The land of Wetenet is one of the most enduring Red Sea placenames mentioned in Egyptian literatu... more The land of Wetenet is one of the most enduring Red Sea placenames mentioned in Egyptian literature. Its place in the Egyptian conceptual map of the Red Sea has been largely ignored due to it being eclipsed by the much more ubiquitous toponym, Punt. Unlike Punt and its aromatics, Wetenet was visited primarily to secure ebony, with these voyages also providing the stimulus or “field notes” for the elucidating the Eastern Souls, the solar baboons of cosmographic literature. A study of the etymology and geography of this land provides a framework for Wetenet’s possible location, namely in the coastal regions of Sudan or Eritrea.
Zeitschrift für Ägyptische Sprache und Altertumskunde 151, 2024
The names of gods are an important expression of the Egyptian experience of the divine. Understan... more The names of gods are an important expression of the Egyptian experience of the divine. Understanding the etymology of divine names can give us insights into the conceptions of the oldest adherents of religious cults, allowing us to appreciate of the essence of the original deity. This analysis will propose an etymology for the name of the god Thoth and situate the god’s name in its proper lexical and theological context, relating the divine name Ḏḥw.ty to an Old Egyptian root for ‘bright’ or ‘white’ and thus lunar concepts. This etymology not only satisfactorily explains the lexical root and theology of Thoth but is also consistent with other patterns in Egyptian divine epithets and names. Using cognates from Afroasiatic languages, the analysis proves that there once existed an ancient lexical root ḏḥ(w) in Old Egyptian or ‘Pre-Old Egyptian’. This root also explains various other nouns in Egyptian such as a type of linen (ḏḥ), the metallic substances of tin (ḏḥ) and lead (ḏḥ.ty), as well as a word for ‘teeth’ (nḏḥ.yt). This analysis demonstrates that some gods’ names are to be found in lexical roots which become unproductive in later stages of the Egyptian lexicon.
The Sudanese Eastern Desert or the ‘Atbai’ is still largely unexplored from the point of view of ... more The Sudanese Eastern Desert or the ‘Atbai’ is still largely unexplored from the point of view of rock art surveys. As part of the Atbai Survey Project’s fieldwork program, surveys conducted in 2018 and 2019 identified new rock art sites in the deserts around Gebel Nahoganet. Findings included a large tableau of a boat ‘fleet’ along with numerous sites yielding faunal rock art and surface remains. While a generalized boat motif is relatively commonplace in the corpus of rock art from Egypt and Nubia, this specific type of boat encountered in this distant desert exhibits a number of unique features. Notably, the tableau is carved within the walls of a natural tunnel and the features and manner of its execution have few parallels elsewhere. This contribution introduces the hypothesis that these boat motifs may have been the products of local Nubian groups including the A-Group horizon (c. 3800–3100 BCE).
Well before Moses ascended “Mount Sinai” and received the revelation from God, Egyptian officials... more Well before Moses ascended “Mount Sinai” and received the revelation from God, Egyptian officials penetrated the rugged vales of the Sinai Peninsula in search of minerals, chiefly copper and turquoise.
The history of Northeast Africa is dominated by a "Nile Narrative", a common story that places th... more The history of Northeast Africa is dominated by a "Nile Narrative", a common story that places the urban and riverine cultures of Egypt and Nubia at its centre. While the various iterations of Egyptian and Nubian (Kushite) territorial states shaped the macro-history of the region, this enduring narrative often homogenizes and reduces a much more complex world which consisted of a milieu of nomadic peoples. Indigenous to the vast deserts east and west of the river, these nomads are a vital element in the macro-history of the Nile basin, constantly interacting with their urban neighbours, forming diasporas, conducting trade, and preventing exploitation of their homelands. While these patterns endured for millennia, pronounced episodes of conflict, subjugation, and even state formation abound in the record. This analysis takes a macro-historical view to nomads in Nilotic history, proposing a new model for nomadic polities and Nile states in ancient Northeast Africa.
Old World: Journal of Ancient Africa and Eurasia, 2021
The Medjay were a group of desert nomads inhabiting the region between the Nile and the Red Sea c... more The Medjay were a group of desert nomads inhabiting the region between the Nile and the Red Sea contemporaneous to the Bronze Age of Ancient Egypt (c. 3100-1050 BCE). Well-known from textual sources from Pharaonic Egypt and Kushite Nubia, it has proven difficult to produce basic societal descriptions of the Medjay and their political status, especially in their desert heartland. Most studies dedicated to the Medjay evaluate their presence as a nomadic diaspora and emigres on the Nile or focus on their interaction with the Ancient Egyptian state. These approaches place little emphasis on their indigenous geography and nomadic heritage in the Red Sea Hills. This study takes a very different tact and attempts to reconstruct some basic information on their political geography in their indigenous homeland. Although the sources, both textual and archaeological, are currently scarce regarding a Second Millennium bce desert occupation, they do demonstrate complex arrangements between Medjay political actors and nearby states. Particularly notable was the ability of individual tribes to enact varying policies of entente, détente, and aggression towards their Nile neighbours as well as exercise de facto sovereignty over a wealthy desert consistently threatened by Egyptian and Kushite imperialism.
