient history the starring role was that of kondakov queen of the Ethiopians from the Christian New Testament chandâga stretches forth her hand here to direct the action exercising her own power not imploring someone else to exercise theirs on her behalf in a survey texts of African history published just two years later Dubois explained to readers that according to the research of Egyptologists can do was not the name of a single nubian queen but instead a title given to multiple Queens across Nubian history who often reigned alone atop the political hierarchy to accompany the star of Ethiopia pageant Du Bois then hired Bostonian sculptor B to work fuller to craft a single piece embodying african-americans as a collective for inspiration fuller came here to Boston's Museum of Fine Arts where she spent hours touring the museum's collection of Egyptian art the statue that fuller ultimately produced to symbolize african-american aspiration was that of an ancient Nubian woman reanimated after a long slumber fuller entitled the piece Ethiopia awakening explaining that it was specifically meant to recall the power of Egypt's Nubian dynasty the 25th dynasty the following decades would then witness the rapid development of archaeological excavation in Nubia itself thoroughly revolutionising modern knowledge of the ancient past the leading figure in that development was undoubtedly George Reisner curator here at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts Reisner excavated several of the most important archaeological sites in sudan greatly expanding the available evidence for feminine power in ancient Nubia many of these finds uncovered by reissner's team are now on display here at the Museum the amulet that you see here on your left depicts a nubian royal woman being suckled by a goddess a conventional scene known also from Egyptian art but one usually reserved for kings one of the additional effects of reissner's research was to demonstrate that feminine power had very deep roots in ancient Nubia in a richly furnished burial at the site of kurma from the second millennium BC he found the skull of a woman still wearing her elaborate silver headdress now reissner's attitudes toward the subject of gender were somewhat complicated he taught his own wife and daughter to read Egyptian and he did advise and support at least two white female Egyptologists but here at kurma it seems that his beliefs about race thoroughly disfigured his rotation of feminine power a process that scholars now call intersectionality Rhys interviewed the Nubians as racially distinct from and decidedly inferior to the Egyptians so the power that he could envision for this ancient Nubian woman was nothing more than the power to degrade Egyptian culture rise in her wrote of the burial quote the positions of the female in primitive polygamous communities is easily misunderstood by modern Europeans her functions approach more nearly to those of an animal and she clings with ignorant and uncomprehending obstinacy to the practices of her Neolithic ancestors Ethiopia was no longer typecast as a suppliant woman reaching out for assistance for Reisner her outstretched hands were now somehow threatening it was clearly not reissner's intention to promote an ideal of nubian queen ship for posterity but published work and museum collections have a way of taking on a life of their own reissner's archaeological research provided abundant evidence from which later generations could draw their own conclusions including not just professional scholars but also readers in the general public by the middle of the 20th century ancient Nubia was established as a symbol of feminine power and the explosion of print culture and then digital media rapidly disseminated that idea to increasingly diverse global audiences one of the most striking examples derives from very recent news in April of 2019 this photograph went viral it shows a young Sudanese woman named Alice Allah leading the protests for civilian governance in sudan sudanese supporters quickly dubbed her candana the exact mechanisms of feminine power in Nubia are still a sub much debate among professional scholars but the ancient reality of that power is now indisputable moreover as my brief survey today has attempted to demonstrate Ethiopia stretching forth her hands has repeatedly inspired modern peoples around the world for this reason alone the intriguing case of the nubian queen is certainly deserving of commemoration thank you [Applause] [Music] [Applause] so good evening ladies gentlemen and many thanks to the BM FA to invite me for this lecture what I want to show in my lecture are basically three points first that settlement excavations in Nubia in the sudan can teach us a lot about the normal life of the normal ordinary people and I will probably show you that Nubian or heretic settlement looked probably very different from what you would expect and that accordingly life in such a settlement was apparently organized in a very urban way well the setting in the last or first millennium BC that means at that time in which we play here developed after the retreat of the Egyptians the koshered Kingdom to the south of Egypt and it had two centers originally the one in nepata near the jebel barkal as you see in the photo and parallel to it developed further south between the 5th and the 6th cataract another Center Mary the special thing about Mary was it was let's say much more in the Iron Age it was one of the largest if not even the largest production center of iron and not Eastern Africa in their time that means about the mid of the first century of 1st millennium BC sorry towards the end of that millennium and became the political center of the kingdom he bethought for example in the century BC quarters they eat you the capital of the order of all other Ethiopians finally in the 3rd century BC the royal cemeteries were located in that area around Mary and from that time on actually the region are on Mary let's say simply boosted somehow it developed a kind of what we call an urban landscape with many settlements along the Nile with many temples and palaces and also spread into the savannas for kilometres into the savannahs like for example year Naga in the last picture you can see here well from the early excavations in Nubia and Sudan we you'll see here for example John Gaston's excavations between 1919 1914 and a royal cemetery of Mary and George reissner's excavations from the royal pyramid cemeteries of mirror we learned quite a lot about the temples about the palaces about the royal circumstances of life about the chronology of the of that Kingdom but actually what do we actually know about the normal life of the normal people that means of those ones who build all these palaces and pyramids and so on how their