| Adams, W Y | Nubia, Corridor to Africa |
At first glance the Egyptians' belief in their superiority seems warranted by their material accomplishments. While the pharaoh was surrounded by every kind of luxury, and his subjects raised some of history's most enduring monuments on his behalf, the conditions of life in Nubia had changed little since the Stone Ages. Nevertheless the attitude of the Egyptians smacks to some extent of the exaggerated haughtiness of the nouveau-riche, for their own rise from savagery to civilization had been recent and rapid. The earlier Neolithic cultures of the Lower Nile - Badarian, Fayyum, and Merimde - were hardly more advanced than were those of Nubia and other parts of Africa. The Egyptians may have farmed rather more systematically than did the Nubians, but they were equally ignorant of the bustling village life and the growing commerce of the contemporary Near East. It was only towards the close of prehistoric times, in the Amratian and Gerzean (or Naqada I and II) periods, that there was a certain quickening of life along the Lower Nile. Settlements became larger and more permanent, mud-brick architecture was introduced, pottery-making and weaving were developed artistically as well as technically, and copper tools came into use even while stone chipping and carving reached their peaks of artistic excellence. Egypt at last began to outstrip the rest of Africa and to achieve that pre-eminence in the material sphere which was never to be relinquished. 1
In Egypt, far more than in Nubia, growing wealth and population led to the growth and consolidation of political power. Petty chieftains became regional warlords, who vied for control over larger and larger territories. Gradually, perhaps over several generations, the dynasts of Thinis in Upper Egypt overcame their rivals and extended their hegemony from Aswan to the sea. In that achievement were born the pharaonic state and the court civilization of Egypt. It was, perhaps, a natural and inevitable development in view of the close cultural (and presumably linguistic) homogeneity which seems to have been characteristic of Egypt since the earliest times. 2
That Egyptian civilization was influenced by the example of Mesopotamia seems indisputable. Yet even in its heyday life on the Nile was something far removed from the cosmopolitan hurly-burly of the Near East. Egypt for more than a thousand years remained a land of country estates, without great cities and their complex social and commercial life?. 3 Over this bucolic scene there presided a kind of tribal superchief and his personal household. If the proudest of French monarchs could boast that 'l'état, c'est moi', the pharaoh could almost assert that 'la civilisation, c'est moi'. There is hardly an achievement of Egyptian civilization in any field of endeavour which does not bear the stamp of the ruler: soldiers, scholars, artisans, and statesmen were alike his personal retainers. Even the abundant and magnificent products of Egyptian craftsmanship went, for the most part, not to the marketplace but to adorn the tombs of kings and nobility.
In the beginning the towering edifice of pharaonic pomp did not rest on a complex infrastructure. re.The whole panoply of court civilization was sustained not by commerce and industry but by a rigidly managed agrarian economy, of which the pharaoh and the nobility were the chief beneficiaries. According to 'official sources' (i.e. the biographical texts of kings and nobles) the peasantry also benefited from their incorporation into a manorial system: they became eligible for grain from the royal storehouses in times of famine, and for work on the royal monuments and other state enterprises during the agricultural slack season. The provision of economic security has been a traditional self-justification of totalitarian régimes, however, and we are at liberty to question if the Egyptian fellaheen really appreciated the benefits which they derived from serfdom. At all events their day-to-day standard of living does not seem to have been improved by their subjection to pharaonic authority: the ordinary tombs of the Old Kingdom were almost devoid of offerings, even while the royal and noble tombs were reaching a pinnacle of splendour. 4
For the man in the field, then, the difference between Stone-Age barbarism and civilization was more shadow than substance - the shadow of a sometimes paternal but more often oppressive and extravagant court. It fell in different ways on Egyptians and on Nubians. For the fellah it brought economic security of a sort, but at the price of an unending burden of conscription and taxation. For the Nubian it offered widened trade opportunities, but with them the intermittent disasters of plunder and enslavement. Centuries of subjugation to the pharaoh transformed the two peoples into the internal and the external proletariat of the Egyptian empire, to use Arnold Toynbee's striking phrase. 5
Once the pharaonic rule was firmly established, Egypt's foreign policy was of a piece with her other totalitarian institutions. While needed raw materials were occasionally obtained through peaceful commerce, more often the pharaoh's armies marched forth and seized what they wanted from neighbouring lands. Except for the wily peoples of the Levant, foreign nations seldom profited for long from traffic with ancient Egypt.
Egyptian imperialism - economic and political - was a continuing factor in Nubian history for more than 2,000 years, from the foundation of the pharaonic state until its final centuries of decline. During that time the extent and character of Egyptian influence fluctuated considerably, reflecting the relative strength or weakness of the pharaoh as well as his vacillating interest in various kinds of luxury goods. The three main phases of imperial power - the Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms - each witnessed a different stage of colonial development in Nubia. To a striking degree these stages parallel the colonial expansion of the Western powers between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The Egyptian Old Kingdom was an age of exploration, characterized at first by sporadic and uncoordinated raiding and trading expeditions into the southern lands. With minor exceptions (to be noted below) no effort was made to extend Egyptian political control or to establish permanent relations with the Nubian peoples, except perhaps for some frontier chiefs in the immediate vicinity of Aswan. 6
The Middle Kingdom was a period of armed trade monopoly, operating through one or more established trading posts in the interior. Its main concern was not the subjugation of territory or of the native population, and production (except in the case of minerals) was left in Nubian hands. Animal and forest products, which were perhaps still more important than minerals at this period, were obtained through subsidization of native suppliers, meaning in all probability local rulers. There was no significant movement of Egyptian settlers into tile southern lands. However, an enormous military effort was devoted to the protection of the trade routes to the south, and the assurance of a complete Egyptian monopoly of the trade along them. This type of economic imperialism is strongly reminiscent both of the French fur trade in Canada and of the earlier stages of the Portuguese and Dutch seaborne empires in the Orient, with their 'factory' ports on the coasts of Africa, India, and the Indies.
Finally, the New Kingdom saw the extension of imperialism from the economic to the political sphere. Outright Egyptian control was extended over the Nubian territory and people, displacing or subordinating the native rulers with whom the Egyptians had formerly been content to deal. Control of raw material production, and probably also of agriculture, passed directly into Egyptian hands, and the Nubians in their turn became fellaheen. Here, then, was full-scale colonialism and the establishment of a 'plantation' economy, comparable to the later stages of European colonialism in many parts of the world.
The traditional African products for which the southern continent has been exploited since time immemorial were gold, ivory, and slaves. The first two of these, however, only serve to head a long list of mineral and animal products which have figured prominently in the African trade. We can better understand the pattern of Egyptian colonial expansion in the second millennium BC , as well as that of the European powers in the recent past, if we consider the resources of Africa under three more general headings: animal resources, human resources, and mineral resources. These have traditionally been obtained in rather different ways, the first by trading, the second by raiding, and the third by colonization. Fluctuating demand for the different types of commodities therefore played some part in the changing character of Egyptian-Nubian relations. We shall consider them briefly here in the chronological order of their development.
