Nubians
Nubians are an ethnic group indigenous to the Nubia region which is now in northern Sudan and southern Egypt. They originate from the early inhabitants of the central Nile valley, believed to be one of the earliest cradles of civilization. In the southern valley of Egypt, Nubians differ culturally and ethnically from Egyptians, although they intermarried with them and other ethnic groups, especially Arabs. They speak the Nilo-Saharan Nubian languages as a mother tongue, part of the Northern Eastern Sudanic languages, and Arabic as a second language.
Neolithic settlements have been found in the central Nubian region dating back to 7000 BC, with Wadi Halfa believed to be the oldest settlement in the central Nile valley. Parts of Nubia, particularly Lower Nubia, were at times a part of ancient Pharaonic Egypt and at other times a rival state representing parts of Meroë or the Kingdom of Kush. By the Twenty-fifth Dynasty, all of Egypt was united with Nubia, extending down to what is now Khartoum. However, in 656 BC, the native Twenty-sixth Dynasty regained control of Egypt. As warriors, the ancient Nubians were famous for their skill and precision with the bow and arrow. In the Middle Ages, the Nubians converted to Christianity and established three kingdoms: Nobatia in the north, Makuria in the center, and Alodia in the south. They then converted to Islam during the Islamization of the Sudan region.
Today, Nubians in Egypt primarily live in southern Egypt, especially in Kom Ombo and Nasr al-Nuba north of Aswan, and large cities such as Cairo, while Sudanese Nubians live in northern Sudan, particularly in the region between the city of Wadi Halfa on the Egypt–Sudan border and al Dabbah. Some Nubians were forcibly moved to Khashm el Girba and New Halfa upon the construction of the High Dam in Egypt which flooded their ancestral lands. Additionally, a group known as the Midob live in northern Darfur, a group named Birgid in Central Darfur and several groups known as the Hill Nubians who live in Northern Kordofan in Haraza and a few villages in the northern Nuba Mountains in South Kordofan state.
The main Nile Nubian groups from north to south are the Kenzi, Faddicca, Halfawi, Sukkot, Mahas, and Danagla.
Etymology
Throughout history various parts of Nubia were known by different names, including "Land of the Bow", tꜣ nḥsj, jꜣm "Kerma", jrṯt, sṯjw, wꜣwꜣt, Meroitic: akin "Lower "Nubia", and Greek Aethiopia. The origin of the names Nubia and Nubian is contested. Based on cultural traits, some scholars believe Nubia is derived from the "gold", although there is no such usage of the term as an ethnonym or toponym that can be found in known Egyptian texts; the Egyptians referred to people from this area as the nḥsj.w. The Roman Empire used the term "Nubia" to describe the area of Upper Egypt and northern Sudan.History
The prehistory of Nubia dates to the Paleolithic around 300,000 years ago. By about 6000 BC, peoples in the region had developed an agricultural economy. In their history, they adopted the Egyptian hieroglyphic system. Ancient history in Nubia is categorized according to the following periods: A-Group culture, C-Group culture, Kerma culture, Nubian contemporaries of the New Kingdom, the Twenty-fifth Dynasty, Napata, Meroë, Makuria, Nobatia, and Alodia.In the view of Egyptian scholar and editor of UNESCO General History of Africa Volume II, Gamal Mokhtar, Upper Egypt and Nubia held "similar ethnic composition" with comparable material culture. Mokhtar described a notable difference between the communities with Upper Egyptians having adopted a system of writing earlier due to the exigencies of the Nile Valley whilst their Nubian counterparts were more reticent due to their higher reliance on mobile, stock-raising as an expressed feature of their economy.
Archaeological evidence has attested that population settlements occurred in Nubia as early as the Late Pleistocene era and from the 5th millennium BC onwards, whereas there is "no or scanty evidence" of human presence in the Egyptian Nile Valley during these periods, which may be due to problems in site preservation.
