Month: January 2021

With that verbose and overly poetic title, my time as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow officially comes to an end.

I was going to write a post about how amazing the experience has been, share some highlights, encourage others to apply for a Marie Skłodowska-Curie (MSCA) project etc etc. All of that would be completely true, but I decided that it would also be kind of boring and predictable. Besides, most of you will have seen all of that stuff on Twitter anyway! So, I’m taking a different and somewhat less celebratory approach to mark the end of this remarkable and truly life-changing time.

I have no idea where the last 24 months have gone. The project has been a whirlwind and some of it is still a bit of a blur. In contrast, my memories of getting here are incredibly vivid. I remember flying to Vienna in August 2016 to write my first attempt at an MSCA (which eventually failed). I remember trying again the following year and having an almost total breakdown when I was put onto a waiting list after having missed out by 0.2%. I remember conversations about giving up entirely and moving to Tasmania where we would get a dog and some bees and just live a normal quiet life. I remember sitting on our Ikea Karlstaad sofa and crying out of sheer relief almost six months later when I received the letter from the European Commission confirming that my project had been funded. I remember selling most of what we owned, putting the rest of our lives into boxes, and moving out of our apartment. I remember a near family tragedy days before my departure that could have been life-changing in a very different way. I remember saying farewell to my family and friends. I remember frantically buying any legal painkillers at a local pharmacy after my partner somehow hurt his back whilst packing his backpack and becoming virtually immobile TWO HOURS before we had to leave for the airport to board a 26-hour flight. I remember sobbing quietly as the plane’s wheels lifted off the ground, spending the entire journey feeling in limbo (or should I say, “InBetween”) and wondering if I was doing the right thing. I remember crying again the second the plane’s wheels skidded onto the tarmac in Vienna, knowing that this was the moment that everything became real. I remember that it was 42ºC on the day we left Sydney, and that it was -2ºC and snowing when we arrived in Vienna. That was perhaps the biggest shock of all.

I ordinarily have a weirdly vivid long-term memory for a lot of totally random things (much to partner’s frustration!), but I think the reason that I remember the process of moving to Vienna with such clarity is because of how difficult it was to get here. I don’t mean logistically difficult (although it was!), but emotionally.

From the outside, what I’ve done for the last couple of years might seem like ‘success’ (whatever that means), but what most people don’t know is that my successful MSCA application was the last in a string of 29 rejected applications to various other jobs and grants over a period of about 2 years. As I said earlier, it was also my second attempt at an MSCA application and even that wasn’t so straightforward. My application was favourably assessed, but I missed out on automatic qualification by 0.2% and was placed on a waiting list. That 0.2% deficit felt as wide and impassable as the Grand Canyon. To miss out is one thing, but to be so close yet still unsuccessful hurt me more than all of those other 29 rejections combined. Like someone was slowly pushing a dagger into my chest and was laughing as they did it. I had reached my lowest point, and I didn’t know what more could I possibly do.

I didn’t sleep at all that night, and the next morning, I got out of bed and unleashed all of my frustration on my poor unsuspecting partner. I was crying hysterically, shaking, and shouting in his direction, all before 8am. At that stage we had been together for about 12 years, but he had never seen me like that before. In fact, I don’t think even I had ever seen myself like that before. Nevertheless, he knows me well enough to know that trying to console me would be the worst thing he could possibly do. So he just sat silently, listened, and let me get it out of my system. I went to work at the gallery that morning, trying to be normal, but when one of my colleagues said “Morning, how are you?”, just as they did every morning, I completely broke down again, and hid in the toilet. It was a rough day. But I came back home to find a smiling face and a little bunch of flowers, and I knew that I would be OK.

The reason I’m telling you this story is because I know I’m not alone in the frustration and anger that I felt before finally landing the MSCA project. But mainly also because I think this side of Academia is something that too often goes un-discussed. In day-to-day conversations and especially on social media, we’re bombarded with images and stories of people being “successful”, but all of these images and tweets and Facebook status updates can sometimes cause people to compare themselves to this particular brand of “success”, which can in turn make people feel inadequate. ‘Imposter Syndrome’ is a real thing, and people at every level experience it. I grapple with it all the time. But what I realise now (and what people don’t say enough) is that for every “success”, there are who knows how many ‘failures’.

