Early Archaeology in Nubia

Because of its historical connection with Egypt, Nubia has always been regarded by Egyptologists as part of “their” rightful domain. However, chaotic political conditions prevented any actual exploration in the country until the early nineteenth century when Nubia was once again annexed as an Egyptian colony. The Swiss explorer J.L. Burckhardt made the first full traverse of the country by any European in 1813, noting along the way a number of ruined Egyptian temples, including the huge rock-cut colossi of abu simbel. He was followed over the next three decades by several other explorer observers who left descriptions and sometimes woodcut illustrations of the major Nubian antiquities. Systematic and scientific investigation began, however, with the monumental work of karl richard lepsius, who between 1842 and 1845 copied all of the then-visible hieroglyphic inscriptions and reliefs on all of the ancient monuments both in Egypt and in Nubia as far south as the ruins of Meroe. His resulting five-volume Denkmaler aus Agypten und Athiopien (1849) remains today as the sole authoritative source for a great many monuments that have since been destroyed.

In the later nineteenth century, political conditions were again disturbed as a result of the Mahdist rebellion in the Sudan, and field investigation did not resume until after the Anglo-Egyptian reconquest in 1898. The highly publicized military campaign in the Sudan aroused a great deal of interest not only among the general public but among archaeologists, and within a decade of the reconquest, no fewer than nine expeditions took the field in the Egyptian and Sudanese portions of Nubia. In the years immediately following the reconquest, Wallis Budge of the british museum carried out a series of rather desultory excavations at several places in northern Sudan while James Breasted and a team from the University of Chicago’s oriental institute made photographic records of all the major temples and inscriptions in Nubia. A little later an expedition from the Vienna Academy of Sciences began work in the area just upstream from Aswan, and two expeditions, one from Oxford University and one from the university of pennsylvania museum, worked on sites in the Egyptian-Sudanese border area. Far to the south, a Liverpool University expedition began to excavate the royal palace compound at the city of Meroe, and an expedition privately financed by Sir Henry Wellcome, a pharmaceutical manufacturer, worked at Gebel Moya south of Khartoum. The architect Somers Clarke, also with private financing, undertook to record all of the medieval Christian remains of both Egypt and Nubia.

Although all the early expeditions, except that of Wellcome, were led by Egyptologists, it is noteworthy that they did not confine themselves to only the archaeological remains of the pharaonic periods. Several of them dug at sites of the Kushite period, and the Oxford and Pennsylvania groups, as well as Somers Clarke, also made major contributions to the study of medieval Nubian remains. There thus arose very early the idea that Nubian archaeology should be a unified study, embracing the whole history of the country, rather than being strictly divided between the Egyptologist and the medievalist, as was the case in Egypt. On the other hand, all of the early expeditions, except that of the Pennsylvania Museum, paid primary attention to monumental architectural remains, mainly of the pharaonic and Kushite periods, although several also did some excavation in cemeteries. There was a conspicuous neglect of townsites, which mostly appeared to be of medieval or later date and which, in any case, were not expected to yield attractive and intact objects for display.

The single most important turning point in the development of Nubian archaeology came about through an act of destruction. The Egyptian irrigation authorities had built a small dam on the Nile just above Aswan at the turn of the century, and in 1907, it was decided to enlarge it so as to create a lake almost 100 miles long. The region to be inundated included a substantial part of Lower Nubia and a number of its important temples as well an unknown, but presumably large, number of other sites. In advance of the destruction, the Egyptian Survey Department sponsored what was, in fact, the world’s first archaeological salvage program. It was called the Archaeological Survey of Nubia, although its