The Potential of the Fourth Cataract Archaeological Project
MOUND-GRAVES AT UMM RUWEIM AND KHOR AL-GREYN
Osama Elnur and Hassan Bandi
Hommages à Jean Leclant, vol.2. IFAO, Caire 1994, pp.323-33
Prior to the last series of preliminary surveys carried out by the Sudan Antiquities and National Museums’ Service, it was generally believed that the area between the IVth and Vth Cataracs was a poor and unpromising archaeological region, by comparison with the rest of Sudanese Nubia.
Owing to occasional unpublished reports, written by administrators as well as by inhabitants of the area, and also to a very few published papers of scientific value (1), the Service had some reason to doubt such pessimistic archaeological appraisal. Could actually any section of the Nile River, especially when it flows through a poor sahel, have ever been deserted?
Every reader of these “Mélanges Leclant” is well aware of the help given by the Professor in modifying substantially the current opinion. His “Rapport pour l’étude archéologique de la zone de la IVe Cataracte” is in all Sudanologists’ hands, and does not require further comment. To thank again the acute UNESCO reporter, let us address here the renowned Meroiticist by offering him two graves among the three excavated as preparatory tests of his final evaluation.
These graves were unearthed in October-November 1989, during one of our preliminary surveys. They might appear rather poor: instead of some of the gigantic superstructures also recorded in the area, they were selected in order to avoid a long term commitment. They are typical of the graves in dozens of small cemeteries scattered in the region, they stress the excellency of the preservation of perishable grave-goods and they obviously contribute to the present debate about the cultural evolution at the end of the pre-Christian period. They are thus worth discussion and are presented here in some detail.
Umm Ruweim (Fig.1)
As the Sudanese team (including its French Unit) gathered at its first camp in Wadi ab-Dom in the vicinity of Umm Ruweim, several days were spent in training the newly appointed Antiquities Officers for the projected field-work. The ruins described by H.N.Chittic (2) were drawn and tested; the isolated mound-grave near Umm Ruweim 1, and a rectangular grave built in the small cemetery near Umm Ruweim 2, were excavated.
Khor al-Greyn (Fig.2)
Since the first testing had yielded no ceramic samples of value to the survey, a second tumulus was chosen inside a cemetery of approximately hundred mounds, at Khor al-Greyn (4). It was selected on account of its small size (6.70 m.x 0.75 m.) and because of its obvious plundering, characterized by the depression in the top. It was again made from the local earth, and strengthened by a stony oval ring, 60- 80 cm. thick, of un-worked schist and gneiss collected locally and arranged upon its slopes.
1. Pottery basin (Ø = 238 - 222 mm., H = 132 mm.). Irregular and misshaped, thick and heavy. Int. and ext. red slip, burnished with a large instrument.
Upon the original ground surface, the up cast from the excavation of the grave had been arranged in a ring. A hearth was located to the NNE of the shaft. Fragments of a globular jar, of a very coarse ware, very irregular in shape and roughly burnished, were found inside the huge plundering cone: whether it belonged to the funerary collection or to the plundering party has not been ascertained.
2. Gourd-shaped pot (Ø = 136 - 134 mm., H. = 131 mm.). Ext. red slip, smoother. This container was found full of coarse gravel fragments of gneiss, and may be compared to a similar find at al-Ghaddar (5).
3. Pottery bottle (Ø = 206 - 203 mm., H. = 257 mm.). Roughly smoothed. Neck and body separately shaped and joined.
4. Large pottery bottle (Ø = 260 - 257 mm. H. = 296 mm.). Irregular. Burnished horizontally on the body and vertically on the neck. Neck and body joined.
5. Large pottery bottle (Ø = 339 - 338 mm. H. = 378 mm.). Irregular. Roughly burnished. Neck and body formed separately.
All this pottery is made in a coarse black or brown ware, badly fired and tempered with a quantity of plant fragments and mineral fraction, more or less micaceous, which leaves no doubt about the regional nature of the ceramic industry. All the vessels are handmade.
Due to the aims of the expedition, the vegetal objects recovered in plenty could not be conserved in situ and have been recorded only by illustration. They consist of:
6. Wooden goblet, originally capping object no. 5, broken and partly fallen on the floor. Diameter around 8 - 10 cm.
7. 8, 9, 10. Complete basket. The roud bottom (10) is made out of wood. The walls are built with stitched bands (9) of palm-leaf fibers, simply woven into the zig-zag pattern that we can observe in modern mats. The inside was strengthened by a piece of leather roughly sewn along the edges (8). 7 is the twisted handle.