Ancient nomadic peoples in Northeast Africa, being in the shadow of urban regimes of Egypt, Kush,... more Ancient nomadic peoples in Northeast Africa, being in the shadow of urban regimes of Egypt, Kush, and Aksum as well as the Graeco-Roman and Arab worlds, have been generally relegated to the historiographical model of the frontier 'barbarian'. In this view, little political importance is attached to indigenous political organisation, with desert nomads being considered an amorphous mass of unsettled people beyond the frontiers of established states. However, in the Eastern Desert of Sudan and Egypt, a pastoralist nomadic people ancestrally related to the modern Beja dominated the deserts for millennia. Though generally considered as a group of politically divided tribes sharing only language and a pastoralist economy, ancient Beja society and its elites created complex political arrangements in their desert. When Egyptian, Greek, Coptic, and Arab sources are combined and analysed, it is evident that nomads formed a large confederate 'nomadic state' throughout late antiquity and the early medieval period-a vital cog in the political engine of Northeast Africa.
Overshadowed by nearby sites along the Nile, the forgotten deserts of eastern Sudan
have their ow... more Overshadowed by nearby sites along the Nile, the forgotten deserts of eastern Sudan have their own record of trade and nomadic life over thousands of years. A survey has been investigating this remote landscape’s at-risk heritage, as project director Julien Cooper reveals.
In 2018 the SARS-Yale expedition to the Eastern Desert of Sudan surveyed some previously document... more In 2018 the SARS-Yale expedition to the Eastern Desert of Sudan surveyed some previously documented sites and also reconnoitred under- or un-explored regions of the desert for future fieldwork opportunities. This desert is well-known for its Egyptian inscriptions, almost entirely New Kingdom in date. Many of the same locales bearing pharaonic inscriptions also exhibited a generally earlier phase of rock art, usually depicting cattle and other fauna. As part of this wide survey of the Eastern Desert of Sudan, two new and noteworthy rock art sites were discovered by the SARS-Yale 2018 expedition, site 18.25 and site 18.27, the latter of which is presented in this paper as a unique record of 4th millennium BCE Naqadan or possibly A-Group iconography in the Sudanese Eastern Desert. The unnamed site 18.27 was named by the mission ‘Jebel Maraekib’ (Map 1), derived from Arabic plural of marakib ‘boat’ due to the depiction of 13 boats on the rock walls of the jebel.
The Lower Nubian borderlands of the Second Intermediate Period, situated between Kush and Egypt, ... more The Lower Nubian borderlands of the Second Intermediate Period, situated between Kush and Egypt, was witness to one of the most culturally complex episodes in the Pharaonic period. The intersection of an ascendant Kush over local Egypto-Nubian elites living in C-Group lands provided for a set of mixed cultural expressions. This region was witness to one of the few episodes in Pharaonic Egypt where Egyptian administrators served a foreign king, in this case the ruler of Kush. A number of documents produced by this elite give us unique insights into the power of Kerma and its efforts to project that power in its newly acquired territories. A reassessment of one particular stele (Khartoum no. 18) demonstrates that its ruler of Kush ‘Nedjeh’ is not a reference to an individual King at all but rather a rare title, a counterpart to the common Second Intermediate epithet ‘strong king’. This stele, along with other documents in the new Kushite realm, reveals the attempts of Nubian rulers to adopt a new elite Egyptianizing language of power to express their local dominance.
The land of Wetenet is one of the most enduring Red Sea placenames mentioned in Egyptian literatu... more The land of Wetenet is one of the most enduring Red Sea placenames mentioned in Egyptian literature. Its place in the Egyptian conceptual map of the Red Sea has been largely ignored due to it being eclipsed by the much more ubiquitous toponym, Punt. Unlike Punt and its aromatics, Wetenet was visited primarily to secure ebony, with these voyages also providing the stimulus or “field notes” for the elucidating the Eastern Souls, the solar baboons of cosmographic literature. A study of the etymology and geography of this land provides a framework for Wetenet’s possible location, namely in the coastal regions of Sudan or Eritrea.
Zeitschrift für Ägyptische Sprache und Altertumskunde 151, 2024
The names of gods are an important expression of the Egyptian experience of the divine. Understan... more The names of gods are an important expression of the Egyptian experience of the divine. Understanding the etymology of divine names can give us insights into the conceptions of the oldest adherents of religious cults, allowing us to appreciate of the essence of the original deity. This analysis will propose an etymology for the name of the god Thoth and situate the god’s name in its proper lexical and theological context, relating the divine name Ḏḥw.ty to an Old Egyptian root for ‘bright’ or ‘white’ and thus lunar concepts. This etymology not only satisfactorily explains the lexical root and theology of Thoth but is also consistent with other patterns in Egyptian divine epithets and names. Using cognates from Afroasiatic languages, the analysis proves that there once existed an ancient lexical root ḏḥ(w) in Old Egyptian or ‘Pre-Old Egyptian’. This root also explains various other nouns in Egyptian such as a type of linen (ḏḥ), the metallic substances of tin (ḏḥ) and lead (ḏḥ.ty), as well as a word for ‘teeth’ (nḏḥ.yt). This analysis demonstrates that some gods’ names are to be found in lexical roots which become unproductive in later stages of the Egyptian lexicon.