Missing out on opportunities is an unfortunate and ugly part of this game we call Academia. Every one of my 29 rejected applications hurt. Every one chipped away at my confidence and self-worth a little bit, and my efforts to cope came crashing down when I ended up on that waiting list. It took time, a lot thinking and self-reflection, but most of all A LOT of support from friends and colleagues to be able to pick myself up and keep going. It’s OK to be angry, and to be frustrated, and to cry, and to feel dejected. It’s necessary to work through those emotions. But that support from trusted friends, at least in my case, is what got me back on my feet.

“Success” means different things to different people, and we need to try not to measure ourselves against others. An impressive CV and a long publication list can get you so far, but in my opinion, a strong and supportive network of friends and colleagues is the most valuable asset anyone can have. Friends and colleagues who you can trust to be honest with you, who give you the ability to see yourself from the outside, and who will help you deconstruct yourself only in order to rebuild a more resilient version of yourself. People who understand that everyone’s journey is different, who will guide you away from bad decisions, but who will support your choices even if they aren’t the choices that they would make for themselves, and who will still be there if you decide to follow a different path. In turn, we need to lend the same support to those people who support us, because nothing is ever a one-way street.

I’ve been extremely fortunate to have had so many such people help and support me over the years, and even more fortunate that this network has expanded further since coming to Vienna. There are too many people to thank –collaborators, co-authors, workshop participants, friends, and more. I would love to name you all, but I know that I will unintentionally forget some of you. You all know who you are, but I want to make special mention of (in alphabetical order) Natasha Ayers, Bettina Bader, Andreas Dorn, Angus Graham, Amber Hood, Barbara Horejs, Lucia Hulkova, Christiana Köhler, Paul Lane, Greg Marouard, Nadine Moeller, Vera Müller, and Annik Wüthrich. All of you either (or both) helped me with the process of getting to Vienna or have helped me survive while I’ve been in Vienna, and I’m sure the support and friendship will continue. I hope you’ve found it mutual.

But the biggest portion of thanks goes to my partner, Adam, who has been been an unwavering source of love, support, and encouragement for 16 years now, who gave up so much to let me follow this path, and who has agreed to stay here for at least a couple more years. No amount of gratitude comes close to being enough.

So, with that, the MSCA comes to an end… at least on paper. I don’t say this about many things, but the last two years has been truly life-changing. I’ve had experiences that I’d never imagined possible, seen things I’ve only ever dreamed about, and met people who were previously only names in books. All the way, I always remember how long it took to get here, and the dark places that I had to claw my way out of in order to keep going. I can’t say I enjoyed that process, but I also know that the low points make me appreciate the high points so much more.

And now, onto Living Nubia. But first, that grant report isn’t going to write itself!

OK, so a lot of people have been asking, and I’ve been dropping hints about what is happening once my Marie Curie project officially ends (on Friday!!!). Well, I have some news…

I’m super excited (and immensely relieved!) to say that I’ve received a two-year project grant from the Austrian Science Fund (the FWF) under the Lise Meitner programme! I’m excited because I get to explore some new material and new ideas, and I’m relieved because I don’t have to make the virtually impossible and prohibitively expensive trip back to Australia in the midst of a pandemic! And while I would love to go home to see my dearly missed family and friends, I’m very happy that I can stay in beautiful Vienna for a while longer.

So, what is this new project all about?

Living Nubia: New perspectives on Nubian settlements

The Living Nubia project is going to be a comparative study of indigenous Nubian habitation sites of the Early and Middle Nubian periods, covering rock shelters, campsites, and larger villages. I use the word ‘indigenous’ here as a technical term to differentiate Nubian settlements established by Nubian communities from Egyptian installations south of the First Cataract.

The idea came from a casual conversation in the office kitchen with my colleague Luci. I was talking about something to do with Nubia (surprise!) and Luci asked if there were many remains of non-Egyptian settlements in Nubia besides Kerma. I answered yes, to which she said that she had never heard of them because it always seems to be about Kerma.

