THE INVENTION OF NUBIA

ARKAMANI Sudan Electronic Journal of Archaeology and Anthropology

February 2002

Geography, we may say, is partly discovered and partly invented. Every region of the globe can be defined, objectively, by a unique combination of mountains, plains, rivers and other topographic features. But geography, like all other realms of human knowledge, is never wholly objective. Every inhabited regions is also a landscape of the mind, where it may appear very different to its inhabitants and to intruders. To the inhabitants it has the beauty of familiarity; it is part of the definition of the Self, or in other words of “We”. To the outsiders its appeal, if any, may lay in its unfamiliarity; it is often part of the definition of the Other, or of “They”.

The same is true in regard to history. It begins, in theory, with an objective record of events, but that record is refracted through the eyes of human observers and recorders, and it too becomes part of the definition of the Self or of the not-Self. In the process it becomes in some degree myth and in some degree propaganda. Again, it may appear very different to those whose ancestors did and did not take part in it.

These considerations apply very clearly to the geography, the history, and the peoples of Nubia. Most of our understandings of the region have come through the Egyptian and Hebrew scribes, Classical historians and geographers, the modern philologues who translate and interpret the work of those ancient writers, and the archaeologists who recover and interpret the archaeological remains of the Nubians themselves. These various observers and interpreters have given us a number of quite distinct and partially conflicting images of Nubia and its peoples, each of which involves its own kind of subjectivity. There is also, at least incipiently, an indigenous Nubian image of Nubia, involving its own set of biases. Some of these perspectives and their biases will be discussed in the pages that follow.

It is common tendency of all peoples to measure themselves against some Other -- a kind of human yardstick by which one's own superiority or inferiority can be gagued. For ancient Egyptians, the principal yardstick was the Nubians, who represented barbarity as opposed to Egyptian civilization. The endlessly repeated epithet "wretched Kush" surely had the same connotation for Egyptians as had "darkest Africa" for Europeans and Americans of the last century. Yet there was not, as nearly as we can tell, any racial dimension to the Egyptian prejudice. The Nubians were not inferior because they were black, but simply because they were not Egyptians. In fact the Egyptian prejudice evidently disappeared during the New Kingdom, when the Nubians did become "Egyptians" in the sense of being culturally Egyptianized.

Unhappily, the ancient Egyptian attitude was taken over wholesale by the early Egyptologists, who fell under the spell of the hieroglyphic texts they translated. They looked upon the civilization of Kush as no more than a pale and inferior imitation of Egypt, not deserving of independent consideration. Moreover, they went beyond the Egyptians themselves in attributing the backwardness of Nubia to racial inferiority. Even the few scholars who took specific interest in Nubia and its history, like Budge and Reisner, were not able to see Nubian culture as anything other than pseudo-Egyptian, or to account for its supposed "backwardness" in other than racial terms.

The attitude of both Egyptians and Egyptologists became, in different ways, a rationale for colonialism. The Egyptians never doubted that they had a divine right to subjugate and rule their backward southern neighbors, and most Egyptologists have similary never doubted that the study of Nubia and its culture is properly a branch of Egyptology. While Egyptologists today are becoming more appreciative of the individuality of Nubian civilization than they once were, the tendency to regard Nubia still as "their" territory seems to be as strong as ever.

At the opposite extreme from the Egyptian perspective was the admiring and romanticizing tendency of Greek and Roman writers, beginning already with Homer for whom "Aethiopians" were the most righteous of men and beloved of the gods. A similar admiration is reflected in the romanticized descriptions of Meroe by Herodotus and Strabo, and in the popular "Aethiopian" romances of the late classical period. Here we can recognize another age-old propensity of human thought: to imagine a simpler and purer world, unpolluted by the complexities and failings of the "modern age" (whenever that may have been). The people thus imagined become a yardstick by which we measure not our superiority but our fall from a condition of original purity. At an earlier age we find this idea expressed in the Garden of Eden myth and its numerous variants; at a later age we find this idea in the "noble savage" so dear to the imagination of Rousseau and other Enlightenment thinkers. The Graeco-Roman vision, no less than the Egyptian, arose out of an ideological need of the viewer rather than from an attempt to understand the realities of Nubian life.