The Sudanese Eastern Desert or the ‘Atbai’ is still largely unexplored from the point of view of ... more The Sudanese Eastern Desert or the ‘Atbai’ is still largely unexplored from the point of view of rock art surveys. As part of the Atbai Survey Project’s fieldwork program, surveys conducted in 2018 and 2019 identified new rock art sites in the deserts around Gebel Nahoganet. Findings included a large tableau of a boat ‘fleet’ along with numerous sites yielding faunal rock art and surface remains. While a generalized boat motif is relatively commonplace in the corpus of rock art from Egypt and Nubia, this specific type of boat encountered in this distant desert exhibits a number of unique features. Notably, the tableau is carved within the walls of a natural tunnel and the features and manner of its execution have few parallels elsewhere. This contribution introduces the hypothesis that these boat motifs may have been the products of local Nubian groups including the A-Group horizon (c. 3800–3100 BCE).
Well before Moses ascended “Mount Sinai” and received the revelation from God, Egyptian officials... more Well before Moses ascended “Mount Sinai” and received the revelation from God, Egyptian officials penetrated the rugged vales of the Sinai Peninsula in search of minerals, chiefly copper and turquoise.
The history of Northeast Africa is dominated by a "Nile Narrative", a common story that places th... more The history of Northeast Africa is dominated by a "Nile Narrative", a common story that places the urban and riverine cultures of Egypt and Nubia at its centre. While the various iterations of Egyptian and Nubian (Kushite) territorial states shaped the macro-history of the region, this enduring narrative often homogenizes and reduces a much more complex world which consisted of a milieu of nomadic peoples. Indigenous to the vast deserts east and west of the river, these nomads are a vital element in the macro-history of the Nile basin, constantly interacting with their urban neighbours, forming diasporas, conducting trade, and preventing exploitation of their homelands. While these patterns endured for millennia, pronounced episodes of conflict, subjugation, and even state formation abound in the record. This analysis takes a macro-historical view to nomads in Nilotic history, proposing a new model for nomadic polities and Nile states in ancient Northeast Africa.
Old World: Journal of Ancient Africa and Eurasia, 2021
The Medjay were a group of desert nomads inhabiting the region between the Nile and the Red Sea c... more The Medjay were a group of desert nomads inhabiting the region between the Nile and the Red Sea contemporaneous to the Bronze Age of Ancient Egypt (c. 3100-1050 BCE). Well-known from textual sources from Pharaonic Egypt and Kushite Nubia, it has proven difficult to produce basic societal descriptions of the Medjay and their political status, especially in their desert heartland. Most studies dedicated to the Medjay evaluate their presence as a nomadic diaspora and emigres on the Nile or focus on their interaction with the Ancient Egyptian state. These approaches place little emphasis on their indigenous geography and nomadic heritage in the Red Sea Hills. This study takes a very different tact and attempts to reconstruct some basic information on their political geography in their indigenous homeland. Although the sources, both textual and archaeological, are currently scarce regarding a Second Millennium bce desert occupation, they do demonstrate complex arrangements between Medjay political actors and nearby states. Particularly notable was the ability of individual tribes to enact varying policies of entente, détente, and aggression towards their Nile neighbours as well as exercise de facto sovereignty over a wealthy desert consistently threatened by Egyptian and Kushite imperialism.
Ancient nomadic peoples in Northeast Africa, being in the shadow of urban regimes of Egypt, Kush,... more Ancient nomadic peoples in Northeast Africa, being in the shadow of urban regimes of Egypt, Kush, and Aksum as well as the Graeco-Roman and Arab worlds, have been generally relegated to the historiographical model of the frontier 'barbarian'. In this view, little political importance is attached to indigenous political organisation, with desert nomads being considered an amorphous mass of unsettled people beyond the frontiers of established states. However, in the Eastern Desert of Sudan and Egypt, a pastoralist nomadic people ancestrally related to the modern Beja dominated the deserts for millennia. Though generally considered as a group of politically divided tribes sharing only language and a pastoralist economy, ancient Beja society and its elites created complex political arrangements in their desert. When Egyptian, Greek, Coptic, and Arab sources are combined and analysed, it is evident that nomads formed a large confederate 'nomadic state' throughout late antiquity and the early medieval period-a vital cog in the political engine of Northeast Africa.
Overshadowed by nearby sites along the Nile, the forgotten deserts of eastern Sudan
have their ow... more Overshadowed by nearby sites along the Nile, the forgotten deserts of eastern Sudan have their own record of trade and nomadic life over thousands of years. A survey has been investigating this remote landscape’s at-risk heritage, as project director Julien Cooper reveals.
In 2018 the SARS-Yale expedition to the Eastern Desert of Sudan surveyed some previously document... more In 2018 the SARS-Yale expedition to the Eastern Desert of Sudan surveyed some previously documented sites and also reconnoitred under- or un-explored regions of the desert for future fieldwork opportunities. This desert is well-known for its Egyptian inscriptions, almost entirely New Kingdom in date. Many of the same locales bearing pharaonic inscriptions also exhibited a generally earlier phase of rock art, usually depicting cattle and other fauna. As part of this wide survey of the Eastern Desert of Sudan, two new and noteworthy rock art sites were discovered by the SARS-Yale 2018 expedition, site 18.25 and site 18.27, the latter of which is presented in this paper as a unique record of 4th millennium BCE Naqadan or possibly A-Group iconography in the Sudanese Eastern Desert. The unnamed site 18.27 was named by the mission ‘Jebel Maraekib’ (Map 1), derived from Arabic plural of marakib ‘boat’ due to the depiction of 13 boats on the rock walls of the jebel.