*light bulb*

Luci was right. Most people have heard of Kerma, but there are dozens of smaller Nubian habitation sites in and around the Nile Valley that get little or no attention. Most of these sites are only briefly published across numerous and disparate sources, partly because they are quite small and poorly preserved, and hence presumably were considered as being of secondary importance. Besides Kerma, the other settlements in Nubia that have received extensive attention are Egyptian monuments – fortresses, temples, temple towns. Not only that, most of what we know about Nubian populations comes from their graves, so we know a lot about how Nubians buried their dead, but virtually nothing about how ancient Nubians actually lived. Addressing all of these imbalances is the ultimate goal of Living Nubia.

The main research questions driving the project are:

1. What constitutes an ‘indigenous’ Nubian settlement during the late-third to the mid-second millennium BCE (c. 3200–1550 BCE)?
2. How far do variations in settlement style and spatial organisation reflect varying subsistence strategies and lifestyles?
3. To what extent do Nubian built environments construct, maintain or challenge social structures and concepts of identity?
4. Can changes in the character of Nubian built environments and settlement patterns be linked to broader cultural processes such as contact, conflict, and identity negotiations?
5. What evidence is there for Nubian impacts on Egyptian culture and identity?

Sites to be included in the survey include the many small campsites and village remains along the length of the Lower Nubian Nile Valley (e.g. at Sayala, Aniba, and around the Second Cataract), the well-known site of Wadi es-Sebua, and Mahal Teglinos in the Sudanese Eastern Desert, along with many other small sites in the region. There are also a handful of Nubian settlement remains in Egypt, like the supposedly ‘Pan-Grave’ villages located near Badari. The city of Kerma is already extensively published but it will of course be included, mainly as a point of comparison.

The settlements themselves are central to the project – their architectural styles, building technology, and spatial organisation – but (as always!) I’m also interested in the material culture objects that were found in association with these structures. These objects and their distributions could offer clues as to how spaces were used and inhabited. Object biographies will also be explored by considering objects that moved between the quotidian and mortuary worlds.

I’ll also take the landscape into account, in particular factors like access to resources, wildlife, spatial relationships to cemeteries and other habitation sites, transport and migration routes, and other things. This might offer some insights on the choices that might have been made in selecting a location to settle, even if only temporarily.

And, as the title of the project is Living Nubia, I will as much as possible engage with members of the Nubian community to gain an understanding of their perspectives on the built environment. Here again I refer to the work of Menna Agha, who has already given me enlightening insights into Nubian concepts of dwellings, domesticity, and the social role of ‘the house’.

The project will officially begin in March 2021 after an “in-between” period during which I’ll wrap up all of the reports and administrative stuff for the InBetween Project. But fear not! InBetween might be over in official terms, but its outcomes and its driving concepts will live on in this new project and everything that comes after it.

I hope you’ll follow me on the Living Nubia journey. Let’s see where it takes us!

2020 was a lot of things – not all of them good – but one silver lining of an otherwise very dark cloud was the abundance of online lectures and workshops, enabling people to stay connected to the research community whilst most of us were locked-down and physically isolated. I was lucky enough to present a number of lectures for organisations around the world, but the last one was perhaps the most special to me. Not just because it marked the ‘end’ of the InBetween project, but also because the messages that I tried to convey are, in my opinion, the most important messages to come out of the project.

That lecture was part of the “New Perspectives on Nubia” series, presented jointly by the Badé Museum and the Archaeological Research Facility at Berkley University. Knowing this was the last chance to present my research with the academic weight of a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship behind me, I decided to use it as an opportunity to make some necessary critical statements, mostly aimed at the discipline of Egyptology. As a result of this, I found myself oddly nervous in the moments before the lecture (I think this was noticeable in my voice for the first 2-3 minutes), but some things needed to be said. Some things might be obvious, some points may have been made before by other people, but maybe it will be new for some people, so the points bear repeating.

The lecture, entitled “More than Kush: Capturing the Complexity and Diversity of Ancient Nubia” is available to watch on YouTube (link at the end of this post), but I thought it worth presenting a written summary of the key points (and the key criticisms) via this webpage. Even as a material culture person, I acknowledge that the written word somehow has more gravity than a YouTube video.

Before I continue, a little pre-warning:
I get a bit ranty towards the end, but I hope you’ll see my point!