Archaeologist Bruce Williams has advanced the view that Nubian elites participated with the early Egyptian rulers in the development of the pharaonic civilization. Williams also clarified in 1987 that his discovery of the Qutsul incense burner proposed no claim of a Nubian origin or genesis for the pharaonic monarchy but that excavations had shown Nubian linkages and contributions. He maintained that detailed, archaeological evidence had found cemeteries of tombs situated in Qustul, Nubia which were described to be vastly wealthier and greater in size than the Abydos tombs of the first dynastic rulers.
Several scholars have argued that the African origins of the Egyptian civilisation derived from pastoral communities which emerged in both the Egyptian and Sudanese regions of the Nile Valley in the fifth millennium BCE.
File:Guardian Figures Middle Kingdom ca. 1919–1885 BCE. Egyptian Museum, Cairo, JE 44951. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 14.3.17.jpg|thumb|left|Pair of guardian statuettes, depicting Middle Kingdom pharaohs, presumably Senusret I or Amenemhat II, with the white crown of Upper Egypt, the other with the red crown of Lower Egypt. The 12th dynasty had origins in Ta-Seti, Upper Egypt/Lower Nubia.
Various biological anthropological studies have shown close, biological affinities between the predynastic southern, Egyptian and the early Nubian populations.
Frank Yurco remarked that depictions of pharonic iconography such as the royal crowns, Horus falcons and victory scenes were concentrated in the Upper Egyptian Naqada culture and A-Group Lower Nubia. He further elaborated that "Egyptian writing arose in Naqadan Upper Egypt and A-Group Lower Nubia, and not in the Delta cultures, where the direct Western Asian contact was made, further vitiates the Mesopotamian-influence argument".
In 2023, Christopher Ehret reported that the existing archaeological, linguistic, biological anthropological and genetic evidence had determined the founding populations of Ancient Egyptian areas such as Naqada and El-Badari to be the descendants of longtime inhabitants in Northeastern Africa which included Egypt, Nubia and the northern Horn of Africa.
The linguistic affinities of early Nubian cultures are uncertain. Some research has suggested that the early inhabitants of the Nubia region, during the C-Group and Kerma cultures, were speakers of languages belonging to the Berber and Cushitic branches, respectively, of the Afroasiatic family. More recent research instead suggests that the people of the Kerma culture spoke Nilo-Saharan languages of the Eastern Sudanic branch and that the peoples of the C-Group culture to their north spoke Cushitic languages. They were succeeded by the first Nubian language speakers, whose tongues belonged to another branch of Eastern Sudanic languages within the Nilo-Saharan phylum. A 4th-century AD victory stela commemorative of Axumite king Ezana contains inscriptions describing two distinct population groups dwelling in ancient Nubia: a "red" population and a "black" population.
Although Egypt and Nubia have a shared pre-dynastic and pharaonic history, the two histories diverge with the fall of Ancient Egypt and the conquest of Egypt by Alexander the Great in 332 BC. At this point, the area of land between the 1st and the 6th cataract of the Nile became known as Nubia.
Egypt was conquered first by the Persians and named the Satrapy of Mudriya, and two centuries later by the Greeks and then the Romans. During the latter period, however, the Kushites formed the kingdom of Meroë, which was ruled by a series of Candaces or Queens. The Candace of Meroë was able to intimidate Alexander the Great into retreat with a great army of elephants, while historical documents suggest that the Nubians defeated the Roman Emperor Augustus Caesar, resulting in a favorable peace treaty for Meroë. The kingdom of Meroë also defeated the Persians, and later Christian Nubia defeated the invading Arab armies on three different occasions resulting in the 600 year peace treaty of Baqt, the longest lasting treaty in history. The fall of the kingdom of Christian Nubia occurred in the early 1500s resulting in full Islamization and reunification with Egypt under the Ottoman Empire, the Muhammad Ali dynasty, and British colonial rule. After the 1956 independence of Sudan from Egypt, Nubia and the Nubian people became divided between Southern Egypt and Northern Sudan.
