Читать книгу A History of Ancient Egypt - Marc Van De Mieroop - Страница 60

Late 4th‐millennium evidence from Nubia north of the 2nd cataract shows the development of a social hierarchy there. Some of the tombs excavated at the site of Qustul were much larger and richer than the surrounding ones and indicate the presence of specially honored people. In one tomb archaeologists found a fragmentary incense burner decorated with Egyptianized royal imagery: A man wearing the crown of Upper Egypt sits in a boat surmounted with a serekh. The scholar who published the tomb claimed that these distinctly royal elements predated evidence from Egypt and suggested that the idea of kingship originated in Nubia and then inspired Egypt. Later research showed, however, that the Qustul tomb was of the same date as the late Predynastic royal‐style tombs of Egypt. Because there is evidence of the processes that led to state formation in Egypt and not in Nubia, it is much more probable that Egyptian events influenced Nubia rather than the other way around.

Indeed, the rise of the Egyptian state had an impact on its immediate peripheries. Whereas Egypt and Nubia had shared a material culture before the 4th millennium, the late Naqada culture was purely Egyptian. Contemporaneous Nubians continued to emphasize materials like ceramics and ostrich shells that had lost their importance in Egypt. We label the Nubian archaeological remains with the term A‐Group. The emerging elites in late Predynastic Egypt desired luxury products, such as gold, ivory, and ebony, which they obtained from or through Lower Nubia in exchange for foods, including cheese, oil, and honey. The vessels used in the transport as well as some luxury objects, such as stone palettes and copper tools, ended up in the tombs of the Nubian elites. The tomb at Qustul with the royal incense burner seems to have been an extreme example of that trend. These trade relations gave way to hostilities, however, and the Egyptians began to portray the Nubians as enemies, stereotypically depicted as bound naked men overcome by Egyptian royal might. The disappearance of A‐Group material around the beginning of the 1st dynasty in Egypt is probably a result of this change in attitude.