Not one kingdom, and not really forgotten
The title is a popular shorthand, and it needs two corrections. First, there was no single “Nubian kingdom”. Over several thousand years the Nile valley south of Egypt was home to many communities and a series of separate states, some rivals of Egypt, some ruled by Egypt, and one that ruled Egypt itself. Second, Nubia has never been forgotten by scholars. Archaeologists have worked there for well over a century, the ancient Egyptians wrote about it constantly, and Greek and Roman authors knew the region as Aithiopia. What is true is that general readers hear far less about Nubia than about its northern neighbour.
Where Nubia was
Nubia is the stretch of the Nile between roughly Aswan in southern Egypt and the area around Khartoum in modern Sudan. The river here runs through desert and is broken by rapids called cataracts, which made travel by boat difficult in places. Archaeologists often divide the region into Lower Nubia, the northern part between Aswan and the Second Cataract, and Upper Nubia, further south. Farming was possible only in a narrow strip beside the river, so settlements, cemeteries and temples cluster along its banks. Where the river was open, goods and people moved on Nile river boats; around the cataracts they went overland.
The name Kush is the one the Egyptians used for the southern land and its rulers, and it later became the name modern writers give to the Napatan and Meroitic kingdoms. The word Nubia is used more loosely for the whole region and its peoples. The name is often linked to an Egyptian word for gold, though that link is a traditional suggestion rather than a settled fact. Gold, ivory, ebony, cattle and skilled archers were among the things Egypt sought from the south.
A sequence of periods
Scholars usually describe Nubian history in phases. The dates below are approximate and vary between authors.
- Early communities (before about 3000 BCE). Cattle herders and farmers lived along the river. The people archaeologists call the A-Group, in Lower Nubia, traded with early Egypt.
- C-Group and Kerma (about 2500 to 1500 BCE). In Lower Nubia the C-Group people lived as herders and farmers, while in Upper Nubia the Kerma culture grew into a powerful kingdom with its own capital and elite burials.
- Egyptian New Kingdom rule (about 1500 to 1070 BCE). Egyptian armies conquered Nubia and ran it through a royal official, with temples and towns built in the Egyptian style.
- Napata (about 900 to 300 BCE). After Egyptian control ended, a Kushite state emerged around Jebel Barkal. Its kings took control of Egypt and ruled as the Twenty-fifth Dynasty, then withdrew south.
- Meroe (about 300 BCE to 350 CE). The royal centre moved south to Meroe, where iron working, a new script and powerful queens became characteristic.
- Post-Meroitic and Christian Nubia (about 350 CE onward). Smaller successor states followed, and from the sixth century Christianity spread through the kingdoms of Nobatia, Makuria and Alwa.
Each of these has its own story, and the other articles in this cluster take them in turn, from the Kerma culture to the Napata kingdom and the Meroe iron industry.
Living between two worlds
Nubian culture was never simply a copy of Egypt’s. Nubians borrowed what suited them, including Egyptian gods such as Amun, royal titles and the Egyptian hieroglyphic script, but they kept their own burial customs, their own gods such as the lion-headed Apedemak, their own language and, later, their own writing system. At the same time Nubians had links to the wider continent. Meroe sat in a position where river, desert and Red Sea routes could meet, and later the Aksumite kingdom in the Ethiopian highlands became a neighbour and, in the fourth century CE, an opponent.
Egypt and Nubia were bound together by trade, warfare and intermarriage for millennia. Nubian soldiers served in Egyptian armies, Egyptian officials ruled in Nubian towns, and in the eighth century BCE a Kushite king marched north and was accepted as pharaoh. The nature of that relationship changed repeatedly, which is why a single phrase such as “forgotten kingdom” fits poorly.
How we know what we know
Much of our knowledge comes from archaeology. The American Egyptologist George Reisner excavated major sites including the Kerma cemeteries and the royal burial grounds early in the twentieth century, and later teams, including Sudanese archaeologists and international missions, have continued the work. Radiocarbon dating helps place sites that lack written dates. Egyptian inscriptions, Assyrian records of conflict with Kushite rulers, and classical writers such as Herodotus add outside views. The best evidence from Nubia itself is the Meroitic script, which scholars can read aloud but cannot yet fully translate.
In the 1960s a large international salvage effort followed the building of the Aswan High Dam. Many Nubian sites in Egypt and northern Sudan were surveyed or moved before Lake Nasser flooded the valley, and the project transformed what archaeologists knew about the region. It also displaced many Nubian communities, whose descendants live today in Egypt and Sudan and still speak Nubian languages such as Nobiin.
After Meroe
The end of Meroe did not end Nubian history. In the centuries after about 350 CE, the region saw local rulers whose rich burials, such as those at Ballana and Qustul in Lower Nubia, show continuing wealth and contact with the Roman world. By the sixth century, missionaries from the Byzantine world brought Christianity, and the three kingdoms of Nobatia, Makuria and Alwa adopted it. Churches with painted walls were built, and written records appeared in Greek, Coptic and Old Nubian. In 652 CE, Makuria and the new Muslim rulers of Egypt agreed a long-lasting treaty known as the Baqt, which governed trade and relations for centuries. Makuria remained a major power until roughly the fourteenth century, when it declined and the region gradually became Muslim and Arabic-speaking.
Why it matters
Nubia shows that the Nile valley produced more than one major civilization. Its pyramids, which are narrower and steeper than the Giza pyramid complex, are more numerous than most people expect. Its kings, as the Twenty-fifth Dynasty, belong to the history of Egypt, and their wars with the Assyrian Empire help explain the end of that dynasty. Its later kingdoms lasted far longer than many readers realise, with Christian Makuria surviving into the Middle Ages.
If the word “forgotten” has a fair use here, it is that Nubia is often an afterthought in popular accounts of the ancient world, even though Egyptians and Kushites shaped each other’s history for thousands of years.