Ancient Egypt Articles

This was a very interesting reply to a post regarding the Ancient Egyptians and their controversial relationship with the Nubians.

Q. When people say that the ancient Egyptians were Nubian, are they talking about the period of time, cerca the 800s b.c., when Nubia conquered Egypt? What else could they be referring to when they say that ancient Egyptians were Nubian?

A. Any of several things:

1) Most likely, they're referring to one of the many myths people have entertained about ancient Egypt. This one, popular with Afrocentrists in the US at least, holds that the ancient Egyptians looked just like West Africans, and makes about as much sense as any other of the Egypt-myths floating around (namely, not quite zero sense; most of the myths have some sort of seed of truth, the relevant one in this case being that the Egyptians did not look like most Europeans).

2) Alternatively, they may be referring to something real. Egypt ruled Nubia (which is, technically, an area on the border between Egypt and the Sudan, along the Nile) much of the time; the episode in the 800s BC is just when Nubia returned the favor. It's reasonable to assume that there was a certain amount of population mixing that went on - in fact, one standard reply scholars make to the Afro centric cookery is to note that Egyptian tomb paintings seem to show that the Egyptians thought of a wide range of skin colors as normal, which suggests that in fact residents of Egypt *were* reasonably familiar with Nubians, and not just as exotic others. So they may simply mean that some particular ancient Egyptian was Nubian (although what on Earth that would *mean*, I'm not sure - would they be claiming to have evidence of what that particular person's native language was? or what?) Or they may mean that some ancient Egyptians in general were Nubians. This is, however, the interpretation of the idea you're inquiring about that requires the most violence to the phrasing you're using, so I dunno.

3) As you note, they may simply be referring to the 8th century BC or thereabouts. This, however, also requires a certain amount of violence to the phrasing.

4) I attended a lecture years ago that proposed a notion I haven't seen repeated since. I don't know enough to comment on its plausibility, but can comment on, if you will, its *probability*. First, however, the idea. This is that we have an archaeological sequence in Nubia, and we have an archaeological sequence in Egypt, but the one in Nubia, per lecturer Carter Lupton years ago, becomes a whole lot scantier right around the time the First Dynasty gets going. Now, the standard interpretation of this, per Lupton, is that Narmer and co. went and conquered Nubia. But he wanted to suggest that instead, the Nubians had gone and *become* Narmer & Co., that is, had invaded en masse. Now, as origin stories go, this sort of works. I mean invaders as founders of states is a pretty common pattern, and in terms of what I know of theories of state origins, works reasonably well. *But*. The evidence on offer, far as I recall, is basically that there's this gap in Nubia. In general, gaps in the archaeological record are things it's unwise to argue from. If you have really *good* archaeology of your region, and you have at least a few examples of what kind of site you should be looking for so you can be pretty sure you're not just missing something exotic, OK; but I have no reason to think these conditions should hold for Nubia, much of which, after all, is now under Lake Nasser. And in *particular*, my understanding is that the Nubian archaeological record has gotten a great deal less gappy that it was when I heard that lecture. So even in the unlikely case that this is what these people mean, the idea is also unlikely to be true.