King Merenptah
2004-04-12 09:51:51 UTC
The site was nearly two hundred miles deep in the heart of a country the
Egyptians had called Ta-Seti - "Land of the Bow." Here in this remote corner of
Africa, an elegant and cosmopolitan culture had flourished centuries before the
pyramids were built.
Discovery of a variety of artifacts led to the startling conclusions.
It had been found by archaeologist Keith C. Seele in 1964. Originally, Qustul
was judged to be one of the least promising areas. Seele spent most of his time
in Nubia excavating other areas. When he finally turned his attention to
Qustul, in his very last digging season in Nubia, Seele discovered a cemetery
of thirty-three tombs.
Twelve of the tombs were tremendous, each one large enough to have served a
predynastic Egyptian king.
Tombs of this size, wealth and date in Egypt would have been immediately
recognized as royal. Their extraordinarily varied contents would have been
taken as evidence of a complex culture exposed to wide outside connections. But
because the discovery was made in Nubia at a time and place when kingship was
thought impossible, further proof of royalty is necessary.
What was really surprising was the age of the tombs. The cemetery clearly dated
from the time of the so-called A-Group - a prehistoric people believed to have
dominated lower Nubia from about 3800 to 3100 B.C.
Of all the numerous items discovered, the most significant were found in an
A-Group grave site, called Cemetery L, which yielded artifacts that were
created six to seven generations (approximately 200 years) before the start of
the First Dynasty in Egypt, 3150 B.C.
All told, more than 1,000 complete and fragmentary painted pots, and over 100
stone vessels. The range of these and other fragments from the plundered
cemetery began to indicate a wealth and complexity that could only be called
royal.
In addition to huge quantities of native pottery, the tombs were filled with
bottles, flasks, bowls, and large storage jars from Egypt - many inscribed with
hieroglyphs. There were also vessels from Syria-Palestine of a type that had
never been found in Egypt and that may have indicated a direct trade link
between Nubia and Asia.
These findings included five major groups:
1 - items probably from Sudan
2 - items very similar to a culture previously know as C-Group, which was found
in Nubia and in Egypt up to the New Kingdom (2300 - 1500 B.C.)
3 - Egyptian pottery, some of which had early forms of hieroglyphic writing
4 - items from the Levant (Syria and Palestine area)
5 - badly damaged objects of Egyptian and Sudanese origin
It was in one of these graves - coded "L-24" by the excavators - that the
mysterious incense burner came to light.
An incense burner with crude figures and pictographs gouged deep into the clay.
The inscription showed three ships sailing in procession. The three ships were
sailing toward the royal palace. One of the ships carried a lion - perhaps a
diety. This piece had been made no later than 3300 B.C. At that early date,
there were not supposed to have been any such things as pharaohs or pharaohs'
palaces. Moreover, the piece had not even been found in Egypt. It had come from
Qustul, located just north of the Sudanese border. The censer, in short was
Nubian.
If Williams's restoration was correct this censer had been inscribed with
nothing less than the earliest known portrait of a pharaoh ever discovered.
Why, then, had it turned up in Nubia rather than Egypt? Such censers simply do
not appear in Egypt. Could the earliest pharaoh have actually been Nubian?
This was not Egyptian art. This censer had been found, not in Egypt, but nearly
200 miles deep in Nubia. Moreover, for the time the censer was made,
archaeologists had found no trace in Egypt of any other inscription showing
such a clear use of royal emblems such as the White Crown, the Horus falcon,
the serekh, and the rosette.
…when the incense burner was reexamined in the light of the obviously royal
stature of people buried in Cemetery L, the essential restoration of the
missing elements was immediately clear. In the first ship, a prisoner is
kneeling on a palanquin or litter held by a rope in the grasp of a guard with a
mace…the white crown of Upper Egypt clearly stands out above the ship. In
front of it is the tail of a falcon - another sign of kingship. The crown
indicates that the figure is a king, and the falcon should be seen as perched
on a serekh, together a characteristic representation in early dynastic Egypt.