The Lower Nubian borderlands of the Second Intermediate Period, situated between Kush and Egypt, ... more The Lower Nubian borderlands of the Second Intermediate Period, situated between Kush and Egypt, was witness to one of the most culturally complex episodes in the Pharaonic period. The intersection of an ascendant Kush over local Egypto-Nubian elites living in C-Group lands provided for a set of mixed cultural expressions. This region was witness to one of the few episodes in Pharaonic Egypt where Egyptian administrators served a foreign king, in this case the ruler of Kush. A number of documents produced by this elite give us unique insights into the power of Kerma and its efforts to project that power in its newly acquired territories. A reassessment of one particular stele (Khartoum no. 18) demonstrates that its ruler of Kush ‘Nedjeh’ is not a reference to an individual King at all but rather a rare title, a counterpart to the common Second Intermediate epithet ‘strong king’. This stele, along with other documents in the new Kushite realm, reveals the attempts of Nubian rulers to adopt a new elite Egyptianizing language of power to express their local dominance.
In East Africa, nomadism is alive today it is in the ancient past. While the foodways and redistr... more In East Africa, nomadism is alive today it is in the ancient past. While the foodways and redistribution mechanisms between ancient and modern nomadism have changed considerably, the basic form of the mixed herd of goat, sheep, cattle and camel has undergone little change. The intersection of ethnographic observations with my ancient study of Blemmyan nomadism in the Eastern Sahara allows many key insights into nomadic pastoralism not always possible in other case studies. The Blemmyes were a group of desert nomads that emerged on the historical record in the Hellenic period, becoming the raiders of the Nile Valley in the late Roman period (c. 300 AD-700 AD) who eventually annexed much of historical Nubian Nile, creating one of Africa’s first traceable pastoralist polities. From their desert homeland in the rocky hills between the Nile River and the Red Sea, the Blemmyes commanded a large desert territory, controlling vital trade routes to Red Sea harbors, and raided well beyond their homeland directed at urban centers on the Nile River. Throughout their history, the Blemmyes would even struggle for territorial control of the Nile Valley from urban regimes in Egypt and Nubia as well as other newly emergent pastoralist groups like the Nobades.
A key theme I am exploring in this context is the social and historical trigger points that make pastoralists transform into 'raiding cultures', drawing a direct link between the transhumance of pastoralist grazing and nomadic subsistence as a key step on this continuum towards raiding. At first raiding may not seem like a particularly unique behavior to nomadic pastoralists, but common to many cultures, particularly Thalassocratic cultures à la the Vikings, Normans, Barbary Corsairs and so forth. But I will argue that pastoralist raiding is a unique subset of ‘raiding’, not only because many pastoralist societies undertake recurrent raiding, but pastoralism itself, through beasts of burden and seasonal movement, enables raiding in a way not possible in many other cultures. A study of the raiding culture in the Blemmyes of the Egyptian and Sudanese deserts provides a unique insight into the evolution of raiding cultures in the longue durée.
Paper given at SOAS, 6th of October 2015
The reconstruction of the ancient linguistic geography ... more Paper given at SOAS, 6th of October 2015
The reconstruction of the ancient linguistic geography of East Africa still remains somewhat elusive. Before the written traditions of Ge'ez and Meroitic, Ancient Egyptian texts provide the only contemporary lexical material for African languages in the form of loanwords and foreign onomastics. Lexical material from languages like Meroitic, Old Nubian, Beja (Bedawiye), and various other Cushitic languages are well attested in Egyptian documents from the Second Millennium BCE. However, very little research has been conducted on the possibility of language contact between Egypt and the languages spoken along the Red Sea coast. In the historical context of Ancient Egyptian expeditions to the distant land of Punt (Egyptian Pwnt), generally located somewhere in Eastern Sudan and Eritrea, it is probable that Puntite loanwords recorded in Egyptian texts provide some of the earliest data on East African languages. This study will provide a lexical analysis of Puntite loanwords and onomastics in Egyptian documents, connecting these words to cognates in Ethiosemitic and Lowland East Cushitic languages. This research not only has implications for the historical linguistics of the Red Sea, but also the dating of the 'Ethiosemitic migration' to the Horn of Africa.
