Seed of South Sudan Read Online Free

explored; only in that year did a Turkish viceroy of Egypt send an expedition through the White Nile and Blue Nile areas to find the headwaters of the river, in Uganda. European impacts followed. 1
    To understand southern Sudan, it’s important to look at Sudan’s history, and at Egypt’s history as well. Since the early 1960s, studies of 20th century artifact rescues have yielded many new discoveries, and more are occurring every day.
    It is well to remember that in ancient times, Egyptians and Nubians mingled in Egypt and in Nubia, and that Nubia’s highly developed African culture rose before the ascent of the Egyptian dynasties. Some of the kings in ancient Egyptian times were from Nubia. The region was in what is now Sudan, north of present-day Khartoum, the country’s capital. In the Old Testament, it was referred to as the Kingdom of Kush. Khartoum is at the juncture of the White Nile and Blue Nile rivers, which flow north and form the storied Nile River. Upper Nubia developed around the third and fourth cataracts of the Nile, and included the royal cities of Kerma and Meroe; Lower Nubia fell between the first and second cataracts; both areas offered access to much-prized gold fields and emerald mines, as well as a door to the valuable products of sub–Saharan Africa.
    â€œMuch material in Lower Nubia now lies under Lake Nasser, permanently flooded after the construction of the Aswan High Dam, while some Upper Nubian sites have been destroyed by the completion of the Merowe Dam at the Fourth Cataract,” writes Marjorie M. Fisher, editor with others of Ancient Nubia: African Kingdoms on the Nile . “Nubia’s indigenous language, which might offer further insights, was not written down until the Meroitic Period (mid-third century BC to mid-fourth century AD), but the language, although deciphered, can be understood only to a very limited extent.”
    So those wanting to understand about this culture “must explore the region’s relations with Egypt, as well as the indigenous sources of data,” Fisher writes. 2
    Researchers wanting to view the remains of the Nubian physical culture, fortunately, are able to see the remains documented and removed in several museum collections, including many in the United States. In the early 1960s, when the Aswan High Dam was being built, an effort to salvage artifacts was begun.
    â€œBefore the world lost much of its precious heritage, an international rescue campaign was organized under the auspices of the United Nations Scientific, Technical and Cultural Organization (UNESCO),” an article in American Visions states. “Participating foreign missions were offered half of the discoveries that would otherwise have been permanently lost. Several American museums and universities participated in the UNESCO Salvage Campaign, and their share of finds forms the backbone of the major Nubian collections in this country.
    â€œThe very concept of rescue archeology—and the foundations of the Nubian collections at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the University Museum of Archeology and Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Oriental Museum of the University of Chicago—originated in Nubia at the beginning of the century, when the first (and smaller) dam was being erected near Aswan in 1906,” the article continues, then details how these discoveries enabled the identification of several previously unknown cultures, and a completely new view of the Nubians, now seen to be rivals at times to Egyptian power. 3

    It is known that several of the ancient Egyptian gods such as Anubia, god of embalming, 4 and Isis, 5 were Nubian. There were Nubians who were kings in Egypt, and Egyptian kings took Nubian wives. “Nubia appears not to have been exploited unduly by the Egyptians,” who probably did not enslave Nubians, Fisher writes. “As late as the Old Kingdom, many Lower Nubian princes and princesses were