Names and Labels

A fundamental problem, which has been raised in the past, is that the sequence of Nubian cultural groups that we’ve inherited from past scholars simply does not work. The groups as we know them – the C-Group, Pan-Grave, and Kerma cultures – were devised and defined in the early 20th Century by scholars working within a colonial and culture-historical framework. Each of the groups was defined by difference, which drove artificial conceptual wedges between ancient Nubian communities, and in turn between Nubia and Egypt as collectives. In fact, we can see very clearly that there are many similarities that link the groups to one another – material culture traditions, burial practices, subsistence strategies, and so on (Fig. 1). I already demonstrated in one of my earlier posts that the three groups co-existed in the same time and space, so it is inevitable that contact and exchange would have occurred.

A key takeaway here is that the C-Group, Pan-Grave and Kerma cultures, as defined by people like Reisner and Petrie, are modern constructs that have been imposed upon the ancient archeological record. It is highly likely (one could even say it is almost certain) that the ancient populations did not recognise the same divisions. Ancient Nubian communities themselves did not leave behind written evidence explaining their own perspectives on any differences that they might have recognised, but the Egyptians did. Take the text from the tomb of the governor Sobeknakht II at Elkab (Fig. 2), in which he refers to attacks by a Kushite-led coalition of ‘looters’ from Wawat, Khentenefer, Punt, and the Medjayw (Davies 2003: fig. 2). Of course, these are the Egyptians’ names for the groups, and we don’t fully know what the divisions refer to (i.e. regions, cultures etc), but we can at least see groups were recognised.

But here’s another thing: those divisions recognised by the ancient Egyptians don’t necessarily correspond to the groups that might have been recognised by the Nubians themselves. Not only that, the archaeological cultures that were devised over a century ago have virtually no relation whatsoever to these ancient divisions. The C-Group was supposedly most active in a land the ancient Egyptians knew as Wawat, which corresponds to Lower Nubia (between the 1st and 2nd cataracts), but C-Group material culture and cemeteries are found well beyond that region. Similarly, the so-called Pan-Grave culture is supposed to have come from Medja-land (don’t even get me started on this!), which corresponds to a large swathe of the Eastern Desert, but material associated with the Pan-Grave tradition is found all over the place (Fig. 3). This then raises the question of how we define and understand ‘culture’, but that’s a much longer discussion for another time.

The issue of the Medjayw brings us to another problem. Many of us will be familiar with the highly problematic traditional view that equates the archaeological Pan-Grave with with the historical Medjay. There are so many problems here. Kate Liszka wrote an entire thesis about it (Liszka 2012), an article (Liszka 2015), and we both co-authored a chapter in the new Oxford Handbook of Ancient Nubia that outlines many of the problems (Liszka & de Souza 2021). But in this context we encounter a different problem. “Medjay” is an Egyptian term, and it appears in Egyptian texts from the late Old Kingdom onwards. The meaning changes depending on the time and context making it very difficult to understand if the term Medjay is an ethnonym, an occupational term, something else entirely, or all of the above. BUT that’s the point. The term ‘Medjay‘ does not refer to a single homogeneous cultural entity, and it is almost certainly not an ‘archaeological culture’, namely Pan-Grave. In some cases, the word Medjay is used to describe mercenaries fighting for Egyptian rulers, or they are depicted as attendants to a royal woman, or they are temple staff… but they are also listed among the Kushite-led coalition that attacked Elkab (Fig. 4). How is it that Medjay can simultaneously be friends and enemies? The answer is that Medjay ain’t Medjay. These groups are not simple, straightforward entities with clear boundaries. They are complex, and no matter how hard we try, we are viewing them from the outside and thus we can never hope to truly understand them. But we can try based on the evidence that we have.

Ancient and Modern Divisions

For some reason this part of the lecture got the biggest response, but really, it should be a fairly obvious thing. I wanted to further contrast the disconnect between perceived ancient divisions and known modern boundaries by using a series of schematic maps (Fig. 5). I go into more detail in the actual lecture, but if you only follow this text version, I’d encourage you to slide through the images as you read along. But before I go on, it’s important to stress that the divisions I talk about below are based on divisions that we know from ancient texts and modern constructs. The aim is to show how complex the region is, to highlight the difficulties in linking text to archaeology to culture, and to emphasise the perils of imposing boundaries where they don’t fit.

