Schlagwort-Archive: Tombos

Regionality of stone quarrying in Nubia: the case study of a granite quarry at Ferka West

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The most recent publication of the ERC DiverseNile Project focuses on landscape and resource management in Bronze Age Nubia. Here, I would like to present some thoughts on the regionality of stone quarrying in Nubia with a case study from the MUAFS concession.

Stone is a natural resource which has typically been associated with Egypt, being regarded as a raw material of little importance for Nubian cultures. However, the quarrying of stone played a role in the complex framework of cultural exchange of Middle Nile communities with Egypt (see Budka 2024). Whereas Nubian sandstone (quartz sandstone) only started to be used as building material in the Middle Nile during the Middle Kingdom, mostly for Egyptian fortresses, there is evidence for a much earlier use of natural- and dry-stone architecture, in both settlement architecture and funerary buildings (cf. Liszka 2017). Sandstone architectural pieces were also well integrated within Nubian monumental architecture (e.g., the columns and stelae at the eastern Deffufa in Kerma, see Budka 2024 with references). Some of the most important sandstone quarries during the New Kingdom can be found at Sai Island – we have studies these quarries already during the ERC AcrossBorders Project and will come back to the topic within the framework of our present project in the near future thanks to the expertise of our PostDoc Fabian Dellefant.

Granite is another important stone quarried in Nubia. While the most renowned granite quarry used for building projects and objects in ancient Egypt over millennia is located in Aswan, there are also a number of granite quarry sites in the Middle Nile. They are less well known and seem to have been used for a considerably shorter amount of time.

The quarry site of Tombos with an unfinished royal statue.

One quite famous example is the site of Tombos close to the Third Nile Cataract. The site includes a large quarry of magmatic rocks, principally granite and granitic gneisses, with known activity from the 18th Dynasty until Napatan and Meroitic times, particularly for statues and stelae. One particularly striking left-over in the quarry is the beautiful, although unfinished royal statue of presumably Napatan date.

There is no clear evidence that the quarry site of Tombos was used prior to the New Kingdom (Klemm, Klemm and Murr 2019, 28).

Another type of granite, pink granite, is available just south of the Dal Cataract in the MUAFS concession. This brings me to my case study: site 3-L-6 is a large red granite quarry at the foot of Jebel Kitfoggo in Ferka West – well noted by Vila and others during the 1970s survey (Vila 1976, 72−73). We visited the site during our 2022 survey of the MUAFS project – the landscape is fantastic and the pink granite very picturesque.

The site 3-L-6 at Jebel Kitfoggo is one of the highlights in the MUAFS concession area.
A large number of stone working traces can be observed at the pink granite quarry 3-L-6.

Fragments of unfinished columns in the southern part of the site testify to an intensive use in Medieval times for architectural pieces (Welsby 2002, 173).

The quarry was clearly used for architectural pieces like columns.

This is supported by evidence from settlement site 3-G-30, just to the north of 3-L-6, where Medieval ceramics were found on the surface. The building technique and general layout of these stone-built huts are also typical of the Medieval era.

Part of site 3-G-30 in close vicinity of the granite quarry.

Although several Kerma sites are also identifiable in the surroundings of 3-L-6, there is no evidence for Bronze Age or Iron Age use of the granite quarry at Jebel Kitfoggo.

It is interesting to stress that both Tombos and Jebel Kitfoggo were used for a relatively limited time span compared to other quarry sites. These examples illustrate regional patterns in quarrying in the Middle Nile, but they also show the need to consider political and historical circumstances when investigating the management of raw material and resources (Budka 2024).

References

Budka 2024 = J. Budka, Introduction. Regionality of resource management in Bronze Age Sudan: an overview and case studies, in: J. Budka and R. Lemos (eds), Landscape and resource management in Bronze Age Nubia: Archaeological perspectives on the exploitation of natural resources and the circulation of commodities in the Middle Nile, Contributions to the Archaeology of Egypt, Nubia and the Levant 17, Wiesbaden 2024, 19−33.

