Thanks to more than a century of large-scale surveys and excavations, the region of Lower Nubia—southern Egypt and northernmost Sudan, on the Middle Nile—is one of the archaeologically best-documented areas of the world. More recently, Upper Nubia (northern Sudan) has also become the focus of a number of major archaeological projects. The results of these investigations are incrementally enlarging our knowledge of the complex socio-cultural dynamics of this region; they provide new grounds on which to challenge deep-rooted—usually colonial—interpretations of the Nubian past.
Monographs focusing specifically on the ancient history and archaeology of the Middle Nile region are rare; exceptions include David Edwards’ seminal book, The Nubian past (2004). Any addition to the small corpus of textbooks on ancient Nubia, especially those integrating old and new data, is therefore welcome. Nubia: lost civilizations is a trade book aiming to disseminate knowledge about the complex and diverse populations of the Middle Nile, spanning from the Palaeolithic to the recent past. The use of plain language in such volumes should always be praised. The general lack of supporting references and the reproduction of some conventional, and contested, narratives about Nubian history (e.g. the alleged depopulation of Lower Nubia between the Neolithic A-Group and C-Group occupations, p. 39), however, highlight the downsides of this book.
The book is divided into eight chapters. The first offers a general overview of Nubia as a place, while Chapters 2 to 4 follow a chronology course, focusing on narratives related to specific periods. Chapters 5, 6 and 7 are thematic, interrupting the book's chronological structure, which then resumes in Chapter 8.
Chapter 1, ‘The ‘lost’ land of Nubia’, sets the tone, stating that the book aims “to bring Nubia out of the shadow of Egypt and place it at the forefront as an ancient world power that is certainly not, nor really ever has been, ‘lost’” (p. 14–15). Nonetheless, Egyptocentric interpretations can be found in the text; for example, the division between the places of ‘men’ and ‘women’ in society, which betrays an Egyptian textual bias, seeing men in the army or working in the fields, while women allegedly stayed at home, raising the children and cooking (p. 24). In reality, the archaeological evidence from Nubian settlements typically makes it difficult to address questions of gender and age, hence the shadow of the Egyptian textual sources (Budka Reference Budka2020: 414).
Chapter 2, ‘From nomads to leaders’, presents a direct line from Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers to state society, based at the site of Kerma. The chapter deploys a useful, straightforward chronological narrative. It falls back, however, on an evolutionist tradition that places Neolithic Nubians below literate Egyptian state society. This is evident when we read that “the Nubians became notable participants in ancient Africa's development” (p. 29) only with the establishment of the Kerma state. In contrast, current models of state formation and political economy in Nubia emphasise the role played by earlier pastoral, Neolithic structures in the shaping of more horizontal social interactions between central authority and hinterland communities (Emberling Reference Emberling2014).
The next chapter, ‘Nubia and Egypt’, contributes to further dismantling Egyptianisation perspectives, now focusing on a wider audience. The chapter focuses on Egypto-Nubian interactions through time and relies, especially for the New Kingdom colonisation, on evidence for ‘cultural entanglements’ from sites such as Tombos, which, over the years, have yielded many examples of material culture featuring complex mixtures of ‘Egyptian’ and ‘Nubian’ patterns. Chapter 4, ‘When Nubia ruled the (ancient) world’, offers a broad overview of Nubia in the Napatan and Meroitic periods.
Chapters 5, 6 and 7—respectively, ‘The Nubian pantheon’, ‘Meroe and the Kandakes’ and ‘Moving into the Iron Age’—break with the general chronological narrative. The first provides an overview of Nubian religion in the Napatan and Meroitic periods (evidence for Nubian religion before the New Kingdom colonial period being scarce). Chapter 6, despite its title, discusses royal women from earlier Egyptian historical periods through to the Meroitic period. Both topics are of broad popular appeal, which might explain the editorial choice of dedicating a separate chapter to each. Chapter 7 briefly discusses Nubian metalworking, with a focus on iron production at Meroe.
The final chapter, ‘From Nubia to Sudan’, returns to the book's overall chronological narrative and connects ancient Nubia to modern-day Sudan. This is a welcome approach, especially as the ancient Nubian past has been traditionally separated from modern Nubian communities in early scholarly narratives (Lemos Reference Lemos2023).
Nubia: lost civilizations presents the history of Nubia using clear language, free of jargon, and this is a strength. The book also helps to raise awareness of Nubia as a ‘civilisation’ in its own right—a praiseworthy attribute. In its overall subscription to traditional evolutionist narratives, however, the book disappoints, missing the opportunity to present the full extent of Nubia's diversity and alternative complexities that arose from millennia of interactions between different cultural entities and social formations. Nubia as a ‘pastoral state’ (Emberling Reference Emberling2014), or ‘melting pot’ of state and nomadic interactions (Manzo Reference Manzo2017), therefore remains to be explored in a way that illustrates people's ways in and out of state control and of ‘civilisation’, as brilliantly discussed by Graeber and Wengrow (Reference Graeber and Wengrow2022).