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I started with the biggest division – that problematic dichotomy of ‘Egypt’ and ‘Nubia’. According to ancient Egyptian ideologies, Egypt is the Nile Valley up to the First Cataract, and Nubia is everything south of that. BUT the terms ‘Egypt’ and ‘Nubia’ are themselves entirely anachronistic and are not the terms that were applied to these regions during the mid Second Millennium BCE. Then I showed a more ‘realistic’ (though still very schematic) map in which the Nubian and Egyptian spheres overlapped. Nubian-ness was always present in Egypt, and Egyptian-ness was always present in Nubia. So why do we divide the two? In the third map I added the point that even the Egyptians seemed to have recognised this overlap. The southernmost Upper Egyptian nome was given the same name as one of the many terms used to describe what we know as Nubia – tA-stj “The Land of the Bow”. That ideological boundary at the First Cataract was just that – ideological. The cultural boundary is much more blurry.

In the fourth map I added another level of complexity – Upper and Lower Egypt, and Upper and Lower Nubia. These are already very general constructs and there are certainly further regional sub-divisions, but let’s not make things too complicated right now! Another layer of complexity was added by placing some other regions from Egyptian texts onto the map, namely Ibhet and Medja . Even in this most schematic of diagrams you can see how all of these regions overlap and are interconnected. But then, the final map imposes the fixed modern boundary that divides Egypt and Sudan, located just near the Second Cataract. That modern boundary, a completely unnatural straight line cuts through the region like a knife, paying no mind to the ancient complexity. What I want to draw your attention to here is that all of Lower Nubia is in modern Egypt. And this is exactly my point – but more on that shortly.

Nubians north of the First Cataract

We know that ancient Egypt’s ideological boundary was located at the First Cataract. That is the point at which we are told Egypt ended and Nubia began. Ideology is one thing, but things look very different on and in the ground.

Put simply, there is A LOT of evidence that can be identified as Nubian from sites north of the First Cataract. There are entire Nubian cemeteries, Nubian-style objects in Egyptian settlements, and even Nubian-style objects in otherwise Egyptian burials. The stuff is everywhere, from the Delta to Elephantine, at the oases, and on the Red Sea coast. Of course – important point! – this does not mean that people identifying as Nubian were there because, as we all know, pots are not people. We know that some Nubian communities were at least partially mobile and as they moved, their things will have moved with them, so the objects may have arrived at a given place through trade or via some other process. The only context in which we can say that people identifying with a ‘Nubian’ tradition might have actually been present is in cemeteries. At the Pan-Grave cemeteries at Hierakonpolis, for example, the material culture and burial customs are distinctly non-Egyptian, but even then can we ever know how those individuals self-identified? They might have used Nubian things, but they might have felt themselves to be ‘Egyptian’.

Nubian evidence is attested in Egypt from as far back as the Predynastic period onwards, occurring in Egyptian towns and cemeteries and in text and art. In the ‘real’ everyday world, away from politics and power-struggles, Nubians and Egyptians seem to have coexisted without any obvious issues. So then comes the question: at what point does something stop being ‘Nubian’? And conversely, when does something stop being ‘Egyptian’? Nubian-style cooking pots are so prolific at sites like Tell Edfu and Elephantine, so are they still Nubian? Or were they just part of the repertoire of utilitarian wares in circulation in Egypt? What is Egyptian? And what is Nubian? Can we and should we even draw a distinction in the first place?

These issues of identity and ethnicity are complicated and, as you can see, any attempt to deal with these issues only raises more questions (see Moers 2015). But I hope that for now, one thing has become clear: Nubians and Nubian-ness were an integral part of the ancient Egyptian world.

An Ill discipline

OK… this is where I get a bit complainy (more than I did in the actual lecture!), but please hear me out!

The scholarly division between ancient Egypt and ancient Nubia is completely misleading and plainly false. There were no hard boundaries in the ancient world. Communities were embroiled in complex networks of interconnected relationships and encounters. The divisions between ‘Egyptian’ and ‘Nubian’ become weaker and weaker the more you interrogate them. So why, then, are ancient Egypt and Nubia treated as separate entities? And why, oh why, does Egyptology often seem so hell bent on keeping Nubia separate?