Klemm, Klemm and Murr 2019 = Klemm, D., Klemm, R. and Murr, A., Geologically induced raw materials stimulating the development of Nubian culture, in: D. Raue (ed.), Handbook of Ancient Nubia, Vol. 1, Berlin; Boston 2019, 15−38.

Liszka 2017 = Liszka, K., Egyptian or Nubian? Dry-stone architecture at Wadi el-Hudi, Wadi es-Sebua, and the Eastern Desert, Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 103 (1) (2017), 35−51.

Vila 1976 = Vila, A., La prospection archéologique de la Vallée du Nil, au Sud de la Cataracte de Dal (Nubie Soudanaise). Fascicule 3: District de Ferka (Est et Ouest),Paris 1976.

Welsby 2002 = Welsby, D.A., The Medieval Kingdoms of Nubia: Pagans, Christians and Muslims Along the Middle Nile, London 2002.

Of identities and bodies: new DiverseNile Seminar on mortuary diversity

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According to the cold and rainy weather here in Munich, summer has long past – fittingly, our short summer break of the DiverseNile Seminar is now officially over. It is my pleasure to announce the upcoming lecture on Tuesday, August 31: Michele Buzon will be talking about „Intersectional Identities and Bodies: Exploring Biological, Geographic, and Mortuary Diversity in the Ancient Nile Valley“.

Michele is bioarchaeologist and Professor of Anthropology at Purdue University in Indiana, USA. I have the pleasure knowing her since many years, having met her both in Sudan and at conferences. She is the codirector of the important excavations at Tombos and we were therefore always in close contact during my AcrossBorders project. Our assessment of the strontium isotope analysis from Sai could nicely built on data published by her and co-authors. As I outlined in an earlier post, only common efforts will allow us to establish a strontium isoscape for New Kingdom Nubia and much work is still waiting for all of us.

Michele is one of the key figures in modern Nubian bioarchaeology conducting contextualized interpretations that combine skeletal evidence with settlement, environmental, and mortuary data. This approach allows to create a more nuanced picture of life and death in ancient Nubia (see also her recent summary of Bioarchaeology of Nubia in the Oxford Handbook of Ancient Nubia, Buzon 2021).

I am very much looking forward to her presentation and hope that many of you will be joining us – without doubts, Michele is going to show exciting material, fresh data and will offer much food for thought! As usual, late registration for our DiverseNile seminar is still possible via email.

Reference

Buzon, Michele R. 2021. Bioarchaeology of Nubia, in: The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Nubia, edited by Geoff Emberling and Bruce Beyer Williams, Oxford, DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190496272.013.55

Anniversary of a new challenge

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The time between Xmas and New Year is often a kind of transition, for many a moment to pause, but for others also a super stressful time in which all kinds of things have to be finished and loads of papers are sitting on one’s desk because one deliberately waited for this “break” between the holidays…

Well, I do not want to go into details, but my current work in home office is far from being relaxed. Nevertheless, it seems adequate to pause for a moment and remember what was achieved in the last few years.

Today one week ago, I gave the first DiverseNile Xmas lecture – this zoom lecture was meant as a kind of “Thank you” to all my friends, colleagues and collaborators who supported me in the last decades.

I tried to outline the most important waypoints leading to the new project in the region between Attab and Ferka, taking my visits and research in the cataract areas as case studies, starting of course with my participation in the Elephantine project.

From the First, to the Third, Fourth and Second Cataract.

Today two years ago, I was leaving Khartoum to go north and start work in my new concession between Attab and Ferka, the first field season of the MUAFS project started. Our very promising results of this first season served as the basis for the successful acquisition of the present ERC DiverseNile project – thus really a day to remember!