settlements looked like and what kind of houses they were living where they are living in straw houses or drowned hoods certainly not in palaces what did they eat for example how their lifestyle was unfortunately from these excavations we didn't learn very much about that not very well ok here our story starts or begins when John Gaston was excavating a mirror in 1914 he let's say I don't know exactly how he did find them but maybe it was a weekend holiday trip he made very short distance two miles to the south of the capital of Norway you see that on the right side in the place called Hamada he found to steal a to steal a carved the text craft an iron stone you see here one of his photographs and they were located exactly you see in third place in an island like mount in the midst of the flood plain until today these both still a which were excavated by him indeed the longest known neurotic inscription which we have from the Sudan Acosta excavated both till a transported the bigger one of them it's a huge two and a half metre high stealer to the British Museum where it is no the small steel and Gaston also excavated a little temple behind that stealer unfortunately I must say the steel a didn't tell us very much about the normal life of the people because we still don't understand the language well Gaston was as I already said basically interested in securing or getting the steel a he excavated the temple and you see the temple itself the central part of the temple very normal almost Egyptian like layout of a small temple but it's a bit unusual because it has a lot lateral rooms which we couldn't interpret yet on the entire amount which you see on the left side from you know other structures have been visible except that we have around a number of iron slag heaps and it is completely scattered or it was completely scattered with portraits and brick fragments well that led to some speculations what kind of site that could have been one of the more prominent speculation was of course that in fact this small temple was one of those temples which we know which are lining up sometimes the processional way of a larger temple standing in front of the temples another speculation was for example that was kind of maybe summer residence of the royal house from the capital which was basically two miles away well when we started and we means the home but in that time home bought University of Berlin - and the University and the Sudanese antiquities service of a joint project in 2001 work at the site we actually didn't really believe these older hypotheses about the temple site and so on especially because of the finding of the iron slag for example which doesn't fit to the temple site and which also doesn't fit to a summer residence of royal house or something like and we were quite lucky and so far is that we encountered the tops of the ancient walls already coming up to how to say this in English I'm not so very well in English near to the service to the present service of today that means but other words when we took away about five to seven centimeters of dust of sour we would find in many places the ancient walls so we decided for that reason not to make Punk oil deep excavations as normally archaeologists is always dreaming of because we said ok we may have the chance not to go by not going into the depth into into the ground but going into the surface to map the structures and to better understand them before we start excavating them and then understand their chronology so we did it took us we are to get a complete what you see here in that area took us almost ten seasons and this everything was mapped I must say also that I thought we made such kind of surface clearance which you see on the line on the left side and everything was met 1 to 20 so we were able to record every single brick every charcoal piece every pot sherds and so on and what you see what appeared was not a temple it was a kind of settlement this was we are looking for and it is certainly not what you probably expected to be a normal settlement of that time since 2005 we use geophysics first of all magnetometry that means you use the special device without excavating you map the area by the magnetic anomalies that gave us a larger picture of the whole mound and gave us also the complete extent and the enclosure wall of the settlement but the structures themselves are not very clear later on we had the chance to use ground-penetrating radar and that was really surprising for us and and because they didn't see a number of walls especially in the lower part of that area that settlement very clearly every single wall we also use other methods for example here RT on the left side and drillings but they are not so effective well combining that together then you see what we found out and this was for us absolutely surprising yeah till 2000 before we started you see the settle that the mound was just known the temple on the right side you see that the complete mount was a complete settlement exactly what we hoped to find if you shown let's say in a in the 3d in a schematic 3d the model it looks like this just so that the first stage after the excavation of John Garstang and 1909 after offer surface clearings and now we have roughly dead picture and this is base this is no fantasy this really based on the excavations well let's have a closer look to it what we have and this is what we call the Upper Town that's apparently a plan settlement its main features is of course a town wall almost rectangular a parallelogram of exactly 104 by 104 meters that means exactly two hundred by two hundred cubits Egyptian cubit we have a central Main Street which divides the whole settlement exactly in the in the middle at the end of the Main Street in a central place you have to town temple this is the one which was excavated by Gaston it's quite for us also very interesting that you see the temple has not its own Temenos it's not divided from the other structures it's really integrated into the town structures it has a public forecourt that is basically a plaza in front of the temple is the main street and it has also got to be excavated in the last season the bigger public open space to the right of it in the corner downstairs at ons there sorry though we have the administration of the town and that as you see already has a clearly urban character it is not a village it has not much space for example to have cattle or to have storages to store grain or other things it is very densely crowded and what is important from what we know also from the chronology shows us it is really an artificial and artificially made thing it is a planned settlement what we call in German a plan start the whole thing is we have an in the north we have debt settlement and then we have kind what we call it suburbs