Animal products were probably the earliest commodities which moved from Nubia to Egypt. As we saw in Chapter 5, the graves of the early Nubian A Horizon already give evidence of a flourishing trade with Egypt even before the unification of the pharaonic state. In these early and uncomplicated days there was certainly no organized gold production, and it is unlikely that the society and economy of predynastic Egypt had much place for Nubian slaves. We are left to assume, therefore, that wild products which had lately disappeared from the Lower Nile Valley were the principal objects of Egypt's early commerce with the south. Among African products mentioned by Gardiner as possibly figuring in this trade were ivory, ebony, incense, aromatic oil, and leopard skins. 7 In later days many other kinds of skins, ostrich eggs and feathers, and hippopotamus ivory were also exported from or via Nubia.
The earliest Nubian trade, antedating a strong Egyptian state, was most probably developed by private entrepreneurs. As Reisner has written: 'The local market went on - that cumbersome process by which goods passed up and down the river by exchanges between traders who ranged only from one local market to the next and back again. Market to market exchanges can be inferred even from predynastic times and go on today between the Nubian villages. Some present-day traders even range from Aswan to Halfa, stopping at all the villages.' 8
A good deal of private trade in animal and forest products may have been carried on at all times in Nubian history, and particularly during those periods (such as the First and Second Intermediate Periods) when the central government was too weak to exercise a monopoly. However, the great southern trading expeditions of which we have record, from the later Old Kingdom onward, were all organized by or on behalf of the pharaoh. With the increasing concentration of wealth in a few hands, the king and his courtiers probably represented the only real market for the more expensive luxury goods from the south. Thus the Nubian trade, like most of Egypt's foreign commerce, became largely if not entirely a royal enterprise.
The First Dynasty inscription of King Jer - the oldest document in Nubian history - probably marks incidentally the beginning of the slave trade. 9 Whether or not it was the prospect of human captives which attracted this shadowy monarch into the southern lands, they were a part of the spoil of his campaign, for his inscription at Jebel Sheikh Suleiman shows at least two bound captives alongside the more numerous slain. Captives in increasing numbers figure in most of the subsequent military texts dealing with Nubia down to the time of the New Kingdom. Evidently they were a major impetus for Egyptian military operations in the south. Such operations are recorded from the First, Second, Fourth, Sixth, Eleventh, Twelfth, Thirteenth, Eighteenth, Nineteenth, and Twentieth Dynasties, 10 or in other words whenever the power of the pharaoh was at its strongest. Whatever the ostensible purpose of these expeditions, every one of them probably yielded as a by-product a considerable harvest of prisoners.
Some Nubian slaves were undoubtedly obtained through commerce (that is, enslaved by the Nubians themselves and traded by them to the Egyptians), but the greater number appear to have been captured directly by the pharaoh's armies. We can therefore assume that the slave trade was largely a royal enterprise, if not a monopoly. What its economic and social importance may have been is difficult to estimate. The number of captives claimed in some of the more extravagant conquest texts is surely exaggerated; for example, Sneferu's purported 7,000 prisoners in the Fourth Dynasty is nearly equal to the total estimated population of Lower Nubia at that time. 11 It is also true that slave labour was never a significant feature of the Egyptian economy. On the other hand possession of a large number of Nubian domestic slaves may have been an important status symbol for the Egyptian nobility, as it was in later times for Oriental monarchs and nobles generally. More than anything else, however, Nubian slaves were probably needed to bolster the ranks of the Egyptian army itself, 12 The same consideration was to lead to the enslavement of Nubia by Egypt as recently as the nineteenth century (cf. Ch. 18).
The later Egyptian pharaohs developed an insatiable appetite for gold, and it became the most important and most coveted of all products from the southern lands. The 'Gold of Wawat' (probably Lower Nubia) and 'Gold of Kush' (Upper Nubia) figure repeatedly in the annals of the New Kingdom. 13 13 However, there is no indication that this industry was extensively developed before the New Kingdom. We now know that gold mining in Nubia was preceded by copper mining and by diorite quarrying, both of which began as early as the Old Kingdom.
All of the mineral operations in Nubia, whether mining or quarrying, appear to have been Egyptian state enterprises organized and supervised by Egyptian officials, although Nubians may have provided the unskilled labour force. The inscriptions found at the diorite quarries and in many mining districts leave no doubt that the supervisory officials were directly responsible to the pharaoh. 14 Here then was an enterprise involving a certain amount of outright colonization: a cadre of supervisors, skilled prospectors and quarrymen, and presumably a military force sufficient to protect them from potentially hostile natives.
To sum up, three different types of extractive industry were developed in ancient Nubia under Egyptian stimulus, and each was exploited in a somewhat different way. Wild animal and forest products were obtained through a genuine two-way trade which was presumably mutually beneficial. It was probably this commerce which provided most of the Egyptian goods which came into Nubian hands. Slaves, on the other hand, were seized by periodic raiding expeditions which brought to the Nubians nothing but suffering and destitution. Mineral resources, finally, were obtained through direct Egyptian enterprise operating on Nubian soil, and again brought little benefit to the native populace.
Throughout the pharaonic period, the picture of Egyptian-Nubian relations which emerges from the hieroglyphic texts is one of almost unrelieved oppression. The pharaohs often asserted the justness of their rule in their own land, 15 but none ever boasted of bringing justice to the Nubians. Yet it is necessary to recognize that the royal and official annals do not tell the whole story. In common with most imperialists the Egyptians glorified the conqueror and disdained the merchant; it was their exploits on the battlefield, not in the marketplace, which they celebrated and probably exaggerated.
When we consider the contents of the Nubian graves of the A and C Horizons, another side of the picture is revealed to us. Except (perhaps) in the later A Horizon, the abundance of Egyptian-made goods in these graves is astonishing. A rapid tally of 1,484 'C-Group' graves investigated by the First and Second Archaeological Surveys of Nubia (see Ch. 3) reveals that nearly half of them had contained one or more objects of foreign origin. Beads, bracelets, and other ornaments were the most common, occurring in 528 out of 1,484 graves, or more than one third of the total. One out of every five graves also contained one or more Egyptian-made pottery vessels. Ground slate palettes, alabaster vessels, and various objects of copper and bronze were less common, but still conspicuous. Considering that the great majority of'C-Group' graves had been heavily plundered, and that in many cases the investigators cleared only the superstructure and not the grave shaft, it seems that the original proportion of Egyptian-made goods may have been higher still. These goods assuredly did not come to the Nubians as gifts, nor is it likely that they were often received as compensation for labour. Much more probably, they are indicative of a continuing flow of peaceful, two-way trade between Egypt and Nubia throughout most of the pharaonic period, in spite of the fluctuations of political policy and economic fortune.
In the two previous chapters we have dealt with various aspects of Egyptian trading and raiding, and their effects on the Nubian society and economy. In this chapter it remains to consider the evidence of outright Egyptian colonization in Nubia during the A and C Horizons - activities which are not reflected to any extent either in the hieroglyphic record or in the archaeological remains of the contemporary Nubians. Our knowledge of them comes from another and unrelated group of archaeological remains, left by the Egyptians who came to live and work in Nubia.
