mandate called for the excavation as well as the discovery and recording of all important sites.

The survey was active in the field for four seasons from 1907 to 1911. It was directed in the first season by george a. reisner and in the subsequent years by C.M. Firth. By its own reckoning, the team excavated 151 cemeteries and over 8,000 individual graves, of all periods from the predynastic to the late medieval. However, only about half a dozen sites other than cemeteries were investigated and only one with any thoroughness. Townsites were mostly bypassed because they appeared to be of recent date and the excavators believed that the later phases of Nubian history were adequately documented by historical records. Temples were also bypassed because, since the Aswan Reservoir was to be emptied every summer, the buildings would still be available for study during the summer months. However, a considerable amount of architectural consolidation was undertaken to protect the buildings from the effects of wave action and currents.

The major contribution of the Archaeological Survey of Nubia was the discovery of a whole series of previously unsuspected Nubian cultures that had no Egyptian counterparts. Because they were historically unrecorded, Reisner simply gave them letter designations: A-Group, B-Group, C-Group, and X-Group. The first three were believed to represent a developmental sequence, spanning a period from about 3400 to 1600 b.c., and the X-Group was a unique Nubian culture corresponding to the time of Byzantine rule in Egypt, ca. 350–600 a.d. These designations, except for B-Group, still remain in regular use among archaeologists working in Nubia.

Having developed the basic chronological framework for the understanding of early Nubian history, Reisner’s interest in the country was thoroughly aroused. In 1913 he asked for and received, on behalf of Harvard University and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, a concession to excavate the great early Nubian necropolis at Kerma. When this work was completed in 1915, the Harvard-Boston expedition was granted a series of other concessions that eventually embraced all of the Kushite royal monuments at both Napata and Meroe as well as the great Middle Kingdom Egyptian fortresses in the area of the Second Cataract. These excavations occupied the Harvard-Boston expedition over a period of twenty years and formed by far the largest body of coordinated archaeological activity carried out in Nubia up to that time. The results provided the backbone for all later studies of the Kushite period.

In 1928, plans were made to heighten the dam at Aswan, an operation that would flood an additional 120 miles of the Nile Valley upriver as far as the Sudanese border. In advance of this destruction, a second archaeological survey was set in motion under the direction of walter b. emery. It was in the field from 1929 to 1934 and excavated a total of 76 cemeteries and about 2,400 individual graves. Once again, as in the first archaeological survey, the emphasis was almost wholly on mortuary remains, although the Emery team did excavate one Kushite townsite and one ancient Egyptian fortress. The major discovery of the second survey was the great X-Group of royal tombs at Ballana and Qustul near the Sudanese border, which showed for the first time that Lower Nubia after the fall of Kush had evolved a powerful chiefdom of its own.

Concurrently with this second survey, a number of distinguished Egyptologists and epigraphers were commissioned to draw up architectural plans and to copy all the inscriptions and reliefs in the temples that would be inundated by the newly enlarged reservoir. At the same time, a German expedition led by Georg Steindorff excavated a series of A-Group, C-Group, and pharaonic cemeteries in Egyptian Nubia while the Italian scholar Ugo Monneret de Villard undertook, at his own expense, a complete survey of all medieval Christian monuments from Aswan to Khartoum. Later in the 1930s, British expeditions from the egypt exploration society and Oxford University worked at several pharaonic and Kushite townsites and temple sites in northern Sudan.

Virtually all of the archaeological expeditions to Nubia before World War II were led by Egyptologists, and their work exhibits the typical characteristics of Egyptological archaeology. There was heavy emphasis on the excavation of