While the Egyptians and the Greek visions of Nubia seem equally one-dimensional, neither of them was founded on belief in racial superiority or inferiority as we would understand it today. Snowden is certainly right in asserting that skin color was of no more consequence to the ancients than is hair color to us, as an index of human ability. In the recent past, however, there has arisen a school of African and African American Scholars who are bent to constructing an avowedly racist version of African history, in which all major cultural achievements on the continent are attributed to peoples who can be identified as black. This development is of course a reaction against the unfavorable interpretations of European and American historians; an attempt to combat white racism with black racism.

In the vie of black nationalists, the peoples of sub-Saharan Africa were the originators of most of the institutions of higher civilization, which were subsequently transmitted to other, non-black populations in Europe and Asia. Since the Nubians are the first historically recognizable black African people, it is not surprising that Nubia plays a key symbolic role in the Afrocentric version of history: Umm al-Dunya ("Mother of the World") as it was characterized to me by one proponent of this school. The Nubians thus take the familiar mythological role of culture-giving heroes. In support of this view, the works of Herodotus and even of Homer are cited as historically authoritative, while ancient Egyptian texts are conveniently ignored.

The archaeological salvage campaigns of the 1960's brought to Nubia for the first time a large group of scholars with no background either in Egyptology or in the Classics; people who could theoretically approach the study of Nubian history without inherited preconceptions. From the work of these scholars, and later of their students, there has gradually arisen a recognized discipline of Nubiology, emphasizing the study of Nubia for its own sake rather than as an adjunct to the Egyptian or the Classical world. The Nubiologists have attempted to portray Nubia simply as a place of interesting in its own right. Their perspective, nevertheless, is not without ideology, for it resonates with a certain cultural nationalism. "Nubia for the Nubians" might figuratively be the rallying cry of the Nubiologists. Cultural particularism of this kind has its roots in 19th century German Geisteswissenschaft, which emphasized the uniqueness and unique spirit of each nation. It is therefore perhaps no accident that the largest number of practicing Nubiologists today is found in Germany.

The chronicling of history as such has never been a Nubian literary tradition. However, two indigenous folk traditions of Nubian history have been recorded; one by Burckhardt near the beginning of the 19th century, and one by MacMichael near the beginning of the 20th century. The interesting feature of both these texts is that, like the Old Testament, they combine fragments of verifiable history with native genealogical traditions that have little to do with history in the ordinary sense. The concern is not so much to link the present-day Nubians to past cultural glories (though this is not wholly ignored) as it is to establish their identity as Arabs, and descendants of the Prophet's early followers. The Nubians' place in history is thus dependent more on bloodlines than on achievements -- a characteristic feature of Near Eastern social and historical reckoning since very early times.

Nubians as inferior Egyptians; Nubians as noble savages; Nubians as the originators of civilization; Nubians as culturally unique; Nubians as Arabs; these are the choices presented to us by the different versions of their history. It is clear that they cannot be fully reconciled in any any single historical version, for they are partly contradictory. How then can we choose among them -- or can we ?

It should be clear, from the foregoing overview, that it is not much easier to "objectify" the Nubians today than it was in the days of the Pharaohs or the Greeks. There are still those among us for whom they stand, symbolically, as part of the definition of Self or of Other; such individuals may have a continuing need to believe in the Nubians as inferior Egyptians or as the originators of civilization or as Arabs. It is the recognition of this essential subjectivity that has given rise to the currently fashionable historical school of "Post-modernism", holding that there is no objective reality, and that all versions of history are equally true and equally defensible.

No one who holds such a view is entitled to call himself a scientist, or to assert that there can be such a thing as historical or social science. but there remain plenty of individuals, including myself, who continue to believe in the possibility of a historical science. For us the Nubians do not symbolize either Self or Other, but only fellow human beings who, like the rest of us, must have undergone some kind of discoverable history. How, then, to discover it, without retreating into subjectivity?