In front of the falcon is a rosette, symbol of royalty before the First
Dynasty…
Its date provided by context, style and composition, the Qustul burner
furnishes the earliest definite representation of a king in the Nile Valley or
anywhere…Perhaps the most troublesome question was why nothing of this
kingdom had been known until now. Actually, the truth is the evidence, other
than the cemetery at Qustul, has been known for some time but it has been
either ignored or wrongly interpreted and dated.
When the Qustul incense burner was subjected to geochemical analysis, it was
found to be made from a distinctive mineral typically found at Nubian sites
such as Aswan, Kalabsha, and Meroe. Did it seem plausible that Egyptians would
have quarried Nubian stone, transported it back to Egypt, carved it into a
distinctly Nubian style of incense burner, then export the censer back to
Nubia? Probably not.
But if the Nubians were organized in a kingdom as early as 3300 B.C., why had
no previous evidence been found for this mysterious African state? In fact, it
had. Egyptologists had simply failed to grasp the significance of this
evidence.
The Nubian desert, for example abounded with rock drawings from roughly the
same period as the Qustul incense burner, many showing distinctly "Egyptian"
themes and symbols.
Ivory seals from the A-Group period had been found featuring kingly serekhs. A
mud seal impression found at Siali - also dating from the A-Group period -
showed a man saluting a serekh surmounted by a falcon. The serekh was actually
labeled with a bow - the hieroglyphic emblem for Ta-Seti, Land of the Bow -
implying that the man was paying homage to a Nubian state. One bowl from Qustul
even showed vultures tearing at a fallen enemy who is labeled with the signs
for Ta-Shemau - Upper Egypt - possibly indicating that the Nubians had defeated
Upper Egypt in battle.
Every one of these inscriptions had been found in Nubia. Yet experts had always
assumed that they referred to an Egyptian monarchy, rather than a Nubian one.
Why, then, should experts assume that every recognizable symbol of royal
authority found in that country would be of foreign origin? Some critics
insisted that the Qustul censer must have been an Egyptian import, despite the
fact that it was a typically Nubian object made of indisputably Nubian stone.
For nine generations or more, according to the sequence of tombs in Cemetery L,
some 12 kings at Qustul participated with other kings in Upper Egypt in the
creation of a unified culture. For Egypt, they helped fashion pharaonic
civilization and thus a legacy for the First Dynasty which the world has
marveled at for millennia. For Nubia, they established an early political unit
and led that country to its first cultural distinction.
Seele speculated that the tombs might be royal, evidence of a long-lost dynasty
of Nubian kings. Unfortunately, this theory flew in the face of conventional
opinion. Seele's theory was subjected to the worst fate known to academia - the
silent treatment.
Following his discovery, several major scholarly works were published on
Nubia's A-Group culture. But none made even passing reference to the mysterious
Cemetery L. For more than ten years, Cemetery L was ignored as completely as if
its treasures lay, still unexcavated, at the bottom of Lake Nasser.
Seele died of cancer without ever seeing his theory vindicated. Seele had gone
to his grave believing that Nubian kings lay buried in Cemetery L. But he had
never imagined that those kings might have been pharaohs, arraying themselves
in all the formal regalia of an Egyptian monarch.
As a result of the reexamination of data concerning ancient Nubia, many
scholars have concluded that the Nubians were an extremely sophisticated people
who built cities, roads, and temples comparable to those of the people of Egypt
in the north. It has even been suggested by one researcher that there were more
pyramids constructed in Nubia than in Egypt.
Ivan Van Sertima stated on Williams conclusions:
What is equally significant is the more recent discovery that there was some
pharaonic-type civilization developing parallel to Egypt through the centuries.
Bruce Williams, in a letter to me in 1984, maintained that a Kushite continuity
sustained the pharaonic impulse through the ages, from A-group (3300 B.C.)
right through to X-Group (550 A.D.). This, to put it in his own words,
'represents a new departure in the examination of Egypt's place in the African
context.
