Archeologists race to uncover lost kingdom on Nile
JOHN NOBLE WILFORD The New York Times - June 24, 2007
On the periphery of history in antiquity, there was a land known as Kush. Overshadowed by Egypt, to the north it was a place of uncharted breadth and depth far up the Nile, a mystery verging on myth. One thing the Egyptians did know and recorded � Kush had gold.
The Kush kingdom was conquered by the Egyptians
Scholars have come to learn that there was more to the culture of Kush than was previously suspected. From deciphered Egyptian documents and modern archaeological research, it is now known that for five centuries in the second millennium B.C., the kingdom of Kush flourished with the political and military prowess to maintain some control over a wide territory in Africa.
Kush�s governing success would seem to have been anomalous, or else conventional ideas about statehood rest too narrowly on the experiences of early civilizations like Mesopotamia, Egypt, and China. How could a fairly complex society exist without a writing system, an extensive bureaucracy, or major urban centres, none of which Kush evidently had?
Archaeologists are now finding some answers � at least intriguing insights � emerging in advance of rising Nile waters behind a new dam in northern Sudan. Hurried excavations are uncovering ancient settlements, cemeteries, and gold-processing centres in regions previously unexplored.
In recent reports and interviews, archaeologists said they had found widespread evidence that the kingdom of Kush, in its ascendancy from 2000 B.C. to 1500 B.C., exerted control or at least influence over a 750-mile stretch of the Nile Valley. This region extended from the first waterfall in the Nile, as attested by an Egyptian monument, all the way upstream to beyond the fourth waterfall. The area covered part of the larger geographic region of indeterminate borders known in antiquity as Nubia.
Some archaeologists theorize that the discoveries show that the rulers of Kush were the first in sub-Saharan Africa to hold sway over so vast a territory.
"This makes Kush a more major player in political and military dynamics of the time than we knew before," said Geoff Emberling, co-leader of a University of Chicago expedition. "Studying Kush helps scholars have a better idea of what statehood meant in an ancient context outside such established power centers of Egypt and Mesopotamia."
Gil Stein, director of the Oriental Institute at the university, said: "Until now, virtually all that we have known about Kush came from the historical records of their Egyptian neighbours and from limited explorations of monumental architecture at the Kushite capital city, Kerma."
To archaeologists, knowing that a virtually unexplored land of mystery is soon to be flooded has the same effect as Samuel Johnson ascribed to one facing the gallows in the morning. It concentrates the mind.
Over the last few years, archaeological teams from Britain, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Sudan, and the United States have raced to dig at sites that will soon be underwater. The teams were surprised to find hundreds of settlement ruins, cemeteries, and examples of rock art that had never been studied. One of the most comprehensive salvage operations has been conducted by groups headed by Henryk Paner of the Gdansk Archaeological Museum in Poland, which surveyed 711 ancient sites in 2003 alone.
"This area is so incredibly rich in archaeology," Derek Welsby of the British Museum said in a report last winter in Archaeology magazine.
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