11. Remains of a basket in the shape and the style of the modern tabaq, made out of a single coil of palm-leaf fibers gathered in stitched rolls. Diameter between 20 and 30 cm.
12. Fragments of leather. The functional shape of the object is uncertain: it may have been the bottom of object no. 13.
13. Remains of the wall of the basket (?), probably with a handle, made from palm-leaf fibers very loosely woven with a pattern of vertical wrap and horizontal weft. Edge reinforced by turning in. This basket could hardly be used as a true container: did it help to carry and hold the pottery bottle no. 3, in the way used for the handled bursa of the
Western Sudan .
14. Several dozens of tubular faience beads, of a blue-green colour, scattered among the plunderers' debris.
As a result of the detailed description above, it is clear that these immediately pre-Christian graves i the IVth Cataract area relate to those in the southern provinces rather than to those in northern
Nubia . the so-called 'beehive" form encountered at Umm Ruweim finds numerous parallels near
Khartoum (6). The other shape, noticed at Khor al-Greyn, a niche cavity arranged perpendicularly to a stairway, has been described in hundreds of instances at al-Gereif-East, Sorurab-Bauda, al-Ahamda, Saggai, al-Geili, al-Hobagi, al-Kadada, Meroe, Berber, Tanqasi, etc. The form of the superstructure reinforces this statement. Mounds protectedby a ring of stones, either with or without one or two square or rectangular "tongues" have been described, at least since Crawford's survey in 1953, in an area extending from Sorurab-Bauda, al-Hobagi, Wadi Hawad, etc., towards Tanqasi and al-Ghaddar at least.
It is possible to date our sampled tombs with more accuracy according to the grave goods collected? It would be hazardous, since the pottery of the region has never been studied and since we have not so far noticed, apart from at Tanqasi, remains of the settlements which might have supplied the country-side with better-known wheel-turned ceramics. Some archaeologists, acknowledging the imprecisely defined "Alwa wares" at the first mention of "hand-made" potteries, will date our funerary collection to the "Post-Meroitic Culture". Others, at first sight recognizing a libation set through the association of a basin with a black bottle, or a "funerary banquet" with the bottles and "beer-jars", will consider it as "Postpyramidial" equipment. We cannot as yet bring a helpful hand to whatever theories, which anyway, might well find soon more than compatibility. A C14 dating would not have added any arguments, the method being rather irrelevant in the instance. It can be stated here that our two graves belong to the late pre-Christian culture of the
Sudan , and leave to the specialists the arguing about exact dates and precise cultural evolutions. As we note at Khor al-Greyn, some continuity since the Meroitic times in the shape of the grave as well as in the ritual contents, let us assert that we cannot be certain that such graves are definitely to be dated somewhere in the IV - Vth centuries. Only with the production of a ceramic corpus of hand-made wares for the period lasting from before to after the "End of Meroe" will we be in a position to suggest a tighter chronology.
A number of questions are posed for the specialists of the period. It is worth noting that the characteristic features of the graves are related more to their geographical location than to their chronology during the first five centuries of this era. Northern Sudanese Nubian graves throughout the late Meroitic and the Post-Meroitic periods commonly consist of a pit excavated into the subsoil in order to build, out of bricks, a rectangular chamber. To the best of our knowledge, such a regional feature has never been found in any southern province: the Nubian agriculturists reproduce their main type of dwelling for their dead. The Gezira and the area immediately to the north of the Niles Confluence gave birth, in the Post-Meroitic epoch, to a "beehive-shaped" tomb that we can recognize as an underground small circular hut: again, they reproduce for the dead their predominant housing. In the
Khartoum and Shendi regions, the main grave type has an oval cavity, to which access is gained either through one or two stair-ways or ramps, or through a vertical cylindrical shaft. Could grave shapes, that last for centuries, be used by archaeologists as serviceable criteria to identify various sections of the pre-Christian population in the
We shall obviously not attempt to identify different peoples according to the variety of regional traditions in building tombs, and on the basis of grave types their respective moves throughout the territory of the former Meroitic Empire, once unified and progressively divided into separate provinces. The danger could be to revive romantic (at least) thesis originating in the colonial historiography of the
Sudan , with their as yet not proved ethnic or racial explanations. Unrealistic conclusions about large movements of tribes, destruction of the civilized culture by barbarians, disappearance of the towns, and also even the spread of a devotion to drinking habits (we read a few such pages even in the recent literature), fell, we hope, into total obsolescence in the Sudan as it did in Europe for explaining the contemporaneous end of the Roman Empire.
