Not long after the Assyrian conquest, however, in 590
BCE, the Kushites quit Napata and moved their capital farther from Egypt, up the Nile to Meroë, between the river’s fifth and sixth cataracts. Meroë was already an important entrepot for gold, ebony and ivory to Egypt and increasingly also to Greece and Rome. By 300
CE Meroë had become known as one of the wealthiest cities of the period, and one of the most beautiful, and its temple to Amun Ra rivaled the one at Jebel Barkal. It was also known for the abundance of steep-sided pyramids that dominated its cemeteries and that remain its most distinctive sight today.
Although damaged in the 19th century by tomb robbers—notably the Italian Giuseppe Ferlini, whose spectacular loot remains on display in Munich and Berlin—the pyramids of Meroë and other Nubian sites were still largely intact when American archeologist George Reisner arrived in 1907. He came at the request of the Sudanese government, which asked him to salvage as much as he could before parts of the area were flooded by the first dam at Aswan. (In the 1960s the Aswan High Dam would flood more Nubian sites, as would the Meroë Dam in 2005.)
Reisner worked until 1913 when he was appointed director of the Harvard University-
MFA Egyptian Expedition, which conducted digs until 1932. “A satisfactory collection,” he called his results, which were divided between the National Museum of Sudan in Khartoum, and the
MFA, which paid for the excavations. The objects found were, he said, “entirely the work of royal craftsmen and represent all that will ever be recovered of these classes of objects from this period of Ethiopian history.”
Though correct in assessing the quality of the artifacts, Reisner failed to imagine that much more would yet be found. More tellingly, however, was his belief that only the Egyptians could have been capable of producing such masterpieces. To Doxey, his error calling the works "Ethiopian," even as a leading expert of his time, speaks to how little known, and even misunderstood, the story of Nubia has been.
“Reisner certainly got wrong this idea that the Nubians were never able to create any wonderful art or important monuments on their own,” she says.
More recent archeologists, benefiting from new finds, new scholarship and new insights, are casting new light on Nubia and Kushite culture. One of their most important finds came in 2003, when Swiss archeologist Charles Bonnet uncovered seven statues, finely sculpted from black granite, each more than two meters tall. One of them depicts Piye’s son Taharqa and another Taharqa’s successor, Tantamani. In 2008 Stuart Tyson Smith discovered a horse tomb that predates those of Piye by 200 years, suggesting that Piye was not the first Nubian to so honor his horses.
At present, archeologists are conducting more than a dozen excavations in Sudan, and as they labor, stories of Nubia continue to be revealed.
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