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The First Colonial Empire: Egypt in Nubia, 3200-1200 B.C.Author(s): William Y. AdamsReviewed work(s):Source: Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 26, No. 1 (Jan., 1984), pp. 36-71Published by: Cambridge University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/178519 .Accessed: 02/10/2012 21:50

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The First Colonial Empire: Egypt in Nubia, 3200-1200 B.C. WILLIAM Y. ADAMS

University of Kentucky

A century ago the phrases "darkest Africa" and "the dark continent" were encountered often in European and American literature. The darkness, one would suppose, was in the minds of the writers, signifying their general ignorance of African geography and ethnography. Yet I doubt if many who spoke of darkest Africa thought of it in quite those terms. For most of them, the darkness was in the minds of the Africans themselves; a metaphor for their moral backwardness and for their ignorance of the higher arts of civilization. African darkness thus contrasted with European and American enlighten- ment-and the contrast provided moral justification for Europe's mission civilisatrice.

Four thousand years earlier, on the same continent, the equivalent of "darkest Africa" was "miserable Kush." The ancient Egyptians seldom referred to their African neighbors in any other terms; they too professed a moral superiority which incidentally provided a cover for more than two thousand years of colonial domination. Nor were the attitude and policy of the pharaohs any less justified-or any more justified-than those of the latter- day colonial powers. Contemplating the world as they knew it in 2000 B.C., they could recognize no civilization or power equal to their own; they had as much reason to believe in manifest destiny as had any later people.' My purpose in this article is to outline the process of Egyptian colonial expansion into Africa between 3200 and 1200 B.C., and to point out some of the ways in which it anticipated the colonial enterprise of the great European maritime

powers between the fifteenth and twentieth centuries.

Parts of this article are based on five chapters from my book, Nubia, Corridor to Africa (Allen Lane and Princeton University Press, 1977). In it I have drawn extensively on earlier work, and particularly Torgny Save-S6derbergh's Agypten und Nubien and W. B. Emery's Egypt in Nubia. Since the article was first written, two other important discussions of Egyptian colonialism have appeared: B. J. Kemp, "Imperialism and Empire in New Kingdom Egypt," in P.D.A. Garnsey and C.R. Whittaker's Imperialism in the Ancient World, and Paul J. Frandsen, "Egyptian Imperialism," in Power and Propaganda, edited by M.T. Larsen (Copenhagen, 1979), 167-90. Nevertheless, my own ideas are also expressed here, and some of them are at variance with accepted Egyptological theories.

I On this, see B. J. Kemp, "Imperialism and Empire in New Kingdom Egypt," in Imperial- ism in the Ancient World, P.D.A. Gamsey and C.R. Whittaker, eds. (Cambridge, 1978), 8-14. 0010-4175/84/1282-7144 $2.50 ? 1984 Society for Comparative Study of Society and History

36

FIRST COLONIAL EMPIRE: EGYPT IN NUBIA 37

The process of Egyptian colonial expansion in Africa involved three major stages. The first was a period of more or less uncoordinated exploration and plundering, which served to make the Egyptians aware of the economic resources and opportunities beyond their southern frontier. This was followed by the establishment of trade relations with a powerful interior chiefdom, backed up by an Egyptian monopoly of trade on the lower Nile. Still later, the Egyptians saw a greater profit in the imposition of direct control over their southern neighbors, and the native monarchy was displaced by a full-fledged colonial regime. However, changing economic and political conditions ultimately made the cost of maintaining the colonial enterprise greater than its revenues justified. At that point, the colonists withdrew, leaving behind an Egyptianized population whose political, economic, and religious institutions for the next 2,000 years were the legacy of their colonial experience. It was these Egyptianized "Aethiopians" that caught the attention and the fancy of classical writers such as Herodotus2 and Strabo,3 who fostered the myth that Aethiopia, i.e., Nubia, was the fountainhead of Egyptian civilization itself.

As I will show in later pages, each of the major stages of Egyptian colonial expansion was paralleled in one way or another in the colonial enterprise of the European maritime powers at the end of the Middle Ages. Reasons for these parallels, as well as their limitations, will be discussed in concluding paragraphs.

EGYPT AND NUBIA

The life cycle of Egypt's ancient civilization is usually described in terms of three climaxes of political centralization and cultural creativity-the Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms-interspersed with episodes of political disin- tegration and cultural stagnation. The pharaonic nation-state was apparently created by force of arms at just about the beginning of the historic period; during its first several centuries (Dynasties I-III, ca. 3200-2600 B.C.) the pharaohs were chiefly engaged in consolidating the realm and subjugating their own people. When that process was completed, Egyptian civilization reached its first flowering under the Old Kingdom (Dynasties IV-VI, ca. 2600-2200 B.C.), whose most enduring monuments are the pyramids. A growing tendency toward feudal separatism in the Sixth Dynasty was followed by the breakup of the pharaonic state and a period of political disunity (Dynasties VII-X, ca. 2200-2000 B.C.), and then by an uneasy restoration of central authority under the Middle Kingdom (Dynasties XI-XII, ca. 2000- 1800 B.C.). This is envisioned as an age of military feudalism during which unification was achieved through the efforts of a series of exceptionally strong and able pharaohs;4 when their grip weakened, the local dynasts once again

2 Herodotus 2.29-30; 3.17-25; 4.69-70. 3 Strabo 7.1-2. 4 For this interpretation, and for the general outline of Egyptian history followed here, I rely

heavily on John Wilson; see his The Culture of Ancient Egypt (Chicago, 1951), 125-53.

38 WILLIAM Y. ADAMS

asserted their independence and the state collapsed (Dynasties XIII- XVII, ca. 1800-1600 B.C.). Parts of northern Egypt were overrun by Hyksos invaders from southwestern Asia-the first successful foreign incursion into Egypt in historic times.

Efforts to expel the Hyksos were ultimately successful and resulted in a reconsolidation of pharaonic power-the New Kingdom or Empire-on a more militaristic and imperialist basis than ever before (Dynasties XVIII- XX, ca. 1600-1000 B.C.). Pursuing the erstwhile Hyksos invaders into Pal- estine and Syria, the New Kingdom pharaohs fell heir to a considerable empire in those lands; almost immediately afterward they also pushed their dominion up the Nile as far as the Fourth Cataract, far in the African interior. However, the effort of maintaining an overseas empire in the face of Hittite, Assyrian, and other Asiatic powers eventually placed an impossible strain on the pharaonic state and economy, and after the Twentieth Dynasty the foreign conquests were largely relinquished. The Egyptian state went into a long period of decline (Dynasties XXI-XXX, ca. 1000-332 B.C.) and was itself prey to a series of foreign conquerors, until in 332 B.C. the Macedonian Alexander finally put an end to the age-old pharaonic succession.

Egypt's civilization arose and for a long time flourished in relative isolation from other peoples. The northern frontier of Egypt was the Mediterranean and its shoreline swamps; the eastern and western frontiers were the desert mar- gins of the Nile Valley. Only in the south was there active and direct contact with alien peoples, but here too there was a fixed cultural and ethnic frontier at the First Cataract of the Nile, just above moder Aswan. Here ended the relatively broad and incredibly fertile valley which stretched unbroken from the Mediterranean, and which was the cradle of Egypt's civilization. All evidence suggests that despite occasional periods of political disunity, the inhabitants of this valley were, ethnically and racially, one people since before the historic period, speaking a common language and sharing a common cultural tradition.

The First Cataract of the Nile, like the other numbered cataracts to the south, is formed by a barrier of naked and eroded granite through which the river has cut a tortuous gorge. This formation extends5 up the river for about thirty-five miles, within which arable land is confined to small and discon- tinuous silt banks here and there along the river. Farther to the south are occasional reaches of broad floodplain with fairly high levels of agricultural productivity, but they are interspersed with equally extensive granite zones of minimal productivity. In each granite zone, navigation is impeded or pre- cluded by innumerable rapids, of which the six numbered cataracts are only the largest. This alternation of fertile and infertile zones, and of navigable and

5 For the sake of clarity, I have described the topography and other features of Lower Nubia throughout this article in the present tense, although they have in fact recently disappeared beneath the waters of the Aswan Reservoir.


non-navigable reaches of the Nile, continues upstream as far as the junction of the Blue and White Niles, deep in the heart of the Sudan.

The parochial civilization of Egypt, dependent as it was both on the fertility of the valley and on the navigation of the river, was for centuries unable to

expand beyond the barrier of the First Cataract. The people who lived to the south continued to pursue in most respects a Neolithic way of life even while their northern neighbors reared the towering edifice of pharaonic pomp and

power. Pharaonic civilization impinged on them, as we shall see, but it was an external, alien force. Even when Egyptian ideas and ideals were finally im- planted in the south, in the time of the New Kingdom, they were not accompanied by substantial numbers of Egyptian settlers. Indeed, the reluctance of the Egyptian masses to live and die anywhere but within the confines of their familiar valley has been remarkable from ancient to moder times. As a result, the racial, ethnic, and linguistic frontier at the First Cataract has remained as fixed throughout Egyptian history as have the more immutable frontiers represented by the deserts and the sea.

For convenience throughout this article I shall refer to the dwellers beyond the First Cataract of the Nile-the southern neighbors of the Egyptians-as Nubians, though this is a term whose use goes back only to the beginning of the Middle Ages. To classical writers, the Nubians were known as Aethio- pians (burnt faces);6 the ancient Egyptians recognized them by still other names, perhaps most commonly as the inhabitants of miserable Kush.7 Never at any time before the twentieth century were they referred to as Egyptians, despite their frequent imitations of Egyptian culture and their long subjugation to Egyptian political rule. They continue to speak today, as they probably have throughout history, an indigenous African language unrelated either to Arabic (the modem language of their neighbors) or to ancient Egyptian.8 They remain also racially distinct from the Egyptians, exhibiting a stable blend of Caucasian and Negroid strains which apparently goes back to the beginning of history.9 This hybrid character results in the Nubians usually

6 The term Aethiopian, occurring in a classical text, may refer to any black African. However, since the only Africans of whom the Greeks and Romans had any detailed knowledge were the dwellers to the south of Egypt, it follows that Aethiopian can usually be read as Nubian. The term very seldom has reference to the region known today as Ethiopia (formerly Abyssinia), which was largley beyond the ken of the classical world.

7 The name Kush did not, however, come into general use until the period of the New Kingdom. In earlier times there was no single generic name for the southern lands; they were called by a variety of local names.

8 In Joseph Greenberg's classification, the Nubian languages belong to the Eastern Sudanic branch of the Nilo-Saharan family. The are closely related to certain remnant languages found in the western Sudan, and more distantly to Shilluk, Dinka, Nuer, and other languages of the Nile headwaters. See Joseph Greenberg, Languages of Africa (The Hauge, 1960), 86-129.

9 Earlier theories of Nubian history laid great stress on periodic "racial migrations"; alternate infusions of Caucasoid and of Negro blood were supposed to account for periods of cultural creativity or of stagnation. For discussion of these racist theories and of the supposed evidence on which they were based, see my "Continuity and Change in Nubian Cultural History," Sudan Notes and Records, 48 (1967), 15-18; and "Invasion, Diffusion, Evolution?" Antiquity, 42:167

40 WILLIAM Y. ADAMS

being designated as "black" by the Egyptians and other freign viewers, whereas the Nubians tend to identify themselves with the northerners in contrast to the much blacker, and largely uncivilized, peoples who dwell still farther up the Nile.

