Hellenizing Art In Ancient Nubia 300 B C Ad 250 And Its Egyptian Models

This book presents a comprehensive discussion of the culture transfer between Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt and Nubia between 300 BC-AD 250. Hellenizing art in Nubia is treated as a Nubian phenomenon expressing Nubian ideas in which only those aspects of Egyptian and Greek art were adopted that were compatible with those goals.

"Twentieth century commentaries on Herodotus' passages on Nubia, the historical kingdom of Kush and the Aithiopia of the Greek tradition, rely mostly on an outdated and biased interpretation of the textual and archaeological evidence. Disputing both the Nubia image of twentieth century Egyptology and the Herodotus interpretation of traditional Quellenkritik, the author traces back the Aithiopian information that was available to Herodotus to a discourse on Kushite kingship created under the Nubian pharaohs of the Twenty-Fifth Dynasty and preserved in the Ptah sanctuary at Memphis. Insufficient for a self-contained Aithiopian logos, the information acquired by Herodotus complements and supports accounts of the land, origins, customs and history of other peoples and bears a relation to the intention of the actual narrative contexts into which the author of the Histories inserted it."--

Numerous research projects have studied the Nubian cultures of Sudan and Egypt over the last thirty years, leading to significant new insights. The contributions to this handbook illuminate our current understanding of the cultural history of this fascinating region, including its interconnections to the natural world.

The cultures of Nubia built the earliest cities, states, and empires of inner Africa, but they remain relatively poorly known outside their modern descendants and the community of archaeologists, historians, and art historians researching them. The earliest archaeological work in Nubia was motivated by the region's role as neighbor, trade partner, and enemy of ancient Egypt. Increasingly, however, ancient Nile-based Nubian cultures are recognized in their own right as the earliest complex societies in inner Africa. As agro-pastoral cultures, Nubian settlement, economy, political organization, and religious ideologies were often organized differently from those of the urban, bureaucratic, and predominantly agricultural states of Egypt and the ancient Near East. Nubian societies are thus of great interest in comparative study, and are also recognized for their broader impact on the histories of the eastern Mediterranean and the Near East. The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Nubia brings together chapters by an international group of scholars on a wide variety of topics that relate to the history and archaeology of the region. After important introductory chapters on the history of research in Nubia and on its climate and physical environment, the largest part of the volume focuses on the sequence of cultures that lead almost to the present day. Several cross-cutting themes are woven through these chapters, including essays on desert cultures and on Nubians in Egypt. Eleven final chapters synthesize subjects across all historical phases, including gender and the body, economy and trade, landscape archaeology, iron working, and stone quarrying.

The Hellenistic Period witnessed striking new developments in art, literature and science. This volume addresses a particularly vibrant area of innovation: the study of animals and the natural world. While Aristotle and his followers had revolutionized fields such as zoology and botany during the fourth century BC, these disciplines took on exciting new directions during Hellenistic times. Kings imported exotic species into their royal capitals from faraway lands. Travel writers described unusual creatures that they had never previously encountered. And buyers from a range of social levels chose works of art featuring animals and plants to decorate their palaces, houses and tombs. While textual sources shed some light on these developments, the central premise of Art, Science and the Natural World in the Ancient Mediterranean is that our surviving artistic evidence permits a fuller understanding. Accordingly, the study brings together a rich body of visual material that invites new observations on how and why knowledge of the natural world became so important during this period. It is suggested that this cultural phenomenon affected many different groups in society: from kings in Alexandria and Pergamon to provincial aristocrats in the Levant, and from the Julio-Claudian imperial family to prosperous homeowners in Pompeii. By analysing the works of art produced for these individuals, a vivid picture emerges of this remarkable aspect of ancient culture.

The establishment of Kushite rule over Egypt during the eighth and seventh centuries BC resulted in a state of extraordinary geographic dimensions and ecological diversity, stretching from the tropics of Sudanese Nubia over 3,000 km to the Mediterranean. In The Double Kingdom under Taharqo, Jeremy Pope uses the copious documentary and archaeological evidence from Taharqo’s reign to address a series of questions which have dogged study of the Twenty-Fifth Dynasty: how was it possible for one king to control all of that territory? To what extent were the Kushite pharaohs’ strategies of governance influenced by the circumstances of their homeland versus the precedents of Egyptian and Libyan rule? And how did Kushite policies differ from those of their Saïte successors? "Bringing to bear an impressive mastery of the sources and refreshingly open to anthropological and comparative approaches, Jeremy Pope's study is welcome in providing a close and careful analysis of varied sources, both historical and archaeological." David N. Edwards (University of Leicester) "...a seminal work pioneering a new historical approach to the Twenty-Fifth Dynasty." László Török (Hungarian Academy of Sciences)

Drawing on the latest archaeological and textual discoveries, a revealing look at the rich and dynamic civilization of Nubia. Nubia, the often-overlooked southern neighbor of Egypt, has been home to groups of vibrant and adaptive peoples for millennia. This book explores the Nubians’ religious, social, economic, and cultural histories, from their nomadic origins during the Stone Ages to their rise to power during the Napatan and Meroitic periods, and it concludes with the recent struggles for diplomacy in North Sudan. Situated among the ancient superpowers of Egypt, Aksum, and the Greco-Roman world, Nubia’s connections with these cultures shaped the region’s history through colonialism and cultural entanglement. Sarah M. Schellinger presents the Nubians through their archaeological and textual remains, reminding readers that they were a rich and dynamic civilization in their own right.

This book brings together papers presented at the 2nd Sudan Studies Research Conference, held at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge, 2018. The papers collected here focus on early administrative and mortuary material culture in the Nile valley and adjacent areas.