Placenames, being one of the most conservative elements of language, are often used to identify t... more Placenames, being one of the most conservative elements of language, are often used to identify the presence of different ethno-linguistic groups. For instance the contemporary presence of Arabic placenames in Andalusian Spain is a relic of Moorish domination before the reconquista. Analysis of the lexical form of placenames and their affiliation can thus aid in the identification of historical populations in the distant past. The Egyptian Nile is no exception to this process and there are a number of placenames in Old Kingdom texts which cannot be etymologically analysed in Egyptian. These names are taken to reflect the presence of non-Egyptians on the Nile, or more debatably, belong to a moribund vocabulary of pre-Old Egyptian. Given the presumed linguistic homogeneity of the Egyptian Nile Valley, the occurrence of non-Egyptian names in the Old Kingdom is a somewhat surprising feature. The largest cluster of non-Egyptian placenames is a group of Semitic placenames in the Delta. Non-Egyptian placenames also appear in the oases, a small number in Middle Egypt, and some debatable instances on the Nubian frontier. This paper aims to analyse these names and relate them to distinct foreign languages in an effort to explain the ethno-linguistic makeup of pre-Old Kingdom Egypt. The results have implications for several linguistic, historical, and archaeological phenomena in early Egyptian history, and as such are an important and overlooked aspect of Egyptian onomastics.
The African Topographical Lists of the New Kingdom and the historical geography of Nubia in the S... more The African Topographical Lists of the New Kingdom and the historical geography of Nubia in the Second Millennium BCE
The ‘Southern’ or ‘African’ sections of the New Kingdom Topographical lists are among the most enigmatic Egyptian documents relating to Ancient Nubia. While this corpus is one of the richest sources of Nubian onomastica, the general difficulty in interpreting this list of placenames has hampered its use in discussions of the historical geography of Nubia. In appearance the list seems to be an inventory of toponyms or a ‘gazetteer’, and is divided into two sections; a ‘Northern’ list corresponding to Syria-Palestine, and a ‘Southern’ list which includes over two-hundred toponyms in Africa. While the placenames of the ‘Northern lists’ can be located with relative ease due to cognates in Biblical Hebrew, Ugaritic and Akkadian texts, the names of the African list may only be compared with the precious little that we know of Meroitic toponymy and the later classical itineraries of Bion and Juba. The most difficult task for the student of these lists has been to locate these placenames on a map, and define some sort of progressional logic in the list. Subsequent questions as to the language of the toponyms or their relationship to individual Egyptian expeditions in Nubia have been generally overlooked.
Previous analyses of the list (Zyhlarz, Zibelius, Priese, O’Connor), while orientated to broadly locating some of the placenames in this gazetteer, preferred to treat each name as a single entity. This paper will attempt a holistic analysis of the entire list, properly contextualizing this document in its epigraphic, historical, geographic and linguistic context. A comprehensive analysis of the different reproductions of the list reveals that it was not a static document copied and recopied, but was open to emendations and additions based on contemporary campaigning, and also orthographic/phonetic issues. The southern list is then a mixture of antiquated and bygone Nubian toponyms, which was then overlaid with new names derived from contemporary campaigning. Furthermore in conducting a linguistic and phonological analysis of the toponyms, it is possible to discern different linguistic zones in ancient Nubia. While it is difficult to generalize from the quantitatively small data-set, the phonology/morphology of these toponyms suggests that there was a major linguistic differentiation between Upper and Lower Nubia even in the New Kingdom, while the names in the Atbai and further south (Punt and Medja) reveal a number of languages from the Cushitic, or even Ethiosemitic families. A holistic analysis of the list, from the point of view of history, geography, and linguistics, allows one to properly contextualize this corpus as ‘snapshots’ of the linguistic geography of the Middle Nile and East Africa, and allow pieces of this geographic puzzle to fall into place.
The Wadi Hammamat, the main route leading east of Coptos, was one of the few routes connecting th... more The Wadi Hammamat, the main route leading east of Coptos, was one of the few routes connecting the Nile Valley with the Red Sea and hence maritime trade networks. In addition to its status as a trade-route, the wadi itself was also the seat of geological exploitation, being the location of the much coveted bekhen-stone quarries (metagreywacke), as well as several gold deposits. The large corpus of rock inscriptionsand petroglyphs in the wadi and surrounding desert attest to the usage and exploitation of this area from the Pharaonic period to the present day.In the study of historical geography in Egypt, the Hammamat area has the esteemed position of being the subject of Egypt’s only Topographical Map, the so-called ‘Turin Geological Papyrus’ of the Ramesside period. In the Graeco-Roman period the many watering-stations (Hydreumata) found in the wadi are a testament to the continued use of this route through the Hellenistic and Late Antique periods. Given the relatively large mass of ancient material in this regionvis-à-visthe rest of the Eastern Desert, discussion of the wadi is usually included in almost all academic works as relating to rock inscriptions (from Predynastic and onwards), the organisation of expeditions and logistics, as well as mining and quarrying.
Indeed, due to the relatively large amount of textual material preserved inthis wadi as compared to others, this is perhaps the only area of the Eastern Desert from which we have detailed onomastic data. One of the peculiar aspects of this area is its plethora of placenames attributed to the wadi area throughout different periods (Iakhet, Ra-Henu, Dju-Bekhen, Khaset-Gebtu, Πέρσου to mention a few), there being no continuity in the name of the wadi over the various epochs. A close analysis of the wadi’s toponyms reveals the competing nature of differing onomastic layers, some names being functional and administrative, others grounded on intimate knowledge of the wadi’s geography,and there are even a few names in non-Egyptian language. This paper will analyse these placenames and suggest reasons for the multi-layered toponymy of this region. A holistic treatment of the wadi’s historical geography that unifies philological, linguistic, archaeological and geological evidence allows the placenames to be treated as contextualised artefacts, that is, entities that were culturally constructed at a specific point in time. The change of names for the wadi area then is not entirely accidental, but reveals specificuse of the wadi by differently aligned groups. Given that our knowledge of desert toponymy is poor or non-existent for most regions of Egypt, this data can be taken as a case study of the rather complex and semantically diverse ways Egyptians could label marginal environments.