Diorite, a hard black-to-grey crystalline rock, was the favoured material for statues and stelae in the early Egyptian dynasties. It was obtained from several sources, one of which was located in the Nubian desert about forty miles west of Abu Simbel. According to Kees:
What the ancient prospector could accomplish is demonstrated in the modern rediscovery of the place from which in Dynasty IV came the diorite used for the statues of Chephren in his mortuary temple and probably also the paving blocks in the mortuary temple of Cheops. The labor corps euphemistically called this place 'Place of snaring of Cheops,' as if it were a fertile oasis. It lies in the desolate Libyan desert.., northwest of Abu Simbel and not very far from the caravan route which led from Aswan by way of the Oasis of Dunkul to Nakhle and the [western Sudan]. The place was marked by cairns. Stelae found there bearing the names of Cheops and Djedefre prove that it was already being exploited at a time when tradition is silent at [Aswan]. Nearby lay an amethyst mine. The transport route that can still be distinguished reached the Nile in the neighbourhood of Toshka, a little to the north of Abu Simbel [Fig. 23]. From here by river to Giza was a distance of more than 750 miles. 16
No trace was found of permanent Egyptian settlement either at the quarries or on the riverbank at Toshka, although fragments of a mud jar-sealing and of a stone stele, both of Old Kingdom date, have been found at the latter place. 17 Given the intermittent nature of the demand for diorite, it seems probable enough that quarrying activity was carried on only occasionally and for relatively brief periods, by expeditions specially sent out for the purpose.
Prior to the most recent archaeological campaign it was generally assumed that Egyptian activity in Nubia during the Old Kingdom had been limited to intermittent forays, whether for trading, raiding, or quarrying. We now know, however, that at least one Egyptian colony was planted on Nubian soil during the Fourth and Fifth Dynasties. At Buhen, on the west bank of the Nile a few miles downstream from the Second Cataract, were found the remains of a sizeable town-site which had been surrounded by a massive though crude stone wall. The buildings were symmetrical, rectangular constructions of stone and mudbrick, recognizably Egyptian in character and quite unlike anything attempted by the Nubians until centuries later. Some were apparently residences, while others were unmistakably workshops (Fig. 24). Although extremely denuded, like the contemporaneous remains of the Nubian A Horizon, the Buhen town could be dated to the Old Kingdom both by the pottery found in it and by mud jar-stoppers bearing the royal cartouches of several pharaohs of the Fourth and Fifth Dynasties. Excavations below the main level of occupation revealed traces of even older buildings, possibly dating back as far as the Second Dynasty. 18
While the presence of an Egyptian colony at Buhen in the Old Kingdom was in itself a surprise, the purpose for which it was established is even more astonishing. To quote from the excavator's report:
Rough stone mortars set in the floors of cubicle type rooms, for use in the pounding of the ore, together with the remains of pottery crucibles and ingot moulds, showed that we were clearing an area of the town which was obviously a metal-working factory. Charcoal and copper slag together with the droppings of pure copper from the crucibles confirmed this... ... Under 1 m. of drift sand we uncovered a well-built stone structure with wails standing 1.15 m. high. On each side of it, at a still lower level, we discovered three well-preserved furnaces in which the copper ore had been smelted. 19
Fig. 23. Lower Nubia showing Egyptian activities in the Old Kingdom
Fig. 24. Plan of a portion of Old Kingdom town, Buhen
The furnaces were cylindrical structures of brick, open at the top, and were about 3 feet in diameter and 3 feet high. Halfway between the base and the top of the walls, a perforated flooring of mud bricks, resting on a central column of masonry, allowed the smelting crucibles to be placed directly over the fire in the chamber below (Fig. 25). A covered flue leading to the lower chamber allowed for stoking and cleaning the furnace. (Surprisingly enough these apertures were oriented in each case away from the wind, and therefore cannot have served to increase the draught on the fire.) Double-chamber pottery kilns similar in design to the Buhen furnaces were used in Nubia throughout the post-pharaonic periods, 20 and may still be seen at the pottery works in Old Cairo.
Professor Emery, the discoverer, sums up the Buhen find as follows:
| 1 | The town was a purely Egyptian colony, for although Nubian B-Group is present, at least 95 per cent of the pottery sherds are Egyptian. 21 The town was a purely Egyptian colony, for although Nubian B-Group is present, at least 95 per cent of the pottery sherds are Egyptian. 21 |
| 2 | Copper working was one of its industries, and so we may conclude that deposits of this metal are to be found somewhere in the northern Sudan. |
| 3 | A well-organized despatch service was maintained with Egypt throughout the IVth and Vth Dynasties, to judge from the mass of papyrus jar sealings. |
| 4 | .... The names of the following kings have been identified on sealings and ostraca: Khafra, Menkaura, Userkaf, Sahura, Neferirkara, Neuserra. 22 |
are no known copper deposits in the northern Sudan, and the source of the ores smelted at Buhen remains a mystery. Presumably they were brought from some point in the western desert, perhaps at a considerable distance from the Nile, to the nearest point on the riverbank where fuel and water were available for smelting.
The location of the Buhen settlement is itself something of a puzzle. It is situated within a few miles of the Second Cataract, which marks the effective head of navigation in Lower Nubia, but the rocky and unprotected shore at Buhen does not offer a particularly favourable anchorage for large vessels. A better landing is available a few miles further south, at the immediate foot of the cataract, and this would seem a more logical place for the loading and off-loading of overland cargoes from the south. Buhen might have been the terminus of a desert road over which the copper ore was brought to the Nile from its inland source, but it is notable that the site remained important long after the cessation of the copper industry. The same locality in the Middle Kingdom was the site of one of the largest fortresses ever built by Egyptians in Nubia, and substantial temples were added to it during the New Kingdom, and later still by the Nubian Pharaoh Taharqa. Buhen, then, was a place of importance to the Egyptians throughout the history of their colonial ventures in Nubia, for reasons which are probably now forever lost. Perhaps its later importance was symbolic, commemorating the site of the earliest Egyptian settlement on Nubian soil.
The initial discoveries of copper and diorite in Nubia can only have come about as a result of extensive and systematic prospecting. Mineralhunters in the Old Kingdom evidently ranged far beyond the familiar confines of Lower Nubia, for their inscriptions have been found as far south as Kulb in the Batn el Hajar 24 and in the Wadi Allaqi in the Eastern Desert (Fig. 23). 25 The authors of the Kulb inscriptions are identified as a 'scribe of prospectors' and two 'overseers of prospectors'; those in the Wadi Allaqi are called 'chiefs of caravans'. The titles make it plain that all of this exploration was state enterprise. The inscriptions suggest, as does much other evidence, that Egyptians ranged freely and unmolested over large areas of Nubia during the first ' age of exploration'.