THE PRODUCE OF NUBIA

Although the Egyptians never showed much desire to live in Nubia, they very early developed an interest in some of its exportable resources. The commodities which they especially coveted were the "unholy trio" of gold, ivory, and slaves-the same products for which Africa was to be coveted and

exploited by foreign powers for millennia to come. Gold, however, was not the only desirable mineral to be found in Nubia, nor was ivory the only product of the tropical forests and savannas; these two commodities merely stood at the head of a long list of mineral, animal, and vegetable products for which the Egyptians came to rely on the southern countries. For this reason it seems appropriate to categorize the objects of Egypt's commercial interest in Nubia under the three broad headings of mineral resources, animal and forest resources, and human resources, rather than under the narrower headings of

gold, ivory, and slaves. It has generally been true in history that the three types of resources just

named have called forth rather different systems of exploitation. Animal

products have been obtained most often through peaceful trade with native

suppliers, human products (slaves) through warfare and capture, and mineral

products through outright colonization and the establishment of extractive industries. Such was the case in Nubia in ancient times. All three types of

exploitative enterprise were begun by the Egyptians very early in their histo-

ry, and all three persisted well down into the New Kindgom. However, the demand for the various kinds of Nubian commodities fluctuated through time, and that fluctuation helped to determine the changing course of Egyptian policy toward Nubia, as similar fluctuations of demand determined the course of European colonial expansion four millennia later.

THE OLD KINGDOM: AGE OF EXPLORATION

As is usual in history, the economic relations between Egypt and Nubia seem to have preceded the political ones. Even in predynastic times (before unification of the Egyptian state) there was a regular commerce between the two countries, which is attested by Egyptian-made goods found in Nubian graves. The volume of such goods shows a substantial increase during the early dynastic period, then drops off abruptly at about the time when the pharaoh was achieving a maximum consolidation of his power.

(1968), 205-6. The clearest empirical demonstration of genetic continuity in Nubia from ancient to modem times is to be found in Ramkrishna Mukherjee, C. Radhakrishna Rao, and J. C. Trevor, The Ancient Inhabitants of Jebel Moya (Sudan) (Cambridge, 1955), 73-92.


The most conspicuous articles of Egyptian manufacture to be found in Nubia are things like copper chisels, alabaster vases, and ivory ornaments-

products of the superior technology of the northern country. The volume of such goods is, however, considerably exceeded by the quantity of simple wheel-made pottery jars, which must have come to Nubia originally as ship- ping containers.10 Their contents have of course long since been lost or consumed; that they were imported originally as containers and not for their own sake can be inferred from the fact that the Nubians made perfectly serviceable, and much more elaborately decorated, pottery of their own, albeit not on the wheel. Fortunately, a biographical text of the Sixth Dynasty makes mention of the Nubians' fondness for Egyptian honey, oil, and oint- ments, as well as for woven garments;11 presumably these were the original contents of the numerous Egyptian vessels which are found in early Nubian

graves. It is a safe assumption that the Nubians did not receive Egyptian luxury

goods as a gift; some product or products of the southern land must have been

exchanged for them. These products have not survived archaeologically, nor are they mentioned in hieroglyphic texts before the Sixth Dynasty. However, the diffuse nature of the trade itself virtually rules out the possibility that slaves or minerals were the earliest exports of Nubia. As we saw earlier, the

Egyptians usually obtained these commodities by direct seizure, for which the Nubians receoved nothing in exchange. We are left, therefore, to infer that the Nubian goods which were involved in the widespread and peaceful trade with

predynastic and early dynastic Egypt were those same products of the tropical forests and savannas-ivory, ebony, skins, and incense-which were later to

figure prominently in Egyptian commercial relations. There is much to suggest that the earliest trade between Egypt and Nubia

was a private and largely unorganized affair. It seems to have reached its peak at a time (in the First and/or Second Dynasty) before the pharaohs had successfully monopolized political and economic power in their own hands, and there is no mention of commercial enterprise in the biographical annals of the earliest Egyptian rulers. The very wide and surprisingly equitable distribution of Egyptian goods in Nubian graves suggests, too, a decentralized system of exchange: perhaps the sort of local market-to-market trade which has flourished along the Nile down to modem times.12 That distribution was in the hands of Egyptian rather than Nubian entrepreneurs can be inferred from

10 For discussion of Egyptian goods in early Nubian graves, see Bruce G. Trigger, History and Settlement in Lower Nubia, Yale University Publications in Anthropology, no. 69 (New Haven, 1965), 70-73; and W. B. Emery, Egypt in Nubia (London, 1965; published in the United States as Lost Land Emerging (New York, 1965)), 125.

11 Cf. Trigger, History and Settlement, 71. 12 See G. A. Reisner, "Ancient Egyptian Forts at Semna and Uronarti," Bulletin of the

Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), 27:163 (1929), 66.

42 WILLIAM Y. ADAMS

the fact that the Egyptians in the early dynastic period already possessed sail- powered cargo vessels, while there is no evidence that the Nubians had anything similar. It is noteworthy that, until the end of the Old Kingdom, Egyptian commercial enterprise was confined to the northernmost part of Nubia, between the First and Second Cataracts-an area which is continu- ously navigable once the First Cataract has been passed.

Some time before 3000 B.c., a certain King Djer, one of the shadowy pharaohs of Egypt's First Dynasty, led an expedition into Nubia as far as the Second Cataract of the Nile, where he left an inscription on a rock outcrop beside the river. The text, which is semipictographic rather than genuinely hieroglyphic, seems to commemorate a military operation against the Nu- bians, and shows a bound captive tied to the prow of the king's boat.13 This may be a record of the first slave raid in Nubian history. There are other and less ambiguous records of slave raids from the Second, Fourth, and Sixth Dynasties. 14

A significant change is observable in the character of Egyptian-Nubian commercial relations after the First or Second Dynasty. In both countries there is a virtual disappearance of luxury goods from the graves of ordinary folk.15 This phenomenon has been associated by historians with the successful monopoly of wealth and power in the hands of the pharaoh after the Third Dynasty; from then onward the surplus wealth of Egypt, and perhaps also of Nubia, was skimmed off by the rulers to pay for their pyramids and other extravagances.16 It is significant that when next we hear of the Nubian trade, late in the Sixth Dynasty, it is as a royal enterprise.

With the consolidation of pharaonic power and the decline or elimination of private commerce, Egyptian interest in Nubia seems to have shifted for a time from its animal to its human and mineral resources. After the expedition of King Djer there were no more military operations in the south under the First Dynasty, and there is only one rather ambiguous record of conflict in the Second Dynasty;17 but it was not much later that Sneferu led his famous expedition which claimed the capture of 7,000 men and 200,000 cattle.18 No records of slave raids in the Fourth or Fifth Dynasties survive, but there are several from the later Sixth Dynasty, by which time the Egyptian rulers were

13 The Djer Inscription. For an illustration, see A. J. Arkell, A History of the Sudan, rev. ed. (London, 1961), 39; for an interpretation, see Trigger, History and Settlement, 73.

14 Palermo Stone and Inscriptions of Pepinakht and Sebni. For the appropriate translations and discussion, see Torgny Save-Soderbergh, Agypten und Nubien (Lund, 1941), 7-10; Emery, Egypt in Nubia, 127-32; and James Breasted, Ancient Records of Egypt (New York, 1962), vol. I, paras. 355, 358-59, 363, 365-66.

15 For the Nubian evidence, see Emery, Egypt in Nubia, 127-30; Trigger, History and Settlement, 78-79.

16 Cf. Wilson, Culture, 271; Trigger, History and Settlement, 79. 17 Victory Stele of Khasekhemui. See Save-Soderbergh, Agypten und Nubien, 7-8; and

Emery, Egypt in Nubia, 127. 18 Palermo Stone. For discussion, see Save-Soderbergh, Agypten und Nubien, 9-10.


beginning to rely militarily on Nubian levies to bolster their weakening grip on the northern country.19 It was during the Sixth Dynasty that the governor of the Aswan district was first awarded a special status as "Keeper of the Door to the South,"20 presaging a long period in which control of the southern frontier and its resources was to hold one of the keys to political power in

Egypt. This situation, which persisted for over 1,500 years, provides a classic

example of Arnold Toynbee's "law of peripheral domination.21 The absolute monarchy of the Old Kingdom witnessed also the first perma-

nent Egyptian encroachments on Nubian territory. Prospectors scoured both the Nile Valley and the deserts east and west of it in search of minerals and stones suitable for royal statues and monuments; their discoveries led to the

opening of a diorite quarry in the desert west of Toshka, in Lower Nubia,22 and of a copper-smelting operation at Buhen, near the Second Cataract. At the latter place the Egyptians maintained for several decades a sizable town, though there is no evidence that they attempted to exert any control over the

surrounding district or its people. They seem to have been occupied chiefly in

smelting copper from ores which were brought to the riverbank from some now-unknown source in the interior.23

Both the diorite quarries and the town at Buhen date principally or entirely from the Fourth and Fifth Dynasties.24 Under the Sixth Dynasty the power of the pharaoh was weakening, and perhaps the royal treasury was no longer able to sustain the expense of foreign mineral enterprises. Near the end of the Old

Kingdom, however, there was a renewal of the trade in animal and forest products, although in a distinctly new form. The official Harkhuf, who lived in Aswan, was sent by the pharaoh on at least four trading and exploring expeditions into the southern lands. Few of the places which he claimed to have visited can be definitely identified today, but it seems clear that his journeys carried him well beyond the limits of previous exploration. On two occasions he set forth across the desert than up the Nile, which suggests that his destination lay somewhere beyond Lower Nubia. It was from one of these overland journeys that he returned with 300 asses laden with various kinds of tropical products, and also with a "dancing pygmy."25

The royally financed expeditions of Harkhuf mark a new departure in

Egyptian colonial expansion. Although the objectives were peaceful and commercial, it is also evident that Harkhuf dealt directly with local Nubian chiefs

19 See E. A. Wallis Budge, The Egyptian Sudan (London, 1907), I, 516. 20 Cf. Hermann Kees, Ancient Egypt (Chicago, 1961), 311-12. 21 Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History (New York, 1962), V, 267-69. 22 For description, see Kees, Ancient Egypt, 313-14. 23 For description of the site, see Emery, Egypt in Nubia, 111-14. 24 Ibid., 114, 129. 25 Inscriptions of Harkhuf. For detailed accounts of his expeditions, see Budge, Egyptian

Sudan, I, 519-23; Save-Soderbergh, Agypten und Nubien, 16-30; and Emery, Egypt in Nubia, 130-31.

44 WILLIAM Y. ADAMS

and not, like earlier Egyptian entrepreneurs, with the masses of their subjects. The centralization of commercial enterprise on the Egyptian side thus probably encouraged a like centralization on the Nubian side-a development which set the tone and character of Egyptian-Nubian relations under the Middle Kingdom.