Six hundred years ago, the great Ibn Khaldûn faced the same dilemma. Confronted with a tangle of conflicting historical accounts, he found that the usual tests of reliability provided no basis for deciding among them. Each tradition was supported by a pedigree tracing it back to a supposedly unimpeachable source.

The solution proposed by Ibn Khaldûn was, for its time, a radical one: so much so that it did not begin to achieve fruition for another five centuries. What he proposed was, in effect, a comparative natural science of man. Let us, he suggested in the Muqaddimah, leave aside the criticism of historical texts and turn our study to the habits, the society, and the culture of actual, living peoples. When we have studied them sufficiently we will be able to form some understanding about characteristic and expectable human behaviors: those that are common to all mankind, and also those that are to peoples of different stages of historical development. (He did not speak of "social evolution" in so many words, but the concept is clearly implicit in his approach). Having acquired this understanding, we can then employ it as a touchstone against which to test different historical traditions.

How closely do the reported behaviors and events of the past correspond to what regularly happens in the present? The most believable historical account, implies Ibn Khaldûn, is that which would cause the least surprise if it were related about the present. This view may be compared to the Uniformitarianism -- now universally accepted -- of the geologists, who insist that geological events of the past must not be attributed to processes (like the Biblical flood) that do not occur in the present.

I like to think that what Ibn Khaldûn proposed was something very close to what modern Anthropology has achieved, or at least to what it attempts, and that this is indeed our best guide in arriving at a believable vision of history. From this viewpoint i find the Egyptians', the Egyptologists', the Greeks', and the black nationalists' views of Nubian history equally unacceptable, because they involve notions about innate cultural or racial superiority or inferiority that cannot be confirmed by any observation of the currently existing world. (I have less difficulty with the Nubians' own genealogical tradition, providing it is recognized that the "genealogies" are really pedigrees, identifying in each generation only one ancestor among hundreds. There are probably few among us who couldn't claim Arab identity, if a single ancestor is all that is required).

There remain the nubiological view -- one to which I myself have contributed substantially, through my book, Nubia, Corridor to Africa. I can safely say that its vision of history is believable in terms of the anthropology of the 1950's, whose main objective (at least in America) was to discover and portray the unique geist (configuration, as we then said) of each culture. Indeed, a close reading will show that Nubia, Corridor to Africa is not so much a connected history as a series of ethnographies, in which each successive phase of Nubian history is portrayed in terms of its own dominant values and interests. It is very much the same interpretative technique as was employed by many mid-century ethnographers, and, I think, it conforms to the model recommended by Ibn Khaldûn.

Nubia, Corridor to Africa, as I have been reminded by critics, is less believable in terms of the anthropology of the 1960's and 1970's, even though it was written during that period. But anthropology was then dominated by the rival schools of Cultural Materialism and Structuralism, both of which deny any important place to the human will. In their very different ways, both schools suggest that human culture is largely the product of forces beyond man's conscious control. From these perspectives it becomes possible to envision certain universal laws of culture and history, whereas in the final chapter of my book I expressed reservations about the applicability of such laws to the Nubian case, as I understood it.

It seems, then, that there is no one "comparative natural science of man", but in fact several even of these to choose from. Not only are there conflicting schools within anthropology, but anthropology as a whole offers a different vision from sociology, economics, political science, and psychology, each of which could (and sometimes does) claim to be a comparative natural science of man.

Does this mean that Ibn Khaldûn's lofty ideal is incapable of achievement, and perhaps even that the post-modernists are right? I am not quite ready yet for such a counsel of despair. Whatever their disagreements, I think the modern social and historical sciences have substantially narrowed the ground of misunderstanding about human nature. A least they have got rid of the age-old notions about innate superiority and inferiority, which have beclouded so many of the earlier views about Nubia. Starting from the recognition that we are all Homo sapiens, and that whatever is innate to all of us, we are at least on the road to putting Nubia where i belongs in the historical picture.

Translated into Arabic by Osama Elnur

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