How much the lives of Nubians in the A Horizon were affected by the presence of Egyptian colonies in their midst is difficult to say. According to traditional theory the later Old Kingdom was a time of poverty and partial depopulation in Lower Nubia (see Ch. 5), so that the number of Nubians who came in direct contact with the foreign settlements may have been small. The handful of 'B-group' sherds (i.e. the poorer varieties of A Horizon pottery) found at Buhen suggest that only a few native labourers or servants were employed in the camp, and there was no congregation of hangers-on outside the walls. Presumably Nubian labourers would have been employed in the more menial tasks of extracting and transporting the ore, but again the numbers required may not have been large. The defensive wall surrounding the Buhen settlement suggests on the other hand that the neighbouring region was not entirely deserted.
On the whole, it seems unlikely that the Egyptian mineral operations at Toshka and Buhen had much influence on contemporary Nubian life. Considering their limited scale, it is most improbable that they had anything to do with the concurrent depopulation of Lower Nubia. If any activity of the Egyptians was responsible for that development, it is much more likely to have been the slave-raiding of Kha-sekhem and Sneferu (of. Ch. 5).
No names of VI Dynasty pharaohs have been found either at the Buhen settlement or at the diorite quarries in the western desert. 26 This was a time of conspicuous weakening of the pharaonic authority, and perhaps the royal purse could no longer afford such costly enterprises on foreign soil. At all events Egypt's first venture as a colonial power came to an end considerably earlier than did the unified Egyptian state itself. The VI Dynasty texts of Uni and Harkhuf, as we mentioned in Chapter 5, are the records of trade between sovereign powers and not of conquest and colonization.
For a period of two hundred years at the close of the second millennium B C Egypt had no effective central government. The extravagance of the Old Kingdom monarchs had apparently combined with a series of natural disasters 27 to exhaust the power and wealth of the state, resulting in the breakaway of local princes in various parts of the country. Four shortlived 'dynasties' (Dynasties VII-X) held sway in different parts of Egypt during the First Intermediate Period, which intervened between the Old and Middle Kingdoms. From the standpoint of the literary record this is one of the darkest ages in Egyptian history; it has left few monuments in Egypt, and none at all in Nubia. Evidently the local dynasts were too busy contending with one another to have time for colonial adventures in the south.
Egypt's weakness may well have contributed to the revival of Nubian prosperity at the beginning of the C Horizon. Some idea of the altered relationship between the Egyptians and their neighbours is conveyed by a hieroglyphic text of the First Intermediate Period, lamenting that 'foreigners have everywhere become people'. 28 Nubians were not only serving as mercenaries in the Egyptian army (as they had also in the later Old Kingdom), but were settling permanently and achieving positions of some prominence in the northern country, as is shown by their funerary inscriptions found near Gebelein in Upper Egypt. 29 The considerable volume of Egyptian-made goods in the earliest' C-Group' graves may represent the rewards of military service in the north; at all events, it testifies to the rapid return of Nubian prosperity.
In the latter part of the First Intermediate Period the main centres of power in Egypt were in the Fayyum Basin, where the IX and X Dynasty 'pharaohs' ruled, and at Thebes (modern Luxor) in Upper Egypt. A century of intermittent warfare ended with the triumph of the southern dynasts and the re-establishment of unified rule under the Theban XI Dynasty. For most of the next 1,000 years Egypt was to be governed from Thebes. The XI and XII Dynasties, known collectively as the Middle Kingdom, represent the second climax of imperial power in Egyptian history, sometimes referred to as Egypt's feudal age. 30
The pharaohs of the XI Dynasty were apparently occupied chiefly in restoring order in their own country. There are suggestions of military campaigns as far south as the Second Cataract during the later reigns of the dynasty, but their scope and duration seem to have been small. 31 It was, at all events, under the more secure and more militaristic XII Dynasty that the full tide of Egyptian imperialism in Nubia set in again. Major campaigns undertaken during the first two reigns of the XII Dynasty are commemorated in a number of hieroglyphic inscriptions. The texts leave no doubt as to the nature and intent of the Egyptian operations: 'we came to overthrow Wawat'; 'I have brought.., all countries which are in Nubia beneath thy feet, Good God'; 'their life is finished'; 'fire in their tents'; 'their grain has been cast into the Nile' are some typical phrases found in them, along with the ubiquitous representations of bound captives. 32
The conquest texts of the XII Dynasty are little different in substance from those commemorating the slave raids of Kha-sekhem and Sneferu in the Old Kingdom. Their aftermath, however, was without precedent in the history of Egyptian-Nubian relations. Not content with the spoil of the southern lands, the pharaohs proceeded to fortify the Nile in the northern Batn el Hajar with a chain of the mightiest fortifications ever erected in the ancient world (Fig. 26; PI. VIIa). Four thousand years after their building, and three thousand years after their final abandonment, the mud walls of these gargantuan relics still rose, in places, over forty feet above the desert sand. With Abu Simbel, they rank among the foremost monuments to Egyptian enterprise in Nubia or anywhere else. But whereas Abu Simbel has been saved, to UNESCO's and the world's credit, the fortresses have disappeared without a trace beneath the Nile waters.
The most impressive and most concentrated group of Middle Kingdom forts, the so-called Second Cataract Forts, numbered ten major installations. 33 They were ranged along the Nile over a distance of forty miles, from Buhen in the north to Semna in the south. All but one of the fortresses were on the west bank of the river or on islands accessible from the west bank. Only at Semna was there an installation on the east bank, directly opposite a larger fort on the west. (For the geographical distribution of the Second Cataract Forts see Fig. 27.)
The Second Cataract Forts were apparently built over a period of about a hundred years, in the reigns of Senusret I, Senusret II, and Senusret III. 34 They were evidently conceived as forming a single complex, and may have been under a unified command. 35 Similarities of plan suggest that several of the forts were designed by the same architect and were built almost simultaneously (Fig. 28). 36
A papyrus found in the Ramesseum at Thebes in 1896 gives the names of seventeen Egyptian fortresses from the later Middle Kingdom. 37 Of these the first eight are evidently the Second Cataract Forts, and seven of them have been specifically identified by name. The truculent names which
some of them bore - 'Repelling the Seti', 38 'Warding off the Bows', 'Repelling the Inu', 'Curbing the Countries', 'Repelling the Medjay' - clearly reflect the self-image of XII Dynasty Egypt. 39 It is noteworthy, however, that the two northerly fortresses of Iken and Buhen were given ordinary local place-names, suggesting that these were localities previously familiar to the Egyptians and therefore not in need of re-naming.