In summary, the Old Kingdom may be described as a time of intermittent and largely uncoordinated Egyptian activity in Nubia, much of it of an explor- atory nature. Various kinds of exploitative activity were undertaken as circumstances allowed. There was an increasing pattern of state involvement, but there was as yet no fully articulated political, economic, or military policy toward the southern countries. This period may be compared with what J. H. Parry has so ably described as the age of reconnaissance,26 when European entrepreneurs, public and private, spread over half the globe, but before colonialism had crystallized as a dominant political and economic concern of the maritime powers. In Parry's words, "precious commodities-indeed, most marketable commodities-might be secured not only by trade, but by more direct methods; by plunder, if they should be found in the possession of

people whose religion, or lack of religion, could be made an excuse for attacking them; or by direct exploitation, if sources of supply were discovered in lands either uninhabited, or inhabited only by ignorant savages."27

THE MIDDLE KINGDOM: ARMED TRADE MONOPOLY

The collapse of Egyptian central authority after the Sixth Dynasty put an end to any further colonial enterprise for about two centuries. There are almost no records of any sort-either textual or archaeological-from the First Inter- mediate Period (Dynasties VII-X), but it can reasonably be inferred that the weak and divided Egyptian dynasties were in no position to undertake either slaving operations or mineral enterprises abroad.

The restoration of unified control in Egypt under the Eleventh Dynasty (ca. 2000 B.C.) was followed very shortly by a re-emergence of Egyptian colonial ambitions in the south, in a radically new and more overt form. After a series

of massive military incursions-obviously a renewal of the earlier slave raids-the pharaohs laid formal claim to the territory between the First and Second Cataracts, and they proceeded to fortify the region around the Second Cataract with a chain of the mightiest fortifications ever seen in the ancient world.

The Second Cataract Forts were, before their destruction by the Aswan Reservoir, by far the most impressive surviving monuments of Egypt's Mid- dle Kingdom. There were at least ten of them, situated at intervals over a distance of forty miles through the heart of the rugged batn el hajjar-the

26 J. H. Parry, The Age of Reconnaissance (New York, 1963). 27 Ibid., 35.


+ m

<c

.Z

1st Cataract

W AWAT

(LOWER NUBIA:

- IC

C6

3rd Cataract

Cataract

100 200

Miles

o Tow ns * Fortresses

FIGURE 1. Egypt and Nubia in the Middle Kingdom (c. 1900 B.c.)

0 I . . .. ..................... I . ............ .

46 WILLIAM Y. ADAMS

barren district immediately upstream from the Second Cataract. The similarities of design exhibited by the ten forts suggest that they were all designed by a single architect and were built at nearly the same time; during most of their history they were also under a unified command, with headquarters at the Buhen fortress, the northernmost of the group.28

The Second Cataract Forts have traditionally been regarded as a sort of Maginot Line, the bulwarks of Egypt's newly advanced southern frontier.29 Such an interpretation is supported by the rather truculent names which some of them bore: "Warding off the Bowmen," "Repelling the Inu," "Curbing the Countries," "Subduing the Oasis-dwellers," "Repelling the Medjay," and so on.30 Yet from other points of view it is difficult to envision the fortresses as frontier defenses in any conventional sense. In the first place, there is no evidence that the Egyptians made any effort whatever (aside from the revival of diorite quarrying) to exploit the recently annexed territory which the forts defended; virtually the only Egyptians who lived in Nubia during the Middle Kingdom were those who garrisoned the forts themselves. So little impact did the Egyptian presence have on the native populace that it is impossible to be sure which Nubian graves and villages belong to the Middle Kingdom and which to the First Intermediate Period (before the fortresses were built) or the Second Intermediate Period (after they were abandoned.)31

From what we know from their archaeological remains, it is also difficult to imagine how the native Nubians of the Middle Kingdom could have posed a threat to Egyptian security sufficient to necessitate the building of an outer line of defense deep in their territory. They were still essentially a Neolithic people, living in small and widely scattered villages. apparently with a seg- mentary lineage organization. Centralized political authority was probably beginning to emerge at Kerma, 150 miles beyond the farthest Egyptian outpost (see below), but there was almost certainly nothing of the sort farther north, nor do the contents of the graves proclaim the northern Nubians as a warlike people. Even if we accord them some warlike prowess, however, the Second Cataract Forts make no sense as territorial defenses against them. Clustered as they were along the riverbank, the forts would have been an effective deterrent only against a maritime force. They would easily have been outflanked by an army moving overland-as any native Nubian force would have moved.

28 The definitive publications on the Second Cataract Forts are two volumes by Dows Dunham entitled Second Cataract Forts (Boston, 1960 and 1967), and the much older volumes by D. Randall-MacIver and C. L. Woolley entitled Buhen, University of Pennsylvania, Egyptian De- partment of the University Museum, Eckley B. Coxe Junior Expedition to Nubia, vols. VII, VIII (Philadelphia, 1911). An excellent popular description of the forts is that of Emery, Egypt in Nubia, 143-53.

29 Emery, Egypt in Nubia, 143; Arkell, History, 59. 30 Emery, Egypt in Nubia, 144-46. 31 See especially Trigger, History and Settlement, 85.


Apart from their architectural peculiarities, the Second Cataract Forts have two characteristics in common. All but one of them are situated on the west bank of the Nile (the route nearly always followed by overland caravans)32 or on islands facing the west bank, and all but one of them are situated overlook- ing the most dangerous rapids which make up the Second Cataract. From these circumstances it is possible to infer that the forts were intimately associated with the river and its traffic; they were meant primarily to protect and assist, and apparently also to control, riverain commerce. They were situated at the places where boats had to be laboriously towed through the most difficult rapids, and where cargoes sometimes had to be offloaded and transshipped. Empirical confirmation for this theory of the forts' primary purpose has been provided by the finding, immediately below the fortress of Mirgissa, of a mud-lined slipway extending for a mile and a half across the desert, bypassing the largest of all the Second Cataract rapids. Bare footprints and the marks of boat keels were clearly discernible along this track.33

Only the northernmost fortress of Buhen, just below the Second Cataract, was not closely associated with a rapid. It was probably the final entrepot where goods were transshipped from the small vessels required to pass the cataracts to larger vessels plying the open water of Lower Nubia. Such an interpretation is suggested by the massive stone quays at Buhen, a feature not found at any of the other Second Cataract Forts.

If any substantial volume of riverain traffic was to pass the Second Cata- ract, it would require the permanent maintenance of labor forces sufficient for the work of towing and portaging. The fortresses presumably provided hous- ing for such forces. In addition, they gave protection to the riverain traffic at the points where it was most vulnerable to attack from the shore, and where a military deterrent was most needed. In sum, the Second Cataract Forts should probably be regarded as the Adens and Gibraltars of the Nile trade, rather than as territorial defenses of Egypt.

For reasons already cited, it seems unlikely that the valley-dwelling Nubian peasants of Middle Kingdom times posed enough of a threat to Egyptian commerce to justify the Nubian forts. Nomadic peoples, on the other hand, have traditionally preyed upon and disrupted commerce, and in ancient Egyp- tian times there were already pastoral nomads-the Medjay-in the Red Sea Hills east of the Nile. In hieroglyphic texts they are often named as the perpetrators of raids upon Egypt. It is significant that it is the Medjay and the Oasis-dwellers-presumably also desert nomads-rather than the Wawat and Kush who are named as enemies in the defiant titles bestowed on some of the Second Cataract Forts.

32 This was apparently due to the much deeper accumulation of wind-blown sand on the west bank-a peculiarity of Nubian geography-which made easier going for beasts of burden.

33 See Jean Vercoutter, "Excavations at Mirgissa-II," Kush, 13 (1965), 68-69; and idem, Mirgissa I (Paris, 1970), 204-14.

48 WILLIAM Y. ADAMS

It seems evident that the Middle Kingdom pharaohs meant not only to protect and assist the Nile commerce, but to control it as well. This is clearly indicated in the "boundary stele" which the Pharaoh Senusret III caused to be set up at Semna, the southernmost of the Egyptian outposts, around 1880 B.C.:

Southern boundary, made in the year 8 under the majesty of the King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Khakaure Senusret III who is given life forever and ever; in order to prevent that any Negro should cross it, by water or by land, with a ship, or any herds of the Negroes; except a Negro who shall come to do trading in Iken [Mirgissa], or with a commission. Every good thing shall be done with them [the Negroes], but without allowing a ship of the Negroes to pass by [Semna], going downstream, forever.34

The message here is perfectly clear. There is no rattling of the sword; the pharaoh's concern is purely economic. The Nubians shall be justly treated, but the Nile is closed in perpetuity to all commerce in foreign ships, except that which is destined for transshipment immediately downstream at the Egyptian port of Iken (Mirgissa). Here, it seems, is history's first recorded decree of commercial monopoly.

If we have correctly identified the role of the Second Cataract Forts, then several important corollaries follow. First, there must already have existed by the Twelfth Dynasty a very substantial volume of trade on the Nile, which Egypt was at pains to protect and control. Second, the desert peoples, after the immemorial habit of nomads, had taken to preying on the river trade-another indication of its probable volume and wealth. Third, the Egyptian "boundary" at Semna, and the effort to enforce a monopoly of trade only below that point, indicate that the upstream origins of the Nile trade were not in Egyptian hands. Finally, the absence of Egyptian forts at the cataracts above Semna (admittedly not as dangerous as those farther downstream) suggests that the Nile beyond this point may have been effectively controlled by another power. If so, this was a genuinely international trade.

What was the nature and source of this flourishing commerce, which played so large a part in shaping Egypt's foreign policy during the Middle King- dom? We noted that, as far back as the Sixth Dynasty, the interest of the pharaohs had already turned from the relatively unproductive region immediately above the First Cataract to greener pastures farther to the south. The major expeditions of Harkhuf hardly paused in Lower Nubia on their way to more distant regions in the interior, the precise location of which will probably never by known. In the Middle Kingdom, however, we have somewhat clearer evidence of the source of Egypt's foreign commerce. It comes from the archaeological site of Kerma, close to the Third Cataract of the Nile and about 150 miles upstream from the southernmost Egyptian outpost at Semna.

The most conspicuous archaeological feature at Kerma is a vast necropolis,

34 First Semna Stele of Senusret III. Translation quoted from Emery, Egypt in Nubia, 157.


containing at a minimum estimate several thousand graves; the exact number has never been calculated. Only a small fraction of them has been systemat- ically excavated. Both the graves and their contents are generally similar to those of Lower Nubia in the Middle Kingdom and the Second Intermediate Period, though there are consistent minor differences. Among these are the

regular presence at Kerma of a fine polished black-and-red pottery, the fre-

quent interment of a native wooden bed as a couch for the deceased, and the occasional inclusion of human as well as animal sacrifices in the graves. These differences have led to the designation of the Kerma remains as repre- senting a separate culture (the Kerma Culture) from that of Lower Nubia in the Middle Kingdom and Second Intermediate Period (somewhat inap- propriately known as the C-Group Culture). At Kerma, as in Lower Nubia, the graves are abundantly furnished with Egyptian-made goods, and these provide the principal clues to their age. On the basis of such evidence it can reasonably be inferred that the Kerma Culture reached its climax late in the Second Intermediate Period (XVII Dynasty), but enough earlier material has been found to suggest that a separate Kerma Culture may have evolved as far back as the Twelfth Dynasty, if not at the end of the Old Kingdom.35

Recent archaeological surveys have shown that the Kerma remains are typical of a fairly large area, extending northward along the Nile to a point only thirty or forty miles above the Egyptian "frontier" at Semna. Beyond this point they give way to the slightly different C-Group remains characteristic of Lower Nubia. Most of the known relics of the Kerma Culture are mortuary remains; the only habitation site yet identified is at Kerma itself.36

Apart from minor cultural differences, the main characteristic which sets Kerma apart from contemporary sites in the north is the presence of a series of enormous earth tumuli, whose size suggests that they contain Nubia's first royal burials. While the external form of the tumulus is a simple dome of earth, often covered with white pebbles, the largest of them are so vast that they had to be stabilized and reinforced by an internal skeleton of brick walls. The largest single tumulus at Kerma had a diameter of 90 meters (about 300 feet), and the extent of the burial chambers within is greater than that in any Egyptian pyramid.37 The number of sacrificial human burials within this tomb-322 by actual count, and perhaps as many as 400 before it was plun- dered by robbers-exceeds that of any other known tomb in the world.38 The mortuary evidence leaves no doubt at all that the Kerma people had achieved a

35 The definitive archaeological report on Kerma is G. A. Reisner, Excavations at Kerma, Vols. V and VI of Harvard African Studies (Cambridge, 1923). For brief discussions, see also Save-Soderbergh, Agypten und Nubien, 103-16, and Trigger, History and Settlement, 101-4.