further in the south so we can divide this apparently we have dense and regular urban structures in the enclosed settlement which is apparently mostly domestic with the sacral and administrative unit and the suburbs in the South are not fortified they are less rectangular have more open spaces and from what I will show you and some of the pictures later you will see there was apparently also concentrated the virtual areas and let's say the kind of industrial area of the place well it's clear that this and this is also what it includes let's say that this settlement was housing a non agrarian population and that rises of course also some other interesting questions for example how these people they are provided with substance with food with other things which they not produced himself the people by the way although we found them let's say and that was on an odd amount about half a kilometer away from the settlement here in the top there is another large amount and we didn't I must say we didn't find it themselves they have been grave robbers and these grave robbers showed us in 2005 that they are that they are graves so we made also give physics their magnetometry there and found out that there must be something about 300 tombs graves they don't have a superstructure anymore that's eroded so it's that way pretty safe but interestingly from the grave goods which have been found there we really can say first of all it is a kind of middle-class society which which was living there and there are also various which by the way also typical for the marital period various finer area traditions so we have for example stretched and we have crouched positions of the skeletons as you see a lot of grave good well starting in 2008 when we had enough funds let's say to make also deeper excavations we were again surprised because we were actually really so now if that we at the beginning belief that we have a one single period settlement would be perfectly easy matter you know that we have one construction period which gives us the settlement as it is when we started excavating we saw it's exactly the opposite so we have a vertical chronology or stratigraphy of up to four five meters and the interesting point is also which this schematic picture over there shows you we have also a kind of horizontal stratigraphy because it's a mount like a tell that means that what we have in the center on the highest point of the Mount the youngest preserved remains of the settlement and the more you go to the outside the earlier you come and you have then the earlier settlement periods there let's say document it well sorry and then the underestimated we we had ability to take a lot of total samples several more than 100 charcoal samples which have been date if you took them from basically from the streets and from other places and we could build up such a chronology in four phases and that's very interesting that these phases coincide also with these main phases of the muriatic kingdoms history early phase 300 so that means parallel to the early majority period and so on but I will show you some of them especially in this early phase now this is for us period II this is the early Neolithic period the so called what we call the upper town was not existing yet but apparently he must have developed in normal kind of village also settlement we didn't found it yet find it yet what the evidence we have of that time are you see these pots large early mitotic vessels sometimes very nice ones painted ones which have been reused turned upside down and reused as ovens for bread and kind of open-air bakeries we cannot explain this yet but you don't have further structures of their time unfortunately at about 100 BC entering the classic muriatic period that up at home was planned and founded and you see I grayed out what is later you see the outside these structures are much more regular than the in the center so that's really planned and let's say the first features which we are built we are certainly the enclosure wall and the main street and basically the temple you see them which we re excavated that whole area got a minimum of four reconstruction periods over the time of the whole settlement these BOTS delay of mana Dinah's one as I said which is known British Museum well dateable they are set up in the third probably third construction period more interesting for us is to point the sacral Center for example how it was structured it was interesting you have a paved main street in front of the temple you have plantation pits for trees which we are linked with irrigation channels we have an also a public world in the main street well the administration in the south east of the settlement is the biggest house which we have there very prominent with so-called case foundations with vaulted storerooms and if you reconstruct it that was really astonishing or architect was able to reconstruct it and probably a four to five story building very much influenced by the Ptolemaic architecture the town gate also very Ptolemaic for example could directly compared some over there and medina not so well preserved and then in the later periods what happens then with the settlement and their time state support decreases because the economic power of the kingdom goes down and temple the state official buildings temple and an inspiration administration are finally abandoned and the settlement spreads out again into the suburbs from that period interestingly we were able to excavate a house we could follow it through about seven building periods it's really the the first muriatic house which was in detailed excavated and from this house for example we have a lot of samples which tell us what the diet the main diet of the people was it was basically summer crops different kinds of millet sorghum we found cotton seeds which show that cotton was really cultivated in that area mostly was used cattle also chips and gold but they were also bonds of wild animals of mild products and we also analyzed the wood species which told us what also very interestingly that more than 90 percent of fuels which was used was occasioned niloticus growing there well.all fines are not that nice like from Graves from well-preserved even not from royal graves but they give us an idea of the lifestyle in the dead area in such a settlement yeah we have oil lamps we have a little of a little box different kinds of amulets and so on and most important and most interesting for us at least is the pottery we have several thousands of vessels no not seven thousand vessels but portraits of several thousands of vessels and that all was produced locally also interesting so we found the pottery kiln six pottery kilns next to centrally in that area and finally also developed in the later period I must say Aaron production in that