Buhen, the northernmost of the Second Cataract Forts, served in later times as the administrative headquarters for the whole group. 40 It was located several miles below the foot of the cataract, and less than half a mile from the long-deserted town which had been Egypt's first colony on Nubian soil. Excavations at Buhen were carried out in the early 1900s by a University of Pennsylvania Expedition, 41 and then for nearly ten years in the 1950s and 1960s by the Egypt Exploration Society of Great Britain. 42 It is by far the most completely excavated and (up to now) the most fully reported of the fortress sites, and may serve to illustrate the features of the group as a whole. In the words of the excavator:
It consists of an elaborate series of fortifications built on a rectangular plan, 172 by 160 meters [c. 560 × 525 ft], which enclosed a town containing domestic habitations, barrack buildings, workshops, a temple, and the Governor's palace. Excavation of this great structure has been completed and has revealed a carefully laid out example of rectangular town planning with paved arterial roads, each with its own independent drainage system. On the river side of the fortress, two great gates in the walls lead directly to the stone quays from which ships were loaded with tribute and products of trade from conquered Nubia. The contents of tombs discovered outside the town, and the condition of houses within it, give ample evidence of a rich and even luxurious standard of living in this outpost of colonial Egypt.The elaborate defense system which enclosed this small town consisted of a massive brick wall, 4.8 meters (11 ft] thick and 11 meters [36 ft] high, relieved at intervals on its outer face with the usual projecting rectangular towerS. At the foot of the wall was a paved rampart with a firestep, protected by a loopholed parapet overhanging the scarp of a dry ditch about 9 meters [30 ft] wide and 7 meters [23 ft] deep. The counterscarp on the other side of the ditch was surmounted by a narrow covered way of brickwork, beyond which was a glacis rising from the natural ground level. Projecting into the ditch from the scarp were round bastions with a system of triple loopholes with single embrasures, through which archers could direct a cross-fire which would completely cover the ditch [see PI. VIIa]. The most strongly fortified part of the structure was the great gate built in the center of the west wall facing the desert from which came the long trade roads leading to the mines and quarries. The gate was closed by double doors, beyond which was a wooden drawbridge which could be pulled back on rollerS. The gate and bridge were flanked by two spur walls which extended over the dry ditch, forming a narrow corridor through which an attacking force would have to battle its way exposed to a rain of missiles from the battlements on three sides. Even when the storming party had broken through the gate, their difficulties would not bc at an end, for they would find themselves in an enclosed square with exits giving access to the town only through narrow roads immediately under the inner sides of the walls of the fortification, thus coming under fire once again from the defenders. 43
Buhen staggers the imagination not only by its size but by the complexity of its defences. Bastions, loopholes, fosse, drawbridge, glacis - virtually all of the classic elements of medieval fortification are present in this structure which was built 3,000 years earlier in the Nubian desert. To a greater or lesser degree, the same features are incorporated in most of the other Middle Kingdom fortresses. 44
Ten miles to the south of Buhen, the even larger fortress of Mirgissa 45 guarded the upper end of the Second Cataract. 46 Facing it across the main channel of the Nile was the island fortress of Dabenarti, apparently never finished or occupied. 47 Further south again were tile isolated strongholds of Askut 48 and Shelfak, 49 both built on rocky summits high above the river. Finally, the southern end of the chain was marked by a cluster of four separate forts (Semna, Kumma, 50 Semna South, 51 and Uronarti 52 ) surrounding the Semna Cataract - the most constricted passage along the entire course of the Nile (PI. VI). It was at this easily controlled point, apparently, that the Egyptians chose to establish the limit of their sovereignty in the Middle Kingdom.
At least five additional fortresses were located to the north of the Second Cataract group, within Lower Nubia (Fig. 26). 53 They too apparently date initially from the reign of Senusret I. They did not form a tight cluster like the Second Cataract Forts, but were widely scattered; most of them seem to have been situated close to the main areas of native settlement. All of the northern forts had a regular rectangular plan, and the outer defences were similar in design to those at Buhen. The interior arrangements, except at Kubban, 54 were too denuded to be worked out in any detail.
Most of the Egyptian fortresses had undergone extensive renovation both in the Middle and New Kingdoms, so that the interior features found by the excavators did not necessarily reflect the original plan. The two fortresses which showed least evidence of alteration were Shelfak and Uronarti. At Buhen, although the buildings had a particularly long and complex history, the excavator was at special pains to work out the original plan and to distinguish it from later modifications, 55 It appears from these investigations that all of the Middle Kingdom fortresses were originally divided into 'quarters' consisting of store rooms, workshops, living quarters and barracks, and officers' quarters. Each fortress was thus a self-contained community. The greatest regularity and symmetry was apparently incorporated in the original design of the forts: streets and drains were perfectly straight and uniformly spaced, and rooms were uniform in size and design. In later years, as is so often the case, increasing departures were made from the original 'ideal plan' in the interests of comfort and convenience.
Recent excavations at the fortress of Mirgissa have revealed, among many other details, the armoury in which weapons were made and stored. Here were found stone 'lasts' upon which hide shields were stretched and formed, a number of finished wooden cross-handles for the shields, and quantities of raw wood and hides for the making of additional shields. More than seventy-five spears and javelins had been carefully stacked around the walls of the room; the wooden shafts had long since disintegrated, but the points were intact. They were made, even at this late date in the Bronze Age, not of metal but of chipped flint. The excellent quality of the stone work recalls the best flint chipping of Pre-dynastic Egypt. A neighbouring room yielded a very large number of crescent-shaped stone arrowheads. 56 Evidently it was not considered necessary at this time to supply the colonial garrisons with the latest in weapons.
We know comparatively little about the military organization of the frontier garrisons. Emery believes that their composition in Middle Kingdom times was almost purely Egyptian, 57 and on that basis has given us a picture which is based largely on our knowledge of army organization in Egypt:
While the private soldier was simply called a 'member of the army,' there was a variety of titles of rank for the officer corps, such as ' General,' 'Commander of the Shock Troops,' 'Commander of the Recruits,' or 'Instructor of Retainers.' There was also the 'Army Scribe' who functioned in the quartermaster's department and the 'Master of the Secrets of the King in the Army' - which surely indicates the existence of an Intelligence Corps attached to the command of the major units. The army of the Middle Kingdom consisted entirely of infantry variously composed of archers, slingers, spearmen and axemen, who wore little in the nature of defensive body armor as we know it. The soldier wore a loincloth and sometimes webbing bands over the shoulders and across the chest, which would give some protection from sword cuts, but he depended mostly for bodily defense on bull-hide shields which appear to have varied in size according to whether the owner belonged to heavy or light infantry, 58
Others believe that the Nubian garrisons from the beginning included considerable numbers of native conscripts, and that the military equipment and organization were not necessarily the same as those in contemporary Egypt. 59 The size of the garrisons at the largest forts has been variously estimated from 300 60 to 3,000; 61 under normal conditions of occupation the lower figure seems considerably the more realistic. 62
The group of Second Cataract Forts, from Buhen to Semna, was certainly under a unified command in the time of the New Kingdom, 63 but this is less clearly attested for the Middle Kingdom. There was, however, a system of visual communication between the major fortresses in the group. From Uronarti, the command headquarters of the most southerly cluster, 64 it was possible to see upstream to Semna and Kumma and downstream to Shelfak. Below Shelfak, where the distance between fortresses was greater, lookout and signalling posts were established on some of the high bluffs west of the river. Five such stations were discovered by the archaeological surveys of the 1960s. 65 In each place were rude stone huts containing purely Egyptian pottery, evidently the temporary residences of the sentries. One lookout post south of Mirgissa also bore traces of a round platform of brick, perhaps intended for the building of signal fires.