36 See Charles Bonnet, "Fouilles archeologiques a Kerma (Soudan)," Genava, 26 (1978), 107-34, and 28 (1980), 31-72.

37 Cf. Reisner, Excavations at Kerma, Vol. V, 65. 38 Ibid., 69.

50 WILLIAM Y. ADAMS

highly centralized political authority at a time when the Lower Nubians were still organized in an uncentralized lineage system. The Upper Nubian people, rather than the immediate neighbors of Egypt, were thus in all probability the first Africans to emulate the example of the pharaohs.

The tombs at Kerma, unlike those in Egypt, proclaim a chiefdom rather than a state, that is, a society in which authority has been formally consoli- dated only in the hands of the ruler, and in which there is as yet no hierarchi- cal differentiation of power and wealth. The royal tombs, although concen- trated in a single zone in the Kerma necropolis, occur side by side with common burials, and they are quantitatively rather than qualitatively distinct from their neighbors. Variations in size and wealth fall on an unbroken continuum from the humblest common grave to the largest royal tomb, so that there is no certain way of knowing which are royal burials and which are not. However, at least thirty of the tombs excavated are sufficiently large and elaborate that they might possibly fall into the royal category. Though the largest (and apparently latest) of them almost certainly date from late in the Second Intermediate Period, the number of potentially royal graves is sufficient to suggest the possibility that the royal lineage had emerged in the time of the Middle Kingdom, about two hundred years before the building of the largest tombs.39

Apart from the royal and common tombs, there are two striking archaeological features at Kerma. These are the buildings locally known as def- fufas40-apparently the remains of massive towers of solid mud brick. One of them is located within the royal cemetery, close to one of the largest tumuli, and has been interpreted as a kind of hypertrophied mortuary chapel.41 The larger of the two structures (the Western or Lower Deffufa), however, is situated about two miles from the cemetery in the midst of a broad, denuded clay plain. This building as originally constructed was a solid rectangular mass of brick, measuring about 75 by 150 feet at the base, and probably stood to a height far exceeding the 60 feet which are still preserved. Within this incredible mass of brick there are no interior apartments, only the remains of a narrow, winding stairway which presumably gave access to the top of the structure.42

39 Reisner, the original excavator of Kerma, believed that the main period of its florescence was in the Middle Kingdom, and that the smaller and poorer tombs represented a progressive degeneration and impoverishment in later times (ibid., 98-102, 116-21). However, other Egyp- tologists soon challenged this interpretation, suggesting that the greatest of the royal tombs were probably in fact the latest, and that they date from some time in the Seventeenth Dynasty. See especially Hermann Junker, Die Nubische Ursprung der sogenannten Tell el-Yahudiye Vasen, Akademie der Wissenschaften in Wien, Philosophisch-Historische Klasse Denkschriften, 63, (Wien, 1921), and Save-Soderbergh, Agypten und Nubien, 111-13.

40 Deffufa is a Nubian word which designates any conspicuous standing ruin. 41 Reisner, Excavations at Kerma, Vol. VI, 268-69. 42 For description, see ibid., Vol. V, 21-29.


Although the deffufas resemble the Second Cataract Forts only in their massiveness, the details of construction, including the size of bricks employed and the regular use of timber bonding, are identical in the two cases. There is therefore a very strong probability that the deffufas are also the work of Egyptian architects, particularly since the native Nubians were making little or no use of mud brick at this time. The function for which the great towers were intended will probably never be known; however, the larger of them is adjoined at one side by an irregular complex of brick rooms, apparently also of Egyptian construction, whose contents leave no doubt as to their intended function. Most conspicuous are fragments of 565 mud-seal impres- sions of Egyptian type, which had been affixed to pots, baskets, and some sort of wooden containers. There are also fragmentary remains of many objects of Egyptian manufacture, such as alabaster ointment jars (twenty-five of them bearing the name of the Old Kingdom Pharaoh Pepi I), other and larger stone vessels, faience and pottery vessels, beads and stone crystals for making beads, and pieces of bronze. Except for the ointment jars, these objects are mostly of Middle Kingdom or later types.43 Also present in the refuse from the Lower Deffufa are various kinds of raw materials, such as red ochre, copper oxide, mica, and shells, used in the manufacture and decoration of pottery, faience, and ornaments.

The Lower Duffufa, in short, was a factory, in the older sense of the word: a depot where the goods of the south were assembled for shipment to Egypt, and where the manufactures of the north were received (and to some extent produced) in exchange. That this commerce was overseen by Egyptians can be inferred from the fact that faience and other products of advanced technology were being manufactured, and from the finding of innumerable Egyptian mud seals. On the other hand, it would be a mistake to suppose, as the excavator originally did, that Kerma was under Egyptian political or\military control.44 The great tombs in the royal cemetery are those of natives rather than of Egyptians, and nowhere is there evidence of a large alien population.

Fitting together the various pieces of the Kerma archaeological puzzle, many pieces of which are still missing, three things become apparent: there was a highly centralized native chiefdom at Kerma; there was an influential if not numerous Egyptian presence, attested both by the contents of the factory and by the architecture of the deffufas; and there was a flourishing trade between Kerma and Egypt. The inference is strong indeed that these three facts are interconnected. Seeking a reliable source for exotic southern goods, the Egyptians had probably entered into diplomatic and commercial relations with a petty Nubian chieftain. The contact was mutually beneficial, resulting

43 Ibid., 32. 44 Reisner's identification of the largest tomb at Kerma as that of an Egyptian prince (based on

the finding in the tomb of a single piece of statuary) led him to conclude that this was the viceroy of Kush and that Kerma was the viceregal seat; see ibid., Vol. V, 116-21, and Vol. VI, 554-59.

52 WILLIAM Y. ADAMS

in the development and institutionalization of a prosperous two-way trade. Under Egyptian patronage, the Nubian rulers became increasingly wealthy and powerful, until in time they were able to emulate the model of the pharaohs and to command a corps of Egyptian artisans for the production of luxury goods and the design of royal monuments.

Here, in all probability, is the missing piece in our picture of Egyptian- Nubian relations in the Middle Kingdom: the source of that rich trade which the Egyptians were at such pains to protect and, below Semna, to monopolize. The factory at Kerma and the Second Cataract Forts can thus be seen as parts of a common politicoeconomic enterprise: a depot at the source of the trade and way-stations for its protection and assistance. It must nevertheless be acknowledged that this interpretation rests, at least for the present, more on deductive than on empirical grounds. Nowhere in Egyptian annals is there any recognizable mention of Kerma at this period, nor can any of the important remains at Kerma be securely dated as far back as the Middle Kingdom. The existence of a Kerma monarchy and of institutionalized trade between that monarchy and Egypt in the Middle Kingdom remains merely a logical probability.

Although armed trade with the south provided the dominant theme in Egyptian-Nubian relations in the Middle Kingdom, there were other kinds of colonial enterprise as well. Slave raids continued intermittently during the Twelfth Dynasty; as always, they were justified in the royal annals as punitive expeditions against the rebellious Nubians.45 In addition, the diorite quarries west of Toshka were reopened for a time, and there is some evidence of copper smelting at the fortress of Kuban, in Lower Nubia.46 This structure, built along the same general lines as the Second Cataract Forts, was situated at the mouth of the Wadi Allaqi, later to be followed as the principal route to the Nubian gold mines. The presence of the fortress might suggest that the gold mines were already in production in Middle Kingdom times, but there is almost no direct evidence to confirm this. Of the scores of inscriptions left by prospectors and mining inspectors along the Wadi Allaqi, none dates from the Middle Kingdom,47 nor is there any significant mention of Nubian gold in Middle Kingdom texts. It seems probable, too, that had the gold of Nubia been discovered at this time, the main focus of Egyptian interest in the south would have been on its extraction rather than on trade with Kerma, as was in fact to be the case under the New Kingdom.

The Middle Kingdom may be epitomized as a time when Egyptian interest in Nubia became crystallized in an official policy of expansion and of largely

45 Second Semna Stele of Senusret III; Stele of Sebek-khu; Hammamat Inscriptions. See Breasted, Ancient Records, vol. I, paras. 423, 658, 687, 707.

46 See A. Lucas, Ancient Egyptian Materials and Industries, 3d ed. (London, 1948), 240-41. 47 Cf. B. Piotrovsky, "The Early Dynastic Settlement of Khor-Daud and Wadi-Allaki the

Ancient Route to the Gold Mines," in Fouilles en Nubie (1961-1963) (Cairo, 1967), 135.


indirect exploitation. The sporadic and uncoordinated enterprises of the Old Kingdom were succeeded by the establishment of regular commercial and diplomatic relations with a native chiefdom, which was thereby enabled to become a dominant force within Nubia itself. The collection of goods for export to Egypt was left in native hands, but transport was managed and, below Semna, monopolized by the Egyptians. On the other hand, Egyptian political control in Upper Nubia was only indirect; it was restricted to whatever influence the pharaoh and his commercial representatives could exert on the native rulers. This phase of Egyptian-Nubian relations is comparable to the period, between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the Euro- pean colonial powers were striving for control of the sea lanes and were providing armed protection for their overseas trade, but were content to leave production in the hands of native rulers with whom they dealt through innumerable factory-ports along the coasts. The closest parallels to the Kerma situation are to be found not in Africa, which after the sixteenth century was chiefly a supplier of slaves, but in India, which like Nubia was a source of various kinds of tropical exotica. Here, "alliances were made with indigenous powers, and minor states accepted Portuguese suzerainty. But the princi- ple laid down by Albuquerque, the first viceroy of the Indies, was always adhered to. Portugal must hold only key fortresses and trading factories. She must rely on naval power to defend them. Territorial empire was beyond her powers and would be unprofitable."48 Albuquerque was quoted to the effect that India Portuguesa could be secured by "four good fortresses and a large, well-armed fleet."49

THE NEW KINGDOM: ANNEXATION AND DIRECT RULE

During the Thirteenth Dynasty the power of the pharaoh rapidly weakened, and Egypt was plunged once again into anarchy. The famous king-list of Karnak names no fewer than twenty-nine or thirty rulers who held power in different parts of the country during a period of less than a hundred years, some of whom apparently reigned for only a few days.50 It was undoubtedly these chaotic conditions which tempted the Asiatic Hyksos to move into the Delta region, where they set up an ephemeral pharaonic state of their own (the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Dynasties). Meanwhile, a native Egyptian dynasty (the Seventeenth) was able to restore a measure of order and unity to Upper Egypt, but for a century and a half its rulers were obliged to coexist with, and at times to pay tribute to, the Hyksos in the north.