Referring back to the IVth Cataract area, a remote and poor region, most probably as unattractive to pillaging raiders as harsh to the urban archaeologist, we would like to suggest at this point a new direction for future debates about the problem of the End of Meroe. We did not record villages or towns, of either Meroitic or Post-Meroitic date, upstream of the Cataract towards
Island . Obviously, it does not mean they did not exist, but simply that hut-settlements are hardly recognizable to the surveyor without extensive excavations such as those undertaken at Kerma and at Soba. We recorded huge mounds on at least two sites, at Hagar al-Beida and at al-Khuzeina (this latter name apparently highly meaningful), of types already studied at Tanqasi and Zuma, that evidently prove the maintenance of a State. To this state could be attributed various ruinous buildings, according to Chittick's cautious thesis concerning their ceramics. They are obvious traces of a royal activity, located either downstream of the Cataract in Wadi ad-Dom, or upstream at Khor Shargawi (see our forthcoming Part II). All these various characteristics, which relate dozens of cemeteries to the rare features of a state hierarchy, lead us to think of the contemporaneous economy in ethnological terms. The subsistence of the population in this poor area insulated from the main roads, we basically that of pastoralists at Late Meroitic and Post-Meroitic times, if we allow the use of such a modern concept.
Such an interpretative preview (another hypothesis, at the launching of the IVth Cataract archaeological project !), would explain why the area relates more to the southern provinces than to the northern one, which had been developing in the Late Meroitic period through agriculture, and was possibly reverting partially to a more traditional economy in the Post-Meroitic Period. The Meroitic Empire may be conceived as a political system assembling peoples given to a predominantly pastoral way of life into a single unit which essentially controlled access to the River. Nubia is the exception, that owes its singularity to a desert geography and to its economic and political contacts with
Egypt . The
Nile , and particularly its wealthiest basins in grazing areas, linked a series of attractive riverine sections. These sections were geographically devoted to the absorption of the demographic surplus originating in the fragile sahelian surroundings. They eventually offered refuge at times of possible calamities and draughts. The developments of the Meroitic Empire may then be seen as the history of the economic balance between peoples that secured access to the River, and peoples that were deprived of it. Meroitic historiography reflects such a view, as far as we know it: repeated rejections in the Early Meroitic epoch, known from a variety of inscriptions which boast the booty taken by thousands if not by tens of thousands if not by tens of thousands, of animal heads; controlled integration in the Classical and Late Meroitic Periods with the economic growth of the southern provinces and the admission of the Noba into them, and with the so-called re-colonization of Nubia coinciding with the introduction of the saggia from Egypt. How did the Axumite campaigns affect such a traditional balance?
Nobody can quantify so far, even when we know precisely that the
Valley lost in one occurrence 10.560 cattle and 51.050 sheep.
The late pre-Christian occupation of the IVth Cataract region may be an ideal field to check the current theories about the end of the Meroitic domination. The geographical location of the province, altogether a refuge area and a contact zone between the dwellers of the
Nile , the people of the eastern desert, and the pastoralists of the sahelian Bayuda, makes it a unique region among the Nilotic provinces. Cemeteries are counted by dozen, and probably run to two or three hundred. Their magnitude and their density are lower than in the south, but they are less disturbed than upstream. They yield exceptionally well preserved grave-goods, thanks to the dryness at that latitude, the quality of which challenges those encountered in
Nubia . The preservation of bones is the best that any anthropologist could dream of. The archaeologist recovers, as in no other sahelian area, the entirety of mortuary equipment, and discovers those goods which are usually missing, made out of floral or faunal materials, basketry and leather, the traditional handicrafts of the Nilotic pastoralists. The 300 km long stretch of the River also does not lack exceptional features such as royal burial mounds and buildings, equivalent to those recently identified farther south both by the
Khartoum and the Antiquities Service.
Thus the styling of our paper, the first we hope, of a series boasting the forseen yield of the Sudan Archaeological Project. Local and foreign undertakings are welcome to participate in a promising salvage campaign before the building of the Hamdab Dam and the submerging of such remains.
(1) See for instance A.Sid Ahmed: “The Antiquities of Mograt Island”, Sudan Notes and Records 52, 1971, p. 1-22.
(2) Chittick H.N.,
Kush , 1955, p.88 sq.
(3) Hintze Fr.,
Kush 7, 1959, p.194.
(4) For coordinates, see the forthcoming S.A.S. specific report.
(5) Phillips, in Grazymski (ed.), Archaeological Reconnaissance in Upper Nubia,
Toronto , 1987, p.35.
(6) See the first example described and the first use of such a terminology in Marshall and AbdelRahman Adam,
Kush ,I, 1953, p. 44, followed since by other examples at al-Sabeil, al-Gereif-East, Sorurab-Bauda, etc.