The rich graves of the A-Group kings contained gold jewelry, beautiful pottery,
and stone vessels…that rivaled the wealth of the Egyptian kings. Many of
these luxury objects were Near Eastern or Egyptian, indicating that the A-Group
carried on extensive trade with those areas.
In time, the Egyptian and Nubian kingdoms became enemies, and the Egyptian
kings, the same ones who built the pyramids, invaded Nubia. The Egyptians
conquered the A-Group and ruled the 'Land of the Bow' as a colony.
However, south of the Third Cataract - beyond the area of Egyptian control, the
Nubians remained independent and continued to grow strong.
The debate over how old dynastic Egypt was, will continue…but it is important
to note two things in this connection. One, it further invalidates any claim to
Sumerian or Mesopotamian primacy or any significant influence on the Egyptians
of the pyramid age - the earliest hard dating of materials found at Ur, the
first Sumerian city-state, is 2600 B.C., whereas the most conservative date for
the first Egyptian dynasty is 3100 B.C.
Two, it does not affect the dating of the first pharaonic dynasty in Nubia
since the methods used to arrive at that dating would still place Ta-Seti at
least 200 years before the first Egyptian dynasty (whatever that date may be).
Discussion with Dr. Bruce Williams has established that very clearly.
Current evidence indicates that the Nubians and Egyptians may be ethnically the
same with cultures coming from similar sources.
Unfortunately, the likelihood of further archaeological study at Qustul, or any
other site in Nubia, is all but impossible became many of the primary areas of
investigation now lie under 250 feet of water, at the bottom of Lake Nasser.
This man-made lake covers an area of approximately 1,550 square miles, and it
is the second largest man-made lake in the world.
During the construction of the Aswan High Dam (1960 - 1968) and the subsequent
creation of Lake Nasser, 40 Nubian villages were relocated further inland.
Thousands of Nubians were resettled in and around the city of Aswan and in
villages further north; however, an untold number drowned when they refused to
leave the lands that their ancestors had occupied for more than 5,000 years.
[Nubian Rescue by Rex Keating) writes:
All 23 temples and shrines were saved and re-erected elsewhere. Four of them,
from Egypt, went overseas; the temple of Dendur now stands in New York's
Metropolitan Museum of Fine Art, Taffeh has come to rest in Holland where it
may be seen at Leyden, Ellesyn is in Turin and Debod at Madrid. In 1969 the
archaeological survey team working in the Sudan reached the Dal Cataract, the
extreme southern limit affected by Lake Nasser. Their work had ended and a year
later the last two expeditions in Sudanese Nubia were forced by the rising
waters to leave. By 1971 Nubia had passed into history. The cost was
$41,774,458. Governments were cajoled while radio and film, television and the
press were tempted into playing their part in the world pattern of mass
persuasion to save Abu Simbel. And it worked.
The decision to build the High Dam was basically humanitarian, not political as
has been so often represented. The generating capacity of its 12 turbines is in
excess of Egypt's foreseeable needs for years to come. The reservoir behind the
dam (known as Lake Nasser) is long and narrow, covering an area of three
thousand square miles and extending across two hundred miles of Egyptian
territory and a hundred miles over the border into the Sudan, and it will bring
two million more acres of land under cultivation.
In addition to the displacement of human beings, a total of 18 ancient temples
were dismantled and relocated. These temples were presented as gifts to those
nations that assisted in the construction of the Aswan High Dam.
There is no way to estimate the total number of temples and tombs which now lie
at the bottom of Lake Nasser, nor is there any way of knowing the many secrets
these structures currently hold. Because of the creation of the Aswan Dam, the
world will never have an opportunity to study the full impact Africans from the
southern Nile Valley had on the development of ancient Egypt and subsequent
civilizations.
Sources:
African Peoples Contributions to World Civilizations, by Paul L. Hamilton
Nile Valley Contributions to Civilization by Anthony T. Browder
The Lost Pharoahs of Nubia by Bruce Williams
Black Spark, White Fire by Richard Poe
Nubian Rescue by Rex Keating
King Merenptah
Egyptians had called Ta-Seti - "Land of the Bow." Here in this remote corner of
Africa, an elegant and cosmopolitan culture had flourished centuries before the
pyramids were built.