The best-preserved of the lookout posts was perched atop the Rock of Abu Sir, a locality famed in recent times for its splendid panoramic vista over the whole length of the Second Cataract. Fires built here could be seen at Buhen in the north and at Mirgissa in the south. A very large number of huts and several inscriptions were found just below the summit o rock, over 200 feet directly above the riverbank. Beneath them, the bast of the cliff was lined with more than 300 additional inscriptions commemorating the passage of merchants, boatmen and officials in the Middle Kingdom. 66
Emery writes that 'the discovery of the complex and elaborate fortifications at Buhen shows that the Egyptian conquerors of the Twelfth Dynasty were holding their newly won territory against a well-organized enemy whose military prowess was by no means negligible.' 67 In fact, the names of the fortresses indicate several potential enemies: the Seti, the 'Bowmen', the Inu, the 'Countries', and the Medjay. Some of these were evidently not riverain peoples, and none of them is necessarily to be identified with the Nubians of the C Horizon. As we have already seen (Ch. 6), the Lower Nubians do not at any time seem to have posed much of a threat either to the security or to the foreign interests of Egypt.
Nothing in the surviving record of Egyptian-Nubian relations seems fully adequate to account for the Second Cataract Forts. They were not intended simply to overawe and hold in subjection the people of Lower Nubia, 68 for the greater number of them were built in the most remote and inhospitable part of the region, far from the centres of population in the C Horizon. In any case subjugation is not achieved through the elaboration of defensive measures, which are in the last analysis a sign of weakness rather than of strength. They may inspire respect, but not fear. In more recent times Aden was held for more than a century, and Gibraltar for more than two, in defiance of hostile neighbours, but both of them notably failed to intimidate the surrounding regions. In ancient Nubia, occasional predatory sallies from Aswan probably accomplished far more towards the subjugation of the native population than did all of the massive Middle Kingdom fortifications.
Neither can the Second Cataract Forts be considered simply as the outermost defences of Egypt. It is true that the XII Dynasty pharaohs laid claim to Lower Nubia, but their purpose in so doing was certainly not to protect either Egypt or Nubia itself against attack from the south. The fortresses are not properly territorial defences at all, for they hug the bank of the Nile and could easily have been outflanked by any determined invader. Nowhere, however, is there evidence of any attempt by the Egyptians to patrol or to protect their desert flanks. 69
The Second Cataract Forts are functionally intelligible only in relation to the Nile, and more specifically to the Nile cataracts. All of them are situated at or close to the largest of the Batn el Hajar rapids: places where riverain cargoes would have to be transferred from larger to smaller vessels, or perhaps off-loaded onto donkeys for overland portage, while the vessels themselves were laboriously dragged through or around the rapids. From these circumstances it seems logical to infer that the fortresses were designed chiefly to provide assistance to riverain commerce, and at the same time to protect it at those points where it was most vulnerable to attack from the bank. 70 They are, in short, the Gibraltars, the Adens, and the Suezes of the Nile trade. The garrisons might have been recruited for military service, but their most important day-to-day activity was probably that of stevedoring.
It is noteworthy that both at Mirgissa 71 and at Buhen 72 there were welldeveloped port and warehouse facilities, situated respectively at the head and at the foot of the main chain of rapids forming the Second Cataract. These facilities were located in each case at a considerable distance from the main fortified enclosures, and were not themselves heavily fortified, yet they seem to have been major centres of Egyptian activity during the Middle Kingdom. Presumably the great enclosures merely provided shelter and occasional protection for the work-forces, while their main daily activity was carried on at the docks.
A recent discovery at Mirgissa even more dramatically underscores the primary function of the Second Cataract Forts. Immediately downstream from Mirgissa lies the Kabuka Rapid, the most formidable of the more than 200 rapids making up the Second Cataract, and a place where several boats have been lost within the last century. Here, on the sandy desert fiat west of the river, the French Archaeological Mission at Mirgissa found the remains of a mud-lined slipway two yards wide and a mile and a half long, over which boats had been dragged around the worst of the rapids (PI. VIIb). The mud was evidently kept wet while dragging operations were in progress, for bare footprints as well as the marks of boat keels were clearly visible along the track. It is now believed that this was a common method used by the Egyptians for the transport of large statues and building blocks, although its use as a means of portaging boats has not previously been recorded. 73
Further insight into the nature of Egypt's interest in the Second Cataract region is provided by the 'boundary' stele which was erected at Semna in the name of Senusret III. In translation it reads:
Southern boundary, made in the year 8, under the majesty of the King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Khakaura 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, but without allowing a ship of the Negroes to pass by Heh, 74 going downstream, forever. 75
The message here is perfectly clear. There is no rattling of the sword; the king's concern is purely economic. 76 The border is simply closed in perpetuity to all commerce in foreign bottoms, unless it be destined for trans-shipment immediately downstream at Mirgissa. Here, beyond doubt, is the hoary ancestor of all those decrees of commercial monopoly which have played so large a part in colonial history down to modern times. It serves once more to underscore the dictum of John Stuart Mill that distribution is a political, not an economic, process. 77
The Second Cataract Forts were, then, at once the defences and the customs posts of the Nile trade. Their function was not to keep the Nubians under control, but rather to keep the Nile under Egyptian control. They had their counterpart millennia later in the castles along the Rhine and Danube, and later still in the 'castles' which reappeared in Nubia in the late Middle Ages. (Senusret would have been startled beyond measure had he known that 3,000 years later the kings of Nubia would themselves garrison the Batn el Hajar against Egyptian commerce, and would proclaim their commercial monopoly in words strikingly reminiscent of his own; see Ch. 15.) That the frontier forts also enabled the Egyptians to keep an eye on the movements of the native population is attested by a series of despatches from the Semna garrison which were found at Thebes, 78 there is no reason to suppose, however, that this was the principal purpose of the forts or that it offers any explanation for their awesome size.
If we have correctly identified the most important function of the Second Cataract Forts, then several important corollaries follow. First, there must already have existed in the Twelfth Dynasty a very substantial volume of trade between Egypt and the lands to the south of Semna, since the Egyptians were at such pains to control and protect it. Second, some desert or Upper Nubian people must have developed the habit of preying on the riverain 'caravans' - another probable indication of their 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 under direct Egyptian control. Finally, the absence of Egyptian forts at the cataracts above Semna (admittedly not as dangerous as those further downstream) suggests the possibility that the Nile above Semna was effectively controlled by another power. If so, this was a genuine 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 Kingdom ? As Trigger has observed, 'Since the region between Kerma and Semna is dangerous and there were marauding tribes in the Eastern Desert, it is unlikely that this river traffic consisted of occasional individuals bringing produce north to trade with the Egyptians. More likely it consisted of regular flotillas which were despatched by the king of Kush, who was probably the successor of the ruler of Yam with whom Harkhuf had traded.' 79
As far back as the late Old Kingdom, we noted that the pharaoh's interest had already turned from the unproductive lands along his immediate frontier to the greener pastures further upriver. The principal objective of each of the four major expeditions of Harkhuf was not the familiar regions of Irtet and Wawat but the more remote and more affluent land of Yam. It is doubtful that this profitable contact was maintained during the turbulent years of the First Intermediate Period, but its restoration seems to have been the principal goal of the Middle Kingdom Pharaohs who conquered and garrisoned Lower Nubia.