There seems to be little doubt that the internal dissentions of the Second Intermediate Period brought a temporary end to the Egyptian colonial enter-

48 D. K. Fieldhouse, The Colonial Empires (New York, 1967), 139. 49 C. R. Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 1415-1825 (New York, 1969), 52. 50 See Alan Gardiner, Egypt of the Pharaohs (New York, 1966), 148; and J. A. Breasted, A

History of Egypt, 2d ed. (New York, 1909), 213.

54 WILLIAM Y. ADAMS

prise in the south, although the circumstances of the Egyptian withdrawal are somewhat obscure. One popular version of Nubian history asserts that the Second Cataract Forts were stormed and overthrown by native attackers,51 but the evidence for this is not very convincing. The vandalism which is evident at Semna and Buhen was probably committed as an act of desecration after the withdrawal of the garrisons, rather than in the course of active operations against them. There is, too, a suggestion that an Egyptian garrison remained at Mirgissa, cut off from foreign support, until in time its members intermar- ried with the natives and disappeared into the Nubian population.52 There are at all events no further textual references to the Second Cataract Forts after the early Thirteenth Dynasty, and it seems evident that they were either volun- tarily or involuntarily relinquished to the natives. By the time of the Egyptian reconquest two centuries later, some of them were sufficiently dilapidated that they required extensive rebuilding.

Freed from the military menace of the Egyptian presence in Lower Nubia, but apparently still maintaining active commercial relations with the northern country, the Kerma rulers seem to have reached the peak of their power and prosperity during the Second Intermediate Period. There is even evidence that they attempted on a small scale to take the place vacated by the Egyptians as overseers of the Nile trade. Small numbers of Kerma graves from the time of the Seventeenth Dynasty have been found both at Mirgissa53 and at Buhen,54 and there is a text in which an Egyptian commandant at Buhen claims to have served a Nubian ruler.55 This development too had a parallel in the later colonial history of Africa. In the late seventeenth century, when the European powers were temporarily weakened by wars at home and on the high seas, African rulers increasingly dictated the terms of overseas trade. "The right to trade was the prerogative of the African rulers, and was commonly granted to any European who was prepared to acknowledge African sovereignty and to pay the required dues and taxes."56

In the seventeenth century B.C. there were, in effect, three coordinate monarchies on the Nile: the Hyksos "pharaoh" in the north, the Egyptian pharaoh at Thebes, and the Nubian ruler at Kerma. This "unnatural" state of affairs was deeply resented by Kamose, the last Theban kinglet of the Seven- teenth Dynasty: "I sit united with an Asiatic and a Nubian, each man in possession of his slice of this Egypt," he complained to his advisors.57 The resentment of Kamose soon found expression in a military campaign against

51 See especially Emery, Egypt in Nubia, 167. 52 See Vercoutter, "Excavations at Mirgissa," 72. 53 Vercoutter, Mirgissa 1, 223-306. 54 Randall-MacIver and Woolley, Buhen, VII, 134-35. 55 Stele of Sepedher. See Emery, Egypt in Nubia, 167. 56 J. D. Fage, A History of Africa (New York, 1979), 251. 57 Stele of Kamose. Translation quoted from Gardiner, Egypt, 166.


the Hyksos, culminating a generation later in their final expulsion from Egypt and in the Egyptian conquest of considerable territories in Palestine and Syria. Thus was launched Egypt's great imperial age-the New Kingdom-com- prising the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Dynasties. It was an age marked, too, by a new phase of Egyptian expansion in the south. As had been the case in the Middle Kingdom, the northerners seemed determined to compensate for their temporary absence by renewing their colonial ambitions in Nubia on a redoubled scale. Their initial motivations were almost certainly revenge against the upstart Nubians and desire to reaffirm Egyptian supremacy, rather than any specific thought of economic profit.58 The transformation of the reconquered territory into a paying colony was a later consideration.

Ahmose, the first pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty, evidently contem- plated nothing more than a restoration of the earlier status quo in the south; he was content to reoccupy Lower Nubia and to renew the garrisons in the Second Cataract Forts. The fact that Buhen and Mirgissa were given extensive face liftings, not so much to strengthen their defenses as to restore their pristine appearance, suggests that the pharaohs expected these buildings once again to serve as the primary symbols of Egyptian majesty in the south. The successors of Ahmose, however, soon made this policy obsolete. In a series of massive campaigns they pushed the Egyptian frontier southward another 350 miles, to a point just below the Fourth Cataract of the Nile. The extent of Egyptian dominion in Nubia was thus doubled within a matter of half a century. The final Egyptian triumph was proclaimed by the Pharaoh Thut- mose II, who completed the reduction of Nubia begun by Ahmose:

Then this army of His Majesty arrived at wretched Kush. . . . This army of His Majesty overthrew those barbarians; they did not let live anyone among their males, according to all the command of His Majesty, except one of those children of the Chief of wretched Kush, who was taken away alive as a living prisoner with their people to His Majesty. They were placed under the feet of the Good God; for His Majesty had appeared upon this throne when the living prisoners were brought in, which this army of His Majesty had captured. This land was made a subject of His Majesty as formerly.. . . 59

The Kerma ruler may have been the "Chief of wretched Kush" mentioned by Thutmose. At all events, the Nubian monarchy seems to have been swept away without a trace in the first rush of Egyptian conquest. No more royal tombs were built, the factory and cemetery at Kerma were abandoned, and in hieroglyphic texts we hear no more of a Nubian monarchy. Henceforth Nubia was under direct Egyptian rule.

The Egyptian occupation of Nubia in the New Kingdom was, for the first time, colonization in the true sense of the word. The course of Egyptian expansion beyond the earlier frontier at Semna is marked not by additional

58 Cf. Kemp, "Imperialism and Empire," 21-23. 59 Biography of Ineni. Quoted from Emery, Egypt in Nubia, 182.

56 WILLIAM Y. ADAMS

fortresses but by planned townsites complete with residences, magazines, workshops, and, perhaps most significant, temples. At least six such towns were established within the newly annexed territory between Semna and The Fourth Cataract. Some of their occupants may have been soldiers, but there was a much larger number who were evidently civil officials, priests, artisans, and ordinary settlers.60 Their presence is attested not only by the townsites but by hundreds of ordinary Egyptian tombs from the New Kingdom which are to be found in every part of Nubia-the first evidence of a general migration of Egyptian settlers into the southern lands.

Most of the new Egyptian towns in Nubia were walled, as were many settlements in Egypt itself, but their fortifications nowhere approached the massive hypertrophy which characterized the Middle Kingdom fortresses. Their purpose was purely defensive, not symbolic. The temple, not the fortress, symbolized Egyptian authority during most of the New Kingdom.

With the southward expansion of Egyptian colonial domination, the old frontier forts lost most of their strategic significance. Only those like Buhen and Aniba, which remained important as regional administrative centers, continued to be occupied on a large scale, and even in these places the growing residential and commercial towns soon outgrew the original fortified enclosures and spilled over into the unprotected areas beyond their walls, as towns and cities in Europe did at the end of the Middle Ages. The Second Cataract Forts above Buhen-once the supreme expression of Egypt's manifest destiny-remained important only for the continued assistance of river traffic through the cataracts, and they were garrisoned only by modest forces.

The altered character of Egyptian colonialism in the New Kingdom is signaled too by the substitution of civil for military rule in Nubia. Ahmose, who began the work of reconquest, had essentially reinstated the military regime of Middle Kingdom times, overseen by the commandant of Buhen. In the following reign, however, the commandant was given a new title, "Kings's Son of Kush'';61 he became the first of a line of twenty-five or more viceroys who governed the southern countries in the name of the pharaoh.62 The principal residence of the viceroys was apparently at Aswan, and their jurisdiction included not only the whole of Nubia, but the southernmost district of Egypt (the Elephantine nome) as well. The viceregal regime has been described by A. J. Arkell:

The viceroy was responsible for the punctual payment of the tribute of Nubia (both from Wawat and Cush). He was usually chosen from the royal entourage, to ensure his fidelity, and he was directly responsible to the king. He seems to have brought the tribute personally and to have handed it over with ceremony to the vizier or treasurer.

60 Cf. Kemp, "Imperialism and Empire," 29-30. 61 Emery, Egypt in Nubia, 173. 62 For extended discussion of the viceroyalty of Kush, see G. A. Reisner, "The Viceroys of

Ethiopia," Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, 6:pt. 1 (1920), 28-55, and 6:pt. 2 (1920), 73-78.


The staff of the viceroy included a commander of the bowmen of Cush, and two deputies, one for Wawat and the other for Cush, and . . . it is thought that during the Nineteenth Dynasty the Deputy of Cush resided at Amara (in Upper Nubia). Most of the Viceroy's officials were no doubt Egyptians, but they included some Egyptianized Nubians. ... No doubt loyal native chiefs were left in charge of their tribal areas, and chiefs of Ma'am (modem Aniba) and Wawat are depicted leading their people to bring tribute to Tutankhamen. Such chiefs were no doubt held responsible for the tribute of their people, although attempts at independence such as some chiefs made early in the Eighteenth Dynasty were naturally crushed with severity.

The children of Nubian chiefs were taken to Egypt, originally as hostages, but they were given both Egyptian education and rank; thus a chief of Ma'am in a rock inscription at Toshka calls himself sandal-bearer and page of the king. Pages were children who were brought up with the young princes, and they kept the title in later life. There is no doubt that Egyptian policy towards Nubia aimed at a peaceful symbiosis of Egyptians and natives.63

Perhaps the most subtle indication of a changed Egyptian attitude and policy toward Nubia is to be found in the substitution of the temple for the fortress as the principal symbol of Egyptian authority. It suggests that, with the opening of cultural communication between Egyptians and Nubians, the basis of Egyptian domination became increasingly mental rather than physical.

There is no evidence that the fortresses of the Middle Kingdom were anything but purely secular affairs; they did not include religious establish- ments. In the first wave of New Kingdom reconquest, they were restored more or less to their original form. The turning point came with the reign of Thutmose II, the pharaoh who completed the reconquest and pacification of Nubia. He was the last ruler to undertake major repairs to the older fortresses, and also the first, so far as we know, to build temples on Nubian soil. The relatively modest structures which he commissioned were located within the existing fortress walls at Buhen, Semna, Kumma, and perhaps elsewhere. The successors of Thutmose, however, turned their attention from the fortresses to the new townsites of Upper Nubia, where they undertook temple building on a far more ambitious scale than had Thutmose. Each of the six major settlements between Semna and the Fourth Cataract was conspicuously dominated by a temple.