Discovery of a variety of artifacts led to the startling conclusions.
It had been found by archaeologist Keith C. Seele in 1964. Originally, Qustul
was judged to be one of the least promising areas. Seele spent most of his time
in Nubia excavating other areas. When he finally turned his attention to
Qustul, in his very last digging season in Nubia, Seele discovered a cemetery
of thirty-three tombs.
Twelve of the tombs were tremendous, each one large enough to have served a
predynastic Egyptian king.
Tombs of this size, wealth and date in Egypt would have been immediately
recognized as royal. Their extraordinarily varied contents would have been
taken as evidence of a complex culture exposed to wide outside connections. But
because the discovery was made in Nubia at a time and place when kingship was
thought impossible, further proof of royalty is necessary.
What was really surprising was the age of the tombs. The cemetery clearly dated
from the time of the so-called A-Group - a prehistoric people believed to have
dominated lower Nubia from about 3800 to 3100 B.C.
Of all the numerous items discovered, the most significant were found in an
A-Group grave site, called Cemetery L, which yielded artifacts that were
created six to seven generations (approximately 200 years) before the start of
the First Dynasty in Egypt, 3150 B.C.
All told, more than 1,000 complete and fragmentary painted pots, and over 100
stone vessels. The range of these and other fragments from the plundered
cemetery began to indicate a wealth and complexity that could only be called
royal.
In addition to huge quantities of native pottery, the tombs were filled with
bottles, flasks, bowls, and large storage jars from Egypt - many inscribed with
hieroglyphs. There were also vessels from Syria-Palestine of a type that had
never been found in Egypt and that may have indicated a direct trade link
between Nubia and Asia.
These findings included five major groups:
1 - items probably from Sudan
2 - items very similar to a culture previously know as C-Group, which was found
in Nubia and in Egypt up to the New Kingdom (2300 - 1500 B.C.)
3 - Egyptian pottery, some of which had early forms of hieroglyphic writing
4 - items from the Levant (Syria and Palestine area)
5 - badly damaged objects of Egyptian and Sudanese origin
It was in one of these graves - coded "L-24" by the excavators - that the
mysterious incense burner came to light.
An incense burner with crude figures and pictographs gouged deep into the clay.
The inscription showed three ships sailing in procession. The three ships were
sailing toward the royal palace. One of the ships carried a lion - perhaps a
diety. This piece had been made no later than 3300 B.C. At that early date,
there were not supposed to have been any such things as pharaohs or pharaohs'
palaces. Moreover, the piece had not even been found in Egypt. It had come from
Qustul, located just north of the Sudanese border. The censer, in short was
Nubian.
If Williams's restoration was correct this censer had been inscribed with
nothing less than the earliest known portrait of a pharaoh ever discovered.
Why, then, had it turned up in Nubia rather than Egypt? Such censers simply do
not appear in Egypt. Could the earliest pharaoh have actually been Nubian?
This was not Egyptian art. This censer had been found, not in Egypt, but nearly
200 miles deep in Nubia. Moreover, for the time the censer was made,
archaeologists had found no trace in Egypt of any other inscription showing
such a clear use of royal emblems such as the White Crown, the Horus falcon,
the serekh, and the rosette.
…when the incense burner was reexamined in the light of the obviously royal
stature of people buried in Cemetery L, the essential restoration of the
missing elements was immediately clear. In the first ship, a prisoner is
kneeling on a palanquin or litter held by a rope in the grasp of a guard with a
mace…the white crown of Upper Egypt clearly stands out above the ship. In
front of it is the tail of a falcon - another sign of kingship. The crown
indicates that the figure is a king, and the falcon should be seen as perched
on a serekh, together a characteristic representation in early dynastic Egypt.