Modern Nubians speak Nubian languages, Eastern Sudanic languages that are part of the Nilo-Saharan family. The Old Nubian language is attested from the 8th century AD, and may be the oldest well-recorded language of Africa outside of the Afroasiatic family, depending on the classification of Meroitic and the language of the Garamantes.
Nubia consisted of four regions with varied agriculture and landscapes. The Nile river and its valley were found in the north and central parts of Nubia, allowing farming using irrigation. The western Sudan had a mixture of peasant agriculture and nomadism. Eastern Sudan had primarily nomadism, with a few areas of irrigation and agriculture. Finally, there was the fertile pastoral region of the south, where Nubia's larger agricultural communities were located.
Nubia was dominated by kings from clans that controlled the gold mines. Trade in exotic goods from other parts of Africa passed to Egypt through Nubia.
Language
Modern Nubians speak Nubian languages. They belong to the Eastern Sudanic branch of the Nilo-Saharan phylum. But there is some uncertainty regarding the classification of the languages spoken in Nubia in antiquity. There is some evidence that Cushitic languages were spoken in parts of Lower Nubia, an ancient region which straddles present-day Southern Egypt and Northern Sudan, and that Eastern Sudanic languages were spoken in Upper and Central Nubia, before the spread of Eastern Sudanic languages even further north into Lower Nubia.Peter Behrens and Marianne Bechhaus-Gerst suggest that the ancient peoples of the C-Group and Kerma civilizations spoke Afroasiatic languages of the Berber and Cushitic branches, respectively. They propose that the Nilo-Saharan Nobiin language today contains a number of key pastoralism related loanwords that are of Berber or proto-Highland East Cushitic origin, including the terms for sheep/goatskin, hen/cock, livestock enclosure, butter and milk. This in turn, is interpreted to suggest that the C-Group and Kerma populations, who inhabited the Nile Valley immediately before the arrival of the first Nubian speakers, spoke Afroasiatic languages.
Claude Rilly and Julien Cooper on the other hand, suggest that the Kerma peoples spoke Nilo-Saharan languages of the Eastern Sudanic branch, possibly ancestral to the later Meroitic language, which Rilly also suggests was Nilo-Saharan. Rilly also considers evidence of significant early Afro-Asiatic influence, especially Berber, on Nobiin to be weak, and considers evidence of substratal influence on Nobiin from an earlier now extinct Eastern Sudanic language to be stronger.
Julien Cooper suggests that Nilo-Saharan languages of the Eastern Sudan branch were spoken by the people of Kerma, those further south along the Nile, to the west, and those of Saï, but that Afro-Asiatic languages were spoken by other peoples in Lower Nubia living in Nubian regions north of Saï toward Egypt and those southeast of the Nile in Punt in the Eastern dessert. Based partly on an analysis of the phonology of place names and personal names from the relevant regions preserved in ancient texts, he argues that the terms from "Kush" and "Irem" in Egyptian texts display traits typical of Eastern Sudanic languages, while those from further north and east are more typical of the Afro-Asiatic family, noting: "The Irem-list also provides a similar inventory to Kush, placing this firmly in an Eastern Sudanic zone. These Irem/Kush-lists are distinctive from the Wawat-, Medjay-, Punt-, and Wetenet-lists, which provide sounds typical to Afroasiatic languages."
It is also uncertain to which language family the ancient Meroitic language is related. Kirsty Rowan suggests that Meroitic, like the Egyptian language, belongs to the Afroasiatic family. She bases this on its sound inventory and phonotactics, which, she argues, are similar to those of the Afroasiatic languages and dissimilar from those of the Nilo-Saharan languages. Claude Rilly proposes, based on its syntax, morphology, and known vocabulary, that Meroitic, like the Nobiin language, belongs to the Eastern Sudanic branch of the Nilo-Saharan family.