By Aaron de Souza
For the last ten years or so I’ve been deeply interested in ancient Nubian cultures of the Second Millennium BCE – in particular the so-called ‘Pan-Grave’, ‘C-Group’ and ‘Kerma’ cultures.[1] I can’t tell you exactly what about them it is that intrigues me so much, but a big part is the objects that these communities made and used. Quite simply, the objects are beautiful. Sure, pharaonic stuff is dazzling, too, but ancient Nubian objects have a simplicity, sophistication and timelessness that I find quite special. And everything feels distinctly human – you can really sense that these were objects made by people, for people. They fit neatly in your hand, and you can often see traces of use and wear from thousands of years ago (Cover Image/Figure 1). You can get a sense of what Nubian material culture looks like here.
But over the last couple of years, the themes of my work have shifted to a bigger and more fundamental questions – What do we actually mean when we talk about something being ‘Nubian’? And likewise, what do we mean by ‘Egyptian’ in the context of the ancient world? And where, how, and – most importantly – why do draw such clear divisions between cultural entities? This very brief piece doesn’t aim to offer clear answers to what is an extremely complex topic – indeed the very idea that there are clear answers to such questions would entirely miss the point. Instead, the goal is to give readers some pause for thought by posing questions and raising ideas that might seem obvious, but perhaps they are so obvious that they are often forgotten in our endless pursuit for understanding the world.
So – back to the fundamental question. What do we mean by ‘Nubian’? And what do we mean by ‘Egyptian’?
The first thing to consider is geography – where does Egypt end and Nubia begin, or vice versa, depending on your perspective? Most often, we hear that the First Nile Cataract (near modern Aswan) is the boundary or the ‘frontier’ between ancient Egypt and Nubia. This certainly seems to be the case from the perspective of pharaonic ideology and also in terms of landscape. The First Cataract is, as the name suggests, the first physical obstacle that one encounters when travelling southward out of Egypt by river (although keep in mind that this is an Egypto-centric perspective, and the same locality is the last cataract when travelling from Nubia!). We also know that the Egyptians had different names for the lands south of the Cataract, for example Wawat, Irtjet, and Kush, each of which referred to different ‘sub-regions’ (Figure 2). However, if we look at the region as a whole in terms of material culture and culture more broadly, the division becomes far less clear.
There are numerous cemetery sites described as ‘Nubian’ along the length of the Nile north of the First Cataract, and it has been recently suggested that a ‘cultural’ boundary might be perceived somewhere near Elkab.[2] There are also substantial quantities of Nubian-style cooking pottery in Egyptian towns such as Elephantine, Edfu, and Elkab.[3] So the impression from the archaeology is that the region was rather multicultural, or like a broad zone where the pharaonic and ‘Nubian’ cultural spheres overlapped. In fact, it seems that the ancient Egyptians themselves considered this region as a kind of border zone. The Egyptian name for the southernmost nome (an administrative region) was “Ta-Seti” – meaning “Land of the Bow” – which was also a general term applied to the lands south of the Cataract, namely ‘Nubia’. Not only that, when the Egyptians established the office of the Viceroy of Kush, the jurisdiction of that official began at Elkab in Egypt and extended south. So in many ways, this southernmost part of what we would consider ‘pharaonic Egypt’ was in some way perceived by the Egyptians themselves as a transitional zone.
But even from a modern perspective there is a lack of clarity. When most Egyptologists talk about ‘ancient Egypt’, they are implicitly referring to the narrow strip of the Nile Valley from the Mediterranean coast to the First Cataract, near modern Aswan. Anything south of the First Cataract is ‘Nubia’, and the deserts to the east and west of the Nile are… well… deserts. It’s also not uncommon that the terms ‘Nubia’ and ‘Sudan’ are used interchangeably, but this is also incorrect. All of what we know as ‘Lower Nubia’ (i.e. between the First and Second Cataracts) is situated within the borders of modern Egypt! So it is important that we, as scholars, are clear in our use of such terminologies and that we say what we mean. It’s a topic I’ve discussed before in a few lectures, one of which you can watch here, if you’d like to.
Let’s now go back to that fundamental question (What is ‘Nubian’ / ‘Egyptian’?) and look at it through the lens of material culture.
To do this, we can go back to the “Nubian-style” cooking pottery that I mentioned earlier. It occurs in considerable volumes at Egyptian settlement sites north of the First Cataract such as Elephantine, Tell Edfu, Memphis, and even way up in the Eastern Delta (Figure 3). We suspect it is cooking pottery because it is rough and ‘utilitarian’ in character, but also because most examples show clear evidence of secondary burning on the exterior from use over a fire. But why do we think they are ‘Nubian’? Firstly there is a technological distinction; these pots are not turned on a wheel, which we assume to be a feature of Egyptian-style pots. Secondly, these vessels often have incised linear decoration that is not dissimilar to vessels found in ‘Nubian’ burials. But are these factors really enough to separate these from the assemblage as something “different”?
Once again, we can start with geography; if these pots are found at settlement sites through the Egyptian Nile Valley, why aren’t they considered ‘Egyptian’? We also don’t know where the pots were originally made, so if they were made locally in Egypt using Egyptian materials, are they still ‘Nubian’? Then we can also consider social and cultural questions. Was the person who made the pots culturally Egyptian or Nubian… or a Nubian person who lived in Egypt? And who used the pot? Was that person Egyptian or Nubian? And what did they cook in the pot? Egyptian food? Or Nubian food? Or both? And how do all of these factors affect how we perceive the pot? And why does any of this matter in the first place?