In front of the falcon is a rosette, symbol of royalty before the First
Dynasty…
Its date provided by context, style and composition, the Qustul burner
furnishes the earliest definite representation of a king in the Nile Valley or
anywhere…Perhaps the most troublesome question was why nothing of this
kingdom had been known until now. Actually, the truth is the evidence, other
than the cemetery at Qustul, has been known for some time but it has been
either ignored or wrongly interpreted and dated.
When the Qustul incense burner was subjected to geochemical analysis, it was
found to be made from a distinctive mineral typically found at Nubian sites
such as Aswan, Kalabsha, and Meroe. Did it seem plausible that Egyptians would
have quarried Nubian stone, transported it back to Egypt, carved it into a
distinctly Nubian style of incense burner, then export the censer back to
Nubia? Probably not.
But if the Nubians were organized in a kingdom as early as 3300 B.C., why had
no previous evidence been found for this mysterious African state? In fact, it
had. Egyptologists had simply failed to grasp the significance of this
evidence.
The Nubian desert, for example abounded with rock drawings from roughly the
same period as the Qustul incense burner, many showing distinctly "Egyptian"
themes and symbols.
Ivory seals from the A-Group period had been found featuring kingly serekhs. A
mud seal impression found at Siali - also dating from the A-Group period -
showed a man saluting a serekh surmounted by a falcon. The serekh was actually
labeled with a bow - the hieroglyphic emblem for Ta-Seti, Land of the Bow -
implying that the man was paying homage to a Nubian state. One bowl from Qustul
even showed vultures tearing at a fallen enemy who is labeled with the signs
for Ta-Shemau - Upper Egypt - possibly indicating that the Nubians had defeated
Upper Egypt in battle.
Every one of these inscriptions had been found in Nubia. Yet experts had always
assumed that they referred to an Egyptian monarchy, rather than a Nubian one.
Why, then, should experts assume that every recognizable symbol of royal
authority found in that country would be of foreign origin? Some critics
insisted that the Qustul censer must have been an Egyptian import, despite the
fact that it was a typically Nubian object made of indisputably Nubian stone.
For nine generations or more, according to the sequence of tombs in Cemetery L,
some 12 kings at Qustul participated with other kings in Upper Egypt in the
creation of a unified culture. For Egypt, they helped fashion pharaonic
civilization and thus a legacy for the First Dynasty which the world has
marveled at for millennia. For Nubia, they established an early political unit
and led that country to its first cultural distinction.
Seele speculated that the tombs might be royal, evidence of a long-lost dynasty
of Nubian kings. Unfortunately, this theory flew in the face of conventional
opinion. Seele's theory was subjected to the worst fate known to academia - the
silent treatment.
Following his discovery, several major scholarly works were published on
Nubia's A-Group culture. But none made even passing reference to the mysterious
Cemetery L. For more than ten years, Cemetery L was ignored as completely as if
its treasures lay, still unexcavated, at the bottom of Lake Nasser.
Seele died of cancer without ever seeing his theory vindicated. Seele had gone
to his grave believing that Nubian kings lay buried in Cemetery L. But he had
never imagined that those kings might have been pharaohs, arraying themselves
in all the formal regalia of an Egyptian monarch.
As a result of the reexamination of data concerning ancient Nubia, many
scholars have concluded that the Nubians were an extremely sophisticated people
who built cities, roads, and temples comparable to those of the people of Egypt
in the north. It has even been suggested by one researcher that there were more
pyramids constructed in Nubia than in Egypt.
Ivan Van Sertima stated on Williams conclusions:
What is equally significant is the more recent discovery that there was some
pharaonic-type civilization developing parallel to Egypt through the centuries.
Bruce Williams, in a letter to me in 1984, maintained that a Kushite continuity
sustained the pharaonic impulse through the ages, from A-group (3300 B.C.)
right through to X-Group (550 A.D.). This, to put it in his own words,
'represents a new departure in the examination of Egypt's place in the African
context.