Of all the newly founded temple-cities in Nubia, the largest and most politically important was that at Napata, at the extreme upper limit of Egyp- tian colonization. Here, a short distance from the bank of the Nile, there stands a flat-topped and steep-sided desert mesa, Jebel Barkal, which has apparently been sacred to the Nubians since very early times. For strategic and psychological reasons, the Egyptians chose this place to establish the seat of their ideological influence in the south. In the shadow of Jebel Barkal they built an enormous Temple of Amon which was to be the southern counterpart

63 Arkell, History, 98-100.

58 WILLIAM Y. ADAMS

{ r7

z

X

(LOWER

I GOLD

FIELDS

4,

3rd Cataract

Kawo \ Napto ^Cotaract 5th Cataract

0 100 200 6th Cataract

Mi I es

o Towns with temples

Figure 2. Egypt and Nubia in the New Kingdom (c.1200 B.c.)


of the great Temple of Amon at Karak (Thebes), the supreme monument to the Egyptian state deity. At least three other temples were built in the immediate vicinity, but they were dwarfed by the main structure in the same way as are the lesser temples at Karnak. The Egyptian policy of transplanting the Amon cult to Jebel Barkal succeeded, in the end, far better than the con-

querors could have foreseen. Napata and its temple were to remain the principal nucleus of political power in Nubia for more than a thousand years-long after the Egyptians themselves had gone.

The main thrust of Egyptian expansion into Nubia had evidently spent itself

by the end of the Eighteenth Dynasty; under the early pharaohs of the Nine- teenth Dynasty there was no further building of towns or temples. Egyptian imperialism, however, was to achieve one final outburst of creative activity in the reign of the megalomaniac Rameses II, who adorned Lower Nubia with no fewer than ten temples dedicated to his personal glorification. The particular innovation of Rameses was the rock-cut shrine, of which Abu Simbel is of course the premier example. Although most of the largest and best-known

temples of Nubia are those of Rameses, he appears to have been strictly a builder of monuments to himself and not a conqueror and colonizer as were

many of his predecessors. His temples were in fact built at a time when

Egyptian power and prosperity in Nubia were already on the wane. The coming of full-scale Egyptian colonization was followed by the devel-

opment in Nubia of the traditional Egyptian manorial economy.64 The economic picture has been described by Bruce Trigger:

During the New Kingdom the economic life of Lower Nubia was much more complex than it had ever been before. It was also more closely integrated with that of Egypt. Although hunting and pastoralism must have remained important, especially in the poorer localities, a portion of the catch or herd was probably now required by the government or temple as tribute. At the same time the pattern of landholding which had prevailed [in earlier times] and was probably based largely on community ownership was replaced by an Egyptian one. Most, if not all, farmers now worked on lands that were owned by the crown, the local princes, government administrators, or by the temples which were built throughout the region. The shift in the patterns of land ownership seems to have been accompanied by a shift away from pastoralism and in the direction of more intensive agriculture.

The profits which the temples derived from their estates and the dues which some of them were able to levy on goods passing on the river65 were used to support not only officials, priests, and their servants but also specialists such as traders, miners, ship- builders, and craftsmen. By the end of the Eighteenth Dynasty some manufactured goods begin to appear as part of the tribute which was sent to Egypt. Among the tribute shown in the tomb of Huy we find shields, stools, beds, and armchairs.66

64 Cf. Kemp, "Imperialism and Empire," 30-33. 65 Kees, Ancient Egypt, 208. 66 Nina Davies and A. H. Gardiner, The Tomb of Huy, Viceroy of Nubia in the Reign of

Tutankhamen (no. 40), Egypt Exploration Fund, Theban Tomb Series, Memoir 40 (London, 1926), 22.

60 WILLIAM Y. ADAMS

Slaves and prisoners of war were sent to Lower Nubia to provide the labor force in such large state projects as the building of temples. Libyan captives were employed at Wadi Sebua in the forty-fourth year of the reign of Rameses II.67 The kings of Egypt also made permanent donations of slaves to temples. A decree from the early Nine- teenth Dynasty records that the king supplied the workshops of a temple in Buhen with male and female slaves68 which His Majesty had captured.69

Just as the concept of "darkest Africa" was the forerunner of a policy of education and Westerization on the part of the European colonial powers, so the concept of "miserable Kush''-frequently iterated in early New Kingdom texts70-was a prelude to the Egyptianization of the Nubians. The earlier Egyptian policy toward the southerners had been one of physical repression or of subsidizing native despots, in neither case having much direct influence on the indigenous culture of the south. When the ideological indoctrination of the temple cults was substituted for the physical repression represented by the fortresses, however, the way was open for Nubian entry into the Egyptian cultural and social scheme.71 The Nubians were thereby transformed from Neolithic barbarians into the "external proletariat" of Egypt72-a development which was to have political repercussions for millennia to come.

Although the majority of Egyptianized Nubians became simple fellaheen, the higher ranks of society were not entirely closed to them. By the late Eighteenth Dynasty, Nubians apparently held positions of sufficient authority under the Egyptian colonial regime so that they could build for themselves quite elaborate shaft tombs of conventional Egyptian type.73 Nothing in the form or content of these tombs suggests that the owners were anything but Egyptians; their Nubian ancestry is revealed only incidentally in the portraits and texts with which some of the burial chambers are adorned. From this evidence it appears that colonial Nubia in the Eighteenth Dynasty had pro- gressed from an ethnically-stratified to a class-stratified society. The Egyp- tianized princes whose tombs we have recognized probably felt more kinship with their Egyptian fellow aristocrats than they did with the Nubian masses from whom they were originally sprung.74

67 Gardiner, Egypt, 270. 68 Save-Soderbergh, Agypten und Nubien, 168. 69 Trigger, History and Settlement, 111-12. 70 Cf. Kees, Ancient Egypt, 316. 71 Cf. Kemp, "Imperialism and Empire," 35-39. 72 This useful concept of Arnold Toynbee's (see Study of History, V, 194-318) seems particu-

larly applicable to the Nubians of postpharaonic times. It should be noted, however, that Toynbee himself never applied the term "external proletariat" to the Nubians. Through ignorance of the details of their history, he regarded them as part of Egypt's internal proletariat. See ibid., 268-69.

73 See Davies and Gardiner, Tomb of Huy; T. H. Thabit, "Tomb of Djehuty-Hetep (Tehuti Hetep), Prince of Serra," Kush, 5 (1957), 81-86; Torgny Save-Soderbergh, "The Paintings in the Tomb of Djehuty-Hetep at Debeira," Kush, 8 (1960), 25-44; and idem, "The Tomb of Prince Teh-Khet, Amenemhat," Kush, 11 (1963), 159-74.

74 Cf. Arkell, History, 100; Kemp, "Imperialism and Empire," 35-37.

FIRST COLONIAL EMPIRE: EGYPT IN NUBIA 6I

Our discussion of Egyptian colonialism in the New Kingdom has been concerned thus far with the annexation of the riverain districts of Nubia and the establishment there of a typically Egyptian manorial economy. There was, however, another sort of Egyptian colonial enterprise which had far-reaching political implications, though it had little direct social or cultural impact on the Nubians. This was the development of gold production in the desert hills east of the Nile.

So long as Egypt's gold was devoted chiefly to luxury manufactures, its production was not a matter of high national priority, and domestic sources were probably adequate. But when, in the New Kingdom, gold was needed to finance the interminable Egyptian military operations in Asia, the development of new sources became a critical concern of the state. It must have been these circumstances that impelled Egyptian prospectors to range far and wide over the eastern deserts, seemingly leaving no ridge or valley unexplored between the Nile Valley and the Red Sea. From such exploration came the discovery and exploitation of the extensive gold deposits in both Upper Nubia and the desert to the east of it-the "gold of Kush" and the "gold of Wawat." One group of mines was located close to the Nile, in the granite zone between the Second and Third Cataracts, but by far the most productive of Egypt's new goldfields was found in the region of barren granite hills which lay from 100 to 150 miles east of the river.

How importantly gold may have figured in the Egyptian drive to colonize Nubia it is difficult to say. The initial reconquest by Ahmose, apparently designed only to re-establish the trade monopoly of Middle Kingdom times, almost certainly predated the beginnings of large-scale gold production. On the other hand, the southward expansion of the Thutmoses, which marks the real transition from the Middle Kingdom policy of trade monopoly to the New Kingdom policy of annexation, probably coincided with the main outburst of gold prospecting and the beginning of production. The two major thrusts of Egypt's southward expansion-up the Nile and into the eastern desert-were therefore probably to some extent related, although the connection between them is not immediately obvious. Exploitation of the desert mines, the gold of Wawat, required the control only of Lower Nubia, since the principal route to the mines was by way of the Wadi Allaqi, which enters the Nile only seventy miles above Aswan.75 Exploitation of the gold of Kush, which came from the riverain district between the Second and Third Cataracts, obviously required the control of the Nile as far south as the Third Cataract, while the annexation of regions still farther upstream might conceivably have been justified in terms of protecting the southern approaches to the goldfields. Still, the newly founded towns and temple estates of Upper Nubia had nothing to do with gold production, and they must be regarded as a quite separate aspect-perhaps in

75 Cf. Jean Vercoutter, "The Gold of Kush," Kush, 7 (1959), 130.

62 WILLIAM Y. ADAMS

the beginning the most important aspect-of Egyptian colonialism under the New Kingdom.

Gold production in Nubia seems to have reached its peak not in the Eigh- teenth Dynasty-the great age of expansion-but in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Dynasties, when other Egyptian colonial enterprises were suffering a rapid decline. There is in fact a famous inscription of Rameses II which suggests that the operation of the desert mines was uneconomical, because of the high mortality rate among men and beasts, until the pharaoh had a well dug in the Wadi Allaqi to supply water for the hazardous overland trek. The pharaoh's enterprise seems to have been successful, for most of the innumerable inscriptions left by prospectors and caravaneers along the Wadi Allaqi date from a time subsequent to the digging of the well, and the largest numbers of them are found in the immediate vicinity of the well itself.76 It seems, therefore, that gold production became the dominant consideration in Egyptian colonial policy only in the latter part of the New Kingdom, when other and more traditional types of colonial enterprise were declining in importance.

The circumstances which brought about the decline and ultimate dissolu- tion of Egypt's African empire are very little understood. If numbers of graves can be taken as an index of the numbers of the living, there seems to have been a significant decline in the population of Nubia-both Egyptian and native-from the middle of the Eighteenth Dynasty onward. Rameses II in the Nineteenth Dynasty undertook the largest building program ever attempted in Nubia, yet evidence of other activities at this time is extremely scarce. C. M. Firth, who directed the first arechaeological survey of Nubia (1908-11), was to write:

The great group of buildings associated with the name of Rameses II are very difficult to reconcile with the almost complete absence of cemeteries from this period. Such huge shrines as Gerf Hussein, Wadi Sebua, and Abu Simbel, could not have been built by the local population, or if they were, the people which produced them has left, so far as is known, no trace of its existence. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Nubia had become a sort of no man's land ruled by the gods and peopled by the ghosts of the dead.77

There are almost no known cemeteries in Nubia from the latter part of the Nineteenth Dynasty, and only a single tomb can be dated with certainty to the Twentieth Dynasty, although hieroglyphic texts found in Egypt refer occa- sionally to activities in Nubia at this time. The line of King's Sons of Kush, the viceroys of Nubia, continued unbroken until the end of the Twentieth Dynasty, but it is apparent that the later viceroys resided at the pharaoh's court, and that their principal responsibility was to oversee gold production

76 Piotrovsky, "Early Dynastic Settlement," 136-40. 77 C. M. Firth, The Archaeological Survey of Nubia, Report for 1910-1911 (Cairo, 1927),

28.


and to command the Nubian levies which were now the main support of the Egyptian throne.78 Although the Egyptians never formally vacated their claim to Nubia, the complete absence both of archaeological remains and of textual references after the Twentieth Dynasty make it evident that their effective control of the south had ended by the eleventh century B.C. Thus ended, after 2,000 years, history's first, and most enduring, colonial empire.