Preparing my lecture for last week, I reassessed my old documentation of rock inscriptions at Tombos, but especially of the Humboldt University Nubian Expedition at the Fourth Cataract as part of the Merowe Dam Archaeological Salvage Project. I will never forget the moment when we first entered our concession area in 2004 coming from the desert and looking on a barren, yet infinitely beautiful cataract landscape.

The three years of fieldwork in the area of Kirbekan were a great challenge, but this work has shaped me and taught me so much about archaeology and surveying. We had a great variety of funerary monuments and for me besides rock art the most interesting sites were tombs of the Napatan era and others associated with the Kerma culture. The discovery of Kerma remains/a local Kerma horizon was among the most impressive outcomes of the entire Merowe Dam Archaeological Salvage Project! And fits perfectly to our current investigations in the Attab to Ferka region.

My visits to the Batn el-Hagar, the Kajbar cataract and of course Sai Island will never be forgotten. Sudan is such an impressive country with stunning landscapes and much more!

Without the years of the AcrossBorders project on Sai Island, my current research focus on remains from the Egyptian colonial era in the Attab to Ferka region with an emphasis on cultural diversity and the materialisation of cultural encounters would not be possible. Thus, many thanks again for all who supported me – there are exciting years ahead of us, stay tuned for new results from the MUAFS concession!

Towards a better understanding of the New Kingdom isoscape in Upper Nubia

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A paper by the AcrossBorders project on the application of strontium isotopes to investigate cultural entanglement in Sai and its surroundings was just published (Retzmann et al. 2019)! In this study, strontium isotopes were applied to identify possible ‘colonialists’ coming from Egypt within the skeletal remains retrieved from Tomb 26 of the pharaonic cemetery SAC5 on Sai Island.

The local strontium signal on Sai Island during the New Kingdom was derived from archaeological animal samples (rodent, sheep/goat, dog and local mollusc shells, all dating from the New Kingdom) in agreement with local environmental samples (paleo sediments and literature Sr isotope value of Nile River water during the New Kingdom era).

As outlined in the article, the strontium values suggest that all people buried in Tomb 26 are members of the local population. A striking outcome, since the tomb, the tomb equipment, the personal names and titles are all clearly ‘Egyptian’.

These fresh results tie in nicely with research at other main Upper Nubian centres like Tombos (Smith and Buzon 2017) and Amara West (Buzon and Simonetti 2013) – and will be of great importance also for DiverseNile. More information on the complex coexistence and biological and cultural entanglement of Egyptians and Nubians during the New Kingdom are urgently needed.

We need to reconstruct the isoscape of the Attab-Ferka region in the next years.

In this respect, we will continue to investigate the isoscape of Upper Nubia further, enlarging our scope with my new concession – I am very happy that the successful team around Anika who did this for Sai will be again involved! The MUAFS area will provide new data from soil, water, molluscs and of course animal bones and human teeth which will allow us to place the data from Sai in a broader context. The periphery of Sai and Amara West, our Attab to Ferka region, has rich potential to check the validity of our present strontium analysis.

References

Buzon and Simonetti 2013 = Buzon, M. R. and Simonetti, A., Strontium isotope (87Sr/86Sr) variability in the Nile Valley: identifying residential mobility during ancient Egyptian and Nubian sociopolitical changes in the New Kingdom and Napatan periods, American Journal of Physical Anthropology 151, 2013, 1-9.

Retzmann et al. 2019 = A. Retzmann, J. Budka, H. Sattmann, J. Irrgeher, T. Prohaska, The New Kingdom population on Sai Island: Application of Sr isotopes to investigate cultural entanglement in ancient Nubia, Ägypten und Levante 29, 2019, 355–380

Smith and Buzon 2017 = Smith, S. T., and Buzon, M. R., Colonial encounters at New Kingdom Tombos: Cultural entanglements and hybrid identity, 615–630, in: N. SPENCER, A. STEVENS and M. BINDER (eds.), Nubia in the New Kingdom. Lived experience, pharaonic control and indigenous traditions, British Museum Publications on Egypt and Sudan 3, Leuven 2017.