The rich graves of the A-Group kings contained gold jewelry, beautiful pottery,
and stone vessels…that rivaled the wealth of the Egyptian kings. Many of
these luxury objects were Near Eastern or Egyptian, indicating that the A-Group
carried on extensive trade with those areas.
In time, the Egyptian and Nubian kingdoms became enemies, and the Egyptian
kings, the same ones who built the pyramids, invaded Nubia. The Egyptians
conquered the A-Group and ruled the 'Land of the Bow' as a colony.
However, south of the Third Cataract - beyond the area of Egyptian control, the
Nubians remained independent and continued to grow strong.
The debate over how old dynastic Egypt was, will continue…but it is important
to note two things in this connection. One, it further invalidates any claim to
Sumerian or Mesopotamian primacy or any significant influence on the Egyptians
of the pyramid age - the earliest hard dating of materials found at Ur, the
first Sumerian city-state, is 2600 B.C., whereas the most conservative date for
the first Egyptian dynasty is 3100 B.C.
Two, it does not affect the dating of the first pharaonic dynasty in Nubia
since the methods used to arrive at that dating would still place Ta-Seti at
least 200 years before the first Egyptian dynasty (whatever that date may be).
Discussion with Dr. Bruce Williams has established that very clearly.
Current evidence indicates that the Nubians and Egyptians may be ethnically the
same with cultures coming from similar sources.
Unfortunately, the likelihood of further archaeological study at Qustul, or any
other site in Nubia, is all but impossible became many of the primary areas of
investigation now lie under 250 feet of water, at the bottom of Lake Nasser.
This man-made lake covers an area of approximately 1,550 square miles, and it
is the second largest man-made lake in the world.
During the construction of the Aswan High Dam (1960 - 1968) and the subsequent
creation of Lake Nasser, 40 Nubian villages were relocated further inland.
Thousands of Nubians were resettled in and around the city of Aswan and in
villages further north; however, an untold number drowned when they refused to
leave the lands that their ancestors had occupied for more than 5,000 years.
[Nubian Rescue by Rex Keating) writes:
All 23 temples and shrines were saved and re-erected elsewhere. Four of them,
from Egypt, went overseas; the temple of Dendur now stands in New York's
Metropolitan Museum of Fine Art, Taffeh has come to rest in Holland where it
may be seen at Leyden, Ellesyn is in Turin and Debod at Madrid. In 1969 the
archaeological survey team working in the Sudan reached the Dal Cataract, the
extreme southern limit affected by Lake Nasser. Their work had ended and a year
later the last two expeditions in Sudanese Nubia were forced by the rising
waters to leave. By 1971 Nubia had passed into history. The cost was
$41,774,458. Governments were cajoled while radio and film, television and the
press were tempted into playing their part in the world pattern of mass
persuasion to save Abu Simbel. And it worked.
The decision to build the High Dam was basically humanitarian, not political as
has been so often represented. The generating capacity of its 12 turbines is in
excess of Egypt's foreseeable needs for years to come. The reservoir behind the
dam (known as Lake Nasser) is long and narrow, covering an area of three
thousand square miles and extending across two hundred miles of Egyptian
territory and a hundred miles over the border into the Sudan, and it will bring
two million more acres of land under cultivation.
In addition to the displacement of human beings, a total of 18 ancient temples
were dismantled and relocated. These temples were presented as gifts to those
nations that assisted in the construction of the Aswan High Dam.
There is no way to estimate the total number of temples and tombs which now lie
at the bottom of Lake Nasser, nor is there any way of knowing the many secrets
these structures currently hold. Because of the creation of the Aswan Dam, the
world will never have an opportunity to study the full impact Africans from the
southern Nile Valley had on the development of ancient Egypt and subsequent
civilizations.
Sources:
African Peoples Contributions to World Civilizations, by Paul L. Hamilton
Nile Valley Contributions to Civilization by Anthony T. Browder
The Lost Pharoahs of Nubia by Bruce Williams
Black Spark, White Fire by Richard Poe
Nubian Rescue by Rex Keating
King Merenptah
