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In the 1960s, Egyptian Nubia was the focus of much international media attention. The Aswan High Dam was being constructed and it buried that part of Nubia under a lake about 250 miles long. The Nubian people living there were removed from their ancestral lands, their unique culture and language uprooted. For a period of about seven years, a massive archaeological emergency team combed hundreds of square miles and worked feverishly to survey, record, and excavate thousands of ancient settlement sites and cemeteries, rock drawings, and inscriptions, spanning many millennia of history and prehistory. Numerous ancient temples were moved block by block to higher ground. The great rock-cut temples of Ramses II at Abu Simbel required that entire mountains be cut into blocks, moved, and reconstructed. Despite these efforts, much of the ancient remains of Nubian civilization disappeared beneath the rising flood waters. By Timothy Kendall |
The Nile River has always been at the heart of the Nubian existence, in ancient times as a principal agricultural source. In modern times it is a painful reminder of what once existed, as the dams that the British started building in 1897 buried precious monuments and temples -- essentially the history of a great ancient black civilization -- under the Nile.