The name of Yam is never heard after the Old Kingdom, and its exact location will probably never be known. It may or may not have lain to the south of the Second Cataract. 80 On the other hand the main source of Egypt's foreign commerce in the Middle Kingdom can almost certainly be identified with the site of Kerma, not far from the Third Cataract. Here in later times was the seat of the most autocratic chief who ever ruled in pre-pharaonic Nubia, and here also are the remains of an Egyptian trade emporium, 81 Kerma, then, is the probable missing piece in our puzzle: the key to Egypt's colonial policy in the Middle Kingdom. The place of Kerma in Nubian history will be discussed at length in the next chapter.
The subjugation of Lower Nubia under the XII Dynasty was, then, in all probability coincidental to the securing of the cataracts and the southern trade route. It was one of those numerous instances of military occupation designed not so much for the exploitation of the conquered territory as to provide a buffer against more warlike peoples beyond: perhaps, in this case, either the Upper Nubians or desert nomads. 82 As we have already seen, the Egyptian yoke seems to have rested rather lightly on the necks of the Nubian villagers who lived within the occupied territory, if their archaeological remains are any gauge. 83 Nevertheless, some of the fortresses which were built to the north of Buhen, and which are not obviously associated with rapids or natural hazards, can only have been intended for the subjugation and administration of the native populace. This is particularly true of the fortress of Aniba, situated in the middle of a broad and fertile plain which is thickly dotted with 'C-Group' remains. 84 Kubban, another fort situated at the mouth of the Wadi Allaqi, was more probably intended originally as a supply and control point for traffic along the desert road which led to some of Egypt's richest mines and quarries (see below), but it may have served as a local administrative centre as well. 85 The Lower Nubian fortresses of Faras 86 and of Serra 87 are more difficult to account for; they are distant alike from cataracts, from overland trade routes, and from known centres of Nubian population. 88 We do not know, and probably will never know, what considerations prompted the Egyptian occupation and fortification of these places.
While we can, on various grounds, explain the locations of all but a few of the Middle Kingdom forts, nothing which has thus far been said seems adequate to explain their colossal size and complexity. Nowhere on the Nubian scene are we aware of 'men to match these mountains'. It is notable that in later times, when Egypt was genuinely threatened by far stronger enemies both in the north and in the south, the defensive measures which she adopted were not even remotely comparable to the Middle Kingdom fortresses.
Any attempt to account for the fortresses on pragmatic military grounds alone. 89 seems as futile as an attempt to account for the pyramids in terms of a need to dispose of the dead. Both are examples of the material hypertrophy which is characteristic of Egyptian civilization. Once the decision to build them was taken, the rest followed from force of habit. In the long run the size of the fortresses might be less a reflection of the pharaoh's will than of his inability to curb his architect's ambition - an experience not unfamiliar to royal patrons.
The rigid canon of their design, as well as their history of continual aggrandizement, make it plain that the fortresses must be regarded primarily as monuments. The formal symmetry of bastions and embrasures bears comparison to the exterior decoration of a temple or cathedral, rather than to any known military challenge of the times. The fortresses are the chosen form of self-expression for the militarist civilization of Egypt's Middle Kingdom, as the pyramids are for the Old Kingdom and Karnak is for the New Kingdom. That they were built in Nubia and not in Egypt was an accident of circumstance which did not affect their primarily symbolic function. They 'showed the flag' to the Nubians, but also, and perhaps even more importantly, to the pharaoh himself, and to posterity. (We may note parenthetically that both Rameses II in the New Kingdom and Gamal Abdel Nasser in modern times have followed the Middle Kingdom example in erecting some of their proudest monuments south of Aswan.)
The full significance of the fortresses can only be understood in relation to their times. The Middle Kingdom was not an age of creative flowering to the same extent as were the Old Kingdom and the New Kingdom; it was an interval of uneasy stability following two centuries of anarchy. The tenor of the times was sober, cautious, and authoritarian, and its watchwords were Law and Order. 90 The great fortresses were the physical embodiment of those ideals.
Although it was not the main focus of Egypt's attention in the Middle Kingdom, Lower Nubia was not wholly without productive resources. Presumably a certain volume of tax or tribute could be wrung from the native inhabitants, and they could perhaps be conscripted for work in the Egyptian mines and quarries. The diorite mines west of Toshka seem to have been reopened at the beginning of the XII Dynasty and to have been worked intermittently until the end of the Middle Kingdom. 91 Amethysts were also mined in the same general region. 92 An inscription from the time of Amenemhat II records that a work party heading for the desert quarries consisted of 20 'chamber officials', 50 lapidaries, 200 stone-cutters, 1,006 workmen, 1,000 pack-asses, and an unspecified number of guardsmen. 93
Copper smelting at Buhen was not resumed in the Middle Kingdom, but a mine at Abu Seyal, in the desert east of Kubban fortress, is believed to date from this time. An inscription from the reign of Senusret I records that a certain official named Horus was ordered by the king to collect 'copper from the land of Nubia'. 94 A large heap of slag found at Kubban itself 95 is believed to represent ore from the Abu Seyal mine; however, the remains of furnaces and slag heaps show that a good deal of smelting was done directly at the mine. 96
Nubian gold production was developed primarily under the New Kingdom, but there are at least a few suggestions that it originated earlier. Among the hundreds of miners' and prospectors' inscriptions found in the Nubian gold-mining districts (cf. Ch. 9), only three can be attributed, somewhat hesitantly, to the Middle Kingdom. 97 However, a Middle Kingdom stele from Edfu states that its owner 'brought back gold and maidservants from southern Kush'. 98 Perhaps more convincing than this direct evidence of gold-mining activity is the indirect evidence represented by the great fortress of Kubban, which was almost certainly built primarily to control traffic along the Wadi Allaqi - the desert watercourse which led to Nubia's richest goldfield. 99 A very small balance-scale of the type traditionally used in Egypt to weigh gold was also found in the Semna fortress, apparently in a Middle Kingdom context. 100 Its presence might suggest that the Egyptians at Semna were buying gold in small quantities from native suppliers, who perhaps obtained it from the outcrops at Duweishat, a few miles upstream. This was another major centre of gold production in the New Kingdom, 101 but here too activity is not clearly attested in earlier times. At all events, it seems clear that the volume of mineral production could hardly have provided the main justification for Egypt's occupation of Lower Nubia during the Middle Kingdom.
Unified rule in Egypt came to an end in the XIII Dynasty; during the Second Intermediate Period (Dynasties XIII-XVII) the country was once again divided among warring factions. The shadowy XIII and XIV Dynasties together lasted just over a century. In the meantime intruders from Asia (the Hyksos) entered the Delta region and set up a kingdom of their own. They reigned as the pharaohs of the XV and XVI Dynasties. Quasi-independent Egyptian rule was maintained at Thebes in the south, but the Theban dynast was obliged to pay tribute to his stronger neighbour and to allow Hyksos trade to pass through his territory.
