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Equally important has been the continuing excavation at Qasr Ibrim in Egyptian Nubia, a fortified townsite originally situated so high above the Nile that the impounded lake waters have not quite reached it. Excavations conducted by a British expedition since 1963 have revealed that the place was a major political, administrative, and religious center in every successive Nubian civilization, from pharaonic times to the early nineteenth century. The elevated situation at Qasr Ibrim has resulted in the total preservation of organic materials, and the site has yielded literally thousands of inscribed documents in nine languages, from hieroglyphic to Turkish. Collectively, and in some cases individually, these have substantially revised the interpretation of many episodes and periods in Nubian history.

Also important have been a number of expeditions working on Paleolithic and Neolithic remains, not only in the Nile Valley but in the adjoining Eastern Desert and the Red Sea Hills. As a result of this work, it is now apparent that Neolithic cultures in the Sudan were much more diversified than was previously thought. There are, in addition, European and American expeditions working at the pharaonic and Kushite temples of Napata, at the townsites of Meroe and Naqa, at the old Christian Nubian capital cities of Dongola and Soba, and on medieval remains in the Third Cataract area. About a dozen major expeditions are working annually in the Sudan at the present time, only a minority of which are now led by Egyptologists. Although present-day techniques of excavation control and recording are vastly improved over those of earlier times, expeditions generally continue the older tradition of working for extended periods—often an indefinite number of years—at a single site. Their aim continues to be basically historical rather than problem focused: to recover everything possible about the history of a site rather than to address specific historical or theoretical questions.

In the broadest sense, the major achievement of the high-dam campaign and subsequent excavations has been the development of a new paradigm, or perspective, of Nubian cultural history. To a large extent, this is owing to the entry of anthropologists and prehistorians into what had previously been regarded as a field of Egyptology. Where earlier scholars since the time of Reisner had tended to see the successive phases of Nubian cultural development as evidence of the arrival of new peoples, or new foreign influences, the new perspective emphasizes the continuity of Nubian cultural development from beginning to end. This view is now generally accepted by the Nubian people themselves as well as by most of the scholars who study them. It provides the theoretical backbone for the newly developed discipline of Nubiology, which, unlike Egyptology, embraces all phases of Nubian history from the Stone Age to the present.

Thanks to its destruction by the successive Aswan dams and the attendant salvage campaigns, Lower Nubia is probably the most thoroughly investigated archaeological zone in the world. There was literally not a square yard of its territory, for a distance of over 300 miles, that was not at least examined from the surface at some time prior to its inundation. Although many sites were eventually destroyed without adequate excavation, the number that went wholly undiscovered was almost certainly very small. The amount of archaeology done in the three salvage campaigns is probably greater than would have been undertaken for several centuries had it not been for the coming inundation.

William Y. Adams