Nubians (,) are an ethnic group indigenous to the Nubia region, which stretches from southern Egypt to northern Sudan. They originate from the early inhabitants of the central Nile valley, believed to be one of the earliest cradles of civilization.Charles Keith Maisels (1993). The Near East: Archaeology in the "Cradle of Civilization. Routledge. . In the southern valley of Egypt, Nubians differ culturally and ethnically from Egyptians. They speak the Nilo-Saharan Nubian languages as their mother tongue, which are 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 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 (744 BC–656 BC), 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, following the collapse of the Kingdom of Kush to the Axumites, and the closure of the last Ancient Egyptian temple by Emperor Justinian I, the Nubians started gradually converting 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.
Nubians in Egypt primarily live in Aswan Governorate, especially in Kom Ombo and Nasr al-Nuba, north of Aswan, and large cities such as Cairo, while Sudanese Nubians live in Northern State, from the city of Wadi Halfa on the Egypt–Sudan border to al Dabbah near the Fourth Cataract, as well as in large cities such as Khartoum. Some Halfawi Nubians were forcibly relocated to Khashm el Girba and New Halfa upon the construction of the Aswan High Dam, while in Egypt, Faddicca and Kenzi Nubians were forcibly relocated to villages in 'New Nubia' near Kom Ombo. The construction of the Aswan High Dam displaced 100,000 Nubians in Egypt and Sudan and flooded much of Lower Nubia. Additionally, a group known as the Midob live in North Darfur, another group known as the Birgid live in Central Darfur and several groups known as the Hill Nubians 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 (Kenzi/Mattokki-speaking), Faddicca (Nobiin-speaking), Halfawi (Nobiin-speaking), Sukkot (Nobiin-speaking), Mahas (Nobiin-speaking), and Danagla (Andaandi-speaking).
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(e) "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 around 700 BC. Ancient history in Nubia is categorized according to the following periods: A-Group culture (3700–2800 BC), C-Group culture (2300–1600 BC), Kerma culture (2500–1500 BC), Nubian contemporaries of the New Kingdom (1550–1069 BC), the Twenty-fifth Dynasty (1000–653 BC), Napata (1000–275 BC), Meroë (275 BC–300/350 AD), Makuria (340–1317 AD), Nobatia (350–650 AD), Alodia (600s–1504 AD), and Dotawo (1180s-1500 AD).
In the view of Egyptian scholar and editor of UNESCO General History of Africa Volume II (1981), 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.
Various biological anthropological studies have shown close, biological affinities between the predynastic southern, Egyptian and the early Nubian populations."When Mahalanobis D2 was used, the Naqadan and Badarian Predynastic samples exhibited more similarity to Nubian, Tigrean, and some more southern series than to some mid- to late Dynasticseries from northern Egypt (Mukherjee et al., 1955). The Badarian have been found to be very similar to a Kerma sample (Kushite Sudanese), using both the Penrose statistic (Nutter, 1958) and DFA of males alone (Keita,1990). Furthermore, Keita considered that Badarian males had a southern modal phenotype, and that together with a Naqada sample, they formed a southern Egyptian cluster as tropical variants together with a sample from Kerma". "Keita (1992), using craniometrics, discovered that the Badarian series is distinctly different from the later Egyptian series, a conclusion that is mostly confirmed here. In the current analysis, the Badari sample more closely clusters with the Naqada sample and the Kerma sample".
Frank Yurco (1996) remarked that depictions of pharaonic 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, [which] 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 stele 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 predynastic 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 (Province) 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 Kandakes or Queens. The Kandaka 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.Jakobielski, S. 1992. Chapter 8: "Christian Nubia at the Height of its Civilization." UNESCO General History of Africa, Volume III. University of California Press The fall of the kingdom of Christian Nubia occurred in the early 1500s resulting in 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 Afro-asiatic 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 (ivory, animal skins) 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 (northern) 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.