Ducommun + Elshazly: Kerma and the royal cache (original) (raw)
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The Nubian pharoahs: black kings on the Nile
Choice Reviews Online, 2007
Krzysztof Grzymski After briefly catching the world's attention during the 1960s, when an international archaeological salvage campaign was carried out between Aswan in Egypt and Wadi Halfa in the Sudan, Nubia returned to its quiet, almost anonymous existence. It took a while to realize that south of the man-made Lake Nasser (as it is called in Egypt) or Lake Nubia (as it is known to the Sudanese) lies an archaeological promised land. Despite the fact that entire buried cities were to be discovered on the banks of the Middle Nile, very few archaeologists decided to explore the sites of Upper Nubia and Central Sudan. The logistical difficulties of mounting an archaeological excavation in the backcountry of the Sudan meant that only the most intrepid scholars undertook the challenge, among them a Swiss archaeologist, Charles Bonnet. He led the team from the University of Geneva that in 1973 began excavating the remains of the city of Kerma. The site, located south of the Third Cataract of the Nile, had previously been explored from 1913 to 1916 by Reisner's Boston expedition. Reisner worked mainly in the cemeteries, excavating enormous tumuli of the chiefs of Kerma. The Swiss mission concentrated its activity in the urban area near a large mudbrick structure known as the Western Deffufa. The patient and diligent work of Bonnet and his colleagues unearthed the foundations of numerous houses, workshops, and palaces, proving that as early as 2000 B.C.E. Kerma was a large urban center, presumably the capital city and a burial ground of the kings of Kush (Egyptian name for the Kerma Kingdom). Egyptians must have seen Kush as a formidable enemy, considering the size and number of fortresses erected near the Second Cataract by the Middle Kingdom pharaohs. Eventually, ca. 1550 B.C.E. the Egyptians finally invaded their southern neighbor, destroying Kerma and extending their control of the Nile Valley all the way to the Fourth Cataract. Bonnet has spent his life excavating the remains of the Kerma civilization, with remarkable results. Field reports were regularly published in Genava, and two volumes of final reports have already appeared. In 1990, he organized an exhibition on ancient Kerma in Geneva's Musée d'Art et d'Histoire. The first chapter of this elegantly published book gives an extensive outline of the history of the site from the Neolithic to the Meroitic periods based on the results of three decades of work. Yet the most dramatic discovery made by Bonnet, and the main subject of the book under review, did not belong to the Kerma culture. It was of a much later date and was the result of a side project on the Egyptian New Kingdom (ca. 1550-1080 B.C.E.) and the native Napatan-Meroitic (ca. 800 B.C.E.-350 C.E.) remains found at a place called Doukki Gel (a Nubian term meaning the "red mound") on the outskirts of modern Kerma. Some of this research was carried out by a Sudanese member of the Swiss team, Salah Mohammed Ahmed, who presented the first major overview of the excavations at the Meroitic temple of Doukki Gel at the Nubiology Congress held in Boston (T. Kendall, ed., Nubian Studies 1998 [Boston 2004], which should be added to the summary bibliography in Bonnet and Valbelle's book). It soon became apparent that the history of the Doukki Gel temple could be traced back to the Napatan and the New Kingdom periods. It is fortunate that shortly before the discovery of those Egyptian New Kingdom remains, the Swiss team was joined by an Egyptologist, Dominique Valbelle, coauthor of the book and responsible for the epigraphic aspects of the project. The discovery of the Doukki Gel temples and the identification of the place as ancient Pnubs is the subject of the second chapter. The original temple dedicated to Amun of Pnubs was founded by Thutmose III but destroyed in the later years of Akhenaten when the site was transformed to the worship of Aten. Nineteenth Dynasty kings then rebuilt the Amun temple. The native Nubian kings who ruled Egypt as the 25th Dynasty rebuilt the temple again, as did their Napatan successors. It was
Nubia Bibliography 2001-2012 is the up date of Nubia Bibliography up 2000 compiled by UNESCO in the frame of the International Campaign for the Establishment of the Nubia Museum of Aswan and the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization in Cairo. This Bibliography includes a separated section dedicated to the Merowe Dam Archaeological Salvage Project, and other related articles, conducted in the past years at the Fourth Cataract of the Nile. UNESCO, not directly involved in such Campaign, acknowledges, with this small contribution, its achieved scientific results through the dedication of national and international teams of experts. To compile a Bibliography of Nubia became a challenging and hard work. This field of study, born with the International Campaign to Save the Monuments of Nubia in the sixties, has now evolved, covering a span of time which goes from prehistory to the modern era. It involves not only archaeology, traditionally associated with it, but various other scientific disciplines. Furthermore, with the intensification, in recent years, of archaeological researches in the surrounding deserts and other regions of Sudan, the discipline tends to give more and more space to comparative studies which are not only limited to those with Egypt. Due to this compleixity, the creation of an Online Interactive Bibliography of Nubia (OIBN), organized by subject, area, historical period, author and date, would be the best and easier way to keep updated (directly by the researchers) this work.