While Egypt was thus divided, the power and wealth of Nubia increased apace. By 1700 Bc there were three major powers on the Nile in place of the former one, prompting the Theban ruler to complain: 'a chieftain is in Avaris [in the Delta] and another in Kush: I sit united with an Asiatic and a Nubian, each man in possession of his slice of this Egypt.' 102 An uneasy balance of power was maintained by an alliance between the Nubian and Hyksos kings, which recalls the historic alliance of France and Scotland against England. Economic as well as political relations were maintained between Kerma and the Hyksos; 103 evidently control of the profitable Nubian trade had passed from the hands of the Theban pharaohs into those of their northern rivals.
What happened to the Egyptian colonial venture in Lower Nubia during these chaotic times? Apparently it did not come to an immediate end, for garrisons were maintained at several of the fortresses at least during the earlier reigns of the XIII Dynasty. A watch was still kept on the movements of the Nubians, as is shown by the 'Semna despatches' dating apparently from the early XIII Dynasty. 104 By the time that Hyksos rule was firmly established in the north, however, it seems certain that Egyptian political control in Nubia had come to an end. 105
As a result of his discoveries at Buhen, W. B. Emery has popularized the idea that the Middle Kingdom forts were 'overthrown' and 'destroyed by fire', 106 This conclusion rests not on any contemporary texts but on archaeological evidence of burning and destruction. As I have written elsewhere, however, archaeological evidence of warfare is likely to be ambiguous. Most sites in the course of time have been ravaged by one destructive force or another, and after the passage of centuries or millennia it is seldom possible to distinguish the handiwork of man from the handiwork of nature, 107
At Buhen there was undoubted evidence of burning between the Middle and New Kingdom occupation levels, most conspicuously in the vicinity of the western gate and the 'Commandant's palace', but to see this as evidence of armed conflict requires considerable imagination. The signs of fire in the 'Commandant's palace' are mostly at floor level, and are unlikely to have resulted simply from the burning of the roof, which was presumably the only flammable part of the structure. It looks much more as though a fire had been deliberately built within the structure, which could hardly have been done while hostilities were in progress. It may have been an act of symbolic destruction, carried out either by the retreating Egyptians or by the Nubians after they took possession of the abandoned fortress.
One thing seems certain: no attack against the fortresses could have succeeded in the face of an organized and systematic defence. Whether or not a token force was overcome or driven out by Nubian attackers, I think it can safely bc assumed that the bulk of the garrisons had already been withdrawn. It is inconceivable that the Theban pharaoh, beset as he was in the north, could have spared any number of men and supplies for the continued occupation of Nubia. It also seems at least possible that the evacuation proceeded peacefully, and that the fires at Buhen and Semna 108 were set by the retreating Egyptians themselves. Destruction of immovable supplies and installations prior to evacuation is, after all, standard military procedure. 109
The conditions encountered at Buhen and Mirgissa point to a considerable hiatus between the Middle Kingdom and New Kingdom occupations. There had been some deterioration of the ramparts, and also a large accumulation of sand within, by the time the buildings were renovated in the XVIII Dynasty. Yet the forts were not completely abandoned during the Second Intermediate Period. The presence of Nubian squatters at Dorginarti fortress is attested by their carvings of bulls on door lintels and jambs; 110 squatter occupation is also suggested at Askut. 111 Much more suggestive, though enigmatic, is a group of hieroglyphic stelae found at Buhen, which seem to indicate that at some time during the Second Intermediate Period the one-time Egyptian stronghold was governed by an Egyptian family on behalf of the ruler of Nubia (meaning presumably Kerma). 112 The stele of Sepedher, the longest of the group, reads in part: 'I was a valiant commandant of Buhen, and never did any commandant do what I did: I built the temple of Horus, Lord of Buhen, to the sarisfaction of the ruler of Cush.' 113 Another stele gives the Nubian king a name, making it plain that it is indeed a native ruler and not the pharaoh who is designated by the term 'ruler of Cush'. 114
While the King of Kerma thus apparently replaced the pharaoh as master of Lower Nubia during the latter part of the Second Intermediate Period, Egyptian influence was not thereby brought to an end. The volume of trade goods in the late graves of the C Horizon is greater than at any previous time, and Egyptian influence is now manifest also in the appearance of mud-brick architecture and in the increasing Egyptianization of burial customs (cf. Ch. 6). Effective interchange between Egypt and Nubia evidently did not depend, after all, upon Egyptian control of the cataracts: it flourished even more conspicuously under Nubian control.
Egypt's colonial interest in Nubia dates back almost to the foundation of the pharaonic state. During the early centuries, however, there does not seem to have been a fully articulated political or economic policy towards the southern countries. Various exploitative activities were begun during the Archaic period and the Old Kingdom, but they were mostly of a sporadic and uncoordinated nature. Slaves and plunder were taken by occasional military forays, and there was intermittent prospecting and quarrying in the Nubian deserts. Only at Buhen was a permanent Egyptian colony planted on Nubian soil, apparently for the smelting of copper ore obtained somewhere in the desert hinterland. There is nothing to suggest, however, that the Buhen colony was an administrative centre, or in fact that any systematic effort was made to extend the pharaoh's authority over the Lower Nubian population. Apparently the natives were too few and too weak in Old Kingdom times to offer either a threat or an opportunity to the Egyptians.
By the later Old Kingdom, the pharaoh had already become aware of richer lands to the south of Lower Nubia, and from that time onward Egyptian policy centred upon the development of commerce with the southern lands. Major expeditions during the last reigns of the VI Dynasty brought back all kinds of exotic products from the Land of Yam, probably in Upper Nubia.
Commerce with the far south was probably interrupted during the turbulent years of the First Intermediate Period, but it was resumed at the outset of the Middle Kingdom. By the time of the XII Dynasty trade with the Upper Nile had reached such proportions that it was subject to depredation by Upper Nubian or desert peoples. In order to secure the southern trade route, and also to assure an Egyptian monopoly of trade, the XII Dynasty pharaohs fortified the most vulnerable points in the Second Cataract region with a series of enormous military posts, which served at the same time as frontier customs stations. They were meant to show the flag in the southern lands, but were also, in a larger sense, the major architectural monuments of a militaristic age.
Concurrently with the building of the fortresses, the pharaoh assumed outright political control over Lower Nubia. This was a holding operation designed primarily to protect Egyptian commercial interests, and had little visible effect on the lives of the riverain farmers of the C Horizon. However, quarrying and copper mining were resumed on a small scale, and native levies were undoubtedly employed.
The unity of the Egyptian state was again destroyed during the XIII Dynasty, and the local ruler at Thebes was too weak and too preoccupied at home to maintain his hold on Nubia. The last of the southern garrisons were withdrawn or chased out by the native populace, and the fortresses fell into a state of partial disrepair. Nevertheless trade continued to flourish, apparently under the protection of the Nubian king at Kerma, long after the departure of the Egyptian garrisons.
last updated 26th December 2000