The decline of Egyptian power in Nubia was undoubtedly linked in some measure to the decline of the pharaohs at home-the consequence of their interminable wars to defend their Asiatic possessions. Yet political conditions offer only a partial explanation, for Lower Nubia at the end of the Twentieth Dynasty had been quitted not only by its Egyptian overlords but by the native population as well. For the next 1,000 years, as nearly as we can judge from the absence of archaeological remains, the region between the First and Sec- ond Cataracts was devoid of permanent inhabitants. It seems evident, therefore, that some sort of environmental reverse must have contributed to the decline of Egypt's colonial enterprise in the south. As Lower Nubia is an area in which the Nile is flanked by exceptionally high banks, and as the only irrigation device available in pharaonic times was the man-powered shaduf (lever-lift), it seems reasonable to suppose that a decline in the average level of the river, making irrigation impossible over large areas, was the specific factor which destroyed the agrarian economy of the southern country.79 Sup- port for this hypothesis is afforded by the fact that Lower Nubia was to remain uninhabited until the introduction of the saqia (ox-driven waterwheel), a much more efficient irrigation device than the shaduf, at which time there was a veritable land-rush of reoccupation.80 It must be emphasized, however, that there is as yet no direct evidence for a decline in the level of the Nile in New Kingdom times.81

The fertile district between the Third and Fourth Cataracts-historically the breadbasket of the Sudan-apparently did not share the fate of Lower Nubia. Here, the retreating Egyptians left behind not an impoverished and deserted region, but a thriving native populace which had become accustomed to Egyptian ways and Egyptian goods; a populace which had been transformed from Neolithic barbarism to the status of an "external proletariat" of Egypt itself. The power vacuum which was created by the Egyptian withdrawal from Upper Nubia was inevitably filled, in time, by the Nubians themselves, with consequences which were soon to be felt in Egypt as well.

78 Cf. Arkell, History, 108. 79 This hypothesis was first put forth by C. M. Firth, The Archaeological Survey of Nubia,

Report for 1909-1910 (Cairo, 1915), 21-23. 80 Cf. W. Y. Adams, "Post-Pharaonic Nubia in the Light of Archaeology, I," Journal of

Egyptian Archaeology, 50 (1964), 119-20; and Trigger, History and Settlement, 123. 81 See B. G. Trigger, "The Cultural Ecology of Christian Nubia," in Kunst und Geschichte

Nubiens in Christlicher Zeit, Erich Dinkler, ed. (Recklinghausen, 1970), 355.

64 WILLIAM Y. ADAMS

The New Kingdom represents the climactic phase of Egypt's colonial enterprise in Nubia. The armed trade monopoly and indirect rule of Middle King- dom times gave way to outright territorial annexation and colonization. Na- tive dynasties which had formerly been subsidized and encouraged were now swept aside; in their place there appeared a purely Egyptian bureaucratic organization. The founding of new towns, temples, and productive enterprises brought Egyptian colonists to Nubia in significant numbers for the first time, and permitted the development of a typically Egyptian manorial economy. The new circumstances of coexistence led inevitably to an Egyptianiza- tion of the native population, a process of ideological transformation which was probably aided by the establishment among the Nubians of Egyptian religious cults. From this acculturative process there emerged a large Nubian fellaheen class and a small Egyptianized elite which was able to take its place in the ranks of colonial officials-and from which undoubtedly sprang the later ruling dynasties of Kush, as discussed below.

The final phase of Egyptian colonialism in ancient Nubia obviously bears comparison to the final phase of recent European colonialism in Africa and Asia. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the European powers, like the earlier Thutmoses, extended their military and political control beyond their long-established factory ports, overrunning the interior districts with which they had earlier been content to deal through native intermediaries. Once-friendly native despots were deposed or reduced to figurehead status, the immigration of European artisans and overseers was encouraged or ac- tively subsidized, and there gradually emerged the familiar colonial regimes of recent times.

The process of European expansion from trading enclaves to territorial empire was of course not a uniform one; it proceeded at different times and at different rates in different parts of the world. It was a feature of Spanish and Portuguese colonial enterprise in America from the beginning, while in Brit- ish India and in the Dutch East Indies it began in the eighteenth century and was completed in the nineteenth. In sub-Saharan Africa, almost the whole process of European inland expansion took place in the years between 1880 and 1900,82 while in China it did not happen at all.

The closest parallel to Egyptian colonialism in the New Kingdom is probably to be found in the European "scramble for Africa" in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Here, as in ancient Nubia, the initial motivation was nationalistic and militaristic rather than economic.83 Economic development in the colonies, which necessarily involved a certain amount of European settlement, was a consequence and not a cause of occupation; it was necessary to offset the cost of occupation. As Roland Oliver and J. D. Fage have

82 Cf. Roland Oliver and J. D. Fage, A Short History of Africa (Baltimore, 1962), 181-82. 83 See Kemp, "Imperialism and Empire," 21-23.


written, "the colonial powers had partitioned Africa as an insurance for the future, not because they had any present plans for its exploitation. Thencefor- ward, their main concern was that the annual premium should not be too high." 84

Even within Africa there were significant differences in the patterns of European colonial development, caused in part by structural differences among the various native societies and in part by the varying productive potential of different parts of the continent. However, in the broadest sense, all of these colonial regimes involved five common features: (1) imposition of outright military control, (2) administration through a bureaucracy modelled on European institutions and staffed in the beginning largely by Europeans, (3) development of productive enterprise-agricultural or extractive-managed by Europeans but dependent on a native labor force, (4), introduction of measures such as land expropriation, ruinous taxation, corvee, or encomien- da, designed to assure a native labor supply,85 and (5) a system of indoctrination, sometimes through state schools but more often by missionaries, which would serve to create an ideological bond and a sense of common interest between the colonized peoples and their overlords.86 As nearly as we can perceive, all of these features were present also in the Egyptian colonial system of the New Kingdom.

In spite of efforts toward economic development, very few African colonies proved in the long run to be profitable. It therefore became a major concern of the colonial powers to hold down the cost of administration. One way of doing so was to co-opt native personnel into the governing bureaucracy, and even into the military officer corps, as an alternative to the much more expensive business of bringing out additional colonists from Europe.87 It was the process of co-optation, prompted more by economic circumstance than by political idealism, that produced the Europeanized elite class which ultimately took over the reins of government from its erstwhile overlords. Here too, as will be observed shortly, there is a parallel to the situation in ancient Nubia.

If the beginnings of territorial colonization in ancient Nubia and in moder Africa were not economically motivated, the end assuredly was. In one respect the circumstances were markedly different in the two cases, for in ancient Nubia there was a drastic decline in agricultural productivity not paralleled in moder Africa. There were, nevertheless, two circumstances common in the abandonment of territorial empire by ancient Egyptians and by moder Europeans. First, the colonial powers had been so weakened and impoverished by wars at home that they could no longer afford the cost of the

84 Oliver and Fage, Short History, 196. 85 Ibid., 202. 86 Ibid., 204. 87 Cf. P. M. Holt and M. W. Daly, The History of the Sudan (Boulder, 1979), 123-24.

66 WILLIAM Y. ADAMS

colonial enterprise. Second, acculturation of the native peoples had pro- gressed to the point where economic, cultural, and ideological dependence on the former overlords might be expected to endure even after the termination of direct control.

AFTERMATH: THE NUBIAN SUCCESSOR-STATE OF NAPATA

The bond which had been forged between Egypt and Nubia under the New Kingdom was, unlike that of Middle Kingdom times, too strong to be broken merely by the withdrawal of Egyptian civil and military authority. The Theban pharaohs had become dependent not only on Nubian gold and ivory but on Nubian troops to support their rule at home; the Nubians had become dependent not only on Egyptian goods but on Egyptian gods. From this mutual dependence there emerged, in the postcolonial period, a new symbiosis which was to endure nearly as long as had the colonial regime.

Egypt in the Twentieth Dynasty was increasingly torn by internal strife, and the viceroys of Kush, as commanders of the Nubian levies, assumed a more and more important role in the northern country. In the end, they usurped the kingly office itself; under the Twenty-first Dynasty, the titles of pharaoh, viceroy of Kush, and high priest of Amon were combined in a single indi- vidual.88 His effective power, however, was limited to Upper Egypt, for by this time the Egyptian state had once again fragmented, and the Delta region was under the control of a rival dynasty at Tanis and of Libyan interlopers at Bubastis. On the other hand, the Theban priest-kings may have continued to exert some influence in Nubia through the priesthood of Amon at Jebel Barkal. Although there is no direct eivdence on this point, it seems clear, in light of subsequent events, that the Amon cult continued to flourish in Nubia even after withdrawal of Egyptian civil authority, and it is probable that at least the chief priests continued to be appointed from Thebes. Whether at this time they were Egyptians or Egyptianized Nubians, or both, will probably always remain moot.

The immediate postcolonial period constitutes another of Nubia's dark ages, from which for the time being we have neither textual nor archaeological evidence. The re-emergence of an indigenous political authority cannot be clearly discerned for at least two centuries after the Egyptian departure; in the meantime, the priests of Amon may have provided what effective government there was in Upper Nubia, as did the priest-kings of Amon in Upper Egypt.89 It is noteworthy that when a purely indigenous political authority finally did emerge in Nubia, probably in the ninth century B.C., it arose in the shadow of Jebel Barkal and under the tutelage of the priests of Amon.

The origins of the postcolonial Nubian dynasty are as obscure as are those

88 Cf. Arkell, History, 108-9. 89 For discussion of this theory, see Budge, Egyptian Sudan, I, 650-52; and Reisner, "Vice-

roys of Ethiopia," 53-55.


of the Kerma monarchy, to which in the beginning it bore a considerable resemblance. Once again, its emergence is first proclaimed not by historical texts but by a series of royal tombs in the cemetery of El Kurru, ten miles to the south of Jebel Barkal. Here were buried some eight or ten Nubian rulers, together with a much larger number of their queens and also a great many of their favorite horses. The earliest tombs at El Kurru are much like those built at Kerma a thousand years earlier; they incorporate the traditional Nubian features of the round earth tumulus and the interment of the corpse on a bed. These tombs evidently belong to a wholly illiterate age, for there are no names or inscribed objects found in association with them. However, the form of the royal tombs soon underwent a strking metamorphosis, reflecting the rising fortunes of the dynasty itself. From the sixth generation onward, for a thousand years, all Nubian rulers were buried under stone pyramids which were obviously inspired by those of the Egyptian pharaohs, though considerably smaller in size and also, in most cases, more slender in profile than are the Egyptian pyramids. Each Nubian tomb is adjoined by a mortuary chapel decorated with hieroglyphic texts and reliefs in typical Egyptian fashion, depicting the deceased ruler with the traditional titles of pharaoh and compan- ion of the gods.