These questions about objects can be easily transposed onto any kind of material culture, even entire burial assemblages. If a grave includes ‘Egyptian’ and ‘Nubian’ objects, what does that mean? Or if we find an ‘Egyptian’ grave in Nubia, what makes it ‘Egyptian’? And vice versa. What does it tell us about the deceased person? What does it say about the living community that they were once a part of? And how do those things relate?
In the end, all of this comes back to questions of identity, which can be impossibly complex. It’s especially complex when we only work with material culture, and Bettina Bader has recently written an excellent synthesis of the many complexities of this topic, which you can download for free here. Not only that, but our understandings of ancient identities are inevitably shaped by our own experience of existing in the world based on factors like age, gender, ethnicity, economics, sexuality, and all manner of things.
I often use myself as an example in situations like this. I was born and grew up in Australia and I hold an Australian passport, but my parents are from Singapore, and our ancestors are a mix of Malay, Portuguese, Dutch, and who knows what else. My full name (Aaron Marc de Souza) is partly Hebrew, partly French, and partly Portuguese, but of those three things I can only claim a loose connection to the latter. English is my “mother tongue”, but I also now speak fairly decent German after having lived in Vienna for a few years. I grew up eating mostly southeast Asian food and, even though I live in Austria, I still cook those foods using whatever ingredients I can get, often in wildly ‘inappropriate’ cookware.
That’s all about my life – but, like everyone else, I will eventually die. Of course I can’t know what my burial will be like. But if (heaven forbid!) I were to die tomorrow, I am sure my parents would give me a Catholic burial, even though that is no longer really part of my personal belief system. That Catholic identity is something that my parents would have projected onto me, because it is important to them and it would give them comfort. I wouldn’t really care because well… I’d be in the grave! But in that moment of burial, all of those things I described above – the foods I ate, the languages I spoke, the ideas I had – all of those things that made me ‘me’ would become all but invisible, because my living community buried me in what they considered the ‘right’ manner. So, this is something we have to think about when we encounter the ancient world primarily through graves and burials. What are we seeing and not seeing? Or – more correctly – what did the people who conducted the burial want us to see and not see?
I could go on about this, but we would be here for days! As I said at the start, this short post didn’t aim to answer any questions, but rather I hope I’ve encouraged readers to think about the kind of questions we need to ask of our data. Humans are complicated creatures, and we behave in complicated and often unpredictable ways, so the way in which we approach ancient communities should be equally complex and consider all the possibilities.
Bibliography
Bader, Bettina. 2021. Material Culture and Identities in Egyptology. Towards a better understanding of cultural encounters and their influence on material culture. Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences.
de Souza, A. M. 2020b. Pots, Gold, and Viceroys: Shifting Dynamics of Egyptian-Nubian Relations at the transition to the New Kingdom, from the viewpoint of Middle Nubian pottery at Tell Edfu. Ägypten und Levante 30 (2020): 314-343.
de Souza, A. M. ‘After ‘InBetween’: Disentangling cultural contacts across Nubia during the Second Millennium BC’, Sudan and Nubia 25 (2021): 230-242.
Forstner-Müller, I. and P. Rose (eds). Nubian Pottery from Egyptian Cultural Contexts of the Middle and Early New Kingdom. Proceedings of a Workshop held at the Austrian Archaeological Institute at Cairo, 1-12 December 2010. Vienna: Austrian Archaeological Institute, 2012.
Raue, D. ‘Cultural Diversity of Nubia’ in D. Raue (ed.), Handbook of Ancient Nubia, 292-334. Berlin: 2019.
Aaron de Souza is an archaeologist specialising in Nubian material culture of the Second Millennium BCE, and his research takes an object-based approach to the complex inter- and intra-cultural contacts that took place across the greater Nile Valley. He is currently a Lise Meitner Postdoctoral Fellow at the Austrian Archaeological Institute in Vienna and prior to that, he was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow, also at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Aaron works as a Nubian material culture specialist with numerous excavations in Egypt including at Tell Edfu, Hierakonpolis, and Aswan. He is also a co-founder and editor of the online journal Interdisciplinary Egyptology, hosted by the University of Vienna. You can follow Aaron on Twitter @aaronmdesouza.
[1] D. Raue, ‘Cultural Diversity of Nubia’, in D. Raue, ed., Handbook of Ancient Nubia (Berlin: 2019); A. M. de Souza, ‘After ‘InBetween’: Disentangling cultural contacts across Nubia during the Second Millenium BC’, Sudan and Nubia 25 (2021): 230-242.
[2] A. M. de Souza, ‘Pots, Gold, and Viceroys: Shifting Dynamics of Egyptian-Nubian Relations at the transition to the New Kingdom, from the viewpoint of Middle Nubian pottery at Tell Edfu’, Ägypten und Levante 30 (2020): 314-343.
[3] See chapters in I. Forstner-Müller and P. Rose (eds)., Nubian Pottery from Egyptian Cultural Contexts of the Middle and Early New Kingdom. Proceedings of a Workshop held at the Austrian Archaeological Institute at Cairo, 1-12 December 2010 (Vienna: Austrian Archaeological Institute, 2012); de Souza ‘Pots, Gold, and Viceroys’.
Cover Image and Figure 1. Studying Nubian pottery in the storerooms of the Museum Gustavianum, Uppsala University, Sweden. Image Credit: A Grubner.
Figure 2. A schematic map showing the complex spatial relationships between different regions in and around the Nile Valley. Map drawn by A. de Souza, author’s own image.
Figure 3. Sherds of Nubian-style cooking pottery from Tell Edfu. Author’s own image, © A de Souza – The Tell Edfu Project 2017.
History Journal 
Leave a comment