"The Sudanese-Eritrean Coast in Classical Toponymy and Interpretatio Graeca
The historical geo... more "The Sudanese-Eritrean Coast in Classical Toponymy and Interpretatio Graeca
The historical geography of the southern Red Sea is largely terra incognita for historians until the advent of classical geographies. The apogee of foreign interest in Red Sea trade seems to have been conducted under the Ptolemaic Dynasty, who patronised trade through the creation of ports in Egypt and further down the Red Sea into modern Sudan and Eritrea. Classical geographies, particularly Ptolemy, Strabo, and the Periplus Maris Erythraei are our chief sources for this region, and together paint a rather extensive picture of the peoples, places, goods encountered on the Red Sea. On the African shores the most prominent port by far was the satellite city of Adulis, located in Zula, Eritrea. However the sources mention many emporia and landmarks both further south and north of this site along the coast.
A marked characteristic of many of these placenames is the fact that they appear lexically and morphologically Greek. This may be seen to be a type of Interpretatio Graeca of foreign onomastica (Bukharin, 2011), where local words were equated with similar sounding Greek words. This paper will investigate these toponyms, and analyse their etymologies in an attempt to establish what languages were spoken on the African coast of the Red Sea. In doing so it may be possible to not only shed light on the ancient geography of this coastline, but also understand the process in which onomastica arrived into the lexicon of Greek geographies.
Julien Cooper,
Macquarie University
"
The Red Sea in the ancient world was both a barrier and a facilitator for exchange and travel. Mo... more The Red Sea in the ancient world was both a barrier and a facilitator for exchange and travel. Most of its shores were arid and inhospitable, but the maritime routes that hugged the coastlines of Africa and Arabia allowed for trade both between the Mediterranean Basin and the Indian Ocean, as well as Africa and Arabia. Deliberate state control and exploitation of Red Sea trade is documented in various periods from Egyptian, Canaanite, Nabataean, South Arabian, Axumite, and Graeco-Roman cultures, while the shorelines themselves were inhabited by semi-nomadic Cushitic speakers (African shore) and Semitic-Arab pastoralists (Arabian shore). Linguistically the placenames on the Red Sea basin bear the influence of these various cultures, and languages from the Egyptian, Semitic, Ethiosemitic, and Cushitic sub-phylums have all contributed to the present make-up of the toponomy on the shores of the Red Sea.
However a cross comparison of the pertinent historical toponymy of each culture does not yield many similarities or cognates, but rather illustrates different conceptions and interpretations of the same geography. This may be due to the fact that the Red Sea itself was often peripheral for these civilizations, with each culture producing its own specific geographic vocabulary upon closer acquaintance with the area. This makes the placenames which survive to the present day, or the placenames that are loaned into different languages and textual corpora, exceptional case studies for reconstructing the historical geography of the Red Sea. This paper will, through a comparative toponymic study, analyse some placenames found particularly in Pharaonic and Greek documents and comment on how they may assist in debates on cultural contact and linguistic geography in the ancient Red Sea.
A workshop organised as part of the InBetween Project (Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship, Grant N... more A workshop organised as part of the InBetween Project (Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship, Grant No. 796050).
Stone Canvas: Towards a Better Integration of "Rock art" and "Graffiti" Studies in Egypt and Sudan, 2019
In 2018, a SARS-Yale mission discovered several new rock art sites in the Sudanese Eastern Desert... more In 2018, a SARS-Yale mission discovered several new rock art sites in the Sudanese Eastern Desert. One of these sites, situated along a ridge east of the Second Cataract, contained a large tableau of boat petroglyphs of likely Naqada III age along with other features including cupules, tally marks, and sandals. The site contains other unique features, including a natural hole on the rock surface with artificial embellishments. The iconographic theme of the naval procession found at this site, which is well known in Upper Egypt and the Nubian Nile and typical of Naqada II-III, is not frequently encountered in this desert - although it is difficult to ascertain whether this observation is a real feature or merely the result of lack of surveys in the region.
This discovery, along with that of other engravings discovered by previous missions in the area, poses many questions related to human activity in the Eastern Desert of Sudan and to the presence of Nile cultures (Naqada, A-Group) in this vast territory. One can indeed wonder how these cultures interacted with indigenous peoples of this region. Is there a chronological overlap between indigenous rock art sites, represented by local pastoralist-themed traditions, and ‘foreign’ rock art using Naqadian iconography? These questions are broad in scope and it has long been considered that the answers are long lost. Fortunately, heuristic tools can assist in piecing the ancient history of this region and shaping approaches of how we view rock art as a human activity in this remote and distant landscape.
