What survives, and why it looks the way it does
Much of what remains of Nubian art is stone, pottery and metal, because these materials last. Wood, textiles and everyday mudbrick houses survive far less often, so the picture is weighted towards temples and tombs. It is also a picture shaped by borrowing. Nubian artists worked with Egyptian forms for long periods, and during the New Kingdom Egypt built temples in Nubia outright. But the later Kushite kingdoms adapted those forms, mixed in Mediterranean and African elements, and produced work that is distinct from Egypt’s.
Temples and sacred hills
Jebel Barkal, a flat-topped sandstone hill beside the Nile near modern Karima in Sudan, was a sacred site for both Egyptians and Kushites. Egyptians of the New Kingdom linked its tall rock pinnacle to the god Amun and to the royal cobra, and built a temple of Amun there. When Kushite kings rose to power, they rebuilt and enlarged the temples at the foot of the hill, and the site became the religious heart of the Napatan state. Several temples stand there today, alongside royal monuments and smaller shrines, and UNESCO lists Jebel Barkal and nearby sites as a World Heritage property.
Kushite builders used the standard Egyptian temple plan: a gateway, courtyards, columned halls and an inner sanctuary. That is the same basic temple architecture found in Egypt, though Nubian examples are often smaller. Kings such as Taharqa also built at sites like Kawa, and left inscribed stone records.
Later, at Meroe and nearby sites, the style grew more individual. At Naqa, the Lion Temple of Apedemak, dating to roughly the first century CE, shows the king and queen on its walls with a lion-headed god who was important in Meroitic religion. Reliefs there combine Egyptian-style poses with distinctly local features and some influence from the Mediterranean world. At Musawwarat es-Sufra, a large sandstone complex known as the Great Enclosure has ramps, courtyards and carved elephants, and scholars still debate its exact purpose. At Meroe, the royal city also included bath complexes with decorative features that echo Greek and Roman fashions.
Pottery
Pottery is among the oldest Nubian art forms. The Kerma culture is known for thin, hand-formed bowls and beakers with a black rim and a polished, often red, body, which were fired in a way that gave the contrasting colours. These are among the most admired ceramics of the ancient Nile. In the Meroitic period, potters made a fine, thin-walled ware painted with plants, animals and human figures, alongside plainer household pottery. Some designs reflect Egyptian or Hellenistic motifs, while others look entirely local. Because pottery styles change gradually, archaeologists use them to date sites, much as in pottery seriation elsewhere.
Jewellery and metalwork
Nubia was a source of gold for Egypt, and the Kushites themselves made jewellery from gold, silver, bronze, glass, faience and semi-precious stones. The most famous find is the treasure of Queen Amanishakheto, who ruled at Meroe around the end of the first century BCE. It was found in the 1830s by an Italian doctor named Giuseppe Ferlini, who dismantled the top of her pyramid at Meroe to search for treasure, an act that destroyed part of the monument. The collection, which includes rings, bracelets, amulets and ornamented shield-shaped pieces, is now in museums in Berlin and Munich. The pieces combine Egyptian symbols and Hellenistic techniques with local taste, and they show how skilled the royal workshops were.
Rock monuments and royal tombs
Nubia is known for monuments carved into or set against rock. The pyramid cemeteries at El-Kurru, Nuri and Meroe have their own history, and the Nubian pyramids deserve separate treatment. Alongside them, tomb chapels were decorated with painted and carved scenes, and burial goods often included objects that echo Egyptian ideas about the afterlife. At Jebel Barkal and elsewhere, royal monuments are carved into or beside the cliffs, and rock-cut temples line the Nile in Lower Nubia. Several of the most famous of these date to the New Kingdom, when Egypt ruled the region, rather than to Nubian rulers. They show how Nubian landscape and Egyptian power were bound together.
The Lake Nasser salvage campaign
The building of the Aswan High Dam, completed around 1970, created Lake Nasser and put much of Lower Nubia under water. In 1960, after appeals from Egypt and Sudan, UNESCO launched an international campaign to survey and excavate threatened sites and to rescue major monuments. Dozens of countries contributed money, engineers and archaeologists.
The best-known rescue was the cutting and reassembly of the two rock temples at Abu Simbel, built under Ramesses II, on higher ground. Other temples, including Philae, Kalabsha, Amada and Wadi es-Sebua, were also moved in Egypt, while a few were given to countries that helped, including the temple of Dendur, now in New York, and the temple of Debod, now in Madrid. The campaign saved a great deal, but it also meant that many villages and farmland vanished, and tens of thousands of Nubians were resettled. That human cost is part of the story of Nubian heritage, not a footnote to it.
What to take from it
Nubian art is easiest to appreciate on its own terms rather than as a weaker version of Egypt’s. Its makers took ideas from several traditions and combined them in temples, pottery and gold work that are recognisably Kushite, and many of its most important sites are still being studied, conserved and understood.