area which was then kept up under the medieval period so that means we have a settlement which is really self sustained you can say this oh well okay I think time is almost over and the future work of that excavations will be of course to make now the structural comparisons to other settlements mostly in Egypt Ptolemaic Egypt but also to later Roman period and other settlements and that is still a lot of work but I hope I could show you that life in melodic Nubia was apart from the Royal life quite a very urban matter which we know also from Hellenistic tomb is not so different on Sofia at the edge of our civilization [Applause] [Music] thank you to all our great speakers I'd like to invite them to have a seat here and now is your chance to ask them all of your saved up questions so and thank you again for such illuminating programs and also for sticking to time [Applause] I'll be ready in a minute I have about [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] from but they fly so it doesn't give us much knowledge just probably a dozen countries but you know knowing and the second difficulty is so it's difficult just in the last year's we are according to this assumption they are quite near to the ancient period because itself is not so and there is a possibility to approach it but this knowledge was is very young and as long that was again very difficult for the understanding of [Music] secondly I guess it is basically these people were living in gentlemen according to the structures in which they must have had a rather so life that means there has been probably not that many farmers but that does not mean that there were no people living for example as workers and field I could imagine so it is far too early too so I guess but why it was exactly in the middle of the floodplain and I could imagine that this was order to house people directly on the spot it means people who were working on the settlement which wasn't so far so the and by the history of the settlement especially in the centuries ad when the state control went down the states in order started probably also exchanging goods with how hard it was controlled at the beginning we can't say but I guess that the beginning of that settlement that was indeed made by the government and supported by the royal house which probably distill so I've been excavating in or doing survey entity and like Pablo for a big chunk of my career so for 20 years now and evenlyn relations between the United States and Sudan have been extremely poor the Antiquities Authority in sedan has been extremely collegial and welcoming and so they're very interested in foreign expeditions and even American expeditions and you know across that twenty years I've never had run into a problem being an American now of course there's a caveat that goes with this and that's that I've stuck to denial and particular parts this again so I would hesitate even now to go to Darfur for example or the border with Ethiopia or the border with South Sudan but the political situation has by and large not you know affected archaeology I'd never had a problem you know getting permits to do things even when yet you passed checkpoints and things like this and I've never really been harassed at all by the police they've always been very polite and professional and somewhat interested in what we were doing we always get a visit from the local security guys and then you know just to see what we're up to and of course we have a representative from the antiquities Department with us which is these people are not just inspectors like you have in Egypt where they're you know kind of looking out primarily for you know the interests of the Egyptian government in the end antiquities service or the Ministry of Antiquities there but they're really colleagues so they you know they obviously do you represent you know the Sydney's and deputies but they also are really a part of your team and in fact the our long-standing inspector hassan mohammed ahmed actually got his PhD based on the data from our and it's worked with us and our project so those kind of collaborations are possible which is really nice in the current political situation because it was volatile over the summer but it seems to have stabilized in what we all hope is going to be a good trajectory towards civilian government and improvements in human rights and so on and so far and I'm planning Catherine's planning to go out very shortly and I'm planning on going out January and and so far everything seems to be running nicely so and the the people in the north you know that actually work in you know where the people are still speaking Nubian and Nubian is the other primary primary identity and and they're just incredibly nice people welcoming I never had a problem with any of the local people and Sunnis the Sudanese I've encountered in general are all you know just have been really welcoming really great to work with very helpful so I wouldn't hesitate if you're going you want to go with you know a legitimate outfit because there's still some logistical issues to traveling around and again and you wouldn't want to go to this place as I mentioned but if you're going to see the sites that we've been talking about then I wouldn't hesitate to go hi and that's just talking about the deportation so all around is but then you were suggesting that they were using shells or what we're hoping so actually it's a relatively new project we've only been out for two seasons at this point and I I do seriously hope that we're going to be able to do some analysis of the finals material there's there's some logistical issues surrounding that we either have to get kind of the equipment into Sudan in order to do the analysis something like a portable XRF machine that well probably not impossible it's very challenging in terms of getting the licenses we need to do that or we have to get the finance out of the country and bring it so that we can analyze it here and that requires again it's possible but it requires a slightly lengthy application process with the with the sudanese antiquities service to get permission to bring that out so I very much hope to do that at some point and actually a similar kind of analysis has been done on Egyptian faience from the same time period so we would have great data to be able to compare what we have with the locally made stuff works at home with what was being made in Egypt and the 25th and 26th dynasty so I hope it would be very telling watch the space thank you [Applause]

Channel: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Views: 1,382,746

Keywords: lecture, course, art history, nubia, ancient nubia, kush, fine art, ancient art, african art

Id: lbdE5De-8UQ

Length: 124min 8sec (7448 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 28 2020