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status, especially in their desert heartland. Most studies dedicated to the Medjay evaluate their presence as a nomadic diaspora and emigres on the Nile or focus on their interaction with the Ancient Egyptian state. These approaches place little emphasis on their indigenous geography and nomadic heritage in the Red Sea Hills. This study takes a very different tact and attempts to reconstruct some basic information on
their political geography in their indigenous homeland. Although the sources, both textual and archaeological, are currently scarce regarding a Second Millennium bce desert occupation, they do demonstrate complex arrangements between Medjay political actors and nearby states. Particularly notable was the ability of individual tribes to enact varying policies of entente, détente, and aggression towards their Nile
neighbours as well as exercise de facto sovereignty over a wealthy desert consistently threatened by Egyptian and Kushite imperialism.
have their own record of trade and nomadic life over thousands of years. A survey has been
investigating this remote landscape’s at-risk heritage, as project director Julien Cooper reveals.
status, especially in their desert heartland. Most studies dedicated to the Medjay evaluate their presence as a nomadic diaspora and emigres on the Nile or focus on their interaction with the Ancient Egyptian state. These approaches place little emphasis on their indigenous geography and nomadic heritage in the Red Sea Hills. This study takes a very different tact and attempts to reconstruct some basic information on
their political geography in their indigenous homeland. Although the sources, both textual and archaeological, are currently scarce regarding a Second Millennium bce desert occupation, they do demonstrate complex arrangements between Medjay political actors and nearby states. Particularly notable was the ability of individual tribes to enact varying policies of entente, détente, and aggression towards their Nile
neighbours as well as exercise de facto sovereignty over a wealthy desert consistently threatened by Egyptian and Kushite imperialism.
have their own record of trade and nomadic life over thousands of years. A survey has been
investigating this remote landscape’s at-risk heritage, as project director Julien Cooper reveals.
A key theme I am exploring in this context is the social and historical trigger points that make pastoralists transform into 'raiding cultures', drawing a direct link between the transhumance of pastoralist grazing and nomadic subsistence as a key step on this continuum towards raiding. At first raiding may not seem like a particularly unique behavior to nomadic pastoralists, but common to many cultures, particularly Thalassocratic cultures à la the Vikings, Normans, Barbary Corsairs and so forth. But I will argue that pastoralist raiding is a unique subset of ‘raiding’, not only because many pastoralist societies undertake recurrent raiding, but pastoralism itself, through beasts of burden and seasonal movement, enables raiding in a way not possible in many other cultures. A study of the raiding culture in the Blemmyes of the Egyptian and Sudanese deserts provides a unique insight into the evolution of raiding cultures in the longue durée.
The reconstruction of the ancient linguistic geography of East Africa still remains somewhat elusive. Before the written traditions of Ge'ez and Meroitic, Ancient Egyptian texts provide the only contemporary lexical material for African languages in the form of loanwords and foreign onomastics. Lexical material from languages like Meroitic, Old Nubian, Beja (Bedawiye), and various other Cushitic languages are well attested in Egyptian documents from the Second Millennium BCE. However, very little research has been conducted on the possibility of language contact between Egypt and the languages spoken along the Red Sea coast. In the historical context of Ancient Egyptian expeditions to the distant land of Punt (Egyptian Pwnt), generally located somewhere in Eastern Sudan and Eritrea, it is probable that Puntite loanwords recorded in Egyptian texts provide some of the earliest data on East African languages. This study will provide a lexical analysis of Puntite loanwords and onomastics in Egyptian documents, connecting these words to cognates in Ethiosemitic and Lowland East Cushitic languages. This research not only has implications for the historical linguistics of the Red Sea, but also the dating of the 'Ethiosemitic migration' to the Horn of Africa.
of the lexical form of placenames and their affiliation can thus aid in the identification of historical populations in the distant past. The Egyptian Nile is no exception to this process and there are a number of placenames in Old Kingdom texts which cannot be etymologically analysed in Egyptian. These names are taken to reflect the presence of non-Egyptians on the Nile, or more debatably, belong to a moribund vocabulary of pre-Old Egyptian. Given the presumed linguistic homogeneity of the Egyptian Nile Valley, the occurrence of non-Egyptian names in the Old Kingdom is a somewhat surprising feature. The largest cluster of non-Egyptian placenames is a group of Semitic placenames in the Delta. Non-Egyptian placenames also appear in the oases, a small number in Middle Egypt, and some debatable instances on the Nubian frontier. This paper aims to analyse these names and relate them to distinct foreign languages in an effort to explain the ethno-linguistic makeup of pre-Old Kingdom Egypt. The results have implications for several linguistic, historical, and archaeological phenomena in early Egyptian history, and as such are an important and overlooked aspect of Egyptian onomastics.
The ‘Southern’ or ‘African’ sections of the New Kingdom Topographical lists are among the most enigmatic Egyptian documents relating to Ancient Nubia. While this corpus is one of the richest sources of Nubian onomastica, the general difficulty in interpreting this list of placenames has hampered its use in discussions of the historical geography of Nubia. In appearance the list seems to be an inventory of toponyms or a ‘gazetteer’, and is divided into two sections; a ‘Northern’ list corresponding to Syria-Palestine, and a ‘Southern’ list which includes over two-hundred toponyms in Africa. While the placenames of the ‘Northern lists’ can be located with relative ease due to cognates in Biblical Hebrew, Ugaritic and Akkadian texts, the names of the African list may only be compared with the precious little that we know of Meroitic toponymy and the later classical itineraries of Bion and Juba. The most difficult task for the student of these lists has been to locate these placenames on a map, and define some sort of progressional logic in the list. Subsequent questions as to the language of the toponyms or their relationship to individual Egyptian expeditions in Nubia have been generally overlooked.
