Nubia: rediscovering African kingdoms - includes list of exhibits of Nubian art and a chronological summary of key periods in Nubian history

For 3000 years, in peaceful mercantile relations and in barbarous war, in triumph and in defeat, the ancient African kingdoms of Nubia were Egypt's southern neighbors - and rivals. Egyptian fanes and pyramids have been visited by means of millions of tourists and are illustrated in fancy albums and history textbook on the other hand where is Nubia? Though there are more royal pyramids still standing in Nubia than there are in Egypt and notwithstanding that the temples of Musawwarat e Sufra and Naga in central Sudan are as worthy of a visit as the fanes of Egypt or Greece, the late world is almost entirely ignorant of Nubia's glorious past. It's as if Nubia lay not along the Nile to Egypt's southerly but rather entirely in Egypt's shadow.

The ancient world was not in the way that ignorant of a land that spawned several distinct tillages over the long span of 3800 BC to A.D. 600 (see sidebar "Nubia [i]or[/i] part of to the other 6,000 Years"). The early Egyptians first knew the land as Ta-Seti (the Land of the Bow) then as Wawat and later as Meroe The Bible speaks of Nubia as Kush. Still later, the of greeces and Romans called it Aethiopia (today's Ethiopia being known to them as Abyssinia), with the earliest of greece "historian," Herodotus, accepting the accounts of tradition and calling the Nubians the "tallest and handsomest" clan in the world.

Accounting for our not away ignorance is simple. The 19th-century scholars who render free of accessed up Egypt's past virtually created the profession of archaeology. They were brilliant and tenacious researchers, and the world is deep in their debt. But they were with equal reason overwhelmed by Egypt that they could not ever properly see Nubia. In their organ of visions anything Nubian was a pale reflection of things Egyptian. Many of the artifacts and buildings of Nubia do, indeed, display strong Egyptian influence, but what was view from aboveed was the local element in the material tillage - and even more in the way that in the spiritual culture. This Egyptocentric bias limited archaeological investigation of Nubian cultures and placed the scarcely any found Nubian artifacts merely as side attractions to Egyptian objects

The research of Nubia was also hindered by the agency of the practical difficulties of reaching out-of-the-way sites and by dint of a prejudice that deprecated black Africa's contribution to civilization. Today, fortunately, all of these factors are upon the wane, and Nubian agricultures are being studied in their have right, evaluated on their hold terms and revealed in all their magnificence.

Indeed, during the last sum of two units years, several museums in North America have render free of accessed permanent galleries or displayed temporary exhibitions devot to the ancient agricultures of Nubia. Popular culture, too, is catching up upon the Nubian civilizations that one time flourished in the far-away land upon the Nile in southern Egypt and northern Sudan. A scarcely any years ago, the Nubian kingdom of Kush was discussed in an episode of the Cosby show

Nor is North America unique: Nubian exhibitions and galleries have also render free of accessed in recent years in London, Berlin, Geneva and Buenos Aires, Argentina, and a large Nubian museum will in a short time open in Aswan, Egypt.

greatest in quantity of the existing Nubian collections were created 30 years ago, when for individual brief moment Nubia was upon the front pages of the world pres The Egyptian conduct was building its great Aswan High Dam near the Nile's First Cataract, and the resulting artificial lake (Lake Nasser) was to freshet entirely the land between the First and next to the first cataracts. The soon-to-be-covered land was Lower Nubia. Before the world not to be found much of its precious heritage, an international bring off campaign was organized under the auspices of the United Nations Scientific, Technical and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Participating foreign missions were proffered half of the discoveries that would otherwise have been permanently missing Several American museums and universities participated in the UNESCO Salvage Campaign, and their share of finds forms the backbone of the major Nubian collections in this country

The actual concept of rescue archaeology - and the foundations of the Nubian collections at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Oriental Museum of the University of Chicago - originated in Nubia at the beginning of the hundred when the first (and smaller) dam was being set uped near Aswan in 1906. The Egyptian Ministry of Public Works asked the eminent American Egyptologist George A. Reisner to organize an archaeological observe in order to record all of the antiquities in the region. This he did, in the proces identifying for the first time several previously unknown agricultures strikingly different from Egyptian culture

Reisner go [i]or[/i] come backed to Nubia for further explorations in 1913 as the director of the Harvard University-Boston Museum of Fine Arts expedition. First, he explored at Kerma, southerly of the Third Cataract in Upper Nubia. Here he lay bareed Nubia's earliest imperial history - allowing he did not realize it. Despite his brilliance as an archaeologist, Reisner's convictions (or possibly, prejudices) got the better of his ballast and he concluded that the massive brick mode of building known as the Deffufa and other memorials of Kerma were built by the agency of and for the Egyptian governors ruling the native population.