A big part of the problem is the colonial, racist framework in which the academic discipline called Egyptology was invented. Ancient Egypt was perceived as a direct ancestor of European imperial powers, while Africa (Nubia) was seen as uncivilised, ‘less than’, passive, and there to be dominated. Maintaining that image was a justification; if the all powerful ancient Egyptians treated Nubia like ‘the other’, then so too could the empires of Europe.

These attitudes of division inevitably permeated the discipline. I can’t tell you the number of times that I have been told that I’m not really an Egyptologist because I study Nubian material culture. Apparently sometimes this is said in jest, but the fact that it is even said at all is a problem in itself. As I said above, Nubian-ness is an integral aspect of Egyptian-ness, and so I ask the question again – why are our disciplines divided in the way that they are?

I also want to clearly state that a division between Egyptian archaeology and Sudanese archaeology is equally problematic. The first point is the indisputable fact that all of Lower Nubia is within the borders of modern Egypt, so ‘Nubia’ and ‘Sudan’ are not interchangeable terms. But also, think about it: why is the excavation of an ‘Egyptian’ temple town in Upper Nubia considered Egyptology, while the study of a ‘Nubian’ cemetery in Middle Egypt is not?

Fun fact: all of my postgraduate, doctoral, and postdoctoral research has been on Nubian material culture, but I have never visited or worked in Sudan. I have tried, but those opportunities didn’t work out for one reason or another. But it’s also not by choice because – another fun fact! – I would say that at least 70% of the Nubian material that I study was excavated at sites in modern Egypt, including all the Lower Nubian sites that are now under the floodwaters behind the Aswan High Dam. And that’s the main reason that I haven’t worked in Sudan – I’ve been too occupied studying Nubian material that was excavated in Egypt! So not only do I sometimes feel ‘othered’ by Egyptology, I also don’t really fit in with Sudanese Archaeology. At every turn the title of this project, InBetween, becomes more and more appropriate.

So I ask again – how is the study of ancient Nubia and ‘Nubian-ness’ not a central aspect of Egyptology?

Let me say it one more time:
Nubians and Nubian-ness were an integral part of the Egyptian world.

This statement doesn’t just apply to ancient communities, but also to modern ones. This point has become patently and powerfully clear to me following a recent conversation with Dr Menna Agha, a Nubian architect and researcher. To quote the title of one of Menna’s articles (which I urge everyone to read) – Nubia Still Exists (Agha 2019). The land might be underwater, but the memories of that land and its history lives on the hearts and minds of the displaced people who were forced to leave their homes.

Becoming Complex

As a final exhortation, I want to reiterate my closing statement from the lecture: The ancient world was complex, and so, if we want to understand it, our approach needs to be equally complex. Boundaries didn’t exist back then, and so we also must not confine ourselves to falsely constructed fields of specialisation. We need to collaborate, to share, to talk to people beyond our disciplines, to be open to having our minds changed, and to be constructively critical of ourselves. No one person can ever have the answer. Indeed, not even a group of people can have the answer. Because there isn’t just one answer. But, if we want to move closer to understanding, we need to work together. The complexity is the key, so we must complicate the issue, together.

References
Agha, M. 2019. “Nubia Still Exists: On the Utility of the Nostalgic Space,” Humanities 8, 24.
Davies, W.V. 2003. “Kush in Egypt: a new historical inscription,” Sudan and Nubia 7: 52–54.
Liszka, K. “We have come to serve Pharaoh: A study of the the Medjay and Pangrave as an ethnic group and as mercenaries from c. 2300 BCE until c. 1050 BCE.” PhD Dissertation. University of Pennsylvania.
Liszka, K. and de Souza, A.M. 2021. “Pan-Grave and Medjay: At the intersection of archaeology and history,” in G. Emberling and B.B. Williams (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Nubia.
Moers, G. 2015. “Egyptian identity? Unlikely, and never national,” in H. Amstutz, A. Dorn, M. Müller, M. Ronsondorf, S, Uljas (eds), Fuzzy Boundaries. Festschrift für Antonio Loprieno. Hamburg. 693–704.