Previous analyses of the list (Zyhlarz, Zibelius, Priese, O’Connor), while orientated to broadly locating some of the placenames in this gazetteer, preferred to treat each name as a single entity. This paper will attempt a holistic analysis of the entire list, properly contextualizing this document in its epigraphic, historical, geographic and linguistic context. A comprehensive analysis of the different reproductions of the list reveals that it was not a static document copied and recopied, but was open to emendations and additions based on contemporary campaigning, and also orthographic/phonetic issues. The southern list is then a mixture of antiquated and bygone Nubian toponyms, which was then overlaid with new names derived from contemporary campaigning. Furthermore in conducting a linguistic and phonological analysis of the toponyms, it is possible to discern different linguistic zones in ancient Nubia. While it is difficult to generalize from the quantitatively small data-set, the phonology/morphology of these toponyms suggests that there was a major linguistic differentiation between Upper and Lower Nubia even in the New Kingdom, while the names in the Atbai and further south (Punt and Medja) reveal a number of languages from the Cushitic, or even Ethiosemitic families. A holistic analysis of the list, from the point of view of history, geography, and linguistics, allows one to properly contextualize this corpus as ‘snapshots’ of the linguistic geography of the Middle Nile and East Africa, and allow pieces of this geographic puzzle to fall into place.
Indeed, due to the relatively large amount of textual material preserved inthis wadi as compared to others, this is perhaps the only area of the Eastern Desert from which we have detailed onomastic data. One of the peculiar aspects of this area is its plethora of placenames attributed to the wadi area throughout different periods (Iakhet, Ra-Henu, Dju-Bekhen, Khaset-Gebtu, Πέρσου to mention a few), there being no continuity in the name of the wadi over the various epochs. A close analysis of the wadi’s toponyms reveals the competing nature of differing onomastic layers, some names being functional and administrative, others grounded on intimate knowledge of the wadi’s geography,and there are even a few names in non-Egyptian language. This paper will analyse these placenames and suggest reasons for the multi-layered toponymy of this region. A holistic treatment of the wadi’s historical geography that unifies philological, linguistic, archaeological and geological evidence allows the placenames to be treated as contextualised artefacts, that is, entities that were culturally constructed at a specific point in time. The change of names for the wadi area then is not entirely accidental, but reveals specificuse of the wadi by differently aligned groups. Given that our knowledge of desert toponymy is poor or non-existent for most regions of Egypt, this data can be taken as a case study of the rather complex and semantically diverse ways Egyptians could label marginal environments.
Julien Cooper,
Macquarie University
The historical geography of the southern Red Sea is largely terra incognita for historians until the advent of classical geographies. The apogee of foreign interest in Red Sea trade seems to have been conducted under the Ptolemaic Dynasty, who patronised trade through the creation of ports in Egypt and further down the Red Sea into modern Sudan and Eritrea. Classical geographies, particularly Ptolemy, Strabo, and the Periplus Maris Erythraei are our chief sources for this region, and together paint a rather extensive picture of the peoples, places, goods encountered on the Red Sea. On the African shores the most prominent port by far was the satellite city of Adulis, located in Zula, Eritrea. However the sources mention many emporia and landmarks both further south and north of this site along the coast.
A marked characteristic of many of these placenames is the fact that they appear lexically and morphologically Greek. This may be seen to be a type of Interpretatio Graeca of foreign onomastica (Bukharin, 2011), where local words were equated with similar sounding Greek words. This paper will investigate these toponyms, and analyse their etymologies in an attempt to establish what languages were spoken on the African coast of the Red Sea. In doing so it may be possible to not only shed light on the ancient geography of this coastline, but also understand the process in which onomastica arrived into the lexicon of Greek geographies.
Julien Cooper,
Macquarie University
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However a cross comparison of the pertinent historical toponymy of each culture does not yield many similarities or cognates, but rather illustrates different conceptions and interpretations of the same geography. This may be due to the fact that the Red Sea itself was often peripheral for these civilizations, with each culture producing its own specific geographic vocabulary upon closer acquaintance with the area. This makes the placenames which survive to the present day, or the placenames that are loaned into different languages and textual corpora, exceptional case studies for reconstructing the historical geography of the Red Sea. This paper will, through a comparative toponymic study, analyse some placenames found particularly in Pharaonic and Greek documents and comment on how they may assist in debates on cultural contact and linguistic geography in the ancient Red Sea.
This discovery, along with that of other engravings discovered by previous missions in the area, poses many questions related to human activity in the Eastern Desert of Sudan and to the presence of Nile cultures (Naqada, A-Group) in this vast territory. One can indeed wonder how these cultures interacted with indigenous peoples of this region. Is there a chronological overlap between indigenous rock art sites, represented by local pastoralist-themed traditions, and ‘foreign’ rock art using Naqadian iconography? These questions are broad in scope and it has long been considered that the answers are long lost. Fortunately, heuristic tools can assist in piecing the ancient history of this region and shaping approaches of how we view rock art as a human activity in this remote and distant landscape.