A certain Kashta-perhaps the sixth king to be buried at El Kurru-is the first of the Nubian rulers to emerge into the light of history. His name is known to us from two brief hieroglyphic texts. Although their meaning is not absolutely clear, one of the inscriptions seems to imply that Kashta at some point in his career journeyed to Egypt, where he was confirmed in the title of king by the priests of Amon at Thebes (as presumably he had already been at Jebel Barkal), and where he obliged the chief priestess of Amon to adopt his own daughter as her successor-designate.90 In thus cementing the alliance between the monarchy and the Amon cult, the Nubian ruler was following the practice of many earlier pharaohs. There is no suggestion that Kashta came to Egypt as a conqueror; rather, he seems to have been invited as a deliverer and protector. The Theban priests, threatened with invasion from the north and long accustomed to rely on Nubian troops for their protection, probably welcomed the appearance of a new and effective commander who could fill the now-vacant role of viceroy of Kush, and they hastened to claim his patronage. The circumstances of Kashta's investiture as king and defender of the faith are strikingly reminiscent of those 1,500 years later, when Pope Leo III bestowed the crown of the Holy Roman Empire on the erstwhile barbarian Charlemagne.

Piankhi, the son and successor of Kashta, seems to have passed the first twenty years of his reign uneventfully at Napata. He had apparently inherited the mantle of defender of the faith from his father, however, for in due course

90 Nitocris Adoption Stele. See Arkell, History, 121.

68 WILLIAM Y. ADAMS

an appeal came from the Theban priests asking for protection against a threatened invasion from the Delta. Piankhi at once dispatched a relieving force to Egypt, and presently followed in person with a larger army. After being acclaimed at Thebes as a deliverer, he proceeded northward with his forces, subdued one after another the rival dynasts in Lower Egypt, and re-established a united rule on the Nile in the name of Amon. To crown his triumph, the Nubian conqueror was invested with the traditional titles and protocols of the pharaoh. He then retired to Napata, where he restored and enlarged the great Temple of Amon at Jebel Barkal, and finally built for himself the first of the great royal pyramids of Kush.91 For the next century, Egypt as well as Nubia was to be ruled by descendants of the once-despised inhabitants of Kush-the so-called Ethiopian pharaohs of the Twenty-fifth Dynasty. It was the high-water mark of Nubian history-an "heroic age," in Toynbee's term.92

The successors of Piankhi were considerably less astute than he, both politically and militarily; overestimating their martial prowess as a result of the relatively easy success in reuniting Egypt, they revived the ancient pharaonic dream of empire in Asia. This brought them into conflict with the rising power of Assyria, and led eventually to the invasion and sack of Egypt by Assyrian troops and to the final expulsion of the Nubian pharaohs. During the century of their dominance in the north, however, the Nubian rulers had time to transplant to their own country a great many of the institutions of the pharaonic court and of Egyptian civilization. Taharqa, one of the last and least successful of the Nubian rulers in the north,93 was nevertheless one of the greatest of all builders in his own country. He adorned both Lower Nubia and Upper Nubia with a series of temples second in size and number only to those of Rameses II.

Although Nubian rulers never again set foot in Egypt after the seventh century B.C., the Egyptian-style dynasty and state which they created in their own country endured for another thousand years, and was strong enough to resist successive attempts at conquest by Egyptians, Persians, and Romans.94 As late as the fourth century after Christ, Nubian rulers still worshipped in temples and were buried under pyramids whose inscriptions proclaimed them

91 The details of Piankhi's reign are known from his great commemorative stele, found at Jebel Barkal in 1862. It is considered by Egyptologists to be one of the masterpieces of ancient literature; cf. Breasted, History of Egypt, 545; and Wilson, Culture, 293. For a full translation, see Budge, Egyptian Sudan, II, 11-26.

92 Cf. Toynbee, Study of History, VIII, 1. 93 Taharqa was the pharaoh upon whom King Hezekiah of Judah proposed to rely for protec-

tion against the Assyrians, provoking from them the contemptuous retort: "Now behold, thou trustest upon the staff of this broken reed, even upon Egypt, whereon, if a man lean, it will go into his hand and pierce it .. ." (2 Kings 18:21).

94 For the later history of postcolonial Nubia, see G. A. Reisner, "The Meroitic Kingdom of Ethiopia: A Chronological Outline," Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, 9: pt. 1-2 (1923), 34-77, and 9: pt. 3-4 (1923), 157-60; Arkell, History, 138-73; and P. L. Shinnie, Meroe (New York, 1967), 29-61.


as the only true successors of the pharaohs and the special protectors of Amon. Egypt itself had been successively a Persian satrapy, a Greek kingdom, a Roman province, and finally an outpost of universal Christendom before the last of Nubia's "pharaohs" passed away, probably around A.D. 350.95

The history of Nubia in the immediate postcolonial period does not exhibit the pattern of economic imperialism, or neocolonialism, that is observable in much of Africa today. Egyptian domination persisted mainly in the religious sphere, where for a long time the priesthood of Amon exerted a stabilizing influence somewhat comparable to that of the church in post-Roman Europe. The Nubians under Egyptian rule had acquired a taste for certain kinds of Egyptian manufactured goods, but many of these were now being produced on Nubian soil, either by natives or by expatriate Egyptian craftsmen. What the Egyptians had not done in Nubia was to create an economy dependent on exports, and hence they were able to exert no real influence in their former colony once their political control was gone. Militarily they were weaker than the Nubians themselves; indeed, their own frontiers were now guarded largely by Nubian mercenary troops.

Although Egyptian rule in Nubia did indeed forge an enduring bond between the two countries, it was a bond which led not to the perpetuation of Egyptian control but to the emergence of Nubian control. This development is not without parallels in later history; it is but one of many instances of barbarians gaining the upper hand over their former overlords through superi- or military prowess. Indeed, the coronation of Piankhi by the priests of Amon foreshadowed in an extraordinary way the coronation of Charlemagne by the Roman Pope 1,500 years later. In each case the spiritual guardians of an ancient empire delivered it into the hands of a barbarian chieftain, because he appeared to be the only person capable of restoring and maintaining order.

CONCLUDING REFLECTIONS

Obviously, comparisons between ancient and moder colonialism can be pushed only so far. The Egyptians confined their attention to immediately neighboring and easily controlled territories, while the European powers spread their dominion over half the globe. The Egyptians had no rivals for the control of Nubia, whereas the colonial activities of the Europeans were stimu- lated in considerable part by competition with one another. Egyptian colonialism was from first to last largely a state enterprise, while private capital contributed importantly to the development of European colonialism. Finally, the acquisition of raw materials for manufacturing purposes played no part in the exploitation of Nubia, although the acquisition of coniferous timber for furniture and shipbuilding was an important motivation of Egyptian control of the Levant. Nevertheless, the similarities between ancient and moder colo-

95 Cf. Shinnie, Meroe, 60-61. It should be emphasized that the date for the final disappearance of the Kushite dynasty is hardly more than a guess.

70 WILLIAM Y. ADAMS

nialism are striking and in some ways seem even more so when viewed against the background of these differences.

Such parallels invite explanation at the level of macrotheory, but in my view-that of an avowed positivist-no one theory is adequate to account for the observable similarities both of structure and of process. Marxist and most other economic theory presupposes a major difference between capitalist and precapitalist systems of exploitation, which is hardly consistent with the empirical evidence. Indeed, even in the recent past, it is difficult to perceive much difference between colonial activities that were financed by private capital and those that were state enterprises. The termination one after another of the European monopoly companies,96 and the substitution of direct state administration, seems to suggest that private capital was a stimulating force but ultimately not a shaping force in the history of European colonialism.

Other kinds of macrotheory seem equally inadequate. Evolutionary theory, like Marxist theory, has no place for atavistic developments. Ecological theory, currently fashionable in anthropology, gives insufficient attention to the purely political dimension of colonialism. Structural and cyclic theories- particularly that of Pitirim Sorokin97-may contain a part of the answer, but they account more for processual than for structural similarities.

I have been forced to conclude, somewhat reluctantly, that the parallels between ancient and moder colonialism were the result of a combination of factors, some constant, some cyclically recurring, and some accidentally recurring. The motivating factors were mostly either constant or cyclically recurring, while the enabling factors were in part accidentally recurring.

The most unchanging factor in the situation was certainly the inequality of resources between the northern and southern lands, which has provided a motive for colonial exploitation from ancient to moder times. Africa was the supplier of certain kinds of exotic goods which the Mediterranean and Euro- pean peoples always coveted precisely for their scarcity value. A second constant factor was the existence of a reliable, and controllable, connecting route between the northern and southern lands-the Nile for the Egyptians and the Atlantic and Indian Oceans for the later maritime powers. Prior to the rise of caravan and maritime trade, the Nile was the only such route, and it was thus no accident that the world's first colonial empire developed along its banks.

Materialists would certainly add economic greed and political ambition to the list of constant motivations, but this argument is acceptable only within limits. Greed and ambition are no doubt universal components of human nature, but they are not always indulged to the same degree or in the same way. In history, they have only intermittently led to costly expansionist ven- tures. Following Sorokin, I am inclined to view expansionism-at least colo-

96 See Fieldhouse, Colonial Empires, 143-44. 97 Pitirim Sorokin, Social and Cultural Dynamics, 4 vols. (New York, 1937). See also F. R.

Cowell, History, Civilization and Culture (London, 1952).


nial expansionism-as a cyclically recurrent phenomenon rather than as a constant one.98 It is neither more nor less explainable in terms of causal theory than are other types of business and political cycles.

Accidentally recurrent factors in the history of colonialism have mostly been of a politicomilitary nature. Militarism arises in response to proximate causes that are somewhat unpredictable in their occurrence. Once set in mo- tion, however, it runs a fairly predictable course that almost always leads to expansionism. It is noteworthy in this respect that each of the major stages of Egyptian colonial expansion in Nubia followed upon an episode of military unification or reunification within Egypt. Similarly, the colonial expansion of Spain and Portugal in the fifteenth century, of England in the sixteenth century, of Holland in the seventeenth century, and of Germany in the nineteeth century, followed, in each case, upon a major national unification. In the nineteenth-century scramble for Africa, A.J.P. Taylor wrote, "all the great powers found a safe channel for their exuberance outside Europe."99 This seems to underscore B. J. Kemp's observation that "empires are ultimately about power and the sense of power, and belong to a stage of internal political development." 00

Naval and military superiority were additional accidentally recurring factors. We have little detailed information about Egyptian and Nubian ships, but we know inferentially that the Egyptians had craft capable of transporting hundred-ton stone blocks from Aswan to Memphis. The Nubians, whose territory included no good building timber, almost certainly had nothing of the sort. In the more recent past, it was specifically European advances in naval design and in navigational expertise that made possible the sea-controlled empires of the sixteenth and later centuries.101 Naval superiority, in short, was the necessary enabling factor for the second phase of ancient and moder colonial expansion.

The necessary factor for the third phase, that of territorial empire, was military superiority. Fage has observed that the European powers before the nineteenth century were incapable of extending their dominion into the Af- rican interior, where the native armies were as well equipped and trained as were their own. 102 Almost certainly this was true, initially, in the relationship between ancient Egypt and Kerma. It was the military expertise and the new weaponry gained in the campaign against the Hyksos which gave the Egyp- tians the upper hand over their Nubian neighbors at the beginning of the New Kingdom. As for the European powers in the nineteenth century, Hilaire Belloc said it all:

Whatever happens, we have got The Maxim gun, and they have not.

98 Sorokin, Social and Cultural Dynamics. 99 See William R. Lewis, ed., Imperialism (New York, 1976), 199. 100 Kemp, "Imperialism and Empire," 56. 101 See Parry, Age of Reconnaissance, 67-